Nationalism and Modernism Anthony D. Smith

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Nationalism and Modernism

 

 

In light of its remarkable resurgence in the last two decades, how do we explain the continuing power of nationalism today? Why do so many people remain attached to their nations? Are nations and nationalism recent phenomena, or can we trace their roots far back in history?

 

These are some of the questions addressed in Anthony Smith’s thought-provoking analysis of recent approaches and theories of nations and nationalism. In the first part of his survey, Smith explores the varieties of ‘modernism’, the current orthodoxy in the field, concentrating on the work of such seminal figures as Gellner, Nairn, Giddens, Breuilly, Anderson and Hobsbawm. In the second part he presents the critics of modernism and their alternatives, from the primordialisms of van den Berghe and Geertz to the ethno-symbolic approaches of Armstrong and Smith, as well as the contributions of, among others, Seton-Watson, Greenfeld, Horowitz, Connor, Reynolds and Brass. The survey concludes with a brief analysis of some ‘postmodern’ approaches to issues of contemporary national identity, gender and nation, civic and ethnic nationalisms, as well as supranationalism and globalisation.

 

The first comprehensive theoretical survey of the subject of nationalism for nearly thirty years, Nationalism and Modernism provides a concise and balanced guide to its often confusing debates, revealing a rich and complex field rent by deep disagreements and rival paradigms. This work places nationalism firmly within the arena of current political and cultural thought and paves the way to more systematic and focused progress in this rapidly expanding field.

 

 

Anthony D.Smith is Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism in the European Institute at the London School of Economics. His previous publications include

Theories of Nationalism (1971, 1983), The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), National Identity (1991) and Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (1995).

 

 

 

Nationalism and

 

Modernism

 

A critical survey of recent theories of nations and nationalism

 

 

 

 

Anthony D.Smith

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

London and New York

 

98–18648

CIP

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First published 1998 by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

 

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

 

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

 

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

 

© 1998 Anthony D.Smith

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

 

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

 

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

 

Smith, Anthony D.

Nationalism and modernism: a critical survey of recent theories of nations and nationalism/Anthony D.Smith

1. cm.

 

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Nationalism. I. Title.

 

JC311.N5388 1998 320.54’01–dc21

 

 

ISBN 0-203-16796-1 Master e-book ISBN

 

 

 

ISBN 0-203-26302-2 (Adobe eReader Format) 0-415-06340-X (hbk)

0-415-06341-8 (pbk)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my research students

 

from whom I have learnt so much

 

 

 

Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preface					x
Introduction: The modernist paradigm					1
The rise and decline of nationalism?  1
The rise and decline of modernism?  2
Aims and plan  5
1  The rise of classical modernism					8
The roots of classical modernism		9
The classical modernist paradigm of nationalism					18
PART I
Varieties of modernism					25
2  The culture of industrialism					27
‘Nation’ and ‘nationalism’	29
Agroliterate and industrial societies			30
From ‘low’ to ‘high’ cultures	32
Nationalism and industrialism		35
Nationalism and ‘high cultures’		37
Nationalism and public education			39
Nationalism and historical continuity				41
Nationalism and the ethnic past		45
3  Capitalism and nationalism					47
Imperialism and uneven development				49
Populism and romanticism	51
‘Nationalism-producing’ development?				53
The social base of nationalism		55
Internal colonialism  57

 

 

vii

 

viii	Contents
	Ethno-regionalism		61
	Elite strategies of ‘rational choice’					63
	Interest and passion			66
4	State and nation							70
	Sources of political modernism  70
	The reflexive state		71
	The nation beyond the state				73
	Nations and the inter-state order					76
	The state and war		79
	A political theory of nationalism?  82
	State and society: bridging the gulf?  84
	Identity and politics			89
	Intellectuals and nationalist ideology						91
	Political modernism and ethnic history						92
	Conclusion  94
5	Political messianism							97
	‘Political religion’		97
	Marginal youth	99
	The cult of the ‘dark gods’				101
	A millennial opiate		103
	Colonialism and the intellectuals					106
	Millennialism and progress				109
	The religion of history			112
6	Invention and imagination							117
	Inventing nations	117
	Ethnic and civic nationalisms?  125
	‘Proto-national’ bonds			127
	The nation as construct?  129
	Imagining the nation			131
	An imagined community?				136
	Print-capitalism and re-presentation						138
	Mass self-sacrifice		140
PART II
Critics and alternatives								143
7	Primordialism and perennialism							145
	Primordialism I: inclusive fitness					146

 

							Contents	ix
	Primordialism II: cultural givens					151
	The instrumentalist critique				153
	Perennialism I: ethnic continuity  159
	Perennialism II: perennial ethnicity, modem nations  161
	The psychology of ethnic affiliation					165
	The immemorial nation?			167
8	Ethno-symbolism							170
	‘Old, continuous’ nations			170
	Pre-modern nations?  173
	Cultural and political nationalism					177
	Myth-symbol complexes			181
	A framework of national emergence					183
	Culture and the border			185
	‘Dual legitimation’		187
	Ethnies and ethno-symbolism				190
	Origins and types of nation  193
	Ethno-symbolism considered				196
9	Beyond modernism?							199
	Polyethnicity, past and future				199
	The post-national agenda			201
	Fragmentation and hybrid identities					202
	Gender and nation		205
	Liberalism and civic or ethnic nationalism						210
	Nationalism and globalisation				213
	National identity and supra-nationalism						216
	Beyond modernism?		218
	Conclusion: problems, paradigms and prospects							221
	Problems	221
	Paradigms	222
	Prospects	225
	Notes							229
	Bibliography							244
	Index							264

 

Preface

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Benjamin West was working on his celebrated painting of The Death of General Wolfe in 1770, he was visited by Archbishop Drummond and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who warned West not to paint Wolfe’s death scene, unless he were to ‘adopt the classic costume of antiquity, as much more becoming the inherent greatness of…[the] subject than the modern garb of war’. Whereupon West, we are told, replied that

 

the event intended to be commemorated took place on the 13th September 1758 [actually 1759] in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and at a period of time when no such nations, nor heroes in their costume, any longer existed. The subject I have to represent is the conquest of a great province of America by the British troops…. If, instead of the facts of the transaction, I represent classical fictions, how shall I be understood by posterity!

 

(John Galt, The Life, Studies, and Works of Benjamin West, Esquire,

 

London, 1820:2, 46–50, cited in Abrams 1986:14)

 

Nationalism, in West’s understanding, is not the exclusive property of the ancients, nor is heroic self-sacrifice for one’s country. It is as much a phenomenon of the modern world as of the ancient. When the painting was finished, Reynolds, we are told, relented, and predicted that West’s painting would ‘occasion a revolution in the art’. He hardly realised that West was, in fact, one of the very first to portray a revolution in the style and content of politics, proclaiming an upheaval in society that has continued to our day.

 

Of course, we are privileged with the hindsight of that posterity to which Benjamin West, and the new age of which he was a child, had begun to appeal. We can see, as he could not, that he was painting an early icon of one of the great pillars, and forces, of modernity. Yet, when we look at his painting, it seems as old-fashioned as it is revolutionary. For, beneath the modern dress and the accessories of modern warfare, West has composed a pietà, a religious image of the dying hero as Christ. His painting, like that of Marat Assassiné by David, looks back to a Christian past, even as it looks forward to the modern age of secular nationalism. Perhaps, West is telling us, heroic self-sacrifice for king and

 

x

 

Preface   xi

 

country is as much ancient as it is modern, and that the nationalism which was already evident, and was to flourish so widely in the next two centuries, is merely a recent version of something far older?

 

This issue of the modernity or antiquity of nations has become central to the study of nationalism over the last few decades. The recent upsurge of ethnic nationalism in many parts of the world has only made more acute questions about the origins, nature and consequences of nationalism. The last ten years have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the practice and the study of nationalism. Since the unravelling of the Soviet Union, some twenty new states have been created, claiming to represent ‘nations’ which had been suppressed within empires or federations. In the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Ethiopia, we have witnessed both peaceful and violent examples of national secession, and in several more states there remains the distinct possibility of further successful partitions and secessions. Elsewhere, a score or more movements of ethnic protest have generated more or less hidden, and more or less hopeless, insurgencies and wars, and it is not difficult to find many other instances of uneasy coexistence of ethnic communities in both old and new states around the globe. In the last decade, not only has ethnic nationalism shown no signs of abating, it has flourished more widely and powerfully than at any period since the Second World War.

 

Such a remarkable resurgence has spurred an equally unprecedented increase in the number of investigations into the phenomena of ethnicity, nations and nationalism. Of course, there had been a considerable spate of studies of these phenomena in the 1950s and 1960s, the era of decolonisation in Africa and Asia. But well into the 1980s, scholarly attention had been devoted to other kinds of ideology and social movement, and in particular the varieties of Marxism and communism. The nation had received little attention apart from its combination (as junior partner) with the state—in the ‘nation-state’—and nationalism had attracted much less interest than ‘class’, ‘race’ or ‘gender’. All this changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Since 1990, there has been a veritable flood of publications on ethnicity and nationalism—case-studies, reports, monographs, textbooks and latterly readers—or on sub-fields within this huge terrain. Indeed, even as I was writing my conclusions, several new books appeared, including Adrian Hastings’ The Construction of Nationhood (1997), Craig Calhoun’s Nationalism, (1997), Sian Jones’

 

The Archaeology of Ethnicity (1997), Lyn Spillman’s Nation and Commemoration (1997), Michael Ignatieff’s The Warrior’s Honour (1998), as well as the new Ethnicity Reader by Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex (1997), not to mention several edited collections of essays on nations and nationalism. It has indeed become quite impossible to keep abreast of the tide of publications in the field.

 

Yet for all this scholarly activity, the theory of nations and nationalism has been much less well served. There was, it is true, a renewed interest in theory construction and in general perspectives in the later 1970s and early 1980s, but, as I hope to show, recent years have seen a turning away from attempts to

 

xii   Preface

 

provide overall theoretical accounts of nations and nationalism. Compared to the 1950s and 1960s—the period to which I devoted attention in my first overview of theories of nationalism—there has been a marked increase in the number of general approaches and theories. But, given the very few examples of general approaches and theories in that early period, the production of original theories and approaches still remains relatively modest compared to the veritable outpouring of other kinds of study in the field.

 

The present book aims to provide a critical survey of recent explanatory theories and approaches to nations and nationalism. It therefore constitutes a sequel to my first book, Theories of Nationalism, which was originally published in 1971. Though there have been some reviews of more recent theories in article form, there has been no recent comprehensive book-length attempt to provide a theoretical survey of the field, with the partial exception of Paul James’ thought-provoking Nation Formation (1996) and the shorter evaluations of some theories of nationalism in Thomas Eriksen’s equally stimulating Ethnicity and Nationalism (1993). Although the first chapter of the present work is devoted to summarising the position in the 1960s by way of necessary context and background, I have concentrated on perspectives, models and theories produced after 1970—from Elie Kedourie’s second major work (Nationalism in Asia and Africa, 1971) and the reformulation by Ernest Gellner of his theory in Nations and Nationalism (1983), right up to Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990) and the second volume of Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power (1993), as well as some of the ‘postmodern’ analyses of the last decade. In particular, I aim to examine in some detail the varieties of what remains the dominant orthodoxy in the field, namely the ‘modernist’ approach to nations and nationalism, while giving due weight to the many criticisms of modernism and to the main theoretical alternatives in the field.

 

I make no claim to be impartial as between the various approaches and paradigms. While I hope to have indicated both the strengths and the weaknesses in each approach or theory, as a partisan in the theoretical debate, I make no pretence to a value-free stance vis-à-vis the various theories and perspectives that I explore. This would in any case be out of the question in a field so riddled with deep disagreements and schisms. Instead, I have sought to give students new to the field some feel for the debates and intersecting monologues with which they are confronted, and to provide some kind of map by which to orient themselves in what must appear to be a particularly confusing intellectual terrain. Throughout, I have tried to bring out the insights, and problems, of each major approach, and some of the reasons behind particular formulations and objections.

 

The last chapter proved to be particularly problematic. In one sense it may seem out of place, since I argue that, with the possible exception of the ‘gender-nation’ theorists, recent postmodern and postmodernist approaches have eschewed grand theory and large-scale narratives. However, not to have included some analysis of the most recent general scholarly trends in the field, would have left students with a decidely incomplete, and therefore one-sided overview

 

Preface xiii

 

of the contemporary field. On the other hand, to have given each of these trends their proper attention would have doubled the length of the book, or required another volume. In the end, I compromised by focusing on four major trends, briefly describing their contributions, with special emphasis on their theoretical relevance or lack of it to an overall understanding of nations and nationalism.

 

A book of this scope required some clear parameters, if it was not to become unwieldy. I have confined myself, for the most part, to analysis of perspectives and theories of nations and nationalism, concentrating on books in the first place, and using articles only where they seemed to provide more succinct and accessible statements of the theory. The one exception to this focus was the need to introduce, in Part II, sections on ethnicity, because for primordialists, perennialists and ethno-symbolists, ethnic identity and community is a major point of reference and a vital building-block for theories of nations and nationalism. I have excluded, as far as possible, separate analysis of other major sources of cleavage and identity—racial, gender, class and religious— except where these sources are invoked by the theories of nationalism themselves; not because I thought them unimportant or irrelevant, but because to have treated them in any depth in their own right would have muddied the primary focus of the book and greatly extended its scope and length. In this respect, it was necessary, in the interests of clarity of focus and purpose, to hew close to the chosen path. Similarly, I have omitted the many important and fascinating normative debates which have developed over the last decade in political science and international relations, over the compatibility or otherwise of liberal democracy with mainly civic forms of nationalism. Once again, limitations of space and the desire to focus on explanatory theories precluded consideration of these debates.

 

I am all too conscious of the many other omissions, to some of which I allude all too briefly in the text or notes. The relationships between nationalism and such developing fields as migration, diasporas, post-colonialism, neo-fascism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, minority rights and multiculturalism—all much-discussed topics today—I have had to leave on one side. My reasons, apart from considerations of space, are twofold. First, I felt that serious examination of the contribution of these topics would have deflected attention from the book’s main purpose, the description and evaluation of explanatory theories of nations and nationalism. Second, while analyses of these issues are vital and immensely valuable in their own right, it is by no means clear that they can further the task of explaining the origins, development and nature of nations and nationalism, or that they seek to do so. It seemed therefore advisable to exclude them from this theoretical survey.

 

I am also aware of failing to give due space to all the theories considered here, and of having done less than justice to the views of some authors. Once again, I have had to be selective and concentrate on the main representatives of each major approach in the field. If this has meant that I have treated cursorily, or overlooked some contributions—which is inevitable in a field that is expanding

 

xiv   Preface

 

so fast—then I hope the authors concerned will accept my apologies for these omissions and for any errors, for which I take full responsibility.

The book is written primarily for students new to the field. I owe a great debt to my students, who in both good and difficult times have worked with me through many of the issues explored in this book, in our many absorbing and fruitful discussions in our Workshop on Ethnicity and Nationalism, in the master’s course on Nationalism and in the conferences and seminars organised by The Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of Economics. To them I dedicate this book, in the hope that we may continue to search for answers to the many questions raised by the fundamental issues of nations and nationalism.

 

Anthony D.Smith

 

London School of Economics

 

November 1997

 

Introduction

 

The modernist paradigm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A single red line traverses the history of the modern world from the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Emerging fitfully in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Holland, it rises bright and clear in late eighteenth-century France and America. Dividing and redividing lands and peoples, it stretches the length of Central and Latin America, pushes across southern, central, eastern, then northern Europe into Russia, India and the Far East, and then winds its way in many guises into the Middle East, Africa and Australasia. In its wake come protest and terror, war and revolution, the inclusion of some, the exclusion of many. At last, the red line becomes blurred, fragmented, faded, as the world moves on.

 

The name of the red line is nationalism, and its story is the central thread binding, and dividing, the peoples of the modern world. Though its forms are many, it is all one red line. The story of its progress is one of emergence and decline, the rise and fall of nations and nationalism. Historians may differ over the exact moment of nationalism’s birth, but social scientists are clear: nationalism is a modern movement and ideology, which emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe and America, and which, after its apogee in two world wars, is now beginning to decline and give way to global forces which transcend the boundaries of nation-states.

 

The rise and decline of nationalism?

 

At the outset, nationalism was an inclusive and liberating force. It broke down the various localisms of region, dialect, custom and clan, and helped to create large and powerful nation-states, with centralised markets and systems of administration, taxation and education. Its appeal was popular and democratic. It attacked feudal practices and oppressive imperial tyrannies and proclaimed the sovereignty of the people and the right of all peoples to determine their own destinies, in states of their own, if that was what they desired. Throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, nationalism was found wherever native elites fought to overthrow foreign imperial and colonial administrations, so much so that for a time it seemed indistinguishable from popular democracy. But already by the mid- to late nineteenth century, imperial and colonial rulers

 

 

1

 

2   Introduction

 

had found ways to siphon off the force of nationalism from its democratic base; the ‘official nationalisms’ of Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey and Meiji Japan revealed the malleability of national sentiments, traditions and myths and the contortions of that single red line (Anderson 1991, ch.6).

 

Worse was to come. The large-scale mass-democratic nationalisms of the earlier nineteenth century were later joined by a host of small-scale mini-nationalisms led by intellectuals who appealed to language and cultural differences. Their successes after Versailles transformed the map of Europe, but more significantly presaged a world of self-aware and assertive ethnic nations. And these again were shadowed, ominously, by nationalisms that appealed to ‘race’—to cranium, blood and genes—and to violence and the cult of brutality, the cradle of fascism. In the convulsions that followed, first in Europe, then across the world, the rampant red line of nationalism blended with the darker forces of fascism, racism and anti-Semitism, to produce the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

 

In the revulsion which this has engendered in Europe, at least, there arose a desire among many to put an end to internecine conflicts and build a supranational continent free of national lines of division. The old faith in the unity and superiority of the nation and its state was shaken, and the new generations in the West, accustomed to travel, migrants and the mixing of cultures, no longer felt the full force of ancient national memories, traditions and boundaries. Of course, in other parts of the world, the red lines of nationalism still mark the violent antagonisms of ethnic cleavages, which threaten to dissolve the fragile unities of new territorial states. But even in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the earlier faith in the mass civic nation has been eroded by the economic and political realities of a very unequal international division of labour, the power of transnational forces, and ethnic cleavages within. In this respect, the advanced industrial societies only hold up a mirror to the future of the planet, when nations and nationalism will be revealed as transient forces which are fast becoming obsolete in a world of vast transnational markets, power blocs, global consumerism and mass communications (Horsman and Marshall 1994).

 

The rise and decline of modernism?

 

Alongside this gradual dissolution of the bonds of the nation in the minds and hearts of many of its members, there has been a parallel evolution in the scholarship and theory of nationalism. The idea that nations are real entities, grounded in history and social life, that they are homogeneous and united, that they represent the major social and political actors in the modern world—all this no longer seems as true as it did thirty and even twenty years ago.¹

 

In the mid-twentieth century, right up indeed until the late 1960s and early 1970s, an optimistic and realist view of nations and nationalism prevailed. Whatever their other differences, scholars and theorists of nationalism seemed to agree on the psychological power and sociological reality of nations and nation-states. They spoke of the need to ‘build’ nations through such techniques as communications, urbanisation, mass education and political participation,

 

Introduction               3

 

in much the same way as one might speak of building machines or edifices through the application of design and technical devices to matter. It was a question of institutionalisation, of getting the necessary norms embodied in appropriate institutions, so as to create good copies of the Western model of the civic participant nation. This became a technical question of appropriate recipes for national development, of securing balanced and diversified economic growth, open channels of communication and expression, well organised and responsive publics, and mature and flexible elites. This was the way to replicate the successful model of the Western nation-state in the ex-colonies of Africa and Asia.²

 

In the late 1980s and 1990s, such optimism seems touchingly naive. Not only have the early democratic dreams of African and Asian states not been realised; the developed countries of the West too have experienced the rumblings of ethnic discontent and fragmentation, and in the East the demise of the last great European multinational empire has encouraged the unravelling of the cosmopolitan dream of fraternity into its ethno-national components. The great tides of immigration and the massive increase in communications and information technology have brought into question the earlier beliefs in a single civic nation with a homogeneous national identity which could be used as a model for ‘healthy’ national development. As a result, the old models have been discarded along with much of the paradigm of nationalism in which they were embedded. Moving beyond the older paradigm, new ideas, methods and approaches, hardly amounting to an alternative paradigm, yet corrosive of the established orthodoxies, have called into question the very idea of the unitary nation, revealing its fictive bases in the narratives of its purveyors. The deconstruction of the nation foreshadows the demise of the theory of nationalism.³

 

The paradigm of nationalism which was so widely accepted till recently is that of classical modernism. This is the conception that nations and nationalism are intrinsic to the nature of the modern world and to the revolution of modernity. It achieved its canonical formulation in the 1960s, above all in the model of ‘nation-building’. This model had a wide appeal in the social sciences in the wake of the vast movement of decolonisation in Africa and Asia, and it had considerable influence on policy-makers in the West. But the model of nation-building, although the best known and most obvious, was by no means the only, let alone the most subtle or convincing, version of the modernist paradigm of nations and nationalism. In its wake there emerged a variety of other, more comprehensive and sophisticated models and theories, all of which nevertheless accepted the basic premises of classical modernism. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that there emerged a series of critiques which have called into question the basic assumptions of that paradigm, and with it the model of nation-building; critiques which on the one hand have revealed the nation as an invented, imagined and hybrid category, and on the other hand as modern versions of far older and more basic social and cultural communities. As we shall see, the story of the rise and decline of nations and their nationalisms in the modem world is mirrored in the recital of the rise and decline of the

 

4   Introduction

 

dominant paradigm of nations and nationalism, together with all its associated theories and models.

The last thirty years have seen an efflorescence of historical, comparative and case-studies of nationalism, which have built on but also moved beyond the earlier historical studies of nationalist ideology.⁴ Though the theory of nations and nationalism has been less well served, there have also been several important new approaches to and models of ‘nationalism-in-general’. Together, they have challenged earlier organic and ‘essentialist’ assumptions of the nation, and have refined and extended the basic paradigm of modernism beyond its classical formulation in the ‘nation-building’ model of the 1960s. These approaches and theories possess a number of features which the majority of scholars and theorists in the last three decades took for granted, including:

 

• a sense of the power and unpredictability of nationalism, the idea that the ideology and movement of nationalism was one of the dominant forces in the modern world and that because it took many forms, it was not possible to predict where and when it could erupt;
• on the other side, a sense of the problematic nature of the concept of the nation, the difficulty in pinning it down and providing clearcut definitions, but also a feeling that established historical nations were sociological communities of great resonance and power;

 

• a belief in the historical specificity of nations and nationalism, that these were phenomena peculiar to a particular period of history, the modern epoch, and that only when that epoch drew to a close would nations pass away;

 

• a growing emphasis on the socially created quality of all collective identities, including cultural identities, and hence an understanding of the nation as a cultural construct, forged and engineered by various elites to meet certain needs or cater to specific interests;

 

• and therefore a commitment to sociological explanations which derive nations and nationalism from the social conditions and political processes of modernity, with a concomitant methodology of sociological modernism and presentism seeking data drawn mainly from the recent and contemporary worlds.⁵

 

Of course, not all the theorists to be discussed here share all of these assumptions, even among self-styled modernists. But there is sufficient convergence among many theorists to mark off the dominant paradigm of modernism from its critics. What these characteristics, taken together, suggest is a strong belief in the rise and decline of a powerful, but historically specific and problematic phenomenon, whose era of dominance was rooted in the revolutions of modernity and which is now gradually coming to its close. And in its wake, shadowing reality, we can trace the rise and gradual decline of its intellectual reflection, the dominant paradigm of the modern nation, classical modernism.

 

Introduction               5

 

Aims and plan

 

This book is largely about the rise and portended decline of this dominant paradigm of nations and nationalism. Its purpose is fourfold. In the first place, it aims to examine the key assumptions of classical modernism and describe its rich varieties and developments through an analysis of the approaches and theories of some of its leading exponents. Second, it offers an internal critique of these approaches and theories on their own terms, and evaluates the strengths and limitations of the paradigm which they all share. Third, it explores and assesses some of the alternatives proposed by the main critics of classical modernism. A few of these critics have turned their backs entirely on the dominant paradigm, but most have accepted some of its premises while rejecting others and supplementing them with ideas drawn from a perennialist paradigm. Finally, there is an attempt to review some of the new developments in the field, draw up a balance-sheet of where we stand today in terms of theories of nationalism, and give some indications of fruitful lines of enquiry and progress in the field.

 

The book is divided into two parts, the first devoted to the varieties and problems of the modernist paradigm, the second to its critics and the alternatives they propose.

 

Part I examines the classical paradigm and its varieties. The first chapter briefly describes the rise of classical modernism as it shook off the assumptions and limitations of older ideas of the organic nation, and then sets out the main features of the classical paradigm in its heyday in the 1960s.

 

Subsequent chapters analyse the main varieties of the paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s. These include:

 

• the sociocultural version associated with the later views of Ernest Gellner, which links nations and nationalism to the needs of generating a ‘high culture’ for modernisation and industrial development;

 

• the socioeconomic models of Tom Nairn and Michael Hechter, which derive nationalism from the rational workings of the world economy and the social and economic interests of individuals;

 

• the more political versions of theorists like Charles Tilly, Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann and John Breuilly, which look at the relationship of nationalism to the sources of power, notably war, elites and the modern state;

 

• and the ideological versions of Elie Kedourie, and more recently Bruce Kapferer and Mark Juergensmeyer, which tend to see nationalism as a belief system, a form of religion surrogate or secular religion, and to link its emergence and power to changes in the sphere of ideas and beliefs.

 

The concluding chapter of the first part continues the theme of the development of classical modernism, as it were, beyond itself. The main theories in question, those of Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson, can be regarded both as Marxian varieties of classical modernism, but also as moving beyond some of

 

6   Introduction

 

the assumptions of that paradigm. Their respective formulations of the ‘invented traditions’ and the ‘imagined community’ of the nation have provided the seedbed for more radical ‘postmodernist’ developments in which the idea of national identity is treated as inherently problematic and broken down into its component narratives.

Part II explores the various critiques of classical modernism and its later developments. These range from moderate ‘internal’ to radical ‘external’ critiques. Among the latter, the most prominent are those that stress the ‘primordial’ quality of nations and nationalism, including the sociobiological versions represented by Pierre van den Berghe which have experienced a recent revival, and the cultural primordialism associated with Clifford Geertz, which has been criticised by ‘instrumentalists’ like Paul Brass. Less radical departures from modernist orthodoxies are represented by those like Walker Connor, Donald Horowitz and Joshua Fishman, who emphasise the psychological and kinship components of ethnicity and ethno-nationalism. Another group of critics is represented by those like John Armstrong and Steven Grosby, who cast doubt on the intrinsic modernity of nations and thereby revive the debate about the ‘perennial’ presence of nations.

 

The second chapter of Part II continues this discussion of pre-modern nations by considering the work of historians like Hugh Seton-Watson, Doron Mendels, Adrian Hastings and Susan Reynolds, who have re-examined the evidence for nationality and nationalism in pre-modern epochs, and thereby seek to decouple (some) nations from ‘modernisation’. It then examines the work of John Hutchinson, John Armstrong and myself, who stress the cultural and ‘ethno-symbolic’ nature of ethnicity and nationalism. Whether they adhere to a more phenomenological approach and Barthian emphasis on the use of symbols and myths in maintaining ethnic boundaries, or to a more structural and ethno-historical approach to the formation of nations, they are critical of what they see as the modernist failure to grasp the recurring nature of ethno-symbolic ties and to ground their understanding of modern nations in the longue durée and in earlier ethnic myths, memories, symbols and traditions.

 

The final chapter of Part II provides a brief critical sketch of some of the many recent developments in the field, including analyses of the fragmentation and increasingly hybrid nature of national identity and the uses of ‘situational’ ethnicity; feminist accounts of gendered national projects, female national symbolism and the relations between gender and ethnicity; debates about the civic or ethnic nature of nationalism and its relations with liberal democracy; and the discussions about the demise of the nation-state in an era of both ‘supranationalism’ and globalisation processes. These developments are assessed less for their intrinsic merits than for their theoretical contributions to an overall understanding of nations and nationalism, and from this standpoint they are found to be limited and partial extensions or revisions of modernism.

 

A brief conclusion spells out the main theoretical problems and suggests that, while no unified theory is likely in such a complex and divided field, significant progress has been made in a number of directions, with the result that our

 

Introduction               7

 

understanding of these elusive and protean phenomena has been greatly enriched and deepened. We can envisage, at least, combinations of elements from the main paradigms in the field, which in turn may generate some fruitful historical and comparative research programmes for the elucidation of the most vexed issues in the field.

 

• The rise of classical modernism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three main issues have dominated the theory of nations and nationalism. The first is ethical and philosophical. It concerns the role of the nation in

human affairs. Should we regard the nation as an end in itself, an absolute value which is incommensurable with all other values? Or should we understand the nation and national identity as a means to other ends and values, a proximate value, and therefore bound to time, place and context, and especially to the conditions of a modern epoch?

 

The second is anthropological and political. It concerns the social definition of the nation. What kind of community is the nation and what is the relationship of the individual to that community? Is the nation fundamentally ethno-cultural in character, a community of (real or fictive) descent whose members are bound together from birth by kinship ties, common history and shared language? Or is it largely a social and political community based on common territory and residence, on citizenship rights and common laws, in relation to which individuals are free to choose whether they wish to belong?

 

The third is historical and sociological. It concerns the place of the nation in the history of humanity. Should we regard the nation as an immemorial and evolving community, rooted in a long history of shared ties and culture? Or are nations to be treated as recent social constructs or cultural artefacts, at once bounded and malleable, typical products of a certain stage of history and the special conditions of a modern epoch, and hence destined to pass away when that stage has been surpassed and its conditions no longer apply?

 

These three issues and the debates they have engendered recur continually in discussions of nations and nationalism. As we would expect, they often overlap and intertwine, and it is not unknown for theorists to take up clearcut positions on one issue, only to ‘cross over’ to the unexpected ‘side’ in one or other of the debates, to hold for example that nations are recurrent and immemorial yet means to other ends, or that they are social and political communities but constitute absolute values. Moreover, the third and last debate conflates two separate issues: the issue of the antiquity or modernity of the nation in history, and the question of its evolved or socially constructed nature. As we shall see, this conflation of issues makes it difficult to adhere to any simple characterisation of theorists or classification of approaches and theories in the field. Nevertheless,

 

 

8

 

The rise of classical modernism               9

 

there is enough consistency among analysts and theories to propose a general classificatory scheme based in particular on the third of the above three issues. Such a classification reveals the main lines of debate in the field in recent decades, though it can serve only as an approximation to understanding of the logic at work behind particular approaches and theories.

 

The roots of classical modernism

 

Early forerunners

 

The earliest scholars of nationalism were in fact happy to conflate these issues, mingling an evolutionary account of the development of nations with a degree of voluntarism, and a prescription for political activism with a sense of the long-term ethno-cultural roots of nations. Michelet, for example, viewed the nation as the best defence for individual liberty in the era of fraternity. The French Revolution had ushered in a Rousseauan religion of patriotism, of ‘Man fraternising in the presence of God’, with France, ‘the common child of nations’, surrounded by sympathetic countries like Italy, Poland and Ireland, whose nationalisms belonged to Mazzini’s Young Europe movement. At the same time, he shared the naturalist assumption of Sieyes and others for whom nations existed outside the social and legal bond, in nature.¹

 

For Lord Acton, on the other hand, the central question is ethical: the extent to which the (French) theory of national unity ‘makes the nation a source of despotism and revolution’, whereas the libertarian (English) theory of nationality harks back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and regards the nation ‘as the bulwark of self-government, and the foremost limit to the excessive power of the State’. For Acton, the continental idealist view of

 

nationality does not aim at either liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State. Its course will be marked with material as well as moral ruin, in order that a new invention may prevail over the works of God and the interests of mankind.

(Acton 1948:166–95)

 

Acton’s conservative analysis nevertheless vindicates multinational empires, like the Habsburg, on the ground that, unlike the national state, it can ‘satisfy different races’. His general commitment to diversity is not unlike that of Moser and Herder; and his belief in liberty he shares with John Stuart Mill who argued for the right of national self-determination and collective voluntarism.²

 

Perhaps the most influential of these early analyses was that contained in a lecture of 1882 by Ernest Renan, which he delivered to counter the militarist nationalism of Heinrich Treitschke. Renan combines a sense of ethno-cultural formation in Europe over the longue durée with a belief in the active political commitment of members of the nation. Renan starts with a contrast that is to

 

10   The rise of classical modernism

 

have a long history: between the fusion of ‘races’ in the nations of Western Europe, and the retention of ethnic distinctiveness in Eastern Europe. In France, by the tenth century, the idea of any difference in race between Gallic and Frankish populations had disappeared; what counts today are the shared experiences and common memories (and forgettings) of the members, which makes the nation

 

a soul, a spiritual principle…. A nation is a great solidarity, created by the sentiment of the sacrifices which have been made and of those which one is disposed to make in the future. It presupposes a past; but it resumes itself in the present by a tangible fact: the consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue life in common. The existence of a nation is a plebiscite of every day, as the existence of the individual is a perpetual affirmation of life.

 

(Renan 1882, cited in Kohn 1955:135–40)

 

In these early commentaries on the principle of nationality, written with specific political developments in mind, there is no attempt to fashion a general theory applicable to all cases, or to resolve the antinomies of each issue in a coherent and systematic manner. This was left to the next generation. By the late nineteenth century, when the concept of ‘nation’ was often used interchangeably with that of ‘race’, more comprehensive and reductionist schemes emerged. The racist schema of biological struggle for mastery of organic racial nations was only one, albeit the most striking and influential. Even the Marxists were not immune, despite their official instrumentalist attitude to nationalism. In judging nationalisms by their revolutionary uses, Marx and Engels had also been swayed by their German Romantic and Hegelian inheritance, with its stress on the importance of language and political history for creating nation-states and their animus against small, history-less, as well as backward, nations. Their followers took over this contempt for the ‘unhistorical nations’, thereby allowing to the concept of the nation a certain historical and sociological independence, and blurring the insistence on the dependance of nationality on the growth of capitalism and its bourgeois ruling classes.³

 

We can see this ambivalence on all the major issues—ethical, anthropological and historical—in the work of the Austro-Marxists like Otto Bauer. On the one hand, Bauer traces the long evolution of European nationalities from their ethnic foundations and class formations into ‘communities of character’; on the other hand, he and his associates believed it was possible to influence the course of national (and international) evolution by active political intervention which would separate the principle of cultural nationality from territorial location and political rights. In this conception, the principle of nationality is both an absolute and a proximate value, both an evolved ethno-cultural community and a class-constructed social category. By organising nations within a wider multinational state, it would be possible both to preserve their unique historical character and also ensure that they contributed to wider societal integration and the realisation of social freedom and abundance.⁴

The rise of classical modernism              11

 

Even among the nationalists themselves, we find the same permutations and inconsistencies. Some, it is true, followed the principles of German Romanticism to their conclusion and became full-blooded organicists, believing in the seamless, immemorial and even biological character of nations. Others were less consistent, believing with Mazzini that, though geography, history, ethnic descent, language and religion might determine much of the character and situation of the nation, political action and the mobilisation of the people were essential if the nation was to be ‘reawakened’ and recalled to its sacred mission. From an early period, these dilemmas of evolution and intervention, of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, were as acute for nationalists as they were for communists.⁵

 

Intellectual foundations

 

It is during this period, at the turn of the twentieth century, that we can discern the intellectual foundations of the classical modernist paradigm of nationalism. Broadly speaking, there were four major streams of influence: Marxism, crowd psychology, Weberian and Durkheimian. I shall deal briefly with the contribution of each to the formulation of a coherent modernist approach to the understanding of nations and nationalism.

 

• It is important to stress at the outset that none of these traditions were concerned more than peripherally with the analysis of nations or nationalism. In the case of the Marxist tradition, this might be ascribed to the early period in which the founding fathers wrote; though in the world of 1848, nationalism was already a powerful, if limited, force in Europe. This lack of concern must rather be attributed to the conscious decision on the part of both the founders and their followers, in reacting against German idealism, to relegate environmental and cultural influences to the background, and concentrate on the explication of the role of economic and class factors in the evolution of humanity. This in turn meant that, in relation to the explanatory role attributed to class conflict and to the contradictions in the mode of production in the successive stages of historical development, ethnic and national principles and phenomena had to be accorded a secondary or even derivative role, becoming at most catalysts or contributory (or complicating) rather than major causal factors. There was also a crucial ethical consideration. Given the inbuilt propensity of human evolution to self-transendence through stages of political revolution, and given the fundamental role of class conflict in generating revolution, there was no place for any other factor, especially one that might impede or divert from the ‘movement of history’, except insofar as it might contribute to hastening that movement in specific instances. It was in these circumstances that Marxists identified particular nationalist movements in strategic terms, judging their ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive’ character in relation to a given revolutionary situation. It was from this perspective that Marx and Engels passed favourable judgments on Polish and Irish nationalism, as they were

 

12   The rise of classical modernism

 

likely to weaken Tsarist feudal absolutism and British capitalism respectively and hasten the next stage of historical evolution; whereas nationalist movements among the ‘backward’ small nations of the western and southern Slavs could only evoke their contempt or disapproval, as they were judged likely to divert the bourgeoisie or proletariat from their historic task in the evolution of Europe (Cummins 1980; Connor 1984).

 

Neither Marx nor Engels, Lenin nor Stalin, Luxemburg nor Kautsky, endeavoured to present a theory or model of nations and nationalism per se, not only because these phenomena were viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility, even by those who conceded their political significance, but because the ‘science’ with which they were concerned was intimately linked to a specific worldview and political strategy that sought to reduce all phenomena, at the explanatory level at least, to their economic basis, deriving cultural and political identities and movements from the class alignments thrown up by a specific stage in the development of the mode of production. It was in this context that the ‘formalism’ associated with Marxist analysis became prominent: the idea that nations provided the forms and vessels, while class formations and their ideologies provided the content and ends to which the next stage of history aspired. This type of reductive reasoning has left a strong imprint on some latterday approaches to the study of nationalism, even where the theorists no longer accept the worldview and strategy in which it was embedded, and even when they eschew the cruder forms of economic reductionism and ideological formalism found in some of Marx’s followers.⁶

 

Equally important for the legacy of the early Marxist tradition has been its historical and global emphasis, and its Eurocentric bias. For Marx, Engels, Lenin and their followers, nations and nationalism were intrinsic to the development of the modern capitalist era. They were to be understood as manifestations both of European capitalism’s need for ever larger territorial markets and trading blocs, and of the growing distance between the modern capitalist state and bourgeois civil society and the levelling of all intermediate bodies between state and citizen characteristic of advanced absolutism. Of course, these themes were not confined to Marxists, and they remained relatively undeveloped in the early Marxist corpus. But it is fair to say that with the rediscovery of the early Marx’s writings and their debt to Hegel and the Left Hegelians, they assumed a new importance at the very moment when a significant number of scholars were increasingly turning their attention to the theory of nationalism. Similarly, the current interest in the concept of ‘globalisation’ which can in part be traced to Marxist concerns with the development of late capitalism, has been increasingly linked to the role of nation-states and nationalism in advanced industrial society and as such reasserts the Western and modernist bias characteristic of the Marxist tradition (Davis 1967; Avineri 1968; Nairn 1977).

 

• The influence of the second tradition of crowd psychology and Freud’s later social psychological work has been more pervasive but also more

 

The rise of classical modernism              13

 

limited. It would be difficult to point to particular theorists of national identity and nationalism who have made explicit use of the crowd psychology of Le Bon or the herd instinct of Trotter, or even of the analyses of Simmel, Mead, Adorno and the later theories of Freud—despite the work of Leonard Doob or Morton Grodzins. On the other hand, many of their insights have permeated the thinking of recent scholars of nationalism. Perhaps the most obvious case is that of Kedourie’s portrait of the social psychology of restless, alienated youth resentful of parental traditions and the humiliations of authority. But we can also discern the influence of an earlier crowd psychology in some of the functionalist analyses of mass-mobilising nationalism as a ‘political religion’ in the work of David Apter, Lucian Pye and Leonard Binder, and of crowd behaviour in social movements in the work of Neil Smelser. There is also a measure of influence exerted by the later Freud, as well as Mead and Simmel, in recent theories that emphasise the role of significant Others in the formation of national identities and the oppositional framework of inclusion and exclusion in nationalism.⁷

 

What these approaches have in common is a belief in the dislocating nature of modernity, its disorientation of the individual and its capacity for disrupting the stability of traditional sources of support. It is in these respects that the influence of certain kinds of earlier social psychology contributed to the overall picture of nations and nationalism presented by classical modernism. More generally, social psychological assumptions drawn from a variety of sources can be found in the most unexpected places—among social anthropologists and sociologists as well as historians and political scientists—but these are not confined to those who adhere to the modernist framework (see Brown 1994).

• The third major influence derives from the work of Max Weber. Strongly imbued with the prevailing tide of German nationalism, Weber never managed to produce the study of the rise of the nation-state which he intended to write; yet his writings contain a number of themes that were to become central both to classical modernism and its subsequent development. These included the importance of political memories, the role of intellectuals in preserving the ‘irreplaceable culture values’ of a nation, and the importance of nation-states in the rise of the special character of the modern West. But what has most marked out the Weberian path of analysis is its emphasis on the role of political action, both generally in the formation of ethnic groups and specifically in the evolution of modern European nations. Weber cannot himself be categorised as a modernist, although when he writes about nations and nationalism, he has in mind mostly contemporary European examples; yet his influence has helped to legitimise the more political versions of the modernist paradigm (see Weber 1948:171–9, 448, note 6; A.D.Smith 1983b; Guibernau 1996: ch. 1)

 

Insofar as Weber’s huge corpus of writings touches on issues of ethnic identity and nationalism, it ranges far and wide in time and place. This is especially true of his analysis of ethnic groups which, for Weber, are a species

 

14   The rise of classical modernism

 

of Stände (status group) based on the belief in common descent. Again, Weber emphasises the importance of political action and political memories: ‘All history’, he writes, ‘shows how easily political action can give rise to the belief in blood relationship, unless gross differences of anthropological type impede it’. Examples are provided by the Swiss and the Alsatians. Of the latter, Weber writes:

 

This sense of community came into being by virtue of common political and, indirectly, social experiences which are highly valued by the masses as symbols of the destruction of feudalism, and the story of these events takes the place of the heroic legends of primitive peoples.

 

(Weber 1968:I/2, 396)

 

Whatever Weber’s intentions, the political bias in his writings has inspired a number of latterday theorists of nation-states to emphasise the political dimensions of nationalism and especially the role of the modern Western state. In this, they receive strong support from Weber’s well known definition of the nation:

 

A nation is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own; hence, a nation is a community which normally tends to produce a state of its own.

 

(Weber 1948:176)

 

This quest for statehood is what distinguishes nations from other communities of solidarity, just as it is political, and especially military, action that is required to turn an ethnic group into a nation. For Weber the modern state is a rational type of association, the apogee of occidental rationalism and one of the main agencies of rationalisation in history, whereas the nation is a particular type of community and prestige group. In the modern world, both need each other: the state requires the legitimation and popular direction accorded by the nation, while the nation needs the state to protect its unique culture values against those of other communities (ibid.: 176; see Beetham 1974)

 

Indirectly, then, the elements of Weber’s writings on nations and nationalism that have had greatest influence have served to support the different versions of political modernism which stress the role of power, and especially state power, in the definition of the nation and the explanation of nationalism. Latterday theorists have generally accepted the picture of occidental rationalism (if not rationalisation) that forms the background of the Weberian approach to modern politics, extending it globally and revealing its many implications for international relations and the impact of the state on civil society.⁸

 

• The final source of influence on the classical modernist paradigm is probably the most important: the legacy of the Durkheimian emphasis on community.

 

The rise of classical modernism       15

 

Again, despite the fervour of his French nationalism, Durkheim wrote little on nations or nationalism until some polemical, occasional pieces during the First World War; it never figures as a theme in itself in his major works. Yet, in a sense, the idea of the nation as a moral community with its conscience collective is the guiding thread of his entire work, and it is made explicit in his analysis of religion and ritual in his last major book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1915; Mitchell 1931; see A.D. Smith 1983b; Guibernau 1996: ch. 1).

 

Much of what Durkheim has to say which bears on ethnicity and nationalism has a timeless quality about it. This is especially true of his analysis of religion as the core of moral community and his consequent belief that ‘there is something eternal in religion’, whatever the changes in its symbolism, because all societies feel the need to reaffirm and renew themselves periodically through collective rites and ceremonies. In this respect, he claims, there is no difference between Christian or Jewish festivals, and

 

a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great event in the national life,

(Durkheim 1915:427)

 

as occurred, most memorably, during the French Revolution when

 

under the influence of the general enthusiasm, things purely laical in character were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. A religion tended to become established which had its dogmas, symbols, altars and feasts.

 

(ibid.: 214)

 

While such an analysis could serve, and was indeed used, to define the role of mass-mobilising nationalism in the new states of Africa and Asia, it was another aspect of Durkheim ‘s theories that proved most influential for classical modernism. This was his analysis of the transition from ‘mechanical’ to ‘organic’ solidarity. Whereas in ethnic or tribal societies, argued Durkheim,

 

mechanical causes and impulsive forces, such as affinity of blood, attachment to the same soil, ancestral worship, community of habits, etc.

 

(Durkheim 1964:278)

 

bring men together, in modern, industrial societies these forces decline, along with tradition and the influence of the conscience collective, and their place is taken by the division of labour and its complementarity of roles. Population growth, increased interaction and competition, and urbanisation and social mobility, have all eroded tradition and the links with grandparents. This is exactly what has happened in the advanced industrial societies of the West.

 

16   The rise of classical modernism

 

Yet elements of the earlier ‘mechanical’ type of solidarity remain even in the most modern societies, above all, the cohesion and self-renewal required by every society and the sense of social dependance and individual belonging engendered by professional groups and collective rituals. Here Durkheim foreshadows the theme of ethnic revival which has become an important element in some modernist theories of nationalism (Durkheim 1964; Nisbet 1965; Giddens 1971). For classical modernists, then, Durkheim provided the framework for inserting nations and nationalism into the evolutionary logic of structural differentiation and modernisation to be found primarily in the West. What the classical modernists understood Durkheim to be saying was that modern societies required a new principle of cohesion and reintegration, after all the dislocations and strains of modernisation, and this was to be found in the idea of the nation and the mobilising power of nationalism. Yet, as we shall see, classical modernism introduced a quite different conception of the nation which amounted to a sharp break in the continuity envisaged by Durkheim’s analysis.

 

 

Historians and social scientists

 

If the pre-1914 sociological and social psychological traditions provided the framework for the paradigm of classical modernism, the immediate impetus to its construction and much of its historical content was provided by the labours of sociologically inclined historians from the 1920s. The object of their detailed investigations was the rise and course of the nationalist ideology and its varieties; the hallmark of their studies was a sustained attempt at dispassionate analysis of the ideology. In this they were not entirely successful. The Western and European bias of their enquiries is evident in the work of the major historians of nationalism, Carlton Hayes, Hans Kohn, Frederick Hertz, Alfred Cobban, E.H. Carr, Louis Snyder and Boyd Shafer. There was also a tendency to treat nationalism as an ethical issue and the nation as an ambivalent means to nobler ends. The result was frequently to blur moral judgment with historical analysis, which was understandable, given the horrors of Nazism and the Second World War, and the general disposition to regard fascism as the logical denouement of a chauvinistic nationalism. Perhaps the best known example is Hans Kohn’s influential distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ nationalisms—east and west of the Rhine: in the West, in England, France, America and Holland, a rational, voluntaristic version of nationalism emerged, whereas in the East, in Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe and Asia, an organic, determinist variety found fertile soil. But there are other examples: Carlton Hayes’ distinctions between ‘humanitarian’, ‘liberal’, ‘traditional’ and ‘Jacobin’ (and later ‘economic’ and ‘integral’) varieties of nationalist ideology, the stages of national self-determination in the analyses of Alfred Cobban, and the early chronological typology of nationalisms espoused by Louis Snyder carry similar moralistic overtones (Hayes 1931; Snyder 1954; Kohn 1967a; Cobban 1969).⁹

The rise of classical modernism              17

 

Two aspects of these early historical analyses have been particularly important for the growth of classical modernism. The first is an increasing recourse to sociological factors, if not explanations. Again, the most obvious case is that of Hans Kohn. The pivot of his typology of Eastern and Western nationalisms is sociological: the presence or absence of a strong bourgeoisie at the moment when the ideology of nationalism was diffused to the particular area or state. States and areas with strong bourgeoisies tended to opt for a rationalist and voluntaristic version of the ideology of nationalism, which required everyone to choose a nation of belonging but did not prescribe a particular nation; whereas states and areas with weak bourgeoisies tended to spawn shrill, authoritarian nationalisms led by tiny intelligentsias who opted for organic nationalisms which prescribed the nation of belonging for each individual from birth. E.H.Carr, too, had recourse to sociological factors in delineating the successive stages of European nationalism: at first monarchical, dynastic and mercantilist, then from the late eighteenth century popular and democratic and free trading (under the financial aegis of London), and finally (from the 1890s to 1940s) the growing economic nationalism of fully socialised mass nations proliferating across Europe and plunging the continent into total war (Carr 1945; Kohn 1955; Kohn 1967a, 329–31).

 

The second aspect is the provision of detailed evidence for the modernity and European origins of nationalism, the ideology and movement. This is not to say that all the historians agreed on a ‘date of birth’ for nationalism. Kohn placed it in the English Revolution, Cobban opted for the late eighteenth century following the Partitions of Poland and the American Revolution, while Kedourie placed it in 1807, the date of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. But most accepted the French Revolution as the event and period of nationalism’s first full blown manifestation, and thereby tied it firmly to the civic and democratic movements of that period in Europe. They also concentrated on charting the evolution of nationalism, the ideology and movement, within modern Europe. If they chose to look further afield, they tended to derive the later nationalisms of India, Japan, China and Indonesia, or of the Arab and African peoples, from this or that version of European nationalism, imbibed by native intellectuals in the metropolis or at home. Such analyses served to reinforce the conviction that nationalism was a manifestation of a particular Zeitgeist, and tied to a specifically modern and European time and place. Chronological modernism was ipso facto Eurocentric: the ideology that sprang to life fully fledged in the French Revolutionary Wars was fundamentally European in character as well as location. This was to have profound implications for the paradigm of classical modernism and the theory of nationalism.¹⁰

 

The historians in question were mainly historians of ideas and political history, and of European ideas and political history at that. It was only in the 1950s, with the acceleration of the process of decolonisation and the rise of the new states in Africa and Asia, that their work began to be supplemented and then to some extent overtaken by a spate of political science and sociological analyses of Third World anti-colonial nationalisms. It was only in the late 1950s that the

 

18   The rise of classical modernism

 

traditional predominance of historians in the study of nationalism came to an end, and the field was opened up to scholars from a variety of disciplines. This was also the moment when the classical paradigm of modernism took shape (see A.D.Smith 1992c).

 

The classical modernist paradigm of nationalism

 

The 1960s, the era of Western liberalisation following economic expansion and accelerated decolonisation in Asia and Africa, also saw the widespread adoption of the model and ideal of ‘nation-building’. It was a perspective well attuned to the optimistic, heady temper of the decade, and it marks the classical expression of what I have termed the modernist paradigm of nationalism.

 

Anti-perennialism

 

Essentially, classical modernism, and especially the model of nation-building, was a reaction to the often tacit ideas and principles of an older generation of scholars of nationalism, many of whom had accepted the main premisses of the nationalist ideologies around them, even where they distanced themselves from their more extreme manifestations. This was evident in their language, which often equated the idea of ‘race’ with the concept of the nation, which saw in national characteristics the underlying principles of history, and which tended to judge international events and relations in terms of national actors and overriding national interests. Behind these views stood a perspective that viewed nations as the basic communities of history, at once ancient and immemorial, and that regarded national sentiments and consciousness as fundamental elements of historical phenomena and their main explanatory principles. We may term this the ‘perennialist’ perspective. Many a popular history in Britain, France, Germany and other countries accepted the spirit of this perspective and retold the story of the nation in terms of its rude beginnings, early migrations, golden ages of saints and heroes, its vicissitudes and servitudes, its decline and rebirth, and its glorious future. More serious historians were content to recount the activities of national leaders and aristocracies in antiquity and the medieval era, thereby demonstrating the centrality and durability of the idea and manifestations of the nation in history.¹¹

 

All this was challenged and dismissed by the rising tide of modernism. For these scholars, the propositions on which perennialism was based were either unverifiable or erroneous. They contended that:

 

• nations were in no sense ancient or immemorial. This was an assumption unwarranted by any documentary evidence and as such an act of faith in the antiquity of a modern cultural collectivity;

 

• nations were in no sense givens, let alone existing in nature or in the first time. Any such assertion was again an act of faith unsupported by any historical or sociological evidence;

 

The rise of classical modernism              19

 

• many nations were in fact relatively recent, both in Europe and latterly in Africa and Asia, and this alone disproved the immemorial or primordial character of nations;

 

• we could not, and should not, read the elements of modern nations and nationalism back into earlier, pre-modern collectivities and sentiments; this kind of ‘retrospective nationalism’ only served to distort our understanding of the quite different identities, communities and relations of the ancient and medieval worlds;

 

• nations were not the product of natural, or deep rooted, historical forces, but rather of recent historical developments and of the rational, planned activity made possible and necessary by the conditions of the modern era.

 

This was a decidedly anti-historicist and rationalist critique. It viewed with suspicion all genetic explanations and substituted a functionalist analysis of the place of nations in history and the role of nationalism in the modern world. It was also markedly optimistic in tone and activist in spirit, arguing that nationalism created nations and that the activities of national elites served to promote the needs of social and political development. Hence the model of nation-building, at once structural and interventionist, with state elites assigned the key role of constructing the edifice of the nation-to-be along rational, civic lines.

 

The activist, interventionist character of classical modernism accounts for the way in which it construes the older perennialism. Generally speaking, it tends to treat the nation as not only perennial but also ‘primordial’ in character. Classical modernism was bitterly opposed to what it saw as the naturalism and essentialism inherent in the older perspectives, the belief that nations are elements of nature, existing before time, and that we possess a nationality in the same way as we have eyes and speech, a view that it regarded as responsible for the extremist emotions and mass following of nationalism. It therefore regarded any idea that any particular nation or nations in general might have deep historical ‘roots’ as part of the naturalistic and genetic fallacy.¹²

 

It was equally opposed to the non-rational and passive character of perennialism. If nations are ‘essences’ and elements of nature, and if individuals belong to this or that nation from birth and are stamped with its being throughout their existence, then nationalism of whatever hue is simply the non-rational expression of the nation and individuals are passive exemplars of its essence. Nationalism can never on this view be a rational strategy employed by individuals for their individual or collective interests, nor an expression of deliberate choice and judgment. Such a view conflicted sharply with the activist and auto-emancipatory spirit of the postwar epoch.

 

Nation-building

 

In contrast, the main tenets of the modernist paradigm, and especially of its classical nation-building model, stressed the political nature of nations and the

 

20   The rise of classical modernism

 

active role of citizens and leaders in their construction. Broadly speaking, the theorists of nation-building contended that:

 

• nations were essentially territorial political communities. They were sovereign, limited and cohesive communities of legally equal citizens, and they were conjoined with modern states to form what we call unitary ‘nation-states’;
• nations constituted the primary political bond and the chief loyalty of their members. Other ties of gender, region, family, class and religion—had to be subordinated to the overriding allegiance of the citizen to his or her nation-state, and this was desirable because it gave form and substance to the ideals of democratic civic participation;

 

• nations were the main political actors in the international arena. They were real sociological communities disposing of the political weight of the world’s populations and the sole legitimating and coordinating principle of inter-state relations and activity;

 

• nations were the constructs of their citizens, and notably of their leaders and elites, and were built up through a variety of processes and institutions. The key to the success of nations was balanced and comprehensive institutionalisation of roles, expectations and values, and the creation of an infrastructure of social communications—transport, bureaucracy, language, education, the media, political parties, etc.;

 

• nations were the sole framework, vehicle and beneficiary of social and political development, the only instrument for assuring the needs of all citizens in the production and distribution of resources and the only means of assuring sustainable development. This was because only national loyalty and nationalist ideology could mobilise the masses for the commitment, dedication and self-sacrifice required by modernisation with all its strains and dislocations.

 

For their examples, the theorists of nation-building had no need to look further than the contemporary processes of decolonisation in Asia and Africa. There they could witness the efforts of nationalist leaders to ‘build’ nations by creating effective institutions which would express the norms of a civic nation, aggregate the interests of its citizens and enable them to translate their needs and ideals into effective policies. These so-called ‘state-nations’ (territorial states attempting to create cohesive nations out of heterogeneous ethnic populations) testified to the importance of ‘nation-building’, revealing the limitations of territorial sovereignty and pointing the way forward through the mobilisation and participation of an active citizenry (see Deutsch and Foltz 1963).¹³

 

The theorists who subscribed to the classical modernist paradigm, and especially to the model of nation-building—notably Deutsch, Foltz, Lerner, Eisenstadt, Apter, Almond, Pye, Bendix and Binder—differed over the particular elements which were crucial for modernisation and nation-building. Some stressed the role of social mobilisation and social communication, others of mobility and

 

The rise of classical modernism              21

 

empathy, still others of interest aggregation, political religion and systems of mass mobilisation. But each subscribed to the idea, and ideal, of the nation as a mass participant political culture and as a popular civic-territorial community, into which, as Bendix’s work in particular demonstrated, ever wider strata of the territorial population were drawn through processes of employment, mass education and citizenship. This emphasis on civic participation was indicative of the modernism of their outlook. For it was only in a ‘modern’, i.e. both recent and industrial-bureaucratic, era that a high level of political participation by the masses was possible; and so it was only in the modern era that nations could flourish and become the sole political actors and units of government. The modern era was the first era in which self-government of the people could be conceived and achieved (see Bendix 1996).¹⁴

 

Equally important, this was the first era in which self-government was essential. It was necessary because the nation was the ideal agent and framework for social development, and the modern era was the first era in which sustained social development could take place. This in turn implied that nations, and nation-building, were functional for social development. In a non-developmental era, there was no need, no room, for nations. On the contrary: traditional religions acted as barriers to the formation of both nations and the desire for social change and development. With the erosion of traditional religions and the rise of nations, national self-government was the only way to harness the social and political resources necessary for social development. Hence the first aim of nation-building must be to secure the independence necessary for citizens to participate in political decisions and govern themselves. Without independence, as Engels had realised long before, there could be no sustained economic development, because there could be no real commitment and self-sacrifice demanded of those who were not masters of their own destinies (Davis 1967).

 

Modernism and perennialism

 

Behind this immediate model stood the larger paradigm of classical modernism. Broadly speaking, it contended that:

 

• nations were wholly modern—modern in the sense of being recent, i.e. since the French Revolution, and in the sense that the components of the nation were novel, i.e. part of the new age of modernity, and so modern by definition;
• nations were the product of modernity, i.e. their elements were not only recent and novel, but also could only emerge, and had to emerge, through processes of ‘modernisation’, the rise of modern conditions and modernising policies;

 

• nations were therefore not deeply rooted in history, but were inevitable consequences of the revolutions that constituted modernity and as such tied to their features and conditions, with the result that, once these features

 

22   The rise of classical modernism

 

and conditions were transformed, nations would gradually wither away or be superseded;

• nationalism likewise was embedded in modernity, or more accurately, in the processes of modernisation and the transition to a modern order, so that when these processes were completed, nationalism too would wane and disappear;

 

• nations and nationalisms were social constructs and cultural creations of modernity, designed for an age of revolutions and mass mobilisation, and central to the attempts to control these processes of rapid social change.

 

In its pure form, the paradigm of classical modernism can be regarded as the polar opposite to the older perennialist assumptions and ideas which regarded nations as more or less persistent and recurrent phenomena of all epochs and continents. Modernism objected to the assumptions of naturalism and immemorialism held by the older generation of scholars on political as well as intellectual grounds. They regarded both fallacies as pernicious influences on the public mind, and in varying degrees responsible for the catalogue of wars and atrocities that had engulfed Europe and the world in the twentieth century. They systematically opposed the assumptions which underlay perennialist accounts of the role of nations in history, and sought to demystify national identity and counteract the claims of nationalism by revealing its inherent absurdity as well as its historical shallowness.

 

If we follow through the assumptions and claims of perennialists and modernists, we discover a series of recurrent dichotomies, which can be summarised as follows:

 

• For the perennialists, the nation is a politicised ethno-cultural community, a community of common ancestry that stakes a claim to political recognition on that basis. For the modernists the nation is a territorialised political community, a civic community of legally equal citizens in a particular territory;
• For perennialists, the nation is persistent and immemorial, with a history stretching back centuries, if not millennia. For modernists, the nation is both recent and novel, a product of wholly modern and recent conditions, and therefore unknown in pre-modern eras;

 

• For perennialists, the nation is ‘rooted’ in place and time; it is embedded in a historic homeland. For modernists, the nation is a creation. It is consciously and deliberately ‘built’ by its members, or segments thereof.

 

• For perennialists, the nation is a popular or demotic community, a community of ‘the people’ and mirroring their needs and aspirations. For modernists, it is consciously constructed by elites, who seek to influence the emotions of the masses to achieve their goals.

 

• For perennialists, belonging to a nation means possessing certain qualities. It is a state of being. For modernists, it means possessing certain resources. It is a capacity for doing.

 

The rise of classical modernism              23

 

• For perennialists, nations are seamless wholes, with a single will and character. For modernists, nations are typically riven and divided into a number of (regional, class, gender, religious, etc.) social groups, each with their own interests and needs.
• For perennialists, the underlying principles of the nation are those of ancestral ties and authentic culture. For modernists, the principles of national solidarity are to be found in social communication and citizenship.

 

These dichotomies can be summarised as follows:

 

Attributes of the nation according to perennialists and modernists

 

Perennialism                                           Modernism

 

The nation as

 

Cultural community                              Political community

 

Immemorial                                            Modern

 

Rooted                                                     Created

 

Organic                                                    Mechanical

 

Seamless                                                  Divided

 

Quality                                                     Resource

 

Popular                                                    Elite-construct

 

Ancestrally-based                                  Communication-based

 

These are, of course, ideal-type dichotomies. Not all the scholars who hold in general terms to the perennialist and modernist paradigms would subscribe to all the elements of ‘their’ paradigm, as listed above. I have deliberately magnified the differences, to bring out some of the antagonistic underlying assumptions which can, and have, been made about nations and nationalism. In fact, a number of theorists have evolved permutations which cross the lines of these paradigms, combining elements from both paradigms in often unexpected ways.

 

One should add that nationalists themselves, perhaps not unexpectedly, have wanted to have things both ways: seeing the nation as organic and rooted in history and territory, but at the same time as created and engineered by nationalist elites. This is not just opportunism. Nationalism is itself an activist, autoemancipatory programme for the oppressed; at the same time the nation which they seek to ‘reawaken’ is often seen as part of nature and subject to the laws of evolution like any other organism.

 

There is a further and critical point. The above inventory of polar types conflates perennialism with the more radical positions of ‘primordialism’. Not all perennialists would regard themselves as primordialists or accept primordialist assumptions. Many would refuse to see the nation as organic, seamless and ancestral. Instead they would simply argue from what they saw as the historical record, and regard nations as recurrent and/or persistent phenomena of all epochs and continents, but in no way part of the ‘natural order’. This is a distinction to which we shall return in Part II.

 

24   The rise of classical modernism

 

From a logical standpoint, however, these dichotomies underlie many of the positions adopted by theorists of nationalism. As such, they demand clearcut choices between the polar types, or a conscious decision to combine elements of each type. In each case, the logic of these paradigms and their dichotomies requires the theorist to clarify the arguments and produce the evidence that has led him or her to adopt a particular standpoint in the debates about nations and nationalism.

 

The modernist paradigm, and its nation-building model, became the standard orthodoxy by the 1960s, at a time when functionalism was dominant and when even its critics stressed the role of classes, elites and leaders in the processes of modernisation and nation-building. Scholars as different in their theoretical persuasions as Elie Kedourie, J.H.Kautsky, S.N.Eisenstadt, W.C.Smith, Peter Worsley and Ernest Gellner all adhered to the modernist paradigm, and stressed the role of active participation, elite choice and social mobilisation in the building of modern nations, factors which Karl Deutsch and the communications theorists had popularised. Whatever their other theoretical and ideological differences, they all agreed that the age of nation-states was recent and modern, that modern conditions provided fertile soil for the formation of nations and that nationalism was one of the more successful ideologies of modernisation.¹⁵

 

In the following chapters I propose to examine in more detail the main varieties of classical modernism—sociocultural, economic, political and ideological—as they were developed during the 1970s and 1980s. In these different versions, classical modernism reached the limits of its explanatory power and heuristic utility, and ultimately exhausted its possibilities, paving the way for critical movements which carried with them the potential for its dissolution.

 

Part I

 

Varieties of modernism

 

 

 

2       The culture of industrialism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps the most original and radical statement of classical modernism was that of Ernest Gellner in the seventh chapter of Thought and Change (1964). In that chapter, Gellner outlined a new theory of nationalism that focused on the effects of processes of uneven global modernisation. Likening modernisation to a great tidal wave that sweeps over the world from its West European heartlands, hitting successive areas at different times and rates, Gellner traced the rise of nationalism to the new role of linguistic culture in the modern world. Traditional role relationships in villages and small towns had been shattered by the effects of uneven development, many villagers had been uprooted and driven towards the great, sprawling cities, and their lifestyles and beliefs had been largely destroyed. Dislocated and disoriented in the anonymous city, the new impoverished proletariat of uprooted peasants no longer possessed anything on which to rebuild communities and stave off anarchy except language and culture. In the new urban setting, language and culture replaced the village and tribal structures of role relationships as the cement of society. Hence the growing importance of a critical and ambitious intelligentsia, the producers and purveyors of these linguistic cultures. But it was also incumbent on everyone to become literate as well as numerate, to be a ‘clerk’ so as to become a citizen and ‘an acceptable specimen of humanity’. That in turn required a new kind of schooling, mass, public, standardised schooling, supervised and funded by the state. The size of the education system was directly related to the scale of nations.

 

But there was another side to uneven development. Not only did the tidal wave erode traditional role structures, it also generated social conflicts in the swollen cities. Conflicts between the waves of newcomers and the urban old-timers, between the urban employed in the city centres and the underemployed proletariat in their shanty-towns on the edge of the cities. Such conflicts were usually social—class conflicts between the propertied and educated and the destitute and illiterate masses. But in some cases social conflict became ethnic antagonism. This happened when the newcomers, the uprooted proletariat, were visibly different, had entirely different belief systems and customs, or spoke unintelligible languages. In such cases the urban old-timers resorted to cultural exclusion and ethnic job reservation. In these circumstances, the intelligentsias on both sides of the cultural divide were able to turn ethnic conflicts into nationalist movements demanding secession from the

 

 

27

 

28   Varieties of modernism

 

existing political unit in which both groups had, usually long ago, been incorporated (Gellner 1964: ch. 7).

For Gellner, therefore, nations do not create nationalism. Rather, nationalist movements define and create nations. Indeed,

 

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist—but it does need some pre-existing differentiating marks to work on, even if, as indicated, these are purely negative.

 

(ibid.: 168)

 

Nationalism is the yearning for, and acceptance of, the norm of the nation, which Gellner at this stage defined as a large, co-cultural, unmediated, anonymous society. Men become nationalists, Gellner concluded, out of ‘genuine, objective, practical necessity, however obscurely recognised’, because ‘it is the need for growth that generates nationalism, not vice-versa’. In this way, nationalism ensures that the world is divided into a system of locks, and acts as a safeguard against a new imperial tyranny (ibid.: 160, 168).

 

The first version of his theory suffered from a number of omissions and problems, and Gellner felt it necessary to address these in a new, fuller formulation. They included:

 

• the problems presented by ascribing a unifying role to language, including the recognition that language sometimes failed to fulfil that role, for example, in Spanish Latin America or the Arabic states;

 

• the unassimilability of certain cultural groups by and in the ‘transition’, that is, the failure of modernisation to integrate various groups, notably those based on pigmentation and scriptural religion;

 

• the prolongation of the processes of modernisation and the failure of the concept of proletarianism to account for the conflicts in its later stages, as well as the doubtful causal relationship between industrialisation and the rise of nationalism;

 

• the importance of divisions within the intelligentsia, and their impact on the very different paths to modernity taken by various nations;
• the problem of how modernity and its literate cultures are sustained, and the need to find an institutional base for its maintenance rather than merely a social group;

 

• the problem of accounting for me absence of nations and nationalism in pre-modern societies, in contrast to their well nigh universal presence in modern, industrial societies.

 

 

To deal with these problems, Gellner reformulated his basic modernist theory, first in an article of 1973, and then in a full presentation in Nations and Nationalism (Gellner 1973, 1983).¹

The culture of industrialism 29

 

‘Nation’ and ‘nationalism’

 

The hinge of the new version was the role of mass public education systems in sustaining ‘high’ cultures in modern, industrial societies. Whereas the earlier version had emphasised the role of language and linguistic culture as the new social cement, the later formulation highlighted the way in which modern growth-oriented societies required a certain kind of literate culture which could only be forged and sustained by ‘exo-socialisation’, a new kind of public, standardised education unlike any to be found in pre-modern societies.

 

The logical starting-point of Gellner’s second version is his definition of the concept of the nation. Neither ‘will’ nor ‘culture’ by themselves can provide useful definitions. The reason is the same: they both bring in far too rich a catch. While nations may be communities that will themselves to persist, in a kind of daily, continuous, self-affirming plebiscite, as Renan claimed, so do many other social groups: clubs, conspiracies, teams, parties, as well as pre-modern religious, political or private groups that knew nothing of nationalism. Similarly, to define nations in terms of shared culture, when there are and have been so many varied and rich cultural differences in the world, will not help us: cultural differences only sometimes coincided with the boundaries of political units, and the fact that they are increasingly doing so only reveals the very special conditions that bring culture and politics together in the modern age (Gellner 1983: ch. 5).

 

Put another way, of the perhaps 8,000 language groups in the world, only a small proportion (about 200) have constituted themselves as nations with their own states, with a somewhat larger proportion (perhaps 600) of others striving to attain their own states, making some 800 in all. With only one tenth of potential cultures striving to become ‘nations’, we can hardly use shared culture alone to define the concept (ibid.: 43–50).

 

This is why it is necessary to define the concept of the nation in terms of the age of nationalism. Only then, under the peculiar conditions of the age, can we define nations as the product of both will and culture.

 

But what then is nationalism? For Gellner, it is a political principle, ‘which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent’. It is a theory of political legitimacy,

 

which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones, and in particular, that ethnic boundaries within a given state…should not separate the power-holders from the rest.

 

(ibid.: 1)

 

National sentiment is the feeling of anger or of satisfaction aroused by the violation or fulfilment of this principle, while nationalist movements are ones actuated by this sentiment.

 

30   Varieties of modernism

 

Agroliterate and industrial societies

 

The central proposition of Gellner’s overall theory—that nations and nationalism are logically contingent, but sociologically necessary in modern industrial societies—is based on his analysis of the transition from agrarian—or agroliterate— societies to modern, industrial ones. For Gellner, there have been three main stages in history: the pre-agrarian, the agrarian and the industrial. Each of these resembles a plateau of human civilisations, with steep, step-like transitions from one stage to the next. In the first, the hunter-gatherer stage, there was no polity or state, hence no possibility of nations and nationalisms, given Gellner’s definition of nationalism. The second stage saw a variety of types of society, most (but not all) of which had states of their own. Here there is a possibility for nations and nationalism to emerge, though it is in fact never realised. It is only in the third, industrial, stage, that the state has become inescapable; every society has, or aspires to, a state of its own, but that is only part of the reason why nationalism becomes so universal an aspiration in modern society (Gellner 1987: ch. 2).

 

Why are there no nations and nationalisms in agroliterate societies? These are societies distinguished, not only by the emergence of the state, but by the transmission of elite literacy. But they are also highly stratified societies. This means that power and culture are united according to status. At the apex of these societies are a series of small, but powerful, elites, arranged in horizontal strata, including the military, bureaucratic, priestly and aristocratic castes, who use culture—their culture—to separate themselves from the rest of society. The mass of the population in each state consists of agricultural producers, and they too are separated, but this time into vertical communities, each with its own folk culture and customs. These small communities of peasants are turned inwards by economic necessity, and their local cultures are almost invisible. The members of each such community relate to each other through contextual communication. As a result, culture tends to be either horizontal as social caste, or vertical, defining small local communities.

 

So in stratified agroliterate societies, there is neither the possibility nor the desire to create a single, homogeneous culture for all the members of a given polity, and hence no possibility of nations or nationalism. Indeed, the only stratum that might have an interest in such cultural imperialism, the clerisy, is either indifferent to seeing its norms and rituals extended throughout society (like the Brahmins) or has neither the resources nor the practical possibility of doing so (as with the Islamic ulema)—since most people must look after the sheep, goats and camels! For the other elites, the gulf between themselves (and their lifestyles) and the rest of the population (and their folk cultures) must be maintained, and even fortified by theories of ‘blood’ and hallowed descent (Gellner 1983: ch. 2).

 

The contrast with industrial societies is striking. They do require a homogeneous culture uniting all the members of a state, since in such societies, everyone is mobile, everyone must be a clerk, communication must be context-free and power-holding must be impersonal:

 

The culture of industrialism 31

 

In an age of universalised clerisy and Mamluk-dom, the relationship of culture and polity changes radically. A high culture pervades the whole of society, defines it, and needs to be sustained by the polity. That is the secret of nationalism.

 

(ibid.: 18)

 

The central ideas of modern society are those of endless cognitive and economic growth, of ceaseless discovery and innovation. Just as everything has to be analysed into its constituent parts before causal relationships can be explored, so all persons and activities in modern society are to be treated as equal, commensurable units so that they can then be conjoined in mass societies, or nations. Modern, industrial societies are by their nature fluid, mobile, constantly changing; their mode of production too depends on an ever changing division of labour, in which individuals must meet and communicate with large numbers of people they never knew before, and must be able to move from one activity to another. This is why, unlike hierarchical and stable pre-modern societies, modern societies are necessarily egalitarian, in their ideals, if not always in practice (ibid.: ch. 3, esp. 24–9).

 

Work in pre-modern society was essentially manual. In modern society, it is mainly semantic. It is a society with a high degree of specialised labour, but the work is strictly standardised and its precondition is a degree of literacy on the part of every member. This means that everyone must have a common generic education followed by specialist training for and on the job. The generic education in basic numeracy and literacy enables everyone to be in a position to become specialists; without that generic education in semantic labour, they could not be so trained. This type of education is relatively novel. Unlike the minimal, contextual education given to children in pre-modern societies, usually by the family and village school, education in a modern society is a public affair and of far greater importance to the operation of society. Public, mass education systems, or ‘exo-socialisation’, provide a rigorous training in the uses of precise, explicit messages and context-free meanings in a standard written language and script (Gellner 1973; Gellner 1983: ch. 3).

 

Unlike its predecessors, the modern education system is a large, complex system—a public, standardised, academy-supervised and diploma-conferring institution for the inculcation of the skills, techniques and values of modernity. Only a large and complex system could educate great numbers of people to be ‘clerks’, and only clerks can be useful citizens of a modern state. This means that the size of the mass public education system sets the lower limit for the scale of nations. It also means that mass education alone can endow its citizens with self-respect and a sense of identity:

 

Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.

(Gellner 1983:36)

 

32   Varieties of modernism

 

Size is crucial in another, political, respect. Only the modern state is large and competent enough to sustain and supervise a system of public, mass education, which is required to train everyone to participate in the literate ‘high’ culture of an industrial society. The public, mass education system binds state and culture together. In the past, the links between state and culture were thin, loose and fortuitous. Today, the necessity of exo-socialisation means that these links are unavoidable; and that is the reason why we live in an age of nationalism.²

 

From ‘low’ to ‘high’ cultures

 

The transition from an agroliterate to an industrial society is marked by the replacement of ‘low’ by ‘high’ cultures. Gellner defines a nation as a society with a high culture, that is, a specially cultivated, standardised, education-based, literate culture. These he calls ‘garden’ cultures, to distinguish them from the ‘wild’, spontaneous and undirected cultures found normally in agroliterate societies, which require no conscious design, surveillance or special nutrition. Cultivated or garden cultures, on the other hand, are rich and complex. They are sustained by specialised personnel and to survive, must be nourished by specialised institutions of learning with numerous, dedicated, full-time professionals (ibid.: 50–2).

 

Now, many of the low, ‘wild’ cultures fail to make it into the industrial era. There are simply too many of them for the number of viable states which can populate the world. So they generally bow out without a struggle and fail to engender a nationalism; while those with prospects of success fight it out among themselves for the available state-space. That is why, in its own terms, nationalism is weak; only a small proportion of potential linguistic candidates stake a claim to becoming nations, and most remain determined ‘slumberers’. On the other hand, those that do engender nationalisms and attain to states of their own are much stronger than before. They are pervasive and universal within the boundaries of ‘their’ state; everyone must share in the same, standardised, literate culture.

 

What then is the relationship between the ‘low’ and the ‘high’ cultures? For Gellner, cultures in the sense of systems of norms and communications have always been important, but they were often overlapping, subtly grouped and intertwined. In general, in pre-modern societies they were confined to elites; indeed, they were used by elites to identify and differentiate themselves from the masses. That is the main reason for the impossibility of nations and nationalism before the onset of modernity. Today, however, cultures are pervasive and homogeneous: and when

 

general social conditions make for standardised, homogeneous, centrally sustained high cultures, pervading entire populations and not just elite minorities, a situation arises in which well-defined educationally sanctioned and unified cultures constitute very nearly the only kind of unit with which

 

The culture of industrialism 33

 

men willingly and often ardently identify. The cultures now seem to be the natural repositories of political legitimacy.

(ibid.: 55)

 

These new, pervasive high cultures are so important for the smooth running of industrial society that they must be constantly sustained and controlled by each state. That is why the modern, industrial world resembles a series of structurally similar giant aquaria or ‘breathing chambers’, which sport superficial, if unduly emphasised cultural differences. The water and the atmosphere in these tanks are specially serviced to breed the new species of industrial person; the name of the specialised plant providing this service is a national educational and communications system (ibid.: 51–2).

 

What happens, typically, is that the successful new high culture of the state is imposed on the population of that state, and uses whatever of the old ‘wild’ cultures that it requires. This is the main role of nationalism. Nations have not existed from eternity, only to be awakened by the call of the nationalists. But cultures have always existed, and nationalism uses their raw materials:

 

Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality, for better or worse, and in general an inescapable one.

(ibid.: 48–9)

 

Contrary to its folk idiom and romantic self-image, nationalism

 

is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society, where previously low cultures had taken up the lives of the majority, and in some cases the totality, of the population. It means the generalised diffusion of a school-mediated, academy-supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication. It is the establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society, with mutually substitutable, atomised individuals, held together above all by a shared culture of this kind…. That is what really happens.

 

(ibid.: 57)

 

Further light is thrown on the relationship between the old ‘low’ and the modern ‘high’ cultures when Gellner vigorously separates the principle of nationalism (‘nationalism-in-general’) from the particular manifestations of nationalism (‘specific nationalism’). Against those who would argue that nationalism is sociologically, as well as logically, contingent, Gellner claims that it has deep roots in the modern condition and will not easily be denied. As he explains:

 

34   Varieties of modernism

 

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round. Admittedly, nationalism uses the pre-existing, historically inherited proliferation of cultures or cultural wealth, though it uses them very selectively, and it most often transforms them radically. Dead languages can be revived, traditions invented, quite fictitious pristine purities restored. But this culturally creative, fanciful, positively inventive aspect of nationalist ardour ought not to allow anyone to conclude, erroneously, that nationalism is a contingent, artificial, ideological invention…. The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred and patch would have served as well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism, as opposed to the avatars it happens to pick up for its incarnations, is itself in the least contingent and accidental.

 

Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all it is not what it seems to itself. The cultures it claims to defend and revive are often its own inventions, or are modified out of all recognition.

 

(ibid.: 55–6)

 

Gellner concedes that nationalism may not be so far from the truth when the people are ruled by officials of an alien, high culture, and they must first be liberated. But the new culture imposed on them after liberation bears only a remote resemblance to their own local folk cultures; rather,

 

it revives or invents a local high (literate, specialist-transmitted) culture of its own, though admittedly one that will have some links with the earlier folk styles and dialects.

 

(ibid.: 57)

 

How do most people acquire the new high culture? In the scenario presented by Gellner, the folk or Ruritanians became conscious of their own local culture and tried to turn it into a literate, standardised ‘high’ culture. This was not the result of any material calculations or manipulation by an intelligentsia. The exigencies of the labour market and bureaucracy taught the Ruritanians the difference between dealing with sympathetic co-nationals and hostile aliens. This experience taught them to love (or hate) their own culture, and the culture in which they are taught to communicate becomes the core of their new identity.³

 

Here we encounter the first of the two principles of fission in industrial societies: that of barriers to communication. There is a second principle, which Gellner terms the inhibitors of ‘social entropy’. These are culture traits that resist dispersion throughout the population of an industrial society, even after many decades. This means that it becomes impossible to assimilate individuals who possess the entropy-resistant trait, for example, those with genetic traits like pigmentation or with deeply engrained religious-cultural habits which ‘frequently have a limpet-like persistence’—especially peoples with a scriptural religion and a special script, sustained by specialised personnel. In the later phases of industrialisation when inequalities are reduced and communication becomes

 

The culture of industrialism 35

 

easier, such groups cannot be assimilated even by a mobile, fluid society. They stand on the other side of the great ‘moral chasms’ which open up between groups with counter-entropic traits and the host society, creating the possibility of new nationalisms and nations (ibid.: ch. 6, esp. 70–3).⁴

 

Nationalism and industrialism

 

In many ways, this later version of Gellner’s theory presents a much fuller and more elaborate picture of the causes of nationalism and its links with modernity than the earlier formulation. For one thing, it explains why there is no room for nations and nationalism in the pre-modern world. For another, it distinguishes earlier and later phases of industrialisation, and suggests why the later phases may give rise to movements of ethnic secession. And it also presents a new typology of nationalisms in terms of the relationship between cultural diversity, access to education and power-holding. Above all, in the distinction between ‘low’ and ‘high’ cultures, it grapples with the ambivalence of nationalism, its backward-looking as well as modernist impulses, and spells out the nature of the cultural transition that must be traversed at the threshold of modernity.

 

There are also important differences between the two versions. The earlier version had highlighted the role of language as the medium of instruction, and the cement of a modern society. In the later version, language, though still present, becomes secondary to the role of mass public education systems in the creation of citizens and in sustaining the high culture of an industrial society. Similarly, the earlier formulation had emphasised the role of the critical intelligentsia as one of the two ‘prongs’ of nationalism, the other being the proletariat. In the later version, little attention is given to the peculiar contribution of the intelligentsia, who are replaced by the state and its control and surveillance of the mass education system. This is part of a wider move away from agents of modernisation (classes, professional strata, etc.) to structures of modernity. Not only have individuals and their choices become irrelevant, group actors and their strategies have become at best the products of the interplay of ‘structure’ and ‘culture’, their movements preordained in the drama of the transition from ‘low’ to ‘high’ cultures. This is as true of the ‘proletariat’, which had figured prominently in Gellner’s earlier version, as of the intelligentsia. Their earlier secessionist role is replaced by the unevenness of the processes of development, which in and by themselves ensure that there can be no modern empires, and that national units are the norm of industrial society. It is only the unassimilability of certain groups defined by pigmentation or ancient religious cultures that defies the determinism of industrialism.⁵

 

The original core of Gellner’s theory, however, remains intact. If anything, it is more pronounced in the later version. Nations, argues Gellner, are functional for industrial society. They are indispensable in the modern world because industrial growth requires both widespread fluidity and patterned homogeneity, individual mobility combined with cultural standardisation. This can only be achieved by creating a uniform body of competent, substitutable citizens, and

 

36   Varieties of modernism

 

this in turn requires a large-scale public mass education system funded and controlled by the state. It was only with the onset of modernity that these conditions could be realised, and they explain why the modern era is ipso facto an age of nationalism.

 

This remains a powerful and relevant thesis, which seeks a deep and underlying cause for the impregnability of nations and the recurrence, and proliferation, of nationalisms in the modern world. But it is not without its problems. We might start by asking, with some historians, whether there is indeed such a phenomenon as ‘nationalism-in-general’, as opposed to the specific varieties, or even instances, of nationalist movement. Gellner counters this objection by elaborating his own typology of nationalisms, and by delineating a general or pure (ideal) type to which particular instances more or less approximate. Of course, this still leaves open the question of whether a particular instance, or even a whole group of instances, should properly be subsumed under the general concept. But the very fact that the participants and their opponents generally do subsume their activities under an overall concept of ‘nationalism’, testifies to its analytical necessity and utility.

 

More important is the problem of causation. One might well concede that nationalism is, in some sense, functional for modern, industrial society (on a variety of grounds), but this in no way explains the origins and spread of nationalism. This is not just a question of the logic of explanation. It is borne out by empirical observation of cases where the movement of nationalism quite clearly antedated the arrival of industrialism. In Serbia, Finland, Ireland, Mexico, West Africa and Japan, to take a few cases at random, there was no significant industrial development, or even its beginnings, at the time of the emergence of nationalism. In Denmark and Australia too, where development occurred through the modernisation of agriculture rather than through industrialisation, nationalist movements emerged in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries respectively. In the most striking case—Japan—the Meiji rulers sought to inculcate nationalist values and myths in order to modernise a country emerging from semi-feudal isolation. Even in the West—in France and Germany—nationalism became a powerful force before the onset of industrialism, though it coincided with the first movements towards modernisation.⁶

 

In Gellner’s theory, it is the logic of industrial social organisation that determines the movement from ‘low’ to ‘high’ culture and the rise of nations. There is even the suggestion that nations and nationalism are the outward appearances of much deeper structural changes, and can be reduced to those changes. This impression arises out of Gellner’s polemic against the self-image of nationalism. It is not nations that constitute the underlying reality waiting to be ‘awakened’ by nationalist Prince Charmings; it is the cultural homogeneity required by modern industrial social organisation that becomes visible as nations and nationalism. Nations and nationalists are, on this view, devoid of independent activity and volition; rather they constitute the form of industrialism, the way in which its workings become manifest in the phenomenal world.

 

This raises a further question. Given the plurality of routes taken by different

 

The culture of industrialism 37

 

countries as they move from a ‘traditional’ community to a more ‘modern’ type of society, given the varying interests and needs of elites and classes in each society, given the many guises in which nations appear, is it plausible to assume that in their actions, societies and their sub-groups all follow the same ‘logic of the transition’, and that the transition itself is, with a few minor variations, the selfsame road to be trodden by one and all? Gellner would argue that it was quite possible to accommodate the many variations of process and style, so long as the end-point of the transition, the goal of modernity with all its requirements, was retained. In his view, the choices open to individuals and groups alike are severely restricted by the parameters of modernisation. Whatever variations elites may execute, the dance remains essentially the same.

 

It would take us too far from the subject to enter the debate about the characteristics of modernity and the validity and utility of the concept of modernisation. Suffice it to say that:

 

• there is both lack of clarity, and considerable dispute, about the concept of modernisation and its relationship with industrialisation or development;
• there is no agreement on the validity or utility of the underlying distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ and their alleged concomitants;
• there are many instances where ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ elements coexist and indeed intertwine;
• there is a clear danger of ethnocentrism in most of the meanings associated with the concepts of modernity and modernisation.

 

Gellner’s own usage is ambiguous. On the one hand, the concept of modernisation seems to refer to economic growth or industrialisation; on the other hand, it has wider connotations, referring to everything that accompanies industrialisation (its trappings and anticipations), notably westernisation. In its narrower usage, as we briefly saw, it is difficult to uphold a close link between nationalism and industrialism or development. Nationalisms emerge in all kinds of socioeconomic settings and social systems. In its wider usage, given the sheer regional and cultural variety of the concomitants of development, the concept of modernisation breaks down into a series of trajectories and processes, which vary historically from state to state and between ethnic communities. The attempt to impose a single, abstract ‘pure type’ of modernity (and modernisation) on the rich variety of historical processes, so as to illuminate the underlying logic of the contrast and transition between a state of ‘tradition’ and one of ‘modernity’, exaggerates the historical gulf between them and denies important continuities and coexistences between elements of both. To this we shall shortly return.⁷

 

Nationalism and ‘high cultures’

 

The main new concept employed by Gellner in his second formulation is that of ‘high culture’, that is, a literate, public culture inculcated through a mass, standardised and academy-supervised education system, serviced by cultural

 

38   Varieties of modernism

 

specialists. It is essentially a preserve of cultivated urban personnel, and so may be likened to a tamed ‘garden’ culture. For Gellner national identity is simply the identification of citizens with a public, urban high culture, and the nation is the expression of that high culture in the social and political spheres. Nationalism in turn can be conceived of as the aspiration to obtain and retain such a high culture and make it congruent with a state.

 

There are a number of problems here. The first is the relationship of high cultures with states, and more generally politics. Is it the case that all ‘high’ cultures are embodiments of power, whether of powerful elites, powerful states or powerful peoples? Is the achievement of a high culture for a particular population also an act of empowerment, whereby the population enters, as it were, into the political kingdom and becomes a ‘subject’ of history? Such an implication seems to follow from Gellner’s assumption that you need a high culture to ‘swim in the sea of industria’ and that cultures that fail to become literate, specialist-serviced, education-nourished ‘high’ cultures are doomed in a modern, industrial era. How then do ‘low’ cultures among small and powerless peoples, some of them even deprived of elites, convert themselves into ‘high’ cultures? What are the mechanisms which ensure success for such a metamorphosis? Gellner cites the view of Plamenatz that culturally well equipped peoples can adapt their cultures to the needs of a modern, industrial society much more easily than those that lack this cultural infrastructure. But this only sharpens the problem of accounting for the ‘submerged peoples’ and the way in which their savage ‘low’ cultures have managed to become literate, sophisticated, education-nourished and serviced by specialists (Plamenatz 1976; Gellner 1983:99–100)

 

The problem is magnified for Gellner whenever he emphasises the discontinuities between the older ‘low’ and the modern ‘high’ cultures, whenever he highlights the modern roots of the latter, and the ways in which they answer to modern needs. It is difficult indeed to see how and why anyone should have wanted to turn the pre-modern Finnish or Czech, Kurdish or Ewe ‘low’ cultures into modern, literate ‘high’ cultures, rather than adopting the nearest high culture of the dominant ethnic population in the state. Of course, this is just what happened with increasing frequency at the level of the individual. But equally, at the collective level, the reverse process, the modernisation of low into high cultures, has become just as prevalent and of course far more explosive.⁸

 

There is a further problem. Gellner frequently underlines the invented, even artificial, nature of so much of the high culture of modernity, manufactured by intelligentsias and purveyed to thousands of schoolchildren through standardised textbooks and courses. His point is that we identify with the public taught culture in modern society, not with our culture of origin or of family.

 

Even if we concede the empirical point, the question of loyalty remains: why should anyone ardently identify with an official, school culture? We know from seventy years of communism how ineffective even two generations of mass indoctrination can be. Are we to believe that within a single generation peasants become French patriots simply because they have been processed through a common educational curriculum and school system, and because of this are

 

The culture of industrialism 39

 

prepared to the en masse for the patrie en danger? Is the sacrifice for the fatherland really a defence of an educationally sustained high culture? The problem becomes even more acute in authoritarian states—especially for non-dominant ethnic communities—as we have been so often reminded in recent years.⁹

It is perfectly true that modern citizens invest a great deal of time and effort in their education. But that of itself cannot explain the often intense commitment and passion for the nation which characterises so many people in all parts of the world. Public education is certainly strongly bound up with personal advancement, but the links between individual career paths and loyalty, let alone self-sacrifice for the nation, are far from clear. Even investment in their linguistic education by an intelligentsia cannot fully explain the ardour of their nationalism.

 

Nationalism and public education

 

In Gellner’s second theory the mass, public system of education is given the fundamental task of instilling ardent loyalty to the nation in its citizens and sustaining the high cultures necessary for industrial societies. That was very much the role assigned to the new standardised system of mass education in the French Third Republic. In an effort to train and inspire a large number of fervent citizens after the great defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, the republican leaders devised a universal system of mass public education based on a standardised curriculum, especially in ‘national’ subjects like literature, geography, history and physical education. In history, for example, the standard textbook by Lavisse was circulated for all French schoolchildren at various grades, and its message of French grandeur and territorial integrity became an important element in French national consciousness for succeeding generations. There were similar attempts to forge a national consciousness through mass public education in newly independent national states such as Japan, Turkey and Nigeria.¹⁰

 

There is little doubt that the leaders of new states (and some older ones) have taken the civic role of public education very seriously. But those that have done so with the greatest fervour are in most cases the leaders of nationalist regimes. These public, mass education systems and their values are the product, not the cause, of the nationalist movement once it has come to power. If we retrace the genesis and course of these nationalisms, we find that the first nationalists in each designated population, those that proposed the category and championed the cause of the nation-to-be, are not—cannot be—the product of the national mass, public education system which at that point in time had not come into being. In fact, they are more likely to be products of a traditional village education or of some other system of public education—usually of a colonial or imperial variety—within ‘their’ territories, or of both. In addition, they may have had some access to the education system (or its products) of another, usually distant national state through travel, reading or the mass media. Partly through a desire to imitate and compete with such systems, the first

 

40   Varieties of modernism

 

nationalists on coming to power make it their business to establish and maintain a mass public education system of their own which will reflect and express their system of national values (see Argyle 1976; A.D.Smith 1983a: ch. 6).

 

The same argument can also be applied to the mass of the adherents of these early nationalists, whom Miroslav Hroch has described as the patriotic agitators of phase B of the nationalist movement. They too will have been educated either in the family and village school, or in the gymnasia and public schools of the imperial or colonial power, or in both. In other words, the nationalist movement predates both the new high culture which it helps to create and the new public, mass education system which it establishes in the territory after independence. It follows that the ardour and passionate self-sacrifice of the nationalist movement cannot be explained in terms of exo-socialisation, the national mass education system, and an attachment to high culture. Rather, all these are products of nationalism and its programme of national regeneration (Hroch 1985, 1993).

 

But should we accept the nationalist belief in the efficacy of mass public education in fashioning a new national citizenry? Was it only the communist experiment in mass indoctrination that failed? Several Western public, mass education systems have, by their own reckonings, proved incapable of inculcating the relevant civic values, skills and loyalties in many of their ‘products’, which would suggest that even when they attach great importance to mass public education, their expectations are often disappointed. Mass civic education frequently failed to attain the national and political goals for which it was framed, and which nationalist theorists from Rousseau and Fichte to Gökalp and Ben-Zion Dinur expected it to achieve.¹¹

 

Part of the problem with Gellner’s account of the role of mass public education systems is that it assumes that there is only one ‘genuine’ version of nationalism, the German Romantic doctrine of organic nations, whose prime goal was to achieve cultural homogeneity in the designated population by ‘educating the national will’. But, though influential in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, this is by no means the only kind of nationalism, and even in these cases it has proved a singular failure in its own terms. In cases where the attempt was made to apply its premisses to states with more than one minority ethnic community, it only succeeded in exacerbating ethnic tensions and highlighting the ‘plural’ nature of the state, as in the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia, Iraq, Iran and India. Most states are in fact plural, so the drive for cultural homogeneity has rarely been able to attain its goal in liberal or democratic states. Even where enforced population transfers and genocide have been practised by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, significant minorities often remain. Other models of nationalism have set greater store by territorial and political unity than cultural homogeneity—in the West as well as Africa, Latin America, Australasia and parts of Asia. While it would be simplistic to claim that these are ‘civic’ rather than ‘ethnic’ nationalisms (many instances are both in varying degrees), it is clear that the ethnic component has often been modified by other political traditions.¹²

In fact, in liberal and democratic states, the aim of a national mass education

 

The culture of industrialism 41

 

system has been not so much to homogenise the population as to unify them around certain shared values, symbols, myths and memories, allowing minorities among them to retain their own symbols, memories, myths and values, and seeking to accommodate or incorporate them within the broad public culture and its national mythology. The increasingly vociferous claims of these ethnic and religious minorities and the distaste in liberal societies for cultural repression, has not led to the abandonment of national loyalties or civic education. Instead, attempts have been made within the mass education system by the most advanced industrial societies to cater for a variety of ethno-religious cultures either tacitly or more overtly through the ideal of ‘multiculturalism’, using the resulting cultural diversity to enhance the quality of a more composite ‘national identity’.¹³

 

Nationalism and historical continuity

 

Returning to the fundamental process in Gellner’s theory, the transition from a low to a high culture, two questions arise. The first concerns the ‘understanding co-national’. For Gellner, people do not embrace high cultures because they realise the ‘needs of industrialism’ or because they calculate its benefits. Rather, the circumstances of modernisation dislocated the Ruritanian peasants, and forced them to migrate to Megalomania in search of work and to come up against an often hostile bureaucracy. So it was the processes of modernisation that engendered an attachment to the new high culture. In these circumstances, the uprooted peasants soon learnt

 

the difference between dealing with a co-national, one understanding and sympathising with their culture, and someone hostile to it.

 

Gellner continues:

 

This very concrete experience taught them to be aware of their culture, and to love it (or, indeed, to wish to be rid of it) without any conscious calculation of advantages and prospects of social mobility.

 

(Gellner 1983:61)

 

Here, the culture they are taught to be aware of appears to be their indigenous ‘low’ culture, not the cultivated ‘garden’ variety associated with industrialism. The co-national, too, appears to be a member of this same low culture, who understands and sympathises with ‘our’ rural wild culture. This in turn suggests that the nation and nationalism pre-exist the transition to industrialism, that the particular new high culture has not yet been created, at least, not by understanding co-nationals, and that the actual distance between low and high cultures may not be as great as the theory assumes. Above all, the low culture (no doubt duly updated and streamlined) provides the ground both of affinity between Ruritanian

 

42   Varieties of modernism

 

peasants and understanding co-nationals, and of hostility between them and the bureaucrats who do not share the low culture.

There is, in fact, plenty of evidence that it is these low cultures which inspire such ardent loyalties. Thus the culture of the Czech-speaking peasants was not that of the earlier Bohemian aristocracy, nor was the Finnish culture continuous with that of the Swedish-speaking upper class minority. The links between Ukrainian peasant culture and that of Kievan Rus many centuries earlier are equally obscure, as are those between Slovak peasants and their shadowy heroic ancestors over a millennium earlier. In all these cases, it is the ‘low’ culture of the peasants that has triumphed and become institutionalised as the new high culture of these East European national states.¹⁴

 

This is one variation of the Gellnerian model. The other is where a new mass high culture is a modernised version of an older elite high culture, as in France and Poland, Japan and Ethiopia. Here we may wonder whether it is the needs of industrialism that explain and underlie the new high culture, or whether the shape and content of that culture is not better explained and derived from the old elite high culture of a dominant ethnie. That such pre-modern elite high cultures are modernised, their concepts developed, their vocabularies extended and their forms streamlined, is not in question. The point at issue is how far the modern, mass public culture of the national state is a modern version of the pre-modern elite high culture of the dominant ethnie, or how far it simply uses ‘materials’ from that culture for its own quite different, and novel, purposes (see Fishman et al. 1968, 1972; Edwards 1985).

 

As we saw, Gellner returns several times to this question. Each time he suggests a range of scenarios: some degree of continuity with the old low or high culture; obliteration of the pre-modern culture; interested selection from its themes and motifs; radical transformation of its elements; indeed, the invention of pre-modern cultures and the almost random use of some of its cultural materials—as he puts it: ‘any old shred or patch would have served as well’. This is all part of the repertoire of nationalism and its cavalier use of the past.

 

The ‘uses of history’ model has its attractions. Historical precedents may be useful for nationalist rhetoric, as well as nationalist reformers who want to push through painful new measures to strengthen the nation. Historical exempla virtutis may also serve the purposes of nationalist moralists, teaching the heroic virtues of ‘our ancestors’. The past can undoubtedly be put to good use and serve as a quarry of cultural materials for didactic illustration. In each case, the ‘national past’ serves the preoccupations, needs and interests of present-day leaders and followers, as is evident in the many territorial claims made by nationalists everywhere. In this Gellner subscribes to the modernist view of the past being shaped by present needs and circumstances (see Gellner 1997, ch. 15).¹⁵

 

But can ‘the past’ be ransacked in this way? Is it composed only of exempla virtutis, moral tableaux worthy of emulation? And can nationalists make use of ethno-history in such instrumental ways? That they have tried to do so, sometimes successfully, is not in dispute. Tilak made use of several themes and events of the Marathi and Hindu Indian pasts, including the warrior cult of Shivaji, the

 

The culture of industrialism 43

 

worship of the dread goddess Kali, and the advice of Lord Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita. But, once unleashed, the emotions generated by such interpretations of the heroic past have deep and lasting consequences that bind instigators and followers into a framework and tradition not of their own making, as the recent troubled history of India demonstrates. They become subject to the continuities of tradition handed down by successive generations of a community, and by the understandings and emotions crystallised in those traditions in which they have been socialised. In other words, nationalists can sometimes use the ‘ethnic past’ for their own ends, but not in the long run: they soon find themselves locked in to its framework and sequences, and the assumptions that underlie the interpretations of successive generations.¹⁶

 

This is not to say that there is just one ‘ethnic past’ for each community, or that the understandings of successive generations of that community do not change. On the contrary: as groups and strata within the community are emancipated, new interpretations of the past are generated and, after a time, become part of a more complex overall image and understanding of ‘our ethnic pasts’. At the same time, existing continuities and previous interpretations limit the possibilities of radical change.

 

Even in the case of the major revolutions, there is often a gradual return to some of the older collective interpretations and values after the violent stage of the revolution has run its course. Our understandings of past cultures set limits to the degree to which they can be transformed; the richer and better documented that past and those cultures, and the greater our knowledge and understanding of them, the more complex and more difficult will be the task of transforming those cultures and our interpretations of the past (see Brass 1991: chs 1–2). There is always therefore a complex interplay between the needs and interests of modern generations and elites, the patterns and continuities of older cultures, and the mediating interpretations of ‘our’ ethnic pasts. This raises a further question, which Gellner’s theory does not take seriously: the modern desire to authenticate the past, to select from all that has gone before that which is distinctive, unique and ‘truly ours’, and thereby to mark out a unique shared destiny. In other words, the process of selection from communal traditions and their interpretations cannot be simply reduced to the interests and needs of particular elites and current generations. Such insistence on the shaping present blocks our understanding of the interplay between current and past generations and their respective concerns and achievements.¹⁷

 

It also omits the role of nationalism in relating the different generations, past, present and future, and their respective needs and achievements. As a collective salvation drama, nationalism specifies what shall count towards collective purification and regeneration. Briefly, everything that is popular, authentic and emancipatory contributes to the renaissance of the nation, while all that is sectional, cosmopolitan and oppressive must retard its rebirth. For nationalism, the supreme value is collective autonomy. But autonomy requires collective unity and a distinctive identity.

 

The ‘we’ cannot be truly self-regulating and inwardly free unless all its

 

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members are united and share a distinctive history and culture. Hence the foundation of collective autonomy must always be sought in the unity and distinctiveness of the community; and its distinctiveness or individuality in turn is gauged by the quantity and quality of elements that are peculiarly ‘its own’, which belong to, and are attributes of, that community and no other. True freedom consists in being ‘true to oneself conceived of as a unique and incommensurable collective cultural identity. The main task of the nationalist is to discover and discern that which is truly ‘oneself and to purge the collective self of any trace of ‘the other’. Hence, the rediscovery, authentication and correct interpretation of a unique ethnic past becomes the focus of nationalist labours. Of these three, the process of ‘authentication’ or sifting elements of the corrupting other from those of the pure and genuine self, is pivotal: and as a rough guide, that which is ‘of the people’ is pure and genuine. Like Levin, who discovered in the simplicity and purity of the Russian peasant the secret of virtue, so nationalists discover the authentic nation in the life and values of the common people (see Thaden 1964).

 

For Gellner, of course, this is all part of the deception and self-deception of nationalism. But this is to miss the point. The nationalists may in reality practice urban modernity while extolling the agrarian life and its folkways, but their model of the nation and their inspiration for its regeneration is derived from their belief in the ideal of national authenticity and its embodiment in ‘the people’. If we fail to grasp this, we are debarred from explaining the messianic ardour of nationalism, its ability time and again to confound the formal rationality of advanced industrial societies as well as the traditional routines of agrarian ones, and with chameleon-like adaptability provide new interpretations and emendations of received national images and narratives, as is occurring in contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe. It is this flexibility, coupled with its ardent belief in the people as touchstone of national authenticity, that enables nationalism to ‘correct itself and alter official or received versions of the national past and national destiny, while remaining true to its basic goals of collective authenticity, unity and autonomy (see Hutchinson 1987: ch. 1).

 

Hence nationalism’s recurrent appeal to ethno-history, to an authentic past of the people, is no mere posturing or cavalier gesture, nor is it just popular rhetoric disguising the pain behind its true intentions. Rather, the narodnik element is essential to the project of modernisation. In this respect, one can see nationalism as a bridge between the distinctive heritage of the ethnic past and its ‘irreplaceable culture values’, and the necessity for each community to live as one nation among many in the increasingly bureaucratised world of industrial capitalism. In doing so, nationalism acts like a prism through which are preserved, albeit in changed forms, some of the continuities with the past amid the transformations of modernity.

 

The culture of industrialism 45

 

Nationalism and the ethnic past

 

The problem of national historical continuity is closely bound up with the vexed question of the relationship of ethnicity and nationalism.

For many theorists, the adjectives ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ are interchangeable, and they make little distinction between ethnic groups and nations. For others, ethnicity signifies a cleavage within a nation, usually within a national state; like regionalism, it is regarded as a ‘sub-national’ phenomenon. Gellner generally avoids the term itself, assimilating the adjective ‘ethnic’ to ‘national’ in speaking of boundaries, or using it interchangeably with ‘culture’, except where it seems to describe a ‘racial’ grouping. This imprecision and lack of attention to ethnic phenomena is of a piece with his cursory and ambivalent treatment of the relationship of nationalism to the past. Given the focus of his theory, the derivation of nations and nationalism from the consequences of modernity, it is hardly surprising that history and ethnicity are regarded as of secondary importance.¹⁸

 

But, as I shall go on to argue, ethnicity, like history, is crucial to an adequate understanding of nationalism. To assimilate ethnicity with nationality begs the question; to equate it with culture, an equally contested, ambiguous and multi-stranded concept, does little to advance our understanding. It also encourages a curious discussion of the strength or weakness of nationalism in terms of the number of ‘cultures’ (ethnic groups) that fail to ‘awake’ and strive to become nations (‘determined slumberers’, in Gellner’s words). The fact is that most of these ‘cultures’ or ‘ethnic groupings’ are simply externally discerned categories; they have little or no collective self-awareness or sense of community and solidarity. To assume that a localised collection of people who speak similar dialects, observe the same customs and worship in the same liturgy, form an ethnic community and should therefore spawn a nationalism, if nationalism is to be regarded as ‘strong’, is to miss out vital stages of ethno-genesis, and bypass the search for factors that turn a loose ethnic category into an ethnic association and thence into an ethnic community, let alone a nation (see Handelman 1977; Eriksen 1993).

 

In those cases where pre-existent cultures were the products of ethnic communities, they often continue to possess a binding, collective quality which cannot be reduced to a series of (counter-entropic) ‘traits’ or ‘shreds and patches’. Ethno-history is no sweetshop in which nationalists may ‘pick and mix’; it sets limits to any selective appropriation by providing a distinctive context and pattern of events, personages and processes, and by establishing frameworks, symbolic and institutional, within which further ethnic developments take place. It furnishes a specific but complete heritage which cannot be dismembered and then served up à la carte.

 

The nationalist appeal to the past is therefore not only an exaltation of and summons to the people, but a rediscovery by alienated intelligentsias of an entire ethnic heritage and of a living community of presumed ancestry and history. The rediscovery of the ethnic past furnishes vital memories, values, symbols and myths, without which nationalism would be powerless. But these myths,

 

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symbols, values and memories have popular resonance because they are founded on living traditions of the people (or segments thereof) which serve both to unite and to differentiate them from their neighbours. This unity is in turn based on the powerful myth of a presumed common ancestry and shared historical memories. To achieve success, the nationalist presumption must be able to sustain itself in the face of historical enquiry and criticism, either because there is some well attested documentation of early ethnic origins or because the latter are so shrouded in obscurity as to be impervious to disconfirmation and refutation.

 

What makes these myths, values, symbols and memories so attractive and potent is their invocation of presumed kinship and residence ties to underpin the authenticity of the unique cultural values of the community. In this sense, the ethnic community resembles an extended family, or rather a ‘family of families’, one which extends over time and space to include many generations and many districts in a specific territory. This sense of extended kinship, of ‘kith and kin’, attached to a particular ‘homeland’, underlies the national identities and unity of so many modern nations and endows their members with a vivid sense of kin relatedness and immemorial continuity. These are themes on which I shall enlarge in Part II.

 

For the moment, we need to grasp the flawed nature of modernist theories such as Gellner’s which, for all their perceptive originality, fail to account for the historical depth and spatial reach of the ties that underpin modern nations because they have no theory of ethnicity and its relationship to modern nationalism. The result is to debar their accounts from dealing with questions about which nations and nationalisms were likely to emerge, where and on what basis. While such theories address the questions of why and when nationalism-in-general emerged with considerable conviction, they cannot answer questions about which nations and where, and on what basis these particular nations arose, or which nations and nationalisms are likely to emerge in the future. For answers to those kinds of question, we need to turn elsewhere.

 

3       Capitalism and nationalism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two great forces have shaped the modern world, two forces that grew up side by side, spread around the globe, and penetrated every aspect of contemporary life. These are the forces of capitalism and nationalism.

 

Some of the earliest attempts to provide explanations of nationalism have linked it causally to the rise of capitalism. This is the central thrust of the various socioeconomic variants of classical modernism. The question has always been whether one could convincingly derive the rise and spread of nations and nationalism from the social consequences of capitalism, or more generally from economic motivations and economic change. Here I want to consider some recent models which make these connections and assess the strengths and limitations of such approaches.

 

The background to these models is, of course, the heritage of classical Marxist interpretations of ‘the national question’. Briefly, Marx and especially Engels tended to define modern nations, in the German Romantic tradition, as communities of ‘language and natural sympathies’, hence as in some sense ‘natural’, at least in form. In contrast, the national state and nationalism, the ideological movement, were a peculiar outgrowth of the modern period and especially of the rise of industrial capitalism. For Marx and Engels, the national state was the necessary terrain for the establishment of market capitalism by the bourgeoisie; only a nationally unified territorial state could ensure the free and peaceful movement of the capital, goods and personnel necessary for large-scale production, market exchange and distribution of mass commodities. The creation of linguistically homogeneous nations was therefore a prerequisite of market capitalism, and hence it was inevitable that the further progress of capitalism depended upon the political and cultural development of what Marx called the ‘leading nations’. Only in highly developed nations was it possible to envisage the social revolution which would lead to the overthrow of the national bourgeoisie within each nation and the establishment of socialist regimes by the proletariat, a class that was both universal but also the true embodiment of the nation and its culture. Neither Marx nor Engels envisaged the withering away of nations along with the state; on the contrary, they assumed that though there would be global cultural convergence, national forms and cultures would persist, albeit with a socialist content.¹

 

47

 

48   Varieties of modernism

 

As far as more immediate strategies were concerned, Marx and especially Engels tended to divide nationalisms into ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’, according to whether they were likely to hasten the social revolution and further the socialist development of the ‘historic’ nations. Engels, in particular, adopted Hegel’s theory of ‘historyless peoples’ which discriminated between the smaller peoples who had no tradition of statehood, and the larger peoples who had possessed a state or political tradition in the past and would therefore be able to build a national state in the future and should be encouraged to do so. For this reason he was especially committed to Poland’s independence struggle, and because he felt it would weaken the great bastion of reactionary feudalism, Tsarist Russia.²

 

Their Marxist successors, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg and Bauer, were forced to devote much greater attention to ‘the national question’, because of the spate of independence struggles in Eastern Europe and the massive national stirrings within the Habsburg empire and the Tsarist empire, ‘the prisonhouse of the nationalities’. Several themes were developed in this context, amid heated arguments among the protagonists:

 

• the petit-bourgeois nature of nationalism, its locus in an intelligentsia increasingly squeezed between big capital and the great proletarian movements;

 

• the use of nationalist ideologies by a triumphant but nervous bourgeoisie to induce ‘false consciousness’ and thereby divide and divert the masses who threatened their position;

 

• the progressive nature of anti-colonial liberation movements, i.e. of nationalisms led by a nascent colonial bourgeoisie against the exploitation of imperialist capitalists;

 

• the right of all genuine nations to secede from larger polities, especially semi-feudal empires, until such time as a socialist regime was established in the area.

 

Though there never was a Marxist consensus about nationalism, these themes have repeatedly surfaced in their writings. Apart from the Austro-Marxists, who sought to recognise the role of culture and community as independent variables in the evolution of nations, the classical Marxists adhered to a largely economistic analysis which either explained or reduced nationalist struggles to the workings of the particular stage of capitalism (early, late, monopoly, imperialist, etc.) held to be responsible for these political developments. As modern components of the political and ideological superstructure, nations and nationalism had, in principle, to be derived from the economic contradictions of capitalism and to be explicable largely, if not wholly, in terms of its class configurations and struggles (see Orridge 1981; Nimni 1994).

 

Capitalism and nationalism               49

 

Imperialism and uneven development

 

Postwar socioeconomic models of nationalism have both developed and broken with these Marxist traditions. We see this ambivalence especially in the work of Tom Nairn. Nairn draws on a number of sources for his theory of uneven development and imperialism. Two are derived from the Marxist heritage and have been briefly indicated: Lenin’s idea of capitalist imperialism and colonial nationalist liberation movements, and Engels’ adaptation of Hegel’s theory of historyless peoples. More immediately, however, Nairn makes great use of André Gunder Frank’s dependency model and his notions of ‘centre and periphery’ and ‘underdevelopment’, though he gives the latter a new direction, and links it to the idea of ‘uneven development’, a notion which he takes from Gellner’s theory, but attaches the unevenness to capitalism rather than industrialisation.³

 

Nairn starts by placing nationalism within the context of political philosophy. He regards nationalism as the most ideal and subjective of ideological phenomena, and argues that we can only grasp the extraordinary manifestations and gyrations of this most subjective and romantic of phenomena by locating it firmly within the violent workings of modern world political economy which it faithfully mirrors. Nairn concedes that there have been nationalities and ethnic identities before the modern period, but seeks to limit his analysis historically by focusing on the specifically modern and global phenomenon of nationalism. To explain why nationalism has spread with such whirlwind force and success across the globe, we need a special theory which derives it from peculiarly modern developments (Nairn 1977:97–8).

 

In this context, the key factor is not capitalism per se, but the uneven development of capitalism. To grasp its effects, we have to adopt the spatial analysis of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ for the period after 1800. From that date, at least, the world can be divided into capitalist centres in the West, and underdeveloped peripheries outside. On one level, nationalism derives from the unequal encounter between centre and periphery. This inequality derives from the uneven, and often violent and discontinuous, imposition of capitalism by Western bourgeoisies on undeveloped and backward regions of the world, and their exploitation and underdevelopment of successive peripheries in the interests of the further development of the centres. Unlike the metropolitan fantasy of ‘an even and progressive development of material civilisation and mass culture’ characteristic of the European Enlightenment, imperialist development involves not merely the annexation of overseas territory by force, but the exploitation of the cheap labour and resources of peripheral regions of the world by metropolitan capitalists and states (ibid.: 336–7).

 

On another level, the spread of nationalism can be derived from the class consequences of the uneven diffusion of capitalism. The jagged nature of capitalism’s advance across the globe, its tendency to affect successive areas at different times, rates and intensities, necessitates the underdevelopment and exploitation of the peripheries, and the consequent relative helplessness of their elites in the face of the massive superiority of the colonial capitalists in technology,

 

50   Varieties of modernism

 

wealth, arms and skills. The peripheral elites possess no such advantages; they are bound in the ‘fetters’ of imperialism and are all too conscious of their helplessness. The only resource left to them is people, masses of people:

 

People is all they have got: this is the essence of the underdevelopment dilemma itself.

(ibid.: 100)

 

But the elites may be able to turn the tables and achieve development ‘in their own way’, if the masses can be mobilised against the exploitation of imperialism.

 

This meant the conscious formation of a militant, inter-class community rendered strongly (if mythically) aware of its own separate identity vis-a-vis the outside forces of domination.

 

(ibid.: 340)

 

But to ‘turn to the people’ means speaking their language, taking a kindlier view of their general ‘culture’ and

 

coming to terms with the enormous and still irreconcilable diversity of popular and peasant life.

(ibid.: 100–1, original emphasis)

 

This in turn meant adopting the programme of romanticism which extols a ‘sentimental culture’, one that is ‘quite remote from Enlightenment rationalism’ (ibid.: 101, 340). Politically, as the most aware section of the native bourgeoisie,

 

The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation-card had to be written in a language they understood.

 

(ibid.: 340)

 

As a result, nationalism is inevitably Janus-headed, facing backward to a mythical past and forward to a future of development in freedom. It is also inevitably populist as well as romantic. The true nerve centre of political nationalism

 

is constituted by a distinctive relationship between the intelligentsia (acting for its class) and the people.

(ibid.: 101)

 

The function of this intelligentsia is to construct a national culture out of the ‘prehistoric’ qualities and ‘archaic’ naturalness of popular cultures, that is, all those customs, myths, folklore and symbols which an irrational movement like romanticism loves to exaggerate. This is what they proceeded to do with such success in nineteenth-century Europe, starting in Germany and Italy, and what

 

Capitalism and nationalism               51

 

they continue to do in the recent ‘neo-nationalisms’ of the West—in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec, Flanders and elsewhere. Despite some discontinuities with classic nationalisms, the latter share the same basic situation of relative deprivation vis-à-vis an invasive centre, operating through the oil industry, the multinational companies and the superpowers, and in these cases too their intelligentsias seek to construct a militant inter-class community with its own separate identity and myths (ibid.: 127–8, 175–81).

 

Populism and romanticism

 

Nairn’s theory seeks to capture the general mechanism behind the worldwide appeal and spread of nationalism, and he has undoubtedly achieved an original synthesis of spatial and social elements. His basic purpose still derives from the Marxist project of explaining nations and nationalism in terms of the contradictions of political economy and the class struggles which they engender, but he has placed this traditional mode of analysis in a new spatial framework which combines elements from dependency models and Gellner’s theory. At the same time, he has been mindful of the importance of the cultural content of nationalism, and the ways in which the intelligentsia seek to mobilise the masses through language, customs and myths.

 

But does the synthesis work? Can it encompass the rich variety of nationalisms which Nairn underlines? Will it tell us why, on his own account, the Welsh movement is so romantic and culturally oriented while the equivalent Scots movement is so practical and hardheaded? Will it help us to fathom why some nationalisms are religious, others secular, some are moderate, others aggressive, some are authoritarian and others more democratic?

 

Nairn might well reply that such refinement is not part of his purpose in furnishing a political economy theory of nationalism. All he has tried to do is to outline the main contours of a global explanation of why political nationalism has become such a powerful and ubiquitous ideological movement in the modern world; it would require other, lower-level theories to account for significant variations within the field of nationalisms.

 

At this global level, two main problems require close scrutiny: the characterisation of ‘nationalism’, the dependent variable, and the nature and effectiveness of the explanatory principle, the ‘uneven development of capitalism’.

 

Nairn nowhere defines ‘nationalism’. But, as we saw, he characterises it as the creation of a ‘militant, inter-class community rendered strongly (if mythically) aware of its own separate destiny vis-à-vis the outside forces of domination’. Such a community is forged, mainly by an intelligentsia appealing to, and mobilising, the people; and it is forged in opposition to ‘outside forces’. Nationalism supplies a myth: that of the separate destiny of an inter-class community. But how does this sense of a separate destiny emerge? Nairn does not elaborate. There are some observations about pre-existing ‘mass sentiments’ and peasant ethnic cultures which the intelligentsia must use; but we are offered no theory of ethnicity or history. The sense of separate destiny appears to emerge

 

52   Varieties of modernism

 

simply from the confrontation with European imperialism. In practice, this elides two forms of nationalism in Africa and Asia: the civic, territorial form based upon the colonial territory and the colonial experience, which would fit Nairn’s model better, and the more ethnic, genealogical form based upon pre-existing popular ethnic communities whose rivalries with other ethnic communities had been sharpened by colonial urbanisation, for which Nairn’s analysis is less apposite. For though Nairn recognises that ethnic communities and struggles existed well before the modern period, their role is largely passive: at most, they furnish some materials for the construction of modern nations by intelligentsias. The ‘masses’ as such play no part in the drama of nationalism.⁴

 

This important omission stems from another crucial element in Nairn’s characterisation of nationalism: the ‘populist’ element. For Nairn, nationalism’s populist character is not the result of a popular movement. It is a movement of the intelligentsia to the people, not a movement of the people for themselves. ‘The people’ remain a Klasse an Sich. Now, since the new intelligentsia, in order to construct the nation in Nairn’s terms must be united by romanticism, it follows that every nationalism must be ‘populist’, that is, it must ‘appeal to the people’ as the repository of everything that romantics value. This blanket, definitional characterisation makes it impossible to distinguish, as Nairn wishes to do in the cases of Scotland and Wales, between nationalisms that were genuinely populist, and those that paid lip-service to the people and remained largely middle-class in inspiration and following, such as early Indian nationalism.⁵

 

The largely mute and passive role of an undifferentiated ‘people’ in Nairn’s account also derives from a third element in his characterisation of nationalism: the romantic mythical quality of the inter-class community. The myth of the self-aware and self-determining nation, as well as of its class unity, is the product of the romanticism of the intelligentsia, because only romanticism can create a ‘national culture’ and hence a nationalist movement. There are a number of problems here.

 

The first is a matter of historical fact. Not all nationalisms were equally romantic, in Nairn’s sense of ‘idealist and subjectivist’. Yes, they all look back to (or assume) some heroic past, which they doubtless idealise, but the nationalism of the French and American Revolutions, as well as strong currents within Scots and Catalan nationalisms, were (and are) of the more practical, ‘sober bourgeois’ variety. In fact, several latterday nationalisms, though they contain a romantic element, have become far less idealistic and subjectivist, preferring to base their political claims on social and economic arguments (see Esman 1977; A.D.Smith 1981a: ch. 9).

 

Nor is it true that only romanticism can create a ‘national culture’. This assumes that national cultures are latterday artefacts collected and put together by the intelligentsia from the variety of folk cultures in a given region, because of their idealisation of the ‘folk’. In fact, quite a few nationalists have not been particularly concerned with the folk, let alone folk cultures, which are usually local and which a true romantic purist would wish to leave intact. A Nasser, a Sukarno and a Nehru, while eulogising ‘the people’ in the abstract, was more

 

Capitalism and nationalism               53

 

concerned with trying to create a new public ‘high culture’ which would unite the diverse ethnic and religious groups within their new states, than with the romanticisation of popular cultures which would be likely to weaken and divide the fragile unity of the state which they had inherited. The fact that they and their successors have had only limited success in forging a united nation says something about the strength of popular ethnic ties that undermine the new ‘nation-to-be’, but it does not turn all nationalists into romantics.⁶

 

What this line of reasoning appears to assume is that the German Fichtean version of nationalism which was largely romantic, in the sense of idealist and subjectivist, provides the ‘true’ standard of all nationalisms. But this is to relegate or even deny other forms of nationalism and to judge them all by a single (Western) criterion. While I would concede a ‘romantic’ element in every nationalism (in that they all seek to measure the present by reference to a heroic past for moral purposes), this does not mean that they are all equally imbued with ‘idealism and subjectivism’ or that the national culture which accompanies their emergence may not have some ‘objective’ basis in pre-modern ethnic ties.

 

Characterising nationalism as a species of romanticism also allows Nairn to treat it as a movement of the periphery. In fact, the earliest nationalisms were firmly metropolitan, as Liah Greenfeld’s detailed recent study demonstrates. They emerged in England, then in Britain, in France and in America, even earlier than in Germany (the first periphery?). Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, Burke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Sieyes and Jefferson laid the foundations for the secular forms of nationalism in the eighteenth century, some of them even before Herder and well before Fichte, Schlegel and Muller. This means that national sentiment, as well as nationalism, percolated through the educated classes of these national states and began to influence their economic activities and colonial rivalries as much as their politics and culture. The creation of a national culture in these early national states was certainly the work of intellectuals and professionals, but it owed little to romanticism and underdevelopment (Greenfeld 1992; Kemilainen 1964).

 

‘Nationalism-producing’ development?

 

The link between romanticism and backwardness, which goes back at least to Hans Kohn, brings us to the second problem-area: Nairn’s explanatory principle of the ‘uneven development of capitalism’. The core of his theory is the link between romanticism, backwardness and the periphery. In the centre, die ‘West’, nationalism is not a major issue (though there are national identities). This is because the centre had no real need of romanticism, as the bourgeoisie possessed the self-confidence that comes with successful social and economic development. Instead, it inflicted nationalism on a periphery which it sought to dominate and exploit. By contrast, that periphery had to adopt nationalism because its underdevelopment, its helplessness, required mythical compensations. These were provided by romanticism with its cult of the people and their culture. As with Kohn’s ‘Eastern’ nationalisms, too, the intelligentsia play a pivotal role in the

 

54   Varieties of modernism

 

periphery, where the small bourgeoisie lacks the necessary confidence to beat its own path to self-sustaining growth. Instead, the intelligentsia must provide a mythical sense of separate destiny for a whole community by forging a national culture based on folk elements and mobilising the masses. Hence the strength of idealist and subjectivist components in peripheric nationalisms (see Kohn 1967a, esp. ch. 7; also Kohn 1960).

 

But many of the sharp dichotomies built into Nairn’s analysis cannot be sustained. The romantic movement was, in its eighteenth-century origins, a British (English, Irish, Scots and Welsh) movement, and was developed by both the French and the Germans from the 1770s onwards. The ‘periphery’ existed as much within regions of England and France (the two cases of bourgeois centres that Nairn singles out) as outside these national states, as Eugen Weber’s study of late nineteenth-century France has demonstrated. ‘Underdevelopment’ characterised Brittany and Wales, but also parts of the north of England, well into the twentieth century, whereas parts of Eastern Europe (Bohemia, Silesia) were relatively developed. Nationalisms have also emerged with great force in ‘overdeveloped’ regions such as Slovenia, Croatia, Euzkadi and Catalonia, and among peoples who were ‘well endowed’ relative to their neighbours and/or political centres, such as the Armenians, Greeks and Jews.⁷

 

To which Nairn might reply that this only goes to demonstrate his basic theorem, the uneven, discontinuous way in which capitalism has spread across the globe, creating conflict between relatively enriched and relatively impoverished regions. Now, few would disagree that industrial capitalism developed in this piecemeal, jagged manner. What they question are the consequences of uneven development for the incidence of nationalism. The trajectory of capitalism’s discontinuous spread is not always coterminous with the diffusion of nationalism. Relatively well developed Silesia and Piedmont, for example, did not develop separate nationalist movements, despite some regional sentiment. Relatively underdeveloped regions such as the northeast of England or Crete, southern Italy or southern Egypt, failed to develop a separate nationalism. Given the failure of so many socioeconomic ‘regions’ to coincide with particular ‘ethnic communities’, regional economic disparities are unlikely to be translated into nationalist movements. The lines of the economic and the ethnic maps regularly diverge (see Connor 1994: ch. 6).

 

What this suggests is the relative independence of ethnicity as a variable in the rise and spread of nationalism. It is only in circumstances where regional economic disparities are conjoined and coterminous with particular ethnic communities that there is a likelihood of a nationalist movement emerging in that region. But what does the movement represent? In this case, we are dealing, not with a regional movement of social protest, but with an ethnic nationalism which aims to secure political recognition and perhaps territorial autonomy, even independence, for a self-aware and well developed ethnie or ethnic community. In other words, the economic disparities and social deprivations are placed in the service of the wider political purposes of ethnic communities, or of their elites, which the relevant state authorities have suppressed or marginalised. Similarly, the extent to which a

 

Capitalism and nationalism               55

 

movement can organise to press the political claims of an ethnic community, depends in turn on the political context in which it operates and the degree to which state authorities and state ideologies permit some or any political organisations to function (see Webb 1977; A.D.Smith 1981a: ch. 2).

 

Part of the problem with Nairn’s analysis of the relationship between uneven development and nationalism is his oversharp dichotomisation of ‘ideal’ and ‘material’ factors, which in reality are so often intertwined. True to the ‘economic last instance’, Nairn is forced to place culture and ethnicity in the ‘ideal’ realm and so attempt to ‘derive’ them from the economic contradictions of global capitalism. The result is a socioeconomic version of modernism which combines explanatory economic reductionism with an expressive, even romantic, characterisation of nationalism, all set within a fixed time-frame determined by the uneven expansion of industrial capitalism. The fact that, as so often in the broad Marxian tradition, ethnicity and uneven ethno-history are never accorded a place alongside class struggle as independent explanatory principles, seriously undermines the chances of constructing a more multi-causal theory, one which can be sensitive to the ‘which’ and ‘where’ as well as the ‘why’ and ‘when’ of nations and nationalism.

 

If Nairn has not completely freed his analysis from the Marxist ‘fortress’ with its constricting view of nationalism, he has at least provided an understanding of one of the fundamental contributing factors to what we may term the ‘uneven development of nationalism’. One of the striking facets of nationalism, so often remarked upon, is its explosive unpredictability. In trying to account for each and every explosion in terms of the single factor of capitalism’s uneven development, Nairn’s arrow has overshot its mark. At the same time, even if there can be no mechanical, one-to-one relationship between the uneven development of global capitalism and that of nationalism, the turbulence generated by both helps to generate further exploitation, underdevelopment and nationalist mobilisations. Nor is the process all one-way. An ‘imitative-reactive’ nationalism may spur economic growth through the perception of collective atimia. Japan is a good example of a ‘reactive nationalism’ which generated massive economic development which in turn fed the nationalist ambitions of Japan’s rulers; but the relationship between nationalism and uneven development was mediated both by the imperial state and Japan’s cultural heritage.⁸

 

All of which suggests that a protean phenomenon like nationalism cannot easily be tied to any particular processes such as relative deprivation and underdevelopment, however powerful, pervasive and global. Other factors in the domains of culture and politics may be even more significant in locating the rise of nations and the spread of nationalism.

 

The social base of nationalism

 

One of the central issues raised by Nairn’s analysis is the social composition of the ideological movement of nationalism. For many, nationalism is specifically a movement of the intellectuals, or more broadly, the intelligentsia. They occupy

 

56   Varieties of modernism

 

a pivotal role in the analyses of Ernest Gellner, Elie Kedourie, J.H.Kautsky, Peter Worsley and Anthony D.Smith and by implication, Benedict Anderson, providing both the leadership and the main following of the movement, as well as being the most zealous consumers of nationalist mythology.⁹

 

There is considerable truth in this characterisation. Most nationalisms are led by intellectuals and/or professionals. Intellectuals furnish the basic definitions and characterisations of the nation, professionals are the main disseminators of the idea and ideals of the nation, and the intelligentsia are the most avid purveyors and consumers of nationalist myths. One has only to scrutinise the origins and early development of nationalisms in central and eastern Europe, India, China, the Arab Middle East, Nigeria, Ghana, French West Africa and North Africa, to see how intellectuals and professionals have acted as the midwives, if not the parents, of the movement. Even in continents like Latin America, North America and Southeast Asia, ‘printmen’ and professionals played an important role in the dissemination of national ideals (see Anderson 1991: ch. 4; Argyle 1976; Gella 1976).

 

In a sense, this is a truism. All modern political and social movements require well educated leaders if they are to make any impact on a world in which secular education, communications and rational bureaucracy have become the hallmarks of modernity. They require the skills of oratory, propaganda, organisation and communications which professionals have made largely their preserve. Besides, the meaning of the term ‘intellectual’ is not uniform; it takes its character from the traditions and circumstances of each culture area, and we should be careful not to compare cases that are essentially dissimilar (Zubaida 1978; Breuilly 1993: ch. 2).

 

What is more important is the relationship between the ‘intellectuals’, however defined, the professionals and the ‘people’. This is what Nairn was attempting to characterise and place at the nerve centre of nationalism’s success. Miroslav Hroch’s analysis of the social composition of nationalist movements in a number of smaller east European countries, takes this suggestion one stage further. Like Peter Worsley before him, Hroch sees a chronological progression from elite to mass involvement in nationalist mobilisation. Only for Hroch, this occurs in three main stages. First, an original small circle of intellectuals rediscovers the national culture and past and formulates the idea of the nation (phase A). There follows the crucial process of dissemination of the idea of the nation by agitator-professionals who politicise cultural nationalism in the growing towns (phase B). Finally the stage of popular involvement in nationalism creates a mass movement (phase C). Hroch applies this schema to the nationalisms of small peoples in the context of processes of urbanisation and industrialisation in Eastern Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and shows how regional elites were important elements in the course of nationalist developments (Worsley 1964; Pearson 1983; Hroch 1985).

 

But can such a sequence be generalised? And are ‘the people’ always involved? It is tempting to see nationalism as a river of wave-like movements starting out as a trickle in its cultural heartlands and gaining in power and extent of

 

Capitalism and nationalism               57

 

involvement as it gathers pace. This is one of nationalism’s most successful self-images. But it can also be misleading and Eurocentric. The ‘trickle’ of scholarly circles of ethnic rediscoverers may suddenly break out into a flood, or the political movement of subelites may antedate the cultural revival, while intellectuals (as creators of ideas) may appear later on the scene. This latter scenario can be found in the Eritrean and Baluch struggles for independence, where only later was there any attempt to give cultural substance to an essentially social and political movement of liberation from oppression. Nor can we always count on the movement involving ‘the masses’. To some extent this depends on tactical considerations of the leaders. Galvanising the ‘people’, beyond rhetorical appeals, may jeopardise middle-class interests or it may involve distasteful recourse to religious symbolism and uneasy compromises with traditional elites in order to mobilise strata with subordinate roles and traditional outlooks for the nationalist cause.¹⁰

 

Nevertheless, even if the east European pattern is not universal and cultural nationalism sometimes occupies a subordinate role, at least initially, it can still be convincingly argued that for a new nation to achieve lasting popular success and maintain itself in a world of competing nations, intellectuals and professionals have an important, perhaps crucial role to play. Beyond the immediate needs of propaganda, advocacy and communications, the intellectuals and intelligentsia are the only strata with an abiding interest in the very idea of the nation, and alone possess the ability to bring other classes onto the platform of communal solidarity in the cause of autonomy. Only they know how to present the nationalist ideal of autoemancipation through citizenship so that all classes will, in principle, come to understand the benefits of solidarity and participation. Only they can provide the social and cultural links with other strata which are necessary for the ideal of the nation to be translated into a practical programme with a popular following. This is not to deny the importance of other elites or strata like bureaucrats, clergy and officers, who can exert a powerful influence on the cultural horizons and political directions of particular nationalisms. But, whereas such ‘leading classes’ may vary between and even within movements at different times without endangering the success of the movement, the pivotal role of professionals and intellectuals must remain constant or the movement risks disintegration.

 

When intellectuals and professionals split into rival nationalist organisations fighting each other, the whole movement is weakened and jeopardised (see Gella 1976; A.D.Smith 1981a: ch. 6; Pinard and Hamilton 1984; and more generally, Gouldner 1979).

 

Internal colonialism

 

Some of the same class insights and structural problems can be encountered in a very different variant of socioeconomic modernism. But, with Michael Hechter’s reading of the recent revival of ethnic sentiments and nationalist movements in the industrialised West, we move even further away from the original Marxist basis of so much socioeconomic modernism.

 

58   Varieties of modernism

 

Hechter’s first and probably his best known formulation arose from his detailed study of the political and economic development of the British Isles from the Tudors until the 1960s. His analysis proceeds at a number of levels. The first is immediate and political, the growing resistance of ‘the Celtic fringe’ to incorporation by the British state in the 1960s, as evidenced in the growth of power of the Scottish National Party and, to a lesser extent, Plaid Cymru, and the early troubles in Northern Ireland. A second level is theoretical, namely a growing dissatisfaction with the Parsonian functionalist and diffusionist paradigm of development, and the need to replace it with a new framework based on the paradigm of peripheral dependency and underdevelopment. A third level is industrial-global: the possibility of explaining the growth of peripheral protest and resistance in the advanced states of the West as the result of the unequal division of labour within an advancing industrial capitalism (Hechter 1975: ch. 2).

 

To this end, Hechter traces the relations between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ within Britain to the expansion of the ‘strong’ Tudor state in the early sixteenth century. Under Henry VIII and his successors, first Wales and then Ireland were brought firmly within the jurisdiction of the English state, and this process of geopolitical unification was given further impetus by the union of the two Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603, followed a century later by the Act of Union in 1707 which left a single Parliament in London. For Hechter, this process was always unequal: England was variously preponderant or oppressive in political terms (ibid.: chs. 3–4).

 

However, it was only when to political incorporation was added economic exploitation that we may begin to speak of Wales, Ireland and Scotland as being reduced to the status of Britain’s ‘internal colonies’. This state of affairs emerged with the spread of industrialisation from its English heartlands to the peripheries. Capitalist industrialism created both a new economic dependence of the periphery on the core, and a whole new nexus of social ties as a result of intensified and regular, if unequal, interaction between the peripheries and the centre. Until the advent of industrial capitalism, the colonial situation was latent and obscured; thereafter it became clear and manifest (ibid.: ch. 5).

 

How can the situation of ‘internal colonialism’ be defined? For Hechter, echoing the dependency theories associated with André Gunder Frank, Robert Blauner and Rodolfo Stavenhagen, it denotes a state of structural dependence. Analogous to relations between the Indian cultural peripheries and the core collectivity in Latin American societies, internal colonies in an industrialised Western Europe possess many of the features found in such overseas colonial situations. Thus:

 

Commerce and trade among members of the periphery tend to be monopolised by members of the core. Credit is similarly monopolised. When commercial prospects emerge, bankers, managers, and entrepreneurs tend to be recruited from the core. The peripheral economy is forced into complementary development to the core, and thus becomes dependant on external markets. Generally, this economy rests on a single primary export, either agricultural

 

Capitalism and nationalism               59

 

or mineral. The movement of peripheral labour is determined largely by forces exogenous to the periphery. Typically there is great migration and mobility of peripheral workers in response to price fluctuations of exported primary products. Economic dependence is reinforced through juridical, political, and military measures. There is a relative lack of services, lower standard of living and higher level of frustration, measured by such indicators as alcoholism, among members of the peripheral group. There is national discrimination on the basis of language, religion or other cultural forms. Thus the aggregate economic differences between core and periphery are causally linked to their cultural differences.

 

(ibid.: 33–4)

 

This (internal) colonial situation, as the product of external forces, reveals a further important difference with the endogenous development found in Europe and Japan: the development of a ‘cultural division of labour’. Thus,

 

colonial development produces a cultural division of labour: a system of stratification where objective cultural distinctions are superimposed on class lines. High status occupations tend to be reserved for those of metropolitan culture; while those of indigenous culture cluster at the bottom of the stratification system.

(ibid.: 30)

 

For Hechter, cultural distinctions have become increasingly important in an age of mass literacy and education; but the social conditions of modernity which encourage individuals to band together as members of ethnic groups are problematic. What is clear is that, in contrast to class relations in the advanced core, the backward periphery is characterised by status group solidarity. The reason for this difference is ultimately political:

 

The persistence of objective cultural distinctiveness in the periphery must itself be the function of an unequal distribution of resources between core and peripheral groups.

 

(ibid.: 37)

 

That unequal distribution of resources is in turn a function of the control exercised by the ethnic core over every aspect of the periphery’s social and economic life, and its refusal to lower the barriers to incorporation and acculturation of the periphery. In which case, the reverse situation may later develop:

 

if at some initial point acculturation (sc. of the periphery) did not occur because the advantaged group would not permit it, at a later time acculturation may be inhibited by the desires of the disadvantaged group for independence from a situation increasingly regarded as oppressive. This accounts for the cultural ‘rebirths’ so characteristic of societies undergoing

 

60   Varieties of modernism

 

nationalistic ferment. It is not that these groups actually uncover evidence of their ancient cultural past as an independent people; most often such culture is created contemporaneously to legitimate demands for the present-day goal of independence, or the achievement of economic equality.

 

(ibid.: 38–9)

 

But economic inequalities and cultural differences are not enough to generate ethnic solidarity and ethnic nationalism. What is also required is adequate communication among members of the oppressed group. In the economically backward periphery, occupational stratification is reinforced by residential segregation, and this favours ethnic rather than class solidarity. So the

 

internal colonialism model predicts, and to some extent explains, the emergence of just such a ‘cultural division of labour’, and therefore the likelihood of ethnic persistence and ultimately of political secession.

 

(ibid.: 42–3)

 

To this structural model, Hechter adds a more ad hoc explanation for the postwar revival of ethnic nationalism in the Celtic periphery of the United Kingdom. Noting the differences between a more unified Ireland, and a more economically and hence politically divided Scotland and Wales, as a result of more intense and focused industrialisation, Hechter argues that all three suffered prolonged economic stagnation as internal colonies as well as cultural stratification. This persisting situation sapped people’s faith in the all-British class-based party system so that by the 1960s,

 

Nationalism has reemerged in the Celtic periphery largely as a reaction to this failure of regional development.

(ibid.: 265)

 

And even more specifically:

 

The most recent crystallisation of Celtic nationalism may ultimately be understood as a trenchant critique of the principle of bureaucratic centralism.

 

(ibid.: 310)

 

But, ultimately, it is the structural situation of systematic dependance of the periphery that explains the persistence of regional sectionalism, and thereby encourages its members to resist an incorporation and assimilation that had previously been refused them.

 

Capitalism and nationalism               61

 

Ethno-regionalism

 

This is a powerful and persuasive thesis. It places the revival of nationalism, and the persistence of ethnic ties, firmly within the transformations of the whole social structure, deducing these outcomes from the situations to which those changes give rise. It correctly predicts the continual resistance of smaller ethnic groups situated at the margins of large states to the pressures of modern state and capitalist penetration. It demonstrates how those very processes of penetration necessarily engender sharp political reactions on the part of the besieged peripheral communities. Moreover, it offers a two-stage historical account, in terms of, first, political conquest, and then economic subordination, to account for the backwardness, exploitation and neglect of the periphery for the development and benefit of the core and its elites.

 

But how well does the model of ‘internal colonialism’ fit the many instances of exploited and impoverished regions in the industrialised West? Take the case of Brittany. Here, until the 1980s, we find a relatively neglected region, designated in the 1962 Debre Plan as part of the western deserts to be turned into ‘parklands’. Without proper communications and infrastructure, Brittany showed all the signs of a depressed region and ‘internal colony’, reinforced by decades of cultural discrimination and disdain by the French core. However, as more and more Bretons compared their plight with other French regions, Brittany in the 1960s began to witness a revival of Breton culture and a renewed Breton political movement, with some violent fringes, to redress the situation; and this in turn helped to change French policy towards redevelopment of the region (Reece 1979; A.D.Smith 1981a: chs. 1, 9).

 

But, if Hechter’s model illuminates the situation in depressed regions like Brittany and Ireland, what of more divided and more affluent regions like Wales and especially Scotland? Do they possess all the features of ‘internal colonies’? Hechter is conscious of the difficulty, both at the theoretical and the empirical levels. In a note, he weighs up the question of how many of these features internal colonies must exhibit (ibid.: 33, n. 1). As far as Scotland is concerned, he acknowledges that the region does not depend on a single primary product, nor suffer from a lack of services. This leads him to amend his thesis by distinguishing a special ‘segmental’ division of labour from the more usual ‘cultural’ division of labour. In a segmental division of labour, ethnic ‘members interact wholly within the boundaries of their own group’; and as a result, ‘group members monopolise certain niches in the occupational structure’. The point, of course, is that regions like Scotland retained ‘considerable institutional autonomy’ since the Union, and so cannot be regarded as proletarian nations or depressed internal colonies tout court (Hechter and Levi 1979:263–5).¹¹

 

The introduction of an alternative type of division of labour marks a considerable advance, but it has serious implications for Hechter’s original model. By separating the cultural division of labour from the spatial relationships of core and periphery, it makes it possible to analyse the consequences of cultural stratification within regions like Wales, with its progressive industrial south and

 

62   Varieties of modernism

 

its agricultural north. In fact, these internal cleavages may contribute as much to separatist sentiment as the colonial relationships between a Welsh periphery and an English core.¹²

 

Even with this amendment, there are other difficulties. First, there is the problem of timing. Why did Scottish and Welsh political nationalism appear only in the late nineteenth century, and full middle-class support only in the 1960s, when industrialisation had appeared much earlier in the nineteenth century? In fact, Hechter’s later model abandons an explanation in terms of relative deprivation, which was ambiguous, preferring instead a political argument to explain the timing of ethnic separatism, namely, the nature of state policies (ibid.: 270–2).

 

Second, there is the problem of ‘overdeveloped’ regions. Ethnic nationalism has surfaced not only in more backward or depressed regions like Brittany and Ireland, but also in more economically advanced areas like Catalonia, the Basque country and Croatia. While the political correlates of internal colonialism fit these cases, it is hard to assimilate them to depressed ‘internal colonies’ of larger states. Conversely, the failure of some economically backward regions like southern Italy or northeast England to develop a separatist (or any) nationalism, and to channel social discontent into ethnic protest, suggests further limitations in the internal colonialism model (see the essays in Stone 1979; cf. Conversi 1990 and Connor 1994: ch. 6).

 

But perhaps most important is the failure of the internal colonialism model to do justice to the ethnic basis of separatism. This is clear in the way in which Hechter dismisses ‘the evidence of their ancient cultural past’, and suggests an instrumentalist reading of the creation of culture to legitimate political aspirations. But this misses the point. Of course, some ‘culture’ and some ‘history’ may be created after the event, or simultaneously with it. But the fact that culture provided the basis for exclusion of the periphery by the core over decades and perhaps centuries through the cultural division of labour, tells us that ‘culture’ and ‘history’ pertain not just to the creations of ‘high culture’ and ‘reappropriated pasts’ by nationalists and others, but to the shared origin myths, experiences and memories of generations of the excluded, the history and culture of ‘the people’. The absence of an ethnic separatism in northeast England or southern Italy is a function of the absence, not just of differentiating cultural markers, but of sufficiently separate origin myths, differentiating shared experiences and distinctive historical memories in those regions; memories of Northumbria and of the Kingdom of Naples have faded away, and their more recent experiences and memories are rejected.

 

But perhaps the basic trouble with the thesis of ‘internal colonialism’ is its conflation of region with ethnic community (or ethnie). This is plausible where a single ethnie occupies a whole and easily identifiable region, as with Bretons in Brittany and Scots in Scotland; less so where they share it with immigrants, as in the Basque country and Catalonia, even less so where advanced ethnic communities like the Armenians, Greeks and Jews have been (or are) scattered across a series of economically developed regions. Again, the thesis is rendered more plausible

 

Capitalism and nationalism               63

 

because of the nationalist demand for ‘land’. But a spatial analysis that ends in a kind of territorial reductionism omits the importance of history and culture.

Land is indeed vital to ethnic separatists, but not simply for its economic and political uses. They are equally interested in its cultural and historical dimensions; what they need is a ‘usable past’ and a ‘rooted culture’. Ethnic nationalists are not interested in any land; they only desire the land of their putative ancestors and the sacred places where their heroes and sages walked, fought and taught. It is a historic or ancestral ‘homeland’ that they desire, one which they believe to be exclusively ‘theirs’ by virtue of links with events and personages of earlier generations of ‘their’ people. In other words, the territory in question must be made into an ‘ethnoscape’, a poetic landscape that is an extension and expression of the character of the ethnic community and which is celebrated as such in verse and song (A.D.Smith 1997a).

 

This suggests that ethnicity must be treated as an independent factor as much as economic development, if we want to grasp the dynamics of ethnic secession. Neither is reducible to the other. It is only where they are conjoined that we can expect to find movements of ethnic secession. We may go even further. Walker Connor has argued that economic factors play only a contributory or catalytic role in fomenting ethnic separatism. He enumerates a range of historical and contemporary cases which reveal the power of ethnicity independent of economic situation. Thus we find ethnic nationalist movements among economically backward as well as advanced groups, in situations of economic advance and economic decline, and even among economically stagnant groups. There seems to be no easily identifiable pattern to the relationship between economic factors and ethnic nationalism, and on the other side, there is clear evidence of ethnic sentiment and activity emerging independently of other, especially economic, factors (Connor 1994: ch. 6).

 

Ethno-regional movements, then, are just one of several sub-varieties of ethnic nationalism which emerge from the historic cleavages in the affluent, developed states of the West. Their relationship to economic changes is secondary to the uneven distribution of their ethno-histories and cultures, changes in their geopolitical situation (notably the loss of their empires) and their political treatment by the elites of these states. It follows that the internal colonialism model is of limited applicability and represents a special case within the broader type of politically disadvantaged ethnic communities in national states. For the reasons why we are witnessing the revival of ethnic ties and nationalist movements in complex societies in the latter half of the twentieth century, we must look elsewhere.

 

Elite strategies of ‘rational choice’

 

This is clearly the problem that has increasingly puzzled Hechter and others: why should people join ethnic and nationalist movements led by elites who are acting on their behalf, when they can so easily avoid doing so in modern societies? As Hechter asks:

 

64   Varieties of modernism

 

If collective action is facilitated when the individual members of a group share common interests, then why does it occur so rarely? How can we explain why some people in the same structural position are free riders (Olson 1965), while others are not?

 

(Hechter 1988:268)

 

This for Hechter is the chief merit of the rational choice approach: while giving due weight to structural constraints, it starts from a methodological individualism that seeks to explain collective outcomes in terms of individual behaviour. It thereby avoids the recourse to explanations of ethnicity and nationalism in terms of historical regression, and explains why individuals act as they do, often against our structural expectations.¹³

 

Rational choice considers individual behaviour to be a function of the interaction of structural constraints and the sovereign preferences of individuals. The structure first determines, to a greater or lesser extent, the constraints under which individuals act. Within these constraints, individuals face various feasible courses of action. The course of action ultimately chosen is selected rationally: …When individual preferences are assumed to be known, transitive and temporally stable, behaviour can be predicted in the face of any combination of circumstances.

 

(ibid.: 268)

 

For Hechter, ethnic groups are, in principle, no different from any other type of group, and therefore demand no special theory. People join ethnic groups or nationalist movements because they think they will receive a net individual benefit by doing so.

 

In this regard, ethnic organisations are critical for two basic reasons. First, they are the major source of the private rewards and punishments that motivate the individual’s decision to participate in collective action. Second, because the individual’s benefit/cost calculation depends in part upon his estimate of the probability of success of any collective action, organisations can play a key role by controlling the information available to their members.

 

(ibid.: 271)

 

Such organisations are solidarity groups, and ethnic organisations are particularly salient examples. They mould the preferences of their members by applying sanctions to deviant individuals (such as free-riders and criminals) and by controlling the information that comes to them from outside the group—as, for example, the Amish communities in Pennsylvania, or the Gypsies in many lands, have done for generations (ibid.: 275–6).

 

Hechter and his colleagues have applied this solidaristic theory of social order to a number of topics. Here I can only consider the two most immediately relevant

 

Capitalism and nationalism               65

 

to the theory of nationalism: secession and nationalist violence. With regard to secession, Hechter has outlined a systematic, step-by-step account of the strategies taken and options open to elites on the road to secession, defined as

 

a demand for formal withdrawal from a central political authority by a member unit or units on the basis of a claim to independent sovereign status.

 

(Hechter 1992, 267)

 

Secession is to be distinguished from separatism, where there is a drift to fragmentation, and from colonial liberation movements. Secession occurs only in constituted national host states, where there are regions with populations who have either common production or common consumption interests, or both. Such populations may occupy a distinctive economic niche, or possess distinctive cultural characteristics, like religion or language, particularly where these also have a corporate character like the millets in the Ottoman empire. Where these common interests are superimposed, where class and culture coincide, and where there are intensive communications networks, the sense of a separate region is likely to emerge.

 

Hechter is prepared to grant that social movements based on primordial attachments may, exceptionally, inspire great self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, rational choice theory, which starts from the preferences of individuals, is more likely to cover the majority of nationalisms, since it predicts that ethnic and national groups will closely monitor and sanction their members and control their access to information, thereby preventing free-riding for what is a collective good, namely, sovereignty. But, given the great costs of attempted secession, it can only be private inducements, such as the prospects of jobs, that could tempt ethnic members, and especially the middle classes who provide its main constituency, into so risky a course of action (ibid.: 273–5).¹⁴

 

Even if they are tempted, the position of the host state is critical. Only where it is perceived to be weak and unable to benefit regional groups, and constitutional reforms and repression have failed, as occurred during the last years of the Soviet Union, is there a chance of success for secessionists. Even then, the geopolitical situation must be favourable; and in general the state system is opposed to secession. All this makes

 

secession a highly improbable outcome. This analysis reveals why it has been so improbable and why it will continue to be improbable in the future.

(ibid.: 280)

 

A similar schema can illuminate even that most intractable of issues, nationalist violence. Here again we should prefer an analysis based on individual desires for wealth, status and power, to one based on unknowable value commitments. Now, to attain these fungible goods, people will be prepared to join groups that produce these goods and abide by their rules. To prevent free-riding, these groups

 

66   Varieties of modernism

 

will monitor and control their members, and create group solidarity. But where there are several solidary groups in a single territory, there must be an institution to regulate intergroup conflict. That institution is the state, whose functions are to protect productive solidary groups from predators (e.g. criminal gangs) and from ideological oppositional groups (e.g. secessionists) who aim to weaken or dismantle the state. The latter situation may induce violent state repression, and so for members of oppositional groups violence becomes instrumentally rational, in order to resist state repression in the name of the nation. This is where nationalism enters the scene:

 

There is ample evidence that nationalist groups employ violence strategically as a means to produce their joint goods, among which sovereignty looms large.

 

(Hechter 1995:62)

 

This is what is occurring in Northern Ireland, where the level of violence has been relatively ‘limited’. What this suggests is that

 

violence is most likely to break out when a weakly solidaristic nationalist group confronts a strong state apparatus having high domestic and international autonomy. But since such a state will be able to repress secessionists, violence will seldom escalate in this situation. The escalation of violence is most likely to be sustained, therefore, in the context of a weakened state facing a highly solidary nationalist group.

 

(ibid.: 64, original emphasis)

 

Interest and passion

 

This may well be true, but what, one may ask, has it to do with nationalism? It is perfectly possible, and useful, to specify the conditions in which low and high levels of group violence are likely to occur, but they apply to all kinds of oppositional social movement and every type of belief system. In this regard, there is nothing special about nationalism; just as, for Hechter, there is nothing special about ethnic groups. The problem thereby disappears; and we are left wondering why it is that the nation and nationalism have stirred so much passion and moulded the modern world in their image.

 

But is this credible? Can we simply subsume nationalist secession under the mantle of ‘oppositional movements’ and ‘solidary groups’? Is the violence of nationalist wars of expansion or resistance identical with the violence of racial hatred, mass communist purges or religious persecutions? Nothing, it seems, is left over for ‘beliefs’ and ‘ideologies’. Is it not just as valid and economical to assume a link between professed beliefs and subsequent actions, and explain the latter, at least in part, in terms of the former? Might not at least some of the actions of nationalists, and those the most intense and impassioned, be explicable through comparative analysis of belief systems and their consequences? In

 

Capitalism and nationalism               67

 

omitting entirely the role of beliefs and ideas, Hechter has altogether elided the problem of why people appeal to the nation. There appears to be no reason why either the state or a solidary group should invoke the name of the nation.

 

There is a related problem. For Hechter, value explanations are not so much wrong as problematic. Values, he claims, cannot readily be imputed from behaviour; we cannot know if a specific item of consumption behaviour, hungry Hindus refusing to eat beef, for example, is due to fear of sanctions or deeply held beliefs. True, but the methodological difficulty of uncovering a mechanism of explanation does not of itself invalidate a value-driven account. By dismissing values, we are left only with preferences which, of themselves, can never really explain the intensity and passion which give rise to nationalist self-sacrifice. The examples Hechter adduces in Northern Ireland relate only to one kind of nationalist violence, that of armed and trained guerillas who are fighting a war and who naturally make careful calculations in terms of rational life-preserving strategies (Hechter 1995:62–3).

 

There is a further omission in rational choice theory: the problem of memory. As we know from the recent wars between Serbs and Croats, memories of previous bloody encounters can play an inordinate role and lead people to commit atrocities which the strategic calculations of battle could never warrant. Similarly, Hitler’s war of extermination of every European Jew, even in the last desperate days of the Reich when all manpower and weaponry was needed for the war on two fronts, is not easily explained by the strategic calculations of members of solidary groups. If it can be explained at all, one might more plausibly start from the fanatically held beliefs and values of the Nazi leaders and of their hatreds born, perhaps, of the scars of early memories of imagined wrongs. Such memories need not be so consistently dark; the commemorations of the glorious dead, fallen for their motherlands in battle, stir the living to emulation, enjoining a morality of and for the nation of citizens. It is not clear what functions such mass displays of emotion perform in the rational calculations of preference theory; but that they clearly have individual and collective functions is attested by their ubiquity and by the mass reverence which they so often command (Ignatieff 1998: ch. 2; Gillis 1994).

 

I do not wish to argue for a specifically ‘non-rational’, much less an ‘emotional’ theory of nationalism. Hechter is right to remind us of the need to specify the mechanisms of any explanation that we invoke, and he has performed an important service in demanding more rigorous attention to the logic of such explanations. But explanations, like definitions, can only be as precise and rigorous as the phenomena under consideration permit. The great number of permutations of explanatory factors, the sheer variety of historical cases, above all the elusive complexity of definitional features of concepts of the nation and nationalism, renders the search for certainty in the explanation of ethnic and nationalist phenomena, and the attempt to reduce their variety to a single pattern of preferences, implausible and untenable.

 

Hechter himself is careful not to make excessive claims for rational choice models. At most, such strategies operate within tightly circumscribed limits. For

 

68   Varieties of modernism

 

example, the feasible choices open to elites contemplating secession is largely determined by the possibility of mounting any kind of collective action, and that in turn is dependent upon shared consumption or production interests, and preferably both, together with communications networks. In other words, structural constraints determine a large part of the answer to the question of whether secession is a possibility. There must, first of all, exist a delimited group, defined in economic, territorial and cultural terms, that is, an ethnic group which is separate and distinctive; and the members must be integrated by networks of communications, making the group a self-conscious ethnic community. This does not seem to be so very different a kind of explanation from a good many others, including some perennialist ones, as we shall see later; and it demonstrates the critical importance of these conditions for secession, without invoking rational choice. Indeed, it is only when such conditions exist, and only within the orbit of such conditions, that rational strategies have any meaning.

 

This is very much what Donald Horowitz has in mind, in his typology of the logic of secession movements. After comparing secession with irredentism, Horowitz identifies the structural and social psychological conditions of the likelihood of bids to secede. Basing himself on a theory of group esteem (to which I shall return), Horowitz analyses the stereotypes of ethnic groups held by the colonial power, and taken over by their ethnic neighbours, in the colonial state. Generally, these stereotypes divide group characteristics into two categories, the one emphasising attributes of ‘backwardness’ such as ignorance, indolence, ineffiency, submissiveness and pride, the other the attributes of ‘advanced’ groups such as enterprise, aggression, industry, thrift, ambition and energy. The latter type of group has benefited from advanced educational levels and non-agricultural employment, while backward groups tend to have lower levels of education, income and employment (Horowitz 1985: chs 4–5).

 

Horowitz then places each type of group in ‘regions’ that are characterised as advanced or backward, in terms of regional income per capita, and thereby identifies four bases for secession. The most common basis, he argues, is found among backward groups in backward regions, for they have little to lose:

 

They conclude rapidly that they have a small stake in preserving the undivided state of which they are a part.

(ibid.: 236–40)

 

This is not just a matter of selfish elite manipulation; it is also a result of genuine and widespread grievances such as the importation of the dominant ethnic group’s civil servants into the region. The case is quite different with advanced groups in backward regions. ‘Where backward groups are early seceders, advanced groups are late seceders’ (ibid.: 243). In fact, as population exporters, they tend to secede only as a last resort, as the cases of the Ibo and the Tamils demonstrated; it is their diasporas and the nationwide opportunities open to them, that inhibit secession, until violence persuades them otherwise. The same lure of opportunities inhibits secession among advanced groups in advanced regions, like the Basques,

 

Capitalism and nationalism               69

 

but it is offset by the tendency for such regions to subsidise the other, poorer regions and communities in the national state. Secession is also infrequent among backward groups in advanced regions, mainly because they tend to be numerically weak. They may desire to secede, as did the Lunda in mineral-rich Katanga, driven by fear of immigrants, but their chances of success are limited by powerful neighbours within the region (ibid.: 249–59).

 

For Horowitz, then, structural constraints which include not only economic disparities but group evaluations of themselves and others, are the determinants of secession, rather than individual preferences. One may disagree with Horowitz’s empirical predictions (for example, it did not take long for advanced groups in advanced regions such as the Ibo, Latvians and Estonians, or in more backward regions such as the Bangla Deshis, to mount powerful secession movements), but his analysis is surely more illuminating in respect of those structural conditions that Hechter consigns to his initial category of ‘structural constraints’. It also reveals how much can be gained by a structural analysis without invoking individual preferences.¹⁵

 

Pure instrumentalism, it seems, is a limiting case in this field. It operates successfully only within certain boundaries. It tells us a good deal about the strategies of elites, and makes us remember how much rational calculation exists even within what so many have assumed is the subjective phenomenon par excellence. There is a rationality to romanticism, a logic to nationalism. But as so often, human motives are mixed, frequently obscure and hard to disentangle. Moreover, just as the individual level of action cannot be read off from collective characteristics, so conversely we cannot deduce the character and features of collectivities like the nation from aggregated individual behaviour. Rational choice theory omits the way in which collectivities, once created through individual experience and action, can operate if not exactly on their own, then at least independently of each individual in every generation. Through institutions, rules, memories, myths, values and symbols, individuals are united into social groups that can perpetuate themselves down the generations, and influence the conduct of their members, not just by means of rewards and sanctions but as a result of socialisation, value example, myth-making, ideology and symbolism. Over and above the analysis of preferences and rational strategies, a general theory in this field would also need to consider these processes and mechanisms, if it was to give a more rounded and convincing account of nations and nationalism.

 

4       State and nation

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the West, the nation and the state emerged together. From the time of the French and American Revolutions, the ‘nation- state’ became the predominant, and soon almost the only legitimate form of political organisation, as well as the dominant vehicle of collective identity. Given the West’s pioneering role, and its superior power, those areas colonised by the European powers also witnessed the emergence of nations pari passu with the colonial states which they established in Africa and Asia. Colonialism has also been the primary source of nationhood in Latin America, where the administrative provinces of the Spanish and Portuguese empires formed the basis, and provided the boundaries, for the subsequent post-colonial states and hence for their nations.

 

Sources of political modernism

 

Considerations like these have led many theorists of nationalism to regard the modern, bureaucratic state as the source and framework of modern nations and nationalism, and see political and military forces and institutions as the keys to explaining their emergence. It is this third, political variant of classical modernism that I wish to explore.

The origins of this view are fourfold. To begin with, the Weberian emphasis on relations of domination provided a classical definition of the state as the political organisation where its ‘administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order’ within a given territory. A legal-rational kind of legitimation for the modern state requires an administrative and legal order subject to legislation, and claims binding authority over all the citizens and actions taking place within its jurisdiction. For Weber, bureaucracy exemplified the spirit and actions of the modern, rationalised state; hence its intimate association with, and interpenetration of, the state (Weber 1948).¹

 

Political explanations of nationalism have also drawn on the Marxist analysis of the growing cleavage between state and civil society in the modern epoch. The levelling of intermediate corporate bodies in the era of capitalism and the growing power and impersonal rationality of the state have left individuals as citizens exposed, and often opposed, to the bourgeois state, just as capitalism

 

 

70

 

State and nation 71

 

has alienated the mass of wage workers and left them at the mercy of the small capitalist class of property owners. Out of this chasm between state and civil society, emerges the historicist vision of the nation and the accompanying nationalist aspirations to reintegrate the civil and the political domains into a single whole (Shaheen 1956).²

 

A third influence contributing to this view is the idea, traceable to Simmel, of endemic conflict between states and societies. The ‘societies’ of the pre-modern world were varied in form and character, with many kinds of city-state, feudal principality, ethnic community and empire; in the modern world, such ‘societies’ are nearly always nations and national states. The modern world is one of national competition and warfare; as a result, military factors and militarism assume an increasingly central role in the distribution of resources and the formation of political communities and identities (Simmel 1964; Poggi 1978; cf. A.D.Smith 1981b).

 

Finally, there is the whole idea of modernity as a revolution in administration and communications, one which requires new kinds of human associations that will be able to operate effectively in such an environment. Here we have the most immediate source of the ‘state-to-nation’ perspective, since it is in and through the modern state that this revolution has made its most significant impact. Stemming from the work of both Weber and the ‘communications’ theorists, notably Karl Deutsch, this view sees in the modern state a monitoring and reflexive institution that requires for its success a political community and identity moulded in its image (Deutsch 1963, 1966; Tilly 1975).

 

The reflexive state

 

It is a view most clearly exemplified in the work of Anthony Giddens. The rise, ‘nature and consequences of the modern nation-state forms the core of the second volume of his Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, entitled The Nation-State and Violence. Though the state as ‘nation-state’ bulks large in its pages, the nation and nationalism are given more cursory treatment. Nevertheless, the passages allotted to them allow us to gain a clear idea of Giddens’ theoretical position vis-à-vis nations and nationalism.

 

For Giddens, what is at stake is ‘a systematic interpretation of the rise of the territorially bounded nation-state and its association with military power’ (Giddens 1985:26). The formation of the nation-state and the nation-state system is ‘an expression of the dislocations of modern history’, which since the advent of industrial capitalism has witnessed extraordinary change (ibid.: 34). Both the nation and nationalism ‘are distinctive properties of modern states’; indeed, a nation Giddens defines as

 

a collectivity existing within a clearly demarcated territory, which is subject to a unitary administration, reflexively monitored both by the internal state apparatus and those of other states.

 

(ibid.: 116)

 

72   Varieties of modernism

 

Nationalism, in turn, Giddens regards as primarily a psychological phenomenon:

 

the affiliation of individuals to a set of symbols and beliefs emphasising communality among the members of a political order.

(ibid.: 116)

 

But nationalism per se is not at the centre of Giddens’ concerns. It functions only insofar as it reinforces the territorial cohesion and reflexive qualities of the nation-state. It is the nation-state in its unique administrative, military and territorial properties that commands his attention:

 

The nation-state, which exists in a complex of other nation-states, is a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence.

(ibid.: 121)

 

In other words, what distinguishes the nation-state from other polities, and nationalism from earlier kinds of group identity, is the rise of stable administration from fixed capital cities over well defined stretches of territory. Before the modern epoch, genealogical myths and religious symbols contributed to the normal exclusionary forms of ‘tribal’ group identity. In the modern epoch, in contrast, nations were formed through processes of state centralisation and administrative expansion which, through the reflexive ordering of the state system, fixed the borders of a plurality of nations. This leads Giddens to characterise the ‘nation-state’ as ‘a bordered power-container…the pre-eminent power-container of the modern era’ (ibid.: 120).

 

For Anthony Giddens, as for Eric Hobsbawm and others, nationalism is intimately linked to the modern state. Indeed, it is only insofar as it is linked to the state that Giddens considers it to be sociologically significant. While he regards nationalism as primarily a political movement associated with the nation-state, he recognises its important psychological dimensions, and notes its definite symbolic content in which the ‘homeland’ is tied to

 

a myth of origin, conferring cultural autonomy upon the community which is held to be the bearer of these ideals.

(ibid.: 216)

 

This symbolic content is often grounded on ‘historicist’ arguments such as those advanced by Herder, and it can lead to more exclusive or to more egalitarian versions of the concept of the nation-state. Similarly, national symbols such as a common language can provide a sense of community and hence some measure of ontological security where traditional moral schemes have been disrupted by

 

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the modem state. They can also be linked to populistic leadership figures who gain influence in crises and dislocating situations which often produce anxiety.

More fundamentally, however, nationalism figures in Giddens’ theory as

 

the cultural sensibility of sovereignty, the concomitant of the co-ordination of administrative power within the bounded nation-state.

(ibid.: 219)

 

Given the vast increase in communications and coordination of activities, we can most usefully regard the nation-state as a ‘conceptual community’ founded on common language and common symbolic historicity. But only in a few cases where political boundaries coincide with existing language-communities is the relationship between nation-states and nationalism ‘a relatively frictionless one’. In most cases the advent of the nation-state stimulates oppositional nationalisms. The origin of these nationalisms is to be sought less in regional economic disparities than in the disruption of traditional modes of behaviour which encourage historicity and the claim to administrative sovereignty. This leads Giddens to conclude that ‘all nationalist movements are necessarily political’, because nationalism is ‘inherently linked to the achievement of administrative autonomy of the modern (sc. reflexive) form’ (ibid.: 220).

 

The nation beyond the state

 

There is no doubt that, historically, the rise of the modern bureaucratic and reflexive state has deeply affected the shape, and to some degree the content, of many nationalisms. This is not only the case in the West; we find it in perhaps its most naked form in the ‘state-nations’ of Africa and Asia, that is, those post-colonial states striving to become nations on the basis of their ex-colonial territorial boundaries and their administrative format. The inclusive, bounded and homogenising state has been the point of departure, and the mould for many national liberation movements in the period of decolonisation from 1945 to the 1970s. The nation that the leaders of these liberation movements envisaged was equally grounded and defined by a statist ideal inherited from the West and adapted by the immediate post-colonial generation of political leaders.³

 

But there are also problems with state-based explanations. To begin with, not all nationalisms have in practice opted for independent statehood; most Scots and Catalans, for example, have not to date supported their movements and parties which sought outright independence, and have instead settled for a large measure of social, cultural and economic autonomy within their borders. Of course, one could envisage circumstances in which, like the Slovenes and Croats, they too would opt for full sovereignty, but, as the Québécois case reveals, a strong element of ‘rational choice’, of calculative strategy, enters into any bid for outright independence, as opposed to ‘home rule’ (see Meadwell 1989; Hechter 1992).

Perhaps more important is the problem of cultural nationalism. It is easy to

 

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dismiss the yearnings for cultural regeneration as the contribution of fringe intellectuals without much influence on the political course of a given nationalism. But, as John Hutchinson has convincingly shown, cultural nationalism is a force in its own right, and one that exists in a contrapuntal relationship with political nationalism. That is to say, where political nationalism fails or is exhausted, we find cultural nationalists providing new models and tapping different kinds of collective energies, thereby mobilising larger numbers of hitherto unaffected members of the community. Hutchinson documents this extensively in the Irish case, showing for example, how the fall of Parnell in 1891 effectively put an end to the Irish home rule political movement, while at the same time encouraging the cultural nationalists to come forward and propagate their Gaelic ideals and a vision of a new Irish moral community, until such time as a new wave of political nationalism, drawing on the work of the cultural nationalists, could take up where Parnell had left off. To say, then, that all nationalism is ‘necessarily political’ is either true by definition, or severely truncates the nationalist experience (Hutchinson 1987: ch. 4).

 

A further limitation of state-centred views is their ethnocentric, that is, West European, bias. Historically, Giddens sees the nation-state as a historical phenomenon which emerged out of European absolutism. Besides overlooking non-European examples of developed absolutism, such as the Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate, this view fails to do justice to the different models of nation-formation outside the West. In Western Europe, it is true, the nation tended to emerge together with, and out of the crucible of, the bureaucratic state, while Western nationalisms, too, can be seen in large part as state-oriented movements, ideological movements for consolidating and enhancing state power (though even here, we may recall that Dutch, Irish, American and even French bourgeois nationalism in the Revolution were oppositional movements directed against the state authorities). But that will hardly help us when we turn to Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Attempts to modernise the administration of the Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman empires were certainly a factor in the genesis of ethnic nationalisms within their borders, but the nationalisms they helped to engender, as well as the nations that became the objects of their aspirations, were not just ‘oppositional’. Their very contours and contents were largely determined by pre-existing ethnic, linguistic and religious heritages, and the ‘nations’ they aimed to create were in turn based, in varying degrees, upon ties and networks that antedated the imperial reforms and, in some cases, the empires themselves. If the West is generally characterised by a ‘state-to-nation’ trajectory, that of Eastern Europe and parts of Asia can be more convincingly analysed in terms of a ‘nation-to-state’ model. Both models, as we shall see, are only crude approximations, but they serve to remind us of the complexities of nation-formation, and the need to exercise caution in generalising from the Western experience (see A.D.Smith 1986b; James 1996:155–8).⁴

 

There are two more general criticisms. The first is the problem of definitional reduction. Giddens insists with others that nationalism, and the nation, are really only significant insofar as they are linked to the state, that is, to attaining and

 

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maintaining state power; and further that the nation has no independent conceptual status outside of its link with the state. This leaves no room for an independent theory of the nation and nationalism. The nation is subsumed within the concept of the nation-state, and in both theory and practice the emphasis throughout falls on the ‘state’ component. Carried to its logical conclusion, this would mean that because a Polish ‘nation-state’ ceased to exist in the Partitions of the late eighteenth century, so did a Polish ‘nation’; and that we could only speak once again of a Polish ‘nation’ when Poland was reconstituted as a ‘nation-state’ in 1918. By the same logic, Scotland cannot become a ‘nation’ until the majority of Scottish voters agree with the Scottish National Party’s platform and vote for an independent Scottish ‘nation-state’. On a theoretical level, to elide the concept of the nation with that of the ‘nation-state’ precludes consideration of the problem of the nation as community: that is, how the ‘nation’ has become so important to vast numbers of people across the globe, and why millions have been prepared to lay down their lives for an apparently abstract community of strangers. What the statist formulation omits, then, is the ubiquity of this sense of a community of like-minded people with whom we feel intimate, even though we cannot know most of them, and for whom we are prepared to make real sacrifices (see James 1996:166–7).

 

The second criticism concerns Giddens’ characterisation of nationalism as a psychological phenomenon, in contrast to the structural nature of the nation-state. In The Nation-State and Violence, Giddens drops his earlier suggestion that nationalism feeds upon and reconstitutes an attenuated form of ‘primordial sentiments’ (in the Geertzian sense) and opts instead for a view derived from Fredrik Earth which emphasises the importance of exclusionary sentiments based on social boundaries between ethnic groups. This kind of argument, which I shall treat more fully later, is open to the charge that it fails to do justice to the unities of social and cultural relations within groups. In fact, Giddens does acknowledge the importance of cultural ties such as language and religion; but he fails to link these with the new kind of ‘borders’ created by the reflexive nation-state, or see how they can be symbolically reconstituted to form a basis for the modern nation. This is part of the greater failure of modernism: its inability to see how the transformations of modernity revitalise in changed form the social and cultural relations of past epochs. By characterising ‘nationalism’ as a purely subjective, psychological phenomenon, Giddens reduces its importance to that of a prop for the nation-state, and thereby fails to see how it symbolically defines and infuses with passion the national identities to which the nation as community gives rise. A chasm between the structure of the ‘nation-state’ and the subjectivity of ‘nationalism’ is opened up which cannot be bridged except by subordinating the latter totally to the former (A.D.Smith 1986a: ch. 3; James 1996: ch. 7).

 

This is one example of a more general problem affecting all variants of political modernism. Anthony Giddens clearly recognises the importance of ideology and ethnic symbolism, for he regards them as crucial elements in the formation of the nation-state as a political community, or ‘power-container’. Yet the concept of the nation embraces far more than the idea of a political community, or vehicle

 

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for state power, even one with fixed borders: it refers also to a distinctive culture community, a ‘people’ in their ‘homeland’, a historic society and a moral community. The desire for political autonomy in a fixed territory is a vital component of nationalism, but it is very far from exhausting its ideals.

 

Nations and the inter-state order

 

The centrality of political institutions was also recognised by Charles Tilly in his work on the formation of national states in Europe. Tilly’s focus is the state and its activities, rather than the nation, ‘one of the most puzzling and tendentious items in the political lexicon’ (Tilly 1975:6). Yet he also distinguished between those nations that were forged by the economic and military activities of modern states, mainly in Western Europe, and those later nations that were created, as it were, ‘by design’ by diplomats and statesmen through international treaties following long periods of protracted warfare, as after the Thirty Years or Napoleonic Wars. Though such a distinction implicitly suggests a role for the idea of the nation advanced by statesmen, intellectuals and others, Tilly gives this idea no independent status. For Tilly, it is the modern state that is sociologically paramount, as it is historically prior; the nation is merely a construct, dependant upon the state for its force and meaning, and is treated adjectivally. Certainly, the deliberations of elites—military, political and intellectual—exerted a profound influence on the political map of Europe and overseas, but always within the context of an inter-state system whose members are in a continual state of competition and hence conflict (Tilly 1975: Conclusion).

 

This inter-state system emerged in a Europe perennially at war, a Europe unable to refashion the Roman empire. Its protected geographical position and multiple groupings, its urban wealth and conflicts between lords and peasants, as well as the military and economic effectiveness of the state form, prevented any one state emerging as hegemonic overlord of the continent. For Charles Tilly, it is, above all, war that ‘makes the state’, just as it is the state that ‘makes war’. War is the engine of state-making, and hence at one remove of national formation. But, after warfare has left the parties exhausted, diplomacy is called in to fashion a new international order of ‘national states’ in accordance with the balance of power between the leading states, first in Europe and then globally (Tilly 1975: Introduction, Conclusion).⁵

 

A more recent exposition of the primacy of political institutions can be found in the work of Rogers Brubaker. He argues that the conventional ‘substantialist’ accounts of nationalism reify the nation and treat it as an enduring collectivity. Far from regarding nations as real communities, which are stable and enduring over time,

 

we should focus on nation as a category of practice, nationhood as an institutionalised cultural and political form, and nationness as a contingent event or happening, and refrain from using the analytically dubious notion of ‘nations’ as substantial, enduring collectivities. A recent book by Julia

 

State and nation 77

 

Kristeva bears the English title Nations without Nationalism; but the analytical task at hand, I submit, is to think about nationalism without nations.

 

(Brubaker 1996:21)

 

Here Brubaker cites the policies and methods by which the Soviet regime institutionalised the territorial and ethnic republics which have taken its place after 1991. Nationalist practices were formed by Soviet political institutions, and, given the occasion, the events of ‘nationness’ created the successor states. For Soviet institutions comprised a

 

pervasive system of social classification, an organising ‘principle of vision and division’ of the social world.

(ibid.: 24)

 

The result of the breakdown of the Soviet system is not a struggle of post-Soviet ‘nations’, but of ‘institutionally constituted national elites’ (ibid.: 25).

Now it is undeniable that the modern state, like the wider inter-state system, provides a powerful context and constraint on the formation of nations and nationalisms. But to say that it also constitutes both interests and actors, in accordance with the postulates of the ‘new institutionalism’ in sociology, seriously limits the field of theoretical analysis and precludes alternative possibilities. We can, I think, avoid social reification while retaining the idea of nations as real communities (though not necessarily ‘enduring’, and certainly not ‘fixed and given’ or ‘internally homogeneous’); and we need to do so, because ‘nation’, besides being a category of practice, an institutionalised form and a contingent event, as Brubaker rightly points out, also refers to a felt and lived community, one which has very real and powerful consequences. It is the social reality of those consequences that has persuaded analysts to treat nations as real (albeit also imagined) communities, alongside other kinds of felt and lived community. (Besides, why should we think that political or other institutions and their practices possess a greater ‘reality’ than communities? After all, they are all abstractions, but in practice social science cannot do without them. Even rational choice theory operates with ‘organisations’ and ‘corporations’ of interest.) The fact is that ethnic communities, conflicts and ethnonational movements were already present in the later Tsarist empire, as well as in the rest of Europe (not to mention in Marxist theorising on the ‘national question’), and the Soviet rulers freely adapted, extended and reinforced politically what often already existed sociodemographically and culturally (Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay 1966). Rogers Brubaker is right to remind us that there, and elsewhere, the ‘nation’ (like the ‘state’) is a concept, but to confine its referents to form, practice and event is to strip it of those attributes that give it so much of its potency and appeal. How could we account for the widespread powerful feelings of attachment to mere forms and practices, even when these are backed by the panoply of state institutions and the international system? ‘Nationalism’ cannot be so readily separated in this fashion from nations-as-communities.

 

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The impact on such nations of the inter-state system is a large topic. It has been explored by sociologists like Stein Rokkan, and by international relations theorists like Hinsley and Mayall. For sociologists, Deutsch’s nation-building model needed to be placed in a wider context of international economic, political and cultural linkages. For this purpose, they evolved complex models of the many factors involved—language, religion, trade, administration and regional economies—from which they attempted to show why some communities and regions failed to achieve national status, while others succeeded. In this vein, Andrew Orridge sought to delineate the complex social and historical bases of recent autonomist and secessionist movements in Europe. In a rich and wide-ranging analysis of the many factors at work and of their permutations, he demonstrated the variability of the grounds and content of such movements, revealing thereby the limitations of previous socioeconomic models (Rokkan et al. 1972; Orridge 1981, 1982; Tivey 1980).

 

At a more global and general level, international relations theorists have sought to locate the meaning and impact of nations and nationalism within the context of a pre-existing inter-state system and the role of diplomacy and war. The new state-based world order, first codified at Westphalia in 1648, underlined the naturalness of hierarchy in a world of princely states in which warfare was regarded as a legitimate institution of sovereign states. It was this world that nationalism challenged in the name of the ideals of popular sovereignty and popular culture (see inter alia Hinsley 1973; Azar and Burton 1986; Mayall 1990; cf. Posen 1993; Snyder 1993).

 

For James Mayall, the most systematic modernist theorist of the challenge of nationalism to the international order, nationalism certainly helped to undermine the traditional basis of political legitimacy. At the same time, it widened and deepened the role of warfare. Nationalists themselves were divided about the role of war. Liberal nationalists were men of peace and hoped a world of free states would eliminate this scourge. ‘Historicist’ nationalists, on the other hand, followed Hegel in regarding warfare as necessary for the survival of the nation and the values it represents. Along with the vast increase in industrial production and the technology of mass destruction, this ideal has encouraged the shift to total warfare in the twentieth century. This has been accompanied by the globalisation of the state system under the impact of nationalism, and the increasing penetration of the state into the everyday lives of its citizens, in the name of the nation (Mayall 1990:25–34; cf. Navarri in Tivey 1980).

 

Did the challenge of nationalism succeed in destroying the new world order based on a system of sovereign states? For Mayall,

 

an accommodation was reached between the prescriptive principle of sovereignty and the popular principle of national self-determination. The result was the creation of over 100 new states and the development of the first truly global international society the world had known. But the old world did not surrender unconditionally to the new: as in any accommodation, compromise was involved. The principle of national self-

 

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determination which was built into the new system turned out to be much less permissive, or popular, than attention to its philosophical origins and meaning might lead one to expect. Moreover, the global integration of international society on the basis of a principle of popular sovereignty was accompanied by an unprecedented attempt to freeze the political map.

(ibid.: 35, original emphasis)

 

This has meant that the inter-state order, resting on the principle of sovereignty, has been unwilling to accommodate new aspirants for national status, unless they are ex-colonial territories. The UN principle of national self-determination was in practice amended to include only states created by the process of decolonisation of empires, and not ethnic secessionist movements seeking their own states by withdrawing from duly constituted national states. Only in rare cases since 1945 have new states been created and accorded international legitimacy, as a result of peaceful agreement between the parties (Singapore) or regional patronage of the seceding nation (Bangla Desh) (ibid.: 61–9).

 

Since 1991, of course, some twenty new states have been created. But this has been mainly the result of the break-up of two empires, the Soviet and the Ethiopian. James Mayall recognises the power of the ethnic resurgence since 1989, but maintains that the inter-state system has shown its customary resilience and remains unwilling to countenance secession or irredentism, except through peaceful agreement, as in the case of Slovakia. This still leaves open the question of the early European recognition of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia: were these exceptions to the rule, or do they betoken a deeper change in international emphasis? Given the worldwide and often unpredictable explosions of ethnic conflict and nationalist sentiments, can we be so sanguine about the stability of an international community of sovereign states? Moreover, are not international organisations, in the name of human and minority rights and under the impact of widespread ethnic nationalism, eroding the sovereign powers of individual states? (Mayall 1991, 1992; cf. Preece 1997).

 

 

The state and war

 

The role of war in the creation of ethnic and national communities can, of course, be witnessed in pre-modern epochs. We have only to remember the way in which paired ethnic communities and nations have reinforced a sense of collective identity through mobilisation of men, sustained enmities and protracted warfare, and how memories and myths of battle helped to forge a sense of ethnic or national unity, whether for ancient Greeks after Marathon and Salamis, Romans after Cannae and Zama, the Swiss after Sempach and Morgarten, the French after the siege of Orleans and the English after the Armada. But it is in the modern epoch that warfare has had its most profound impact; and this is largely because, as Michael Howard has so vividly documented, the early modern revolution in warfare had become closely linked

 

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causally to the administrative efficiency of the modern state (see Howard 1976; A.D.Smith 1981b).

For Michael Mann, too, military factors are vital in shaping the emergence and course of modern nationalism. Mann, like Tilly and Giddens, is a convinced ‘modernist’: in the first volume of The Sources of Social Power, he argues that though there may have been loose ethnic networks in antiquity and the Middle Ages, they could not, and did not, serve as the basis of polities. Nor could nations have emerged prior to the Western democratic revolutions which first brought the masses into the political arena. Nevertheless, Mann is ready to concede that not only military-political, but other factors played some part in the emergence of modern nations and nationalism (Mann 1986:527–30).⁶

 

In his second volume, Michael Mann links the emergence of nations and nationalism to that of classes around the end of the eighteenth century. He defines a nation as

 

an extensive cross-class community affirming its distinct ethnic identity and history and claiming its own state.

(Mann 1993:215)

 

He distinguishes four phases in the rise of nation-states: first, a religous one in sixteenth-century Europe, in which the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformations both encouraged new networks of discursive literacy in the major vernacular languages, linking family rituals to wider, secular social practices and thereby mobilising a higher degree of ‘intensive power’ in a limited class. Second, from around 1700, state expansion and commercial capitalism widened the scope of discursive literacy to a broader class through a variety of institutions from contracts and army manuals to coffee house discussions and academies, encouraging a limited sense of ‘civil citizenship’ among the upper classes (ibid.: 216–8).

 

These two phases brought into being what Mann calls ‘proto-nations’, whose consciousness was largely elite-based. Real, cross-class nations emerged only in the third phase, towards the end of the eighteenth century, under the pressures of fiscal crises and state militarism. Prior to 1792, the military revolution had profoundly affected geopolitical relations in Europe, producing a series of fiscal crises in several European states. The result was greater conscription, war taxes and regressive war loans, all of which served to politicise the concepts of ‘people’ and ‘nation’. Through the growing demands by propertied classes for representative government and political citizenship, intensive, pre-existing familial networks of ritual and literacy were linked to the extensive power networks of an enlarged and more aggressive state, albeit as yet on a limited scale among the elites. In a centralised Britain and, more radically, in France, the nationalism that emerged from these crises was state-supporting; in confederal Austria and Germany, it was state-subverting, because these polities were organised along provincial lines and had ancient, powerful provincial organisations which controlled taxation. So,

 

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Cross-class nations were propelled forward more by the states’ military than by their capitalist crystallisations. Because fiscal-military pressures hit states more directly and more uniformly than commercial or industrial capitalism, nations appeared amid all of them with regional political institutions, not only in the more economically advanced.

(ibid.: 226; cf. Mann 1995)

 

In the post-1792 period, under French revolutionary and Bonapartist military pressure, regimes all across Europe began to penetrate the intensive, familial networks and link them more directly to extensive state and military networks, and on a much broader scale. Of particular importance here was the use made of pre-existing religious and commercial networks of discursive literacy by capitalism and the military state. This was the work of a radical intelligentsia, invoking universal principles which crossed all boundaries—whether of knowledge, social class or social practice. In extreme crises, these ideological principles seemed to be self-fulfilling: they loudly proclaimed an end to privilege and the nation in arms, and the free nation came into being. At these key ideological ‘moments’, the ‘nation-state mobilised greater collective power than old regimes could muster’ (ibid.: 235).

 

In Germany and Austria, it is true, the lack of fit between language and political boundaries made the first romantic stirrings of scholarly nationalism curiously ‘cultural’ and apolitical. But this was not to last. Under the impact of French militarism, national stereotypes were accentuated, whole peoples were pitted against one another, and radical patriot societies, some of them appealing to ‘the people’ in their local languages, multiplied. In the process, language became a principal means of distinguishing ‘us’, the local community, from ‘them’, the conquerors and political rulers; and hence of defining the new ‘nation-to-be’ in Central Europe (ibid.: 238–47).

 

In the fourth and final phase of nation-formation, industrial capitalism from the later nineteenth century reinforced nations through the agencies of the expanded state. The universal desire for industrial capitalist growth vested the state with ever greater powers of social coordination. The state became increasingly responsible for communications, mass education, health and welfare, even family mores, making states both more representative and ‘national’, more participant and homogeneous. Of course, this might stir up opposition based on language or religion, subvert the existing state or become the basis for new national states; but the trend to national homogeneity and popular nations of the middle classes, peasants and workers encouraged a more passionate, aggressive nationalism resulting from the tighter links between intensive, emotional spheres and the militarist, capitalist state. Industrialism expanded both civilian and military state networks: these formed the core of aggressive nationalisms. Mann concludes by emphasising the close links forged between state and nation, arguing that:

 

In the industrial capitalist phase the state-reinforcing nation can be simply represented as three concentric circular bands: the outer one circumscribed

 

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by and attached to the total national state, the middle more linked to the inner circle, the statist core.

(ibid.: 734)

 

This is a complex and nuanced modernist account of the rise of nationalism in Europe, which locates it in the historical context of the growth of classes and class conflict in the shadow of the modern, militarised state. Michael Mann can find no single ‘ultimate’ cause for nations or nationalism, even if capitalism figures prominently in the last two phases. But then, as he intimates, so does the militarist state. Moreover, Mann is careful to warn us that all we can expect is a sketch of the general factors involved in the rise of nations and nationalism, and that thereafter each case must be treated on its own merits in its particular social and historical setting, some European examples of which he accordingly analyses.

 

A political theory of nationalism?

 

In apparent contrast, Michael Mann later proposed a starker ‘political’ theory of nationalism and its excesses. Here, he goes much further in insisting on the primacy of political and military factors. This comes out when he claims that the ‘key lies rather in the state’. In the third, or militarist, phase, ‘states now loomed over the lives of their subjects, taxing and conscripting them, attempting to mobilise their enthusiasm for its goals’. As people fought back, they demanded political citizenship of the ‘people’ and the ‘nation’ (Mann 1995:47–8).

 

At this point Mann draws back from single-factor explanations. He is prepared to admit that regional-ethnic, as well as religious components enter into the picture, especially in the early phases of establishing larger spheres of discursive literacy. This is especially clear in ‘confederal’ structures like the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov empires, where ‘patriotic’ opposition was organised along provincial lines. Yet, he continually returns to ‘political’ explanations. In respect of state-supporting nationalisms like those of Britain and France, he writes:

 

But the clarity of focus on the nation as coterminous with the state cries out for a predominantly political explanation.

(ibid.: 48)

 

And again, in respect of the ‘provincial’ nationalisms of the Habsburg empire, he observes:

 

We cannot predict which few nations successfully emerged on the basis merely of ‘ethnicity’. The presence or absence of regional administration offers a much better predictor. This suggests a predominantly political explanation.

 

(ibid.: 50)

 

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Mann is certainly right to underline the growth of the nation within the framework of the state in much of the West. But can such an explanation be supported in the case of Central Europe? How does such an explanation fare in Germany and Italy? Shouldn’t we have expected a Prussian and Piedmontese nation to emerge, rather than the ‘Germany’ and ‘Italy’ that eventually took their seats in the concert of ‘nations’? Why was the fight for democracy and representative government ipso facto a movement for a German and an Italian nation? Mann may be right to say, in partial reply, that nationalism is part of the wider movement for democracy (whatever its subsequent manifestations may have been); but that hardly explains why democratisation is also everywhere nationalist, why it is the nation that must be democratised and why democracy must be realised in and through the nation.⁷

 

Mann is rightly concerned to explain the passionate, often aggressive character of nationalism. He does so by claiming that nationalism originated in protest against the exactions of authoritarian, militarised states which invaded the private spheres of the family, religion and education and linked them to the militarised state. But why should people want to take over an intrusive, often alien, state, and link their private concerns or feel a sense of belonging to a community in the image of a militarised, professional state? Isn’t it exactly because the state is so intrusive and alien, and appears so often as a threat to their traditional lifestyle, that people seek to return to some sense of community against the state?

Mann sees the nation largely in terms of the state—as its product, either harmoniously or, by way of reaction, in conflict. After all, as Tilly argued, the modern, rationalised state emerged before nations and nationalism; so they can only be understood in a European context of inter-state diplomacy and warfare. This might help to explain why boundaries and the exclusion of those beyond them became an important concern of many nationalists, and why, when the boundary question was unresolved, war appeared to be a normal, even ‘natural’, option (Tilly 1975: Introduction; see Dunn 1978: ch. 3).

 

But modern nations and nationalism involve many more elements than a heightened concern for monitored boundaries and the exclusion of ‘foreigners’. What is crucial for nationalists is the sense of a ‘homeland’ and of historic, even sacred territory, not just boundaries. It is not just in the shape, but in the content of what lies within, that we need to seek an explanation. It is the relationship, emotional as well as political, between land and people, history and territory, that provides one of the main motive forces for national mobilisation and subsequent claims to title-deeds. Hence, explanations in terms of inter-state relations and warfare fail to uncover the emotional sources of national sentiment.⁸

In the same way, the nationalists emphasise the uniqueness of a vernacular culture. Mann is sensitive to issues of culture in the context of Germany and Austria and its nationalities, but fails to see that these are general concerns of nationalists everywhere. We need to explain why so many people followed the nationalists in emphasising their distinctive cultures and desiring to belong to ‘unique’ nations—especially those peoples who did not possess their own state.

 

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It is difficult to see how we can derive explanations for these central concerns of modern nationalism from such broad factors as the inter-state order and its constituent militarised states.⁹

 

One might also question Mann’s assertion that failure by national states to institute democracy, especially in what he calls the post-1918 ‘modernist’ phase, resulted in extreme aggressive nationalism, and especially fascism (ibid.: 57–63). One could equally argue that the failures of orthodox nationalisms to live up to their promises—economic, cultural and political—opened the way to much more radical ‘solutions’, which ultimately undermined the very concept of the vertical nation, substituting the idea of horizontal racial castes. The radicals were often non-state personnel: ex-soldiers, lower-class intellectuals and lower clergy, as much as clerks. The state may be the target of their aspirations, but it is not always the source of their discontents (A.D.Smith 1979: ch. 3).

 

State and society: bridging the gulf?

 

An attempt to come to grips with some of these problems while upholding the idea of the state as the focus and goal of nationalism is central to the most elaborate and comprehensive ‘political’ theory of nationalism. John Breuilly is a convinced modernist: he begins by admitting that there may have been something like national consciousness in the late medieval era, but refuses to label this as ‘nationalism’. For Breuilly,

 

The term ‘nationalism’ is used to refer to political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such actions with nationalist arguments.

 

A nationalist argument is a political doctrine built upon three assertions:

 

• There exists a nation with an explicit and peculiar character.

 

• The interests and values of this nation take priority over all other interests and values.
• The nation must be as independent as possible. This usually requires the attainment of at least political sovereignty.

 

(Breuilly 1993:2)

 

By limiting the term to a political doctrine, this definition ‘avoids the danger of being too vague and all-embracing and, among other things, draws attention to the modernity of nationalism’ (ibid.: 5).¹⁰

 

Breuilly also wants to exclude from his definition those political movements that demand independence on the basis of universal principles like freedom and equality. This leads him to exclude the American colonies’ Declaration and War of Independence in 1776. Nationalism demands that such universal principles be married to a concern with a distinct cultural identity, and American leaders before and during the War showed no such concern. At the same time, Breuilly is prepared to concede, à propos the goal of creating a German nation in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848–9, that, in place of an ethnic

 

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criterion, nationalism may base its claims on ‘an historical-territorial concept of the nation’ (ibid.: 6).

Nevertheless, Breuilly is not prepared to accept an extreme voluntarist position: to base national identity purely on individual choice would be to abandon any idea of a culturally specific nation, even in the eyes of nationalists. Nor should nationalist appeals be equated with claims to universal human rights in a given territory, of the kind that many anti-colonialist movements in Africa put forward. In fact, in many of these cases, cultural themes loomed large: modern anti-colonial movements opposed an allegedly superior Western culture to ‘accounts of their own, non-western cultures’. These accounts may be very broad, operating at a ‘pan-’ level: Arab, African, Indian and Chinese. Or they may operate at a ‘sub-nationalist’ or ‘tribalist’ level and refer to specific ethnic identities (ibid.: 6– 7).

 

John Breuilly is really interested only in politically significant nationalisms, rather than with ideology or ideologies per se.

 

The focus here is with nationalism as a form of politics, principally opposition politics. The principle of classification will, therefore, be based upon the relationship between the nationalist movement and the state which it either opposes or controls. A nationalist opposition can seek to break away from the present state (separation), to reform it in a nationalist direction (reform), or to unite it with other states (unification).

 

(ibid.: 9)

 

These distinctions yield six classes of nationalisms, depending on whether separation, reform and unification are from, of and to nation-states or ‘non-nation-states’ (e.g. empires). Of course, cases like nineteenth-century Polish nationalism were directed against both kinds of state, and aimed to separate from, unify and reform in quick succession. But the differences in their goals and situation dictated very different kinds of nationalist politics within overall Polish nationalism. Hence a political typology is illuminating and ‘the only starting point for a general understanding of nationalism is to take its form of politics seriously’ through comparative historical investigation. Given the variety of social groups brought together by nationalism, and the difficulty of distinguishing clearly between different kinds of nationalist ideology, a political criterion offers the best means of classifying and grasping the nature of nationalism and its impact on the modern world (ibid.: 12–14).

 

Broadly speaking, nationalism is able to seize power in the state because it can generate mass support, bring different social groups together and provide an underlying rationale for their separate social interests. Because it performs the functions of social mobilisation, political coordination and ideological legitimation so effectively, nationalism has spread across the globe, drawn in a variety of social groups and remained a powerful force for the last two centuries. For Breuilly, the role of sub-elites has been crucial, particularly for the important category of oppositional nationalisms in colonial territories. Under this heading,

 

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Breuilly includes middle-level bureaucrats, officers, professionals, traders and intellectuals. In other cases, disaffected and poorer aristocrats or members of the lower clergy provided the vanguard of the nationalist movement, notably in parts of Eastern Europe. At times even the peasants and workers have been drawn into the nationalist cause, though left to themselves manual workers tend to place class solidarity above the nation, as Marx and Engels claimed. However, nationalism has flourished among peasants in certain revolutionary situations in Asia and Africa, just as it has drawn in workers wherever their trade unions have formed the main parties of opposition against the colonial authorities. Workers have also tended to become nationalistic wherever labour competition between workers of different ethnic groups has become acute, as occurred in late nineteenth-century Bohemia. But perhaps the most striking example of working-class adherence to nationalism occurred in the two world wars, though we should remember that, despite the high rate of workers volunteering for battle, it was the leaders of the trade unions in France, Germany and Britain, much more than their rank and file, that acceded to the bourgeois summons to war in 1914 and again in 1939 (ibid.: 36–46).¹¹

 

Professionals and intellectuals are often thought to have played a pivotal role in nationalist movements. Given their discursive skills, status interests and occupational needs, professionals have been particularly strong adherents of the nationalist cause. Yet, claims Breuilly, it would be a mistake to see nationalism as the politics of professionals, if only because their positions in the hierarchies of status and power have kept the majority of professionals neutral and apolitical. Similarly with the intellectuals, who are often held to be the central proponents and adherents of nationalism. John Breuilly readily concedes the importance of intellectuals to political movements in general, and is prepared to allow that nationalist ideologies with their claim to speak for the whole nation hold special attractions for those who value both intellectual abstraction and their autonomy from sectional interests. At the same time, such abstraction and autonomy are the hallmarks of all modern ideologies; and intellectuals like others are subject to all kinds of social constraints and must operate within pre-existing political networks. It would be wrong, therefore, to characterise nationalism as the politics of the intellectuals or any other social group. It is to the politics and political contexts of social groups rather than their ideas that we must look to grasp the nature and functions of nationalism (ibid.: 48–51).¹²

 

If nationalism cannot be seen as the politics of intellectuals, does this mean that ideology is unimportant? With certain qualifications, concludes Breuilly,

 

ideology can still be regarded as a powerful force which was essential to the work of co-ordination, mobilisation and adding legitimacy to what was carried out by a nationalist movement.

 

(ibid.: 70)

 

However, the claim to link cultural distinctiveness to the demand for political self-determination had to be related to specific interests, and it worked only in

 

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particular sorts of political situations. The fundamental situation was that of modernity. The modern era of capitalism, bureaucracy and secularism saw a growing split between ‘state’ and ‘society’, the growth of an absolutist realm of politics on the one hand, and of a private realm of ‘civil society’ on the other. It was this yawning chasm which various ideologies sought to bridge and to which nationalism offered a pseudo-solution, by holding up a vision of the community defined simultaneously as the cultural and the political ‘nation’ of theoretically equal citizens. At this point, Breuilly takes Herder’s arguments as representative of what he regards as the essentially historicist vision of nationalism. For Herder, language was thought and it only developed within the context of social groups. Thought, therefore, like language, was group-specific and unique; so was every other cultural code—dress, dance, architecture, music—in tandem with the society in which it developed. In its original state of nature, as created by God, each nation is both unique and ‘authentic’. The task of the nationalist is clear: to restore his or her community to its natural, authentic state. But this can only be done by realising the cultural nation as a political nation, thereby reintegrating what modernity had sundered. Hence the call for national self-determination, which means reintegrating society with the state, by securing for each unique nation its own territorial state. Only in this way can authenticity be restored and the community, i.e. the nation, realise its distinctive self and its true inner values (ibid.: 55–64).

 

Breuilly regards the historicism of nationalism with deep suspicion insofar as it makes a specious leap from culture to politics by a sleight-of-hand redefinition of the unique cultural nation as the political nation of citizens. At the same time, he concedes that nationalism sets out to tackle a real problem: the split between state and society which modernity opens up. In an important and original passage, he seeks to show how that attempt, although flawed, exerted great power over the masses through the development of a uniquely concrete symbolism. The quality that sets nationalism apart from other ideologies is its unabashed celebration of the community itself.

 

Nationalists celebrate themselves rather than some transcendent reality, whether this be located in another world or in a future society, although the celebration also involves a concern with transformation of present reality.

 

(ibid.: 64)

 

Breuilly illustrates this self-referential quality through the powerful example of the Afrikaner myth of the Great Trek and the Day of the Covenant, recalling the ‘deliverance’ of the Boer farmers at the battle of Blood River in 1838. The symbolism of liberation and victory was successful in mobilising a sense of Afrikaner destiny (though not immediately of political unity) a century later, when the Ossawatrek was instituted through a re-enactment of the Great Trek. Here, according to Breuilly,

 

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The central message, conveyed through anthems, rallies, speeches and elaborate ceremonials, is of an embattled people. The aim is to return to the heights of the past, though in a transformed fashion.

 

(ibid.: 67–8)

 

Breuilly ends by conceding, reluctantly, that

 

the self-reference quality of nationalist propaganda and the theme of the restoration of a glorious past in a transformed future has a special power which it is difficult for other ideological movements to match.

 

(ibid.: 68)¹³

 

The bulk of John Breuilly’s massive study is devoted to historical elucidation of the forms and conditions of nationalisms in each of the six categories (reform, unification and separation nationalisms in nation-states and non-nation-states) both in Europe and in Africa and Asia. He concludes by recapitulating his political modernist theory. The modern absolutist state, at once territorially bounded and globally universal, came to be increasingly challenged and checked by a private domain of ‘civil society’ based on advancing capitalism, which constituted the growing political community. The idea of a sovereign state and its political community became dominant in Europe in the late eighteenth century and formed the basis of the modern territorial nation. The concept of the nation ‘related principally to the institutions of the political community that sustained the monarchy’ (ibid.: 374). When the opposition to the monarch and the state began to be based on historic or natural rights, the first step towards nationalism was taken. But where political opposition was weak, groups hitherto excluded from political life could be drawn in through an appeal to cultural identity as the basis for a territorial political community. This is the moment when nationalism emerges. So,

 

The idea of the ruled society which might only be definable in terms of its private character, that is, in terms of its ‘culture’; of the sovereign territorial state; of a world made up of such states in competition with one another— these are the essential premises upon which nationalist ideology and nationalist politics build.

(ibid.: 375)

 

For Breuilly, the first real nationalist movements are those of separation or unification, for both kinds of movement aim to make the boundaries of the cultural community coextensive with the political unit. More generally, the development of nationalism was closely bound up with the nature of political modernisation in nineteenth-century Europe and in areas of European settlement and imperial rule overseas. Nationalism should be seen in this specific, political context, not as an intellectual invention to be unmasked, nor as an irrational force erupting in history, much less as the solution propounded by nationalists

 

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themselves to a deep human need for identity. It is ‘a peculiarly modern form of politics which can only be understood in relation to the way in which the modern state has developed’ (ibid.: 398–9, 401).

 

Identity and politics

 

But can we specify so precisely the nature and limits of nationalism? Breuilly’s lucid, tightly-argued case for a political definition of nationalism is bought at considerable cost, of which he is well aware. On several occasions, he reverts to the question of a wider ‘identity’ sought by nationalists and by people at large, and espoused by rival approaches to nationalism. His arguments for rejecting the idea of nationalism as a language and ideology of cultural identity are twofold. The first is methodological: to try to include the concern with cultural identity is to inflate the definition of nationalism beyond all reason, and to render it vague and imprecise. We should concern ourselves exclusively with nationalism as a form of politics, because only that kind of definition is amenable to historical and social analysis.

 

But is a commendable concern for precision sufficient reason to reject at least a reference to ‘identity’ in the definition of the concept, when, on Breuilly’s own admission, we can only speak of ‘nationalism’ at the point where a cultural identity is made the basis for political mobilisation? For Breuilly, nationalism is a species of historicism, premissed on cultural diversity and the quest for ‘authenticity’. Can we extrude all reference to ‘culture’ from the definition of a concept whose specificity resides exactly in the relationship it proposes between culture and politics? And if we include ‘culture’, is it not because culture is supposed, in nationalist ideology, to define a collective identity? Precision and rigour should not be bought at the cost of excluding a concept’s key elements and its differentiating characteristics.¹⁴

 

There is also a theoretical ground for rejecting a concern with cultural identity as a defining characteristic of nationalism. Breuilly feels that its inclusion would lead us back to the unacceptable primordialism of an irrational need to belong and an atavistic appeal to forces erupting in history. At the same time, he admits at the end that nationalism ‘derives much of its power from the half-truths it embodies’. He continues:

 

People do yearn for communal membership, do have a strong sense of us and them, of territories as homelands, of belonging to culturally defined and bounded worlds which give their lives meaning. Ultimately, much of this is beyond rational analysis and, I believe, the explanatory powers of the historian.

(ibid.: 401)

 

This might appear to undermine his case for limiting nationalism to a form of politics. But John Breuilly is being perfectly consistent with his premises: exactly because there are ideas and sentiments the historican cannot explain, we must

 

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stick to those elements that are amenable to explanation. At the same time, such an ‘under-labourer’ view of the scholar’s task must accept its own limitations; and there will always be those who are tempted to take a different view of what can and cannot be the object of rational analysis. In particular, the interpretive method stemming from Weber’s Verstehende Soziologie will continue to be used to analyse the subjective motivations of both individuals and communities, without resorting to a primordialist approach.¹⁵

 

In fact, there appear to be good reasons for including a reference to cultural identity in the definition of nationalism. One of the goals of nationalism is the attainment and maintenance of cultural identity, that is, a sense of a distinctive cultural heritage and ‘personality’ for a given named population. Without such a collective identity, there can be, from a nationalist’s standpoint, no fully fledged and authentic ‘nation’. Of course, this presupposes a more ostensive definition of nationalism than the stipulative one offered by Breuilly; but even he concedes in his initial definition of the concept of nationalism that the nation is credited with ‘an explicit and peculiar character’ in the nationalist doctrine.¹⁶

 

A second reason for including a reference to cultural identity is the need to accommodate diferent kinds of nationalism—religious, racial, linguistic and cultural. Indeed, there have been ‘pure’ cultural nationalists who have either rejected or remained silent about the state and the need to capture state power. Breuilly consistently denies to such ideologies and movements the label ‘nationalist’. But not only does this fly in the face of the cultural, religious or linguistic nationalists’ own self-description and understanding; it makes it very difficult to do justice to the role of influential cultural nationalists like Yeats, Achad Ha’am or Aurobindo, or of movements for cultural renewal and moral regeneration such as the Irish Gaelic revival or the Finnish literary renaissance (Branch 1985; Hutchinson 1987).

 

There is also a more empirical objection to Breuilly’s restrictive definition of nationalism. Several nationalisms have eschewed the road to outright independence, preferring to attain maximum cultural, social and economic autonomy for their homelands and peoples within a wider, federal sovereign state. The Scots and Catalans, for example, have been given considerable autonomy, including their own legal, educational and cultural institutions, but most Scots and Catalans have opted to date to remain within the United Kingdom and Spain. This may, of course, change, but to deny them the label of ‘nationalism’ because their oppositional movements have not been bent on capturing state power is to overlook the centrality of national cultural and social regeneration in their movements, an ideal that is common to so many other ‘nationalisms’.¹⁷

 

Finally, if nationalism is a form of politics, as Breuilly rightly reminds us, it is also a form of culture and society, perhaps even more importantly so. It proposes a form of culture based on ‘authentic’ and unique experience which aims to regenerate societies by uncovering and releasing their inner rhythms and energies. It does so through the rediscovery, reconstruction and appropriation of the communal past to become the basis of a vision of collective destiny. It offers a kind of collective salvation drama derived from religious models and traditions,

 

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but given a new activist social and political form through political action, mobilisation and institutions. Breuilly’s reduction of the concept of nationalism to its political forms, while clarifying its political goals and role, omits the crucial dimensions of national cultural and social regeneration which nationalism aims to realise.

 

Intellectuals and nationalist ideology

 

Similar problems beset his explanatory paradigm. For John Breuilly, the alienation consequent on the split between the modern state and civil society generates nationalism. Indeed, nationalism is an attempted, though specious, political solution to this very real problem of modernity. Breuilly’s emphasis on the pivotal role of the modern rational state provides a welcome corrective to so many sociological accounts that would ‘reduce’ nationalism to economic, social and psychological levels of analysis, with only the tactics of movements left to a residual political domain. The political level needs to be considered in its own right, and its vaunted autonomy restored. This allows due consideration of the policies of elites, the role of collaborators, and in particular the impact of political institutions in shaping nationalist goals and movements, which Breuilly delineates so acutely in his empirical analyses of particular nationalist movements (see also Brubaker 1996: chs 1–2).

 

Breuilly is not, however, oblivious to the role of non-political factors. He concedes the importance amd legitimacy of an enquiry into ‘standard national cultures’ such as Gellner conducts, as well as the impact of ideologies and intelligentsias on some nationalisms. If ‘national identity’ is the object of enquiry, then clearly these cultural and social psychological factors must receive far greater attention. For those interested in nationalism as a political movement, on the other hand, it is the impact of the modern state and its relationship with society that provides the sole crucible of nationalism. But is this proposed division of labour satisfactory? Can we so easily separate the political movement of nationalism from the growth of a sense of national identity? Are they not intimately conjoined, not just on occasion, but in all cases? After all, the fostering of such a sense of national identity is a prime objective of nationalist movements; but can nationalist movements emerge without some sense of national identity among the elites? If nationalism creates ‘nations’, does it not also create ‘national identities’, or does it presuppose some sense of national identity among its adherents? (Breuilly 1993:379–80).¹⁸

 

These questions are related to the role of intellectuals and professional intelligentsias in nationalist movements. As Breuilly notes, in one sense, every political movement must have its intellectuals and professionals to promote and help organise it; in another sense, nationalist movements vary as to the extent of involvement of intellectuals and professionals in their ranks. But there is also a specific sense in which intellectuals as well as professionals, notably educators, are crucial to nationalisms: so often, they propose the category of the nation in the first place and endow it with symbolic significance. It is their imagination

 

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and understanding that gives the nation its contours and much of its emotional content. Through their images and symbols, they portray and re-present to others the significance and distinctiveness of the nation. Without that imagery and re-presentation, the political movement would be merely an anti- (or pro-) state movement; it would lack the directive guidance that the specific ideal of the nation furnishes (see Argyle 1969, 1976; Anderson 1991: ch. 5).

 

This in turn means that ‘ideology’, which Breuilly rightly takes to be essential as a cognitive map in a modern world of abstractions, has a special role in nationalist movements. Not only does it designate such movements, marking them off from other ‘ideological movements’ like conservatism and socialism; it endows them with those special symbols, images and concepts (for example, ‘the people’, the ‘homeland’, authenticity, destiny and autonomy) which give nationalisms their mobilising appeal and direction. Without them, nationalisms would be bereft of that self-reflexive quality which Breuilly, like Giddens, concedes is the source of much of their unique power. Hence the ideology and symbolism of nationalism must be treated as having just as much ‘significance’ as political institutions and political movements. The ability of nationalism to portray and forge a collective cultural identity is integral to its state-capturing capacity, for it seeks state power in virtue of its unique cultural values.

 

Nowhere is the power of symbolism and imagery more evident than in the territorial dimensions of nationalism. For Breuilly, territory is treated largely instrumentally, as the necessary arena and format of state power and hence nationalist aspiration. But the urge to possess land which characterises nationalism, is not confined to its political properties: the land is also the land of ‘our ancestors’, the historic land, and hence desired for its symbolic value as much as for its political empowerment or its economic resources. Like Anderson, Breuilly sees the modern state as the force that shapes the attachment to and identification with a territory, through censuses, maps and plebiscites and all the paraphernalia of centralised bureaucracy and political penetration. But again, while these agencies may define national borders and unify, even homogenise populations within them, they require the symbols, images and concepts of nationalism, the ideology and language, to give life to a bordered territory and attach people to it. The most dramatic case of this is Zionism. But other diaspora nationalisms—Greek, Armenian, Black—have also been nourished by the symbolic power of a historic territory and have only been able to mobilise their peoples by holding out the vision of restoration to ‘their’ ancestral territory. It has required the imagery and symbolism of nationalism to turn a territory into a homeland (Anderson 1991: ch. 10; cf. Breuilly 1993: ch. 10).¹⁹

 

 

Political modernism and ethnic history

 

This brings us back to the underlying premise of the political modernists’ perspective. Their argument is predicated on the explicit assumption that nationalism can only emerge, and nations can only form, in the modern period and through the agencies of modernity, notably the modern sovereign state. For

 

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John Breuilly, it is the alienation consequent on the split between state and society that fuels nationalism, and such a rift can only occur under modern conditions of state sovereignty, centralisation and capitalism. This is an argument ultimately derived from Marx (and before him Hegel, Schiller and other German idealists), for whom the sovereign modern state levelled all intermediate associations and confronted the citizens as individuals in a capitalist economy. Breuilly is not alone in drawing attention to the specifically political dimensions of the ensuing crisis of alienation felt by so many in this situation. Yet the curious fact is that, as Elie Kedourie clearly sees, it is the intellectuals and professionals who bear the brunt of this alienation, for it is they who most acutely feel their exclusion and isolation from the ‘mechanical enginery’ of the sovereign bureaucratic state. Not only in Central Europe, but in the European colonies, it was the educated urban classes who, doubly marginalised by the West and their own traditional societies, were unable to climb the bureaucratic ladder and whose education, talents and merits were spurned by an impervious but intrusive colonial state (see Crowder 1968; Kedourie 1971: Introduction).

 

But even if we accept the intellectuals’ and professionals’ feelings of alienation as a true reflection of the situation, and as evidence of a gulf between an autonomous state and a burgeoning civil society, why should these feelings turn to nationalism? Why should they find in the culturally defined ‘nation’ the apparent answer to their discontents? Is it true that nationalism seeks to abolish the distinction between a private domain—civil society—and a public one—the modern state—and is this why intellectuals and professionals have flocked to its banner?

 

That there have been some forms of fervent nationalism that sought to abolish the distinction between the private and public spheres, is clear enough. But by no means all nationalisms seek to do so. So-called ‘civic’ examples of nationalism are content to define the nation tacitly in cultural terms while infusing it with a largely civic content and vision. At moments of crisis and danger, the nationalist state often invades the private sphere, even in national states where civic ideals are well established, as occurred in Western countries during the two world wars. But there is also an everyday, banal nationalism where the flag remains ‘unwaved’, as Michael Billig puts it, but where the assumptions of nationalism are deeply entrenched. In these cases, nationalism as a political movement may be latent, but as ideology and language it has long done its work: national sentiments are widely diffused and the private domain flourishes within the cradle of the nation (Billig 1995).²⁰

 

Breuilly may, of course, exclude such examples from the orbit of his political concept of nationalism, but the fact that situations of danger produce the same nationalist reactions as we find in cases which he would admit as genuine cases of ‘nationalism’, and that the populations of national states with these civic nationalisms operate on similar nationalist principles and assumptions, makes it difficult to draw a line of exclusion on political grounds. What these cases suggest is that civic nationalisms which accomodate and balance state and society rather than overcoming the one in terms of the other, presuppose a long history of

 

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cultural and social ties which are often based on some presumed common ethnic bonds. Even in kingdoms such as England and France where a powerful state shaped the nation, the modern state and its institutions have been forged on the basis of relatively united cultural groups, if not in remote antiquity, then during the period when their states were becoming gradually entrenched. Of course, the state was itself a factor in this process of unification, through its taxes, its wars, its courts and the like. Nevertheless, it benefited from the relative cultural unity of the core community which buttressed its power and which provided its elites (A.D.Smith 1986a: ch. 6).

 

So, even in the West, where Breuilly’s state-centred modernism is best exemplified, an important qualification is necessary: the state developed pari passu with the nation, because there already existed unifying myths, memories and symbols of community among a core population which furnished the state elites and inhabited the core historic territory of the state. Even if in a more distant past these populations originated from several ethnic strands, as occurred in England and France, circumstances—including political action—had welded them sufficiently together to endow them with a sense of cultural community which in turn formed the basis of state power and state institutions. This is especially evident in the use of a common administrative language from the late medieval period, but it is also evident in the liturgy and institutions of Catholicism and the relative religious unity of the core cultural community until the mid-sixteenth century, by which time an elite national community was well established (Beaune 1985; Greenfeld 1992: ch. 2; Hastings 1997: chs 1–3).

 

Outside the West, no such congruence between state institutions and cultural populations existed, except in Poland and Hungary. Here, ethnicity and language provided an alternative basis for mobilising populations in opposition to the state. Granted that, as Breuilly claims, the modernisation of empires, such as Joseph II’s reforms in the Habsburg empire or the Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman empire, provided a stimulus and target for such ethnic oppositional movements; we cannot derive the sources and content of the ensuing ethno-national mobilisation from these state forms and institutions. For these, the nationalists had to turn back to a vernacular culture and a putative ancestral past, one which could unite and energise the different interest groups and strata of the designated population. Breuilly, like the other modernists, concedes the significance of such reappropriations of the past, but sees them largely in instrumental terms, as serving current elite needs and interests. The question that always returns to haunt this kind of analysis is why these reappropriations have such widespread popular appeal. It is one to which I shall return.

 

Conclusion

 

There is much to commend a modernist political approach in the study of nations and nationalism. For one thing, it highlights the centrality of the mass, citizen nation. Clearly, there are few, if any, parallels for the inclusion of most individuals in a given territory as participant citizens of the state, possessing equal rights

 

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and duties; and the ideology of nationalism, insofar as it mobilises the population and legitimates its political role, underpins this crucial political development.

 

Along with citizenship goes a bordered territory. The nation is a spatially finite category, a nation among nations, each defined in the first place by a set of clearcut and internationally recognised borders. Where in pre-modern times empires and kingdoms were separated from each other by often fluctuating frontiers, in the modern era nations are defined through their incorporation in sovereign states demarcated by recognised and regularly policed borders, which mark the limits of their jurisdictions, and which are symbolised, as well as realised, by guards, controls and national armies.

 

Of equal importance is the political modernists’ emphasis on the primary role of political elites and political institutions. Of course, bureaucrats play a particularly important role in governmental nationalisms and in the maintenance and renewal of nations. Their vested interests in the state are legitimated as custody of the ‘national interest’ over and above sectional pressures, and as disinterestedly pursuing the ideals of the nation in opposition to party factions. But political elites also play a vital role in oppositional nationalisms, such as separatism or irredentism. They supply much of the organisation and tactics of struggle, and are often among the first to feel the alienation consequent on exclusion from office by the ruling power. Hence the centrality of this process of bureaucratic exclusion in the genesis of political nationalism in Asia and Africa (see Hodgkin 1956; Crowder 1968; Kedourie 1971).

 

Finally, political modernists can point with much historical justification to the role of the state as a central element in nationalist ideologies worldwide. So many people have come to regard the attainment of a state as a vital instrument for the protection of the nation and its culture. From the beginning, independent statehood came to be seen as an intrinsic part of every nation’s aspirations, and as the sole bearer of the nation’s cultural values—in large part because of the spectacular success of the Anglo-French model, and its first imitators in Germany, Italy and the United States.

 

But by the same token, the state as a necessary instrument of the nation could only attain some of the goals of nationalist ideologies. It proved unable to resolve questions of cultural identity, collective memory and the homeland, of the ethnic past, authenticity and destiny, or even of economic autarchy and national unity. To reduce the scope of nationalism to a cultural argument for independent statehood does scant justice to the range of nationalist concerns and hence their appeal to so many people across the globe.

 

If the stress on political elites is a strength of the political modernist approach, it is also a limitation. A ‘top-down’ governmental and elite approach needs to be complemented by a popular perspective ‘from below’. If nationalist elites appeal to ‘the people’, strata within the latter can and do reshape the nationalist ideology in their own image. The most articulate sections of the artisans, clerks, workers and peasants carry through their inherited fund of symbols, memories, myths and traditions, a set of attitudes, perceptions and sentiments that reshape the messages of the nationalist elites. To omit the perceptions and role of non-elite

 

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strata is to miss this underlying drive of so many nationalisms and the source of their direction.

Finally, we may note that the modernist emphasis on the role of the territorial state tends to preclude an equally important role for the ethnic origins of nations. This is a large subject to which I shall return. Suffice it to say here that an overt concern with ethnic origins has shaped the ideologies of many non-Western nationalisms; ethnic motifs form an intrinsic element of the historicism of nationalist ideologies, while the model of the ethnic nation has been as potent as the success story of the Anglo-French national state. Here the strength of political modernism is also its weakness. Its exclusive concern with the political modernity of nations and nationalism precludes it from considering the influence of ethnic motifs of origin and the impact of cultural history on the appeal and success of nations and nationalism. As a result, the study of nationalism becomes truncated and shorn of much of its content.

 

5       Political messianism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On one matter, practically all scholars agree. As an ideology and movement, nationalism is modern. It dates from the late eighteenth or very early nineteenth centuries, and it originated in Western and Central Europe, and the United States. It is, therefore, a product of the discontents of modernity. Just as the world religions constituted a much earlier response to the predicament of humanity in agrarian societies, with their natural disasters and social cataclysms, so the nation and nationalism represent the fundamental response to the crisis of identity so many human beings faced with the onslaught of modernity on the traditions of their ancestors. Nationalism is the natural response of human beings whose social world, with its stable groupings, has collapsed; yearning to belong to a durable community, they turn to the transhistorical nation as the only available replacement for the extended family, neighbourhood and religious community, all of which have been eroded by capitalism and westernisation.

 

‘Political religion’

 

This was very much the basis of the argument advanced by the theorists of ‘political religion’ in the 1960s. They saw nationalism in the new states of Africa and Asia as a religion of modernisation, a political version of traditional religion. These modern states, they argued, have a number of requirements; the aggregation of interests, the establishment of strong central authority, the development of economic rationality, the need for flexible institutions for coping with change. But in the new states, the needs of social integration and economic development took on special importance in view of their ethnic heterogeneity and lack of resources. To achieve social integration and development, elites had to mobilise the masses and encourage them to postpone gratification and accept considerable sacrifices. The virtues of patriotism, commitment, hard work, frugality and self-sacrifice had to be inculcated in the newly enfranchised citizens. Nationalism, as a fervent and puritan ideology of mass self-sacrifice, served the purposes of the elites of the new states admirably, for in conditions of national liberation from colonial rule it equated the unitary new nation with the newly independent state, and urged the citizens to labour for the good of the whole nation. In this way, the state, and its one-party or military regime, came to

 

 

97

 

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embody the seamless unity of the nation, which was endowed with the characteristics of a faithful church. It became a pure, sinless and seamless community, to be worshipped by the citizenry in the same way as communities of believers had formerly worshipped the deity. Nationalism, in other words, substituted the nation for the deity, the citizen body for the church and the political kingdom for the kingdom of God, but in every other respect replicated the forms and qualities of traditional religions.¹

 

In this Durkheimian model, nationalism becomes a form of reflexive collective self-worship, a ‘political religion’ not just in the sense in which a religion like Islam is sometimes characterised as political, that is, as a way of life which does not distinguish between politics and religion, but as a political surrogate for religion. Nationalism here is really a modern, secular ideology which serves as a ‘civil religion’, performing the same functions for individuals and groups as did traditional religion, although springing from secular, non-traditional sources. Durkheim himself summed this approach up when, commenting on ideological developments in the French Revolution, he remarked that

 

At that time, under the influence of the general enthusiasm, things purely secular in nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: these were the Fatherland, Liberty, Reason. A religion tended to become established which had its dogmas, symbols, altars and feasts.

 

(Durkheim 1915:214)

 

For Durkheim, of course, this ‘religious’ quality, which derives from the etymology of the term, is universal and enduring; it is to be found in different forms in all societies, even in modern, apparently quite secular industrial societies. Traditional worship of God or gods may have been superseded; but the deeper roots of religion, the need for cults to distinguish the sacred from the profane, the need to express the dependance of human beings on a powerful society, will always remain.²

 

This is not the standpoint of the theorists of ‘political religion’. They are adherents of an ideological version of modernism. For David Apter, Lucian Pye, Leonard Binder and Manfred Halpern, these relapses into ‘political religion’ are characteristic of the painful transition to modernity. In order to forge modern nations, elites in the new states resort to what Apter termed ‘mobilisation systems’, and invent a symbolic mythology and civic religion to persuade the masses to make the necessary sacrifices. Once development has been achieved, and the threshold of modernity crossed, there will be no further need of the political religion of nationalism or of the political mobilisation system built up on its basis (Pye 1962; Apter 1963b; Halpern 1963; Binder 1964; cf. Lerner 1958; Smelser 1962; Eisenstadt 1965).

 

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Marginal youth

 

This is the starting point for Elie Kedourie’s analysis of the spread of nationalism to colonial societies in the long introduction to his second book, an anthology of writings of nationalists entitled Nationalism in Asia and Africa. This is a sequel to his earlier influential Nationalism. In that book, Kedourie had argued that nationalism was a doctrine invented in Europe in the early nineteenth century and that it sprang from the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, notably from Kant’s doctrine that the good will can only be the autonomous will. It was the merit of Fichte and other German Romantics like Schlegel, Muller, Schleiermacher, Arndt and Jahn to marry Kant’s individualist doctrine to Herder’s cultural populism in such a way that autonomy was now predicated of pure linguistic communities, in which, to realise their true freedom, individuals must absorb themselves. To realise its autonomy, the linguistic nation must determine itself and take up its destiny; the individual’s self could only be realised in the struggle of his or her nation for self-determination (Kedourie 1960: chs 4–5).

 

Kedourie went on to sketch a brief social explanation of why this romantic version of nationalism (which he assumed was the only true version of the doctrine) arose in Germany. Aside from Kant’s influence, and the example and legend of the French Revolution with its new style of mass politics, the political and social situation in the German-speaking lands, divided as they were into many principalities of varying size and importance, denied to the emerging class of German intellectuals any influence on the direction of affairs. Excluded and alienated from politics, these intellectuals became restless under the impact of Enlightenment rationalism and sought in romantic fantasies a solution to their discontents. They eagerly latched onto the Fichtean nationalist synthesis, especially after the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon in 1806; but they were only the first of many waves of European nationalism spearheaded by alienated young intellectuals for whom the traditions of their fathers had lost all meaning. Young Italy, Young Poland, Young Hungary and the like, children’s crusades against the old order, attested to a European Zeitgeist of revolutionary messianism that could only end in terroristic nihilism and ethnic hatred, especially in ethnically mixed areas like the Balkans (ibid.: ch. 6).

 

In the Introduction to his second book on nationalism, Kedourie extended his analysis to the colonies of Africa and Asia which had fallen prey to secular European ways and ideologies. Colonies, he argued, had not been established for the export of capital in an age of finance capital, as Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin had claimed; their economic returns were negligible compared to their strategic and psychological benefits. Not only were they territories where immigrants could find economic opportunities, they also served as imperial outposts against European rivals at a time when the landmass of Europe itself was unable to accommodate territorial expansion. These strategic considerations were abetted by the nineteenth-century imperialist desire for ‘glory’ in a period of colonial political annexation which for Disraeli and his generation signified

 

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the original political meanings of the terms ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ (Kedourie 1971:4, 8, 10–14).

Now imperialism had a number of unforeseen consequences. To begin with, colonial administration tended to pulverise traditional society and regiment the colony through its bureaucratic measures. This meant that traditional handicrafts and village production suffered; they were no match for the exports of Lancashire industries or the financial speculations of the City. Hence the economic basis of village life, which accounted for the vast mass of the population, collapsed. In addition, the colonial authorities encouraged literacy and secular education on Western lines. Mass literacy undermined traditional religious authority and customary ways, and, along with Western research into the ethnic traditions and cultures of the colonies, prepared the way for alternative conceptions and new leaderships in the African and Asian colonies. From this clash of cultures and confusion of soul, emerged a new class of ‘marginal men’ who embraced western ideals of independence and self-reliance, yet bore the marks of the strain and discontent of men

 

disaffected toward their traditional society, the nucleus and vanguard of a radical and uncompromising opposition and its battering ram pounding down outmoded and obscurantist institutions.

 

(Kedourie 1971:27)

 

Among the many ideas that spread to African and Asian colonies, the most appealing to the marginal men was nationalism, the doctrine that

 

holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.

 

(ibid.: 28)

 

As a doctrine, nationalism is utterly alien to the political traditions of Asia and Africa, with their great empires and tribal kingdoms respectively; it is a product of the history of Europe, with its abiding tendency to ‘require and enforce uniformity of belief among the members of a body politic’ (ibid.: 31). From Theodosius in 379 AD through the Crusades and the Wars of Religion right up to Rousseau’s ‘civil religion’, the drive for religious and cultural homogeneity in a polity has reappeared regularly in Europe. This tendency has been reinforced, and given its concrete modern expression, by two additional, if more recent, features of European thought and practice: the elevation of cultural, and especially linguistic, group diversity by the German Romantics, and the profound European preoccupation with history and evolutionary development as the basis for personal and collective identity, which became widespread during the period of the Enlightenment and romanticism (ibid.: 34–6).³

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The cult of the ‘dark gods’

 

What impact did these new European ideas have on Asian and African societies? Kedourie takes as his prototype the early expression of Greek nationalism in the person of Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), the Greek enlightener and native of the Greek Orthodox community of Smyrna. Korais had imbibed Western ideas and languages under the auspices of a Dutch clergyman, and stayed several years during the 1770s in Holland; after returning for a brief sojourn in his homeland, he spent the rest of his life in France. Here, under the influence of the growing radicalism of the French Revolution, Korais began to reinterpret the condition of his native Greece in Western terms, lamenting its decline and expressing (in a lecture of 1803) ‘the customary appeal to a glorious past, earnest of a still more glorious future, and warrant for the subversion of present and existing institutions’. In his conclusion, Korais emphasised that modern Greeks are the descendants of the ancient Greeks, and as such must be worthy of them; only by accepting this, would the regeneration of Greece become possible (ibid.: 42–3).

 

For Elie Kedourie, love of the ancient past feeds on hatred of the present. Quoting Yeats’ ‘More substance in our enmities than our love’, Kedourie emphasises the European Enlightenment roots of the non-Western intellectuals’ antagonism towards all existing traditional institutions, notably religious orthodoxies, in the Balkans and in Asia. The same European metamorphosis of beliefs and assumptions invaded the Ottoman Empire, which, from being ‘the work of the House of Osman laboring in the triumphant cause of Islam’, became ‘an achievement of the Turkish, or more generally the Turanian, genius’, both ‘Turk’ and ‘Turanian’ being nineteenth-century European philological and historical inventions. In fact, the name ‘Turkey’ was given to the land of the Turks by the Kemalist regime in the 1920s; there was no name for this idea in the Turkish language. For the foremost Turkish theorist of nationalism, Ziya Gökalp, indeed,

 

The country of the Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan. Their country is a broad and everlasting land—Turan,

 

a term that could cover Sumerians and Hittites, not to mention Attila, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, as ‘manifestations of the protean genius of Turan’. Later, however, the Turks ceased to be ‘Turanians’: for Tekin Alp in the 1930s they had become beautiful, tall specimens of the Aryan race’, in line with the new interest in racial and fascist doctrines (ibid.: 48–52).

In Iran, Pakistan, India and Africa, Kedourie finds the identical processes of Europeanisation of thought and the same transvaluation of values. In the past, the Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad and Isaiah were teachers and prophets whose teachings

 

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lighted men on their way, a rule of life unvarying and stable, which gave meaning and coherence to the world, a living, self-confident, self-contained tradition; they were not symbols and proofs of national greatness.

 

(ibid.: 64–5)

 

Now their role is purely instrumental, to provide an example and harbinger of the ‘national’ genius; thus Arab nationalism has ‘transformed Muhammad from a prophet and lawgiver into a mere harbinger of Arabism’. In order to transform the ‘heap of loose sand’ which is all that is left of a traditional society pulverised by Europe into something ‘solid and powerful’, it is necessary to arouse a sense of national identity, appeal to the ethnic past and ‘restore’ traditional morality as the cement of national solidarity. Indeed, the tendency of nationalism to assimilate traditional religion shows that it is not simply a cognitive doctrine; it is also a ‘method of spirital mobilisation, of eliciting, activating, and canalising dormant political energies’ (ibid.: 70).⁴

 

Good examples of this political activism are provided by Tilak’s instrumental use of the Hindu revival in Marathi festivals such as the worship of the elephant-god Ganesh or the chieftain Shivaji’s birthday, or his political reinterpretation of the stoic spiritual teachings of Krishna in the Bhaghavad-Gita. For Bipin Chandra Pal, too, popular Hinduism, being partly spiritual and partly social, could easily and naturally furnish the basis for a civic religion of India, through the politicisation of what were originally purely religious ideas. Thus the worship of the dark goddess Kali, with her garland of human heads round her neck, dripping blood, before whom initiates of terrorist societies took their vows, could be made to serve nationalist political ends, simply by substituting a sacrifice of 108 white, rather than black, goats at each new moon—that is, 108 whites (ibid.: 70–76; cf. Adenwalla 1961; Kapferer 1988: ch. 3).

 

If this was the effect of the introduction of nationalist activism on Indian and indeed on all non-European societies, how did it come about that this style of politics and this doctrine became the dominant form of politics outside Europe? Kedourie argues that, although there were well known resistance movements to European incursions in the mid-nineteenth century, such as the Indian Mutiny, the novel pattern of European rule began to attract the new educated classes who had come to accept the superiority of European civilisation. Indeed, they fervently desired to remake their own societies in the likeness of Europe. Unfortunately, they soon found that, despite their Western education and their assimilation into Western ways, they were not accepted on an equal footing with their European counterparts. This was especially true of access to European imperial institutions. Here Kedourie cites the example of European anger at and emasculation of the Ilbert Bill of 1883, which proposed to allow Indian-born magistrates the same rights to try British subjects in India as British-born colleagues, and the ensuing Indian resentment. There was also the influential case of Surendranath Banerjea (1848–1926) who was dismissed from the British civil service for a lesser offence, travelled to London for a fair hearing but was refused reinstatement, and launched in consequence a nationalist lecture

 

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campaign, persuaded as he was that ‘the personal wrong done to me was an illustration of the impotency of our people’ (ibid.: 84–5).

Similar slights, frustrations and rejections by the higher echelons of the civil service were experienced by Western-educated Arabs like Edward Atiyah and George Antonius, and they once again revealed the profound gulf between imperial pretensions to impartiality and fairness and imperial practices of racial discrimination. But these illiberal rejections raised a more profound question of identity, of ‘What am I?’, in the shocked and anguished souls of the marginal men. Their reply was a strident assertion of self in a collective mode unknown to their forbears, and, in revulsion against Europe and its bloody internecine wars, an appeal to the ‘dark gods’ of ethnic tradition (ibid.: 86–9, 91–2).

 

A millennial opiate

 

Or was it revulsion? Perhaps, argues Kedourie, the appeal to the dark gods and their rites was really an imitation and adaptation of European ideas, not only the idea that every nation must have a past, preferably heroic and glorious, but also the previously hidden but now manifest European tradition of progress of which the idea that the nation must have a great and splendid future is one variant.

 

Now the idea that history, in the words of the German enlightener Lessing, is ‘a road on which humanity progresses towards perfection’ and that ‘It will certainly come, the era of a new, everlasting gospel which is the New Covenant’, can be traced back, as Lessing himself was aware, to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe. The term ‘everlasting gospel’ figured in the title of a work published in Paris in 1254 by Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, who was in turn inspired by the writings of a Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130–1202). Joachim speculated about the imminent advent of the millennium, basing himself on apocalyptic texts in the Book of Revelations such as:

 

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.

 

(ibid.: 94–5, citing Revelations 20:6)

 

Joachim speculated that the age of law (the Father) had been followed by the age of grace (the Son) and that this would now give way to an age of love (the Holy Spirit), the ‘new heaven and new earth’ of the prophecies of St John the Divine. Despite repeated condemnations by church authorities (as well as by rabbis and ulema), such antinomian, millennial heresies reappeared from time to time, wreaking havoc and destruction, as in the terrifying rising of 1534 among the Anabaptists of Münster, or outside Europe in the Taiping rebellion of 1850–61 in southern China.

 

In all these examples, the political style of millennialism is clear:

 

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The millennial hope is of the inauguration and institution of a totally new order where love reigns and all men are brothers, where all distinctions and divisions, all selfishness and self-regard are abolished. But a society in which the distinction between public and private is annihilated, in which ranks, orders, classes, associations and families are all dissolved into one big family, a society in which all articulations and complexities have disappeared—such a society becomes helpless in the hands of those who prophesy the good tidings of the coming salvation.

 

(ibid.: 97)

 

Hence the revolutionary aims and style of the politics of millennial nationalism:

 

All of them [millennialisms] announce the gospel of love and brotherhood, and they must therefore destroy all social and political institutions; they must, as Tseng Kuo-Fan put it, ‘depose sovereigns and degrade officials’.

 

(ibid.: 102)

 

Since the French Revolution, millennialism has re-emerged in secular garb, as the ideal of progress and the quest for absolute liberty which, as Hegel observed, goes hand-in-hand with terror. The idea of progress is a ‘secularised and respectable version of the medieval millennium’. Its disreputable political style, sans-culottisme, has been placed in the service of a secular politics of the impossible, a frenzied meliorism in which, as Robespierre declared, terror is the emanation of virtue.

 

Nationalism as it appears and spreads in Europe is one of the many forms of this vision of a purified society in which all things are made new…. What gives the doctrine dynamism, what makes it a mainspring of human action is surely this millennial hope that men can somehow put an end to all oppression and injustice.

(ibid.: 103–5)

 

Citing the Revolutionary Catechism (1869) of the anarchist Bakunin, written under the influence of the terrorist Nechaev, to reveal the revolutionary political style of the quest for absolute liberty, Kedourie argues that the cult of the dark gods by educated non-Europeans represents the adoption and adaptation of certain revolutionary and terrorist features of the European tradition. The glorification of Kali, goddess of destruction, is the counterpart of Bakunin’s regrouping of ‘this world of brigands into an invincible and omni-destructive force’ and Robespierre’s conjunction of virtue and terror. This leads Elie Kedourie to conclude that:

 

We may say in short that the mainspring of nationalism in Asia and Africa is the same secular millennialism which had its rise and development in Europe and in which society is subjected to the will of a handful of visionaries

 

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who, to achieve their vision, must destroy all barriers between private and public.

(ibid.: 106)

 

Kedourie goes on to illustrate his thesis of the politics of the impossible, leading to what the poet Rimbaud called ‘the systematic derangement of the senses’, with examples taken from India, Ghana, Kenya, the Congo and southern Africa.

 

Mau Mau, Ethiopianism, the cult of Black messiahs, and the popularity of millenarian varieties of Christianity alike testify to the disturbance and disorientation which contact with Europe brought and which practices and beliefs of this kind promised to assuage and relieve.

 

(ibid.: 127)

 

From this disorientation and the religious fervour which it breeds, the nationalist movement can fashion a formidable weapon, provided it can be channelled and focused onto a few slogans and symbols. Of these symbols, the national leader is often the most potent, as Kenyatta, Nkrumah and Nehru discovered. For the emotional link between leaders and led, which satisfies the leader’s will to power, fosters the ‘pathetic fallacy’, namely, that

 

there is no difference between them and those whom they rule, that their interests, their preoccupations and their aims are exactly identical.

(ibid.: 131)

 

This makes the political tie a ‘private, amorous relation, in which the body politic is united by love’; indeed for Michel Aflaq, the ideologue of the Syrian Ba’ath Party, nationalism is love. But government, Kedourie reminds us, is the exercise of power and the governors must be kept apart from the governed; they must not ‘feel with the people’, for they are not flesh of their flesh. Nationalists, on the other hand, ‘feel with the people’. Their despotisms are driven by a tender mercilessness which aims to bring their countrymen back to their true selves, if necessary through terror and death. Hence the celebration of violence by Fanon and the nationalisation of the proletarian struggle by Sultan Galiev, for whom the class struggle becomes a conflict between the white and the coloured races.⁵

 

In the final analysis, these are all variations on the underlying theme of the virtue of the poor, the guilt of Europe and the innocence of Asia and Africa, salvation through violence and the coming reign of universal love. ‘Theory’ has indeed become the opium of the masses. But Marx was wrong: opium is no mere soporific.

 

As the Old man of the Mountain—whose ‘theory’ was so potent that legend has transmuted it into hashish—could have told him, the drug may also excite its addicts to a frenzy of destruction.

 

(ibid.: 147)

 

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Colonialism and the intellectuals

 

The idea that nationalism is a product of ‘marginal men’ or uprooted intellectuals caught between tradition and westernisation is not an original one. It can be found in an early essay by Trevor-Roper, as well as in the works of Thomas Hodgkin, and it owes much to Hans Kohn’s characterisation of an organic ‘Eastern’ nationalism led by tiny coteries of intellectuals in place of a bourgeoisie. But in Elie Kedourie’s hands, this thesis is charged with a new emotion and a deeper meaning. Kedourie’s makes three claims: first, that the discrepancy between imperial ideals and colonial practices inevitably breeds the discontent of wasted merit among the intellectuals; second, that the ensuing crisis of identity can only be assuaged by a (false because impossible) millennial doctrine of collective political progress; and third, that the violence we so often associate with nationalism is the product of its ‘transvaluation of values’ and its appeal to mass emotion through the politicisation of ethnic religion. His penetrating exploration and rich illustration of these arguments gives Kedourie’s analysis a singular power and originality, and makes it the most compelling statement of ideological modernism (Kohn 1967a: ch. 7; Trevor-Roper 1962; Hodgkin 1956, 1964).

 

Two considerations frame Kedourie’s arguments. The first is that his theoretical claims are limited. Unlike Gellner, Nairn or Hechter, Kedourie rejects the idea that he aims to offer any kind of theory; indeed, he argues that such theoretical understanding is impossible and undesirable. The specificity of history and variety of human responses renders any overall theory pointless and misleading. All we can hope to do is to understand a particular doctrine or movement in its context, as an expression of a particular Zeitgeist, all the historian is concerned with are the ways in which specific ideas and practices emerge and are developed in a particular social and cultural milieu. The milieu in which Kedourie locates the birth of nationalism is, first, an early nineteenth-century Central Europe undergoing revolutionary social and political change; and second, a late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Asia and Africa radically transformed by the impact of European colonialism. Common to both is the solvent of cultural westernisation and social modernisation, which undermines traditional communities and breaks the age-old transmission of political habits and ideas (see S.Kedourie 1998).

 

The second consideration is normative. Kedourie is violently hostile to all expressions of nationalism, as he regards the doctrine as not only intellectually incoherent and erroneous, but also morally pernicious and destructive of all political order. For Kedourie, nationalism is a particularly virulent, because self-destructive, species of the more general Western ideal of progress; its violence stems from its frenzied attempts to realise unattainable ideals in an imperfect world. Worse, nationalists are guilty of the sin of pride. Taking off from the assumptions of their intellectual progenitors, the Cartesian rationalist philosophers from Descartes to Kant, they add a pitiless impiety to their overweening arrogance by seeking moral perfection in an imperfect world. These ruthless but self-deluded

 

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would-be gods inevitably wreak havoc on themselves and their peoples, and destroy all hope of peace and a stable international order (see also Dunn 1978: ch. 3; Viroli 1995).

 

Despite these claims, Kedourie succeeds in offering a general framework for the understanding of nationalism which, at certain points, even manages to evince a degree of sympathy with those who embrace nationalism. That overall framework is the diffusion of ideas under the impact of a discriminatory colonialism. Kedourie sees nationalism as a disease transmitted through travel and reading from its sources in the West; yet he acknowledges that intellectuals may all too easily succumb to the disease because of the unenviable position in which they find themselves. With many an incisive example, Kedourie illustrates their predicament: their fervent embrace of an apparently superior civilisation with its ideals of impersonal merit and impartial justice; their subsequent bitter disappointment on finding themselves excluded both in the metropolis and at home; their tendency to see in their individual rejection the impotency of their people to which racial discrimination in the imperial bureaucracy lends credence; their ensuing self-doubt and identity crisis; and their search for a political solution to their alienation. This tendency to exclude the meritorious Western-educated non-Europeans from the higher echelons of the colonial bureaucracy is well documented, as is the accompanying self-doubt and ambivalence of the intellectuals; indeed, these same intellectuals and professionals can experience similar frustrations in the West itself, for example, in Quebec, where they are in the forefront of Québécois nationalism (Pinard and Hamilton 1984; cf. Wallerstein 1965; Crowder 1968; Gouldner 1979; A.D.Smith 1981a: ch. 6).

 

But is this diffusionist framework helpful in accounting for the rise of nationalism in Africa and Asia? Diffusionism in itself is always theoretically inadequate; it can never account for the reception of ideas that are transmitted from one centre to another. We may accept the Western origins of nationalist ideas, but is that in itself sufficient to explain the emergence, let alone the content, of nationalism in a given colony or state outside Europe? Can we derive the rise of an Arab or Indian nationalist movement from the political self-assertion of a few intellectuals whose discontents have found a political outlet in the idea of an Arab or an Indian nation? Granted that intellectuals are necessary to such movements, at least in their inception, are the latter mere products of their ambivalence and discontent, and is their nationalist thought always merely derivative? (see Chatterjee 1986).

 

The general picture that Kedourie paints is one in which traditional societies are pulverised and regimented by colonial modernity, leaving the intellectuals as the only social group able to respond to the onslaught. On the other hand, Kedourie admits the persistence of traditional elements, when he analyses the ways in which these intellectuals seek to manipulate the atavistic emotions of the masses and to use or revive their traditional practices. In fact, as we know, colonialism’s impact was highly variable. For one thing, it very much depended on the nature and policies of the colonial power. Where the French, for example, tended to assimilate an African or Indo-Chinese elite, leaving the rest of the

 

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population uneducated and second-class citizens, the British colonial authorities preferred a policy of ‘indirect rule’, working with and through traditional but subordinated indigenous authorities. We also have to take into account the variable presence of missionaries and the impact of missionary education in uprooting indigenous beliefs and customs. These are only some of the reasons why many traditional elements—ways of life, customs, beliefs, symbols, myths— persisted in varying degrees in Asia and Africa, even after decades of colonial rule (Crowder 1968; Markovitz 1977; cf. Horowitz 1985).

 

Now, the important point about colonial rule is that it provided, in relation to pre-colonial cultures and social structures, the crucible in which nationalist movements emerged. In other words, the genesis and development of nationalism in, say, Nigeria, Kenya and India must be located, not simply in the diffusion of Western ideas through conspiratorial cells of restless indigenous intellectuals who have returned empty-handed from the West, but in the interests, sentiments and aspirations of a variety of social and cultural groups in colonial India, Kenya and Nigeria. These social and cultural groups are partly formed by the activities of colonial officials, traders and missionaries, but they are also derived from pre-colonial ethnic communities and polities, and from traditional social strata like chieftains and traders, tribal castes and Brahmins, which have taken on a new life in the colonial setting. We cannot understand the specific nature of Indian, Kenyan or Nigerian nationalisms without taking into account the cultures and traditions of these communities and strata. Kedourie indirectly admits this, but sees the process as one-sided, a manipulation of the inert masses by messianic elites; whereas, in fact, the cultural resources and ethnic outlooks of peasants and traders, tribesmen and lower castes, also helped to shape the particular versions of nationalism that emerged in these colonies.⁶

 

The failure to treat seriously the social and cultural conditions in which nationalism emerges in Africa and Asia stems not only from Kedourie’s diffusionism, but also from his psychologism. In fact, his overestimation of the power of ideas is closely linked to his belief in the universal need of human beings to belong to a stable community. It follows that, if such communities are undermined, human beings must immediately look for alternative sources of collective stability. At this point, the nation appears, like some deus ex machina, to fill the gap and assuage the pain of their disorientation. A new idea gives birth to a new type of community at the very moment when the old ideas of religion and the traditional forms of community are undermined.

But all this assumes, first, that human beings must belong to stable communities, and second that the nation is indeed a wholly new kind of community and has no links with traditional communities. Now, it may be true that many human beings prefer to live their lives in stable communities, though, given the variety of such groups in the modern world, their collective identities are likely to be multiple and cross-cutting. But it should not be inferred from this that all human beings always prefer stability to change, and tradition to the ability to join or even form their own communities of choice. This is as much a generalisation open to challenge as the nationalist idea that all human beings

 

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desire to free themselves from oppression, which Kedourie correctly refutes. Once again, the context is all-important. In some circumstances, human beings may wish to rid themselves of stable but oppressive communities, in others to restore a measure of communal stability even at the cost of curtailing their freedom of choice. In following the conservative tradition of Lord Acton and Michael Oakeshott, Kedourie adopted a rather one-dimensional psychologism that bypasses the social and cultural settings which contribute to the variety of human responses to rapid change in the modern world, and prevents him from seeing how in the contemporary world, many more human beings are experimenting with different forms of social network and cultural community (see Melucci 1989).

 

Second, even if ‘nationalism-in-general’ is a modern ideology, it does not follow that nations are themselves wholly novel kinds of community. In fact, as we shall see, this view needs to be seriously qualified. For the moment, it suffices to demonstrate the lack of solid argument or evidence in Kedourie’s formulation of the link between the ‘need to belong’ and the appearance of the nation. Let us concede such a universal need. Why must it fasten on ‘the nation’? Why not on ‘class’, ‘city’, ‘region’, indeed ‘continent’? Why not just ‘the state’? Given these alternatives, we are hardly justified in choosing the nation, simply because of the lucubrations of a few German intellectuals and their followers. In other words, Kedourie’s idealist and psychologist methodology precludes him from explaining why it was, and is, the nation that has won out over all these rivals, and why nationalism has become the dominant ideology and culture of our time.

 

This failure is linked to Elie Kedourie’s unique combination of radical socio-historical modernism with a normative anti-modernism. The nation, along with nationalism, is seen as a new-fangled type of community, a construct of disaffected intellectuals, without any precursor or foundation in pre-modern epochs. It is a brutal imposition of the West on innocent cultures and societies. Forced to eat of this tree of knowledge and driven out of their pre-colonial Eden, Africans and Asians have become prey to the lure of the latterday opiate of unattainable perfectibility, which removes them yet further from the ways of life that had served them so well, and bars their return to the warmth and intimacy of family and tradition.

 

Millennialism and progress

 

Kedourie traces this modern opiate of messianic secular nationalism to a specific source, medieval Christian and European millennial heresies. The argument proceeds in two ways: by analogy and by filiation. Kedourie seeks to trace first the historical route by which these medieval heresies became by the late eighteenth century the basis for secular nationalism. This route is necessarily obscure, since the heretics were suppressed and often left no records. But Kedourie manages to reconstruct some passages along the way. A view of the last stage is afforded by some paragraphs of Lessing’s Education of the Human Race (1780) which, in prophetic bursts, proclaims the coming of ‘this epoch of perfection’ and traces the origin

 

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of this ‘everlasting gospel’ of perfection to ‘certain visionaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’. Of course, as Kedourie readily concedes, this was simply a more lyrical and fervent expression of the enlightened meliorism of the Enlightenment, of which Kedourie quotes an orthodox example from an English theological work of 1773 by William Worthington, which also foresaw a future approximation to ‘the innocence and perfection of the paradisiacal state’ (Kedourie 1971:94–7).

 

Now, we may readily concede some influence on eighteenth-century meliorism from earlier expressions of religious messianism. But it is far more difficult to trace a clear provenance from the medieval apocalyptic millennialism of Joachim of Fiore in the late twelfth century and Gerard of Borgo San Donnino in the thirteenth century to Lessing’s outpourings and Mazzini’s rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the long intervening period, Kedourie cites only the drama of the Anabaptist rising in Münster under Jan Mathys and Jan of Leyden. Can we seriously trace the origins of German, or indeed any nationalism to the apocalyptic visions of the Franciscan Spirituals, the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Anabaptists of Münster from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries? For Kedourie’s filiation thesis to hold, we would need to show that every case of nationalism, at least in Europe, was preceded by a millennial movement with strong chiliastic expectations. It may be possible to show that a few nationalisms were preceded, within a few decades, by a millennial movement—the Taiping Movement in China springs to mind—but there are many more cases where no such chronological succession of millennial and nationalist movements can be discovered. Of course, Kedourie’s claim is more limited; merely to have shown a general trend, a thread of heretical ideas, that re-emerged in the late eighteenth century. Yet so many strands went into the making of eighteenth-century meliorism; why give this particular one such importance?⁷

 

The answer lies in the second, analogical, mode of argument. For Kedourie, nationalism is a species of the revolutionary doctrine of progress, which in turn is a modern analogue of medieval Christian millennialism. Nationalism, therefore, like millennialism, seeks to abolish the distinction between the private and public domains; nationalism, like millennialism, seeks to institute a new morality of absolute purity and brotherhood; nationalism separates its devotees in the movement from the crowd much as millennialism elevates its virtuous elect; and, like millennialism, nationalism renounces earthly pleasures to achieve through struggle its goal of justice on earth. Both are revolutionary rather than reformist doctrines, and both seek a radical break with a corrupt and oppressive past.

Now it is certainly true that nationalism often displays messianic tendencies and seeks the overthrow of particular regimes. But its revolutionary messianism is frequently limited and circumscribed. Nationalists are not seeking to abolish this world and establish the kingdom of God on earth. They are relatively optimistic about this world, but profoundly unhappy with their place in it, or rather their lack of it. Their concerns are relatively local; they aim to rectify a particular anomaly. Admittedly, it is a serious anomaly in their eyes and causes them grievous pain; but it is not one that requires, in Isaiah’s words, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’,

 

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only a return to the earth’s ‘natural state’ of autonomous nations. The typical follower of millennial heresies seeks to rid the earth of all corruption; the typical adherent of nationalism seeks only to rid his country of corrupt, because alien, rulers (see Cohn 1957; Burridge 1969).⁸

 

Nor is it clear that nationalists are intent on destroying all barriers between the private and public domain and instituting a new morality of absolute purity. There have been puritannical nationalisms like the French Jacobin or perhaps the Black ‘Nation of Islam’ movements, which have enjoined on their followers zeal, self-sacrifice, abstention and self-discipline. But even they have not sought to abolish entirely the private domain. Most nationalisms encourage the puritanical virtues of heroic self-reliance, simplicity, fraternity and discipline in an effort to create the ‘new man’ and ‘new woman’, but they also extol family values, prize community and harness religious fervour for their ends. Most nationalisms, once in power, have made use of or re-established status hierarchies and institutions, and have turned their energies to this-worldly projects of ‘nation-building’.⁹

 

Above everything else, nationalisms seek ‘auto-emancipation’: the self-reliant individual choosing his or her destiny, and the autonomous community determining its own fate without external interference. Nationalism embraces this world, but seeks to reform it in accordance with its own vision of regeneration. This is in stark contrast to the ethos of millennialism, which seeks to escape from and abolish a corrupt world and establish an entirely new order of purity, love and justice. Nationalists may desire purity and proclaim love as their goal, but it is a love that is designed to cement the members of the nation, and a purity that seeks to reappropriate its authentic nature. The love and purity that nationalists seek is this-worldly, a social solidarity, or fraternity, which underpins a world of national states, rendering them peaceful and united.¹⁰

 

By concentrating on the most extreme statements and practices of certain nationalists, Kedourie has been able to suggest the close affinity between nationalism and medieval millennialism and tar them both with the brush of antinomianism heterodoxy and chiliastic fanaticism. But most nationalists are none of these things; they are perfectly ordinary bourgeois, lower-middle or working-class men and women seeking an escape from immediate oppression and injustice. Kedourie indeed concedes that this is what animates the great majority of the followers of nationalist movements; but he claims that an elite of fanatical intellectuals uses these quite ordinary grievances of the majority for their own more sinister or wilful ends. This suggests once again the seductive picture of an elite of alienated intellectuals pursuing chimerical dreams, cut off from the everyday needs and aspirations of the vast mass of their compatriots, whom they manipulate through the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of collective empathy. This in turn presupposes a vast gulf between active elites and inert masses unbridged by any social strata or cultural values and institutions, which we saw was rarely the case even after the advent of colonialism. But this simply compounds the errors of the state-centred versions of political modernism explored in the last chapter, which are then magnified by treating the modern followers of nationalism as analogues of the adherents of millennialism. But, as I have argued elsewhere,

 

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the social constituencies of millennialism and nationalism are quite different. Millennialism appealed to the least educated, the poorest, most peripheral and most downtrodden strata, whereas more ambitious, educated, urban classes formed the backbone of most nationalist movements, even when they sought to draw other strata, lower down the social scale, into the movement (A.D.Smith 1979: ch. 2).

 

It is noteworthy that the French Revolution figures only as a legend and an example in Kedourie’s analysis, despite the fact that, already in 1789, let alone 1792, French nationalism was the first fully fledged example of secular nationalism in Europe, and that it directly evoked nationalist responses wherever the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies penetrated. This means that, both ideologically and socially, the ‘progressive’ urban bourgeoisie is excluded from the picture, to be replaced by the authoritarian, organic and millennial nationalism of Central and East European intellectuals, as Hans Kohn had already proposed. But it is not only in France that the educated urban classes, including the bourgeoisie, took up the nationalist cause. We find them in the vanguard of the movement in places as far removed from each other as Greece and Tartary, Japan and India, Mexico and the Gold Coast. Nor is the movement they espouse in the least bit apocalyptic or antinomian, even if it often centres on a messianic leader. On the contrary, it is firmly grounded in the realities of the present situation, even when it seeks to change them for the better. In this respect, most nationalisms conform much more closely to what Kedourie calls the British ‘Whig doctrine of nationality’ of which he approves, than to the ‘Continental’ unitary doctrine of nationalism, which he so heartily detests (Shafer 1938; Kedourie 1960: ch. 7; Kohn 1967a: ch. 7; Gildea 1994: ch. 3).

 

So neither at the sociological nor at the ideological level, can nationalism be compared with, or derived from, millennialism, whether of the medieval or of more recent varieties. They belong to different worlds of thought and action, and are divided not just by ‘modernity’ but, more radically, by the particularism of ethnic history, culture and territory.

 

The religion of history

 

Millennialism seeks to abolish the past, and replace it wholly by the future. Nationalism, in contrast, seeks to fashion a future in the image of the past. Not any past, of course; only an authentic past, the genuine past of a people in its homeland. It is this past that must be rediscovered and resurrected to provide a blueprint of the community’s destiny; for only through a real understanding of the ethnic past can national regeneration succeed.

 

Now, for Elie Kedourie, the past is mainly a cultural resource to be politicised so as to mobilise and manipulate the sentiments of the masses. The cult of the ‘dark gods’ likewise functions as an instrument of mobilisation and activation. In this respect, Kedourie differs from other modernists. They see religion and history as, at best, quarries from which various cultural elements can be appropriated to give legitimacy to, or emotional support for, radical social change.

 

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There is, in this view, something optional about the nationalist attitude to the past. For Kedourie, on the other hand, nationalist mobilisation and manipulation of the masses can only succeed if history and religion are taken seriously and their emotions politicised and harnessed to the national cause. The elites have no option. They are constrained by pre-existing mass cultures and especially religions. To some extent this qualifies Kedourie’s modernism. Even if the nation is modern and perhaps ‘invented’, it does not, cannot, emerge out of nothing. Kedourie may underline the historical novelty of such modern ‘nations’ as Egypt and Greece, yet he has to concede their basis in the older religious traditions of Islam and Orthodoxy. Instead, he argues that these purely religious traditions have been perverted by being politicised and their values ‘transvalued’, while the masses have been seduced by millennial promises couched in the language and liturgies of their religious traditions.¹¹

 

This, then, is Kedourie’s answer to the problem of ‘popular resonance’ which all theories of ‘elite manipulation’ face. How is it that the elites manage to persuade ‘the masses’ to embrace their ideas and heed their call to action? Through propaganda and control over education, elites have frequently manipulated the masses, often quite successfully in the short term. But the long-term success of their endeavours is always in doubt, and so nationalists have often thought it better to build on the traditions and sentiments of the majority, and, as Nairn argued, use those motifs and symbols that have popular resonance. Now, for Kedourie, it is the symbols and rites of traditional religion that resonate with the masses. To mobilise the people, elites must therefore harness the collective emotions roused by traditional religions. That is why they appeal to indigenous beliefs and practices, invoke the dark gods and their rites, and transform purely religious motifs and figures into political and national symbols and heroes— which is all part of the ‘ethnicisation’ and nationalisation of previously universal and transhistorical religions (Nairn 1977: ch. 2; cf. Brass 1991: ch. 2).

 

I find this one of the more interesting and convincing parts of Kedourie’s thesis. In so many non-Western nationalisms, religion plays and has played a critical role in the life of the vast mass of the population, and as a result the nationalist ‘transvaluation’ and politicisation of its values has been profoundly significant for the mobilisation of the people and the character of the subsequent nationalism. Of course, Kedourie sometimes exaggerates the contrast between purely religious and purely national motifs and symbols: for many Zionists and Pan-Arabists, Moses and Muhammad have retained their religious significance, while acquiring new political relevance as embodiments of the ‘national genius’. Nevertheless, insofar as nationalism is a modern and a secular doctrine—and this is Kedourie’s point of departure—its attitude to religious figures like Moses and Muhammad and to religious festivals like Passover is quite different from, and shows scant respect for, the traditional religious understanding (see A.D. Smith 1973c).¹²

 

But is Kedourie right in seeing in nationalism a purely modern and secular doctrine and movement? For all his assertions, even he thinks this is only part of the story; after all, nationalism is also the secular heir of a religious

 

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millennialism. For a number of other theorists, too, religion continues to be directly relevant to nationalism. Mark Juergensmeyer, for example, distinguishes between the revival of religious nationalisms and the secular statist nationalism of the West. The latter has attempted to reconstitute the nation as a secular and liberal creation of the modern state. This is a project that religious nationalists passionately reject. They denounce the rampant materialism, alienation and corruption of Western society and its secular nationalism, and wish to wrest the nation back from the secular modern state to its ‘genuine’ spiritual and religious roots. Secular nationalism has failed the people and corroded the nation; it has encouraged greed, vice and corruption; it must be opposed in the name of a higher, purer conception of the nation. Hence it is not nationalism as such, but rather the Western, materialist and secular conceptions of the nation that have proved so disastrous in their consequences. Juergensmeyer sees a new cold war emerging, replacing the old one between the Western and Soviet ideological blocs, with one between a secular, liberal West and a chain of revivalist, even fundamentalist, religious movements stretching from the Protestant revival in America to the Shi’ite revolution in Iran, and from the Sunni revival in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to the Hindu revival in India and the Buddhist renascence in Sri Lanka (Juergensmeyer 1993; cf. Chatterjee 1986).¹³

 

For Bruce Kapferer, too, there are close links between religion and nationalism. He examines two very different societies and religious settings, Sri Lanka and Australia, showing how in both, nationalism itself takes on the role of a religion whose beliefs and rites address the central ontological problems and supply meaning and purpose to individuals and nations. This religion of the nation may, of course, ally itself with traditional religion and thereby reinforce it. This is what has happened in Sinhalese Sri Lanka: traditional Sinhalese Buddhism has been politicised and its rituals have taken on new and violent meanings in the context of inter-ethnic warfare. The speeches and actions of contemporary Sinhalese leaders are full of allusions and analogies with the Buddhist doctrines and the Buddhist Sinhalese past; ancient wars with Tamils interpret, and are interpreted, in the light of the current Sri Lankan conflict (Kapferer 1988: chs 2–4; Roberts 1993; Subaratnam 1997).

 

In Australia, in contrast, the religion of the nation replaces traditional religions, Christian or other, while taking over much of their rites and symbols. Thus Kapferer analyses the imagery and symbolism of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, built to commemorate the egalitarian ideals and self-sacrifice of the ANZAC soldiers in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915, seeing in it a national shrine which sacralises the secular by using Christian models for the building, the stained glass windows and the rites of ANZAC Day. By emphasising themes of suffering, death, sacrifice and rebirth, a pragmatic, secular Australian nationalism is framed by religious forms, and provides an interesting variant on the ‘secular religion’ of Western nationalisms (Kapferer 1988: chs 5–6).¹⁴

 

In both these cases, as in the religious nationalisms that Juergensmeyer describes, the past plays a vital role, linking the sacred to the secular. It may, of

 

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course, be a recent past, as in the Australian case. But it is always about authenticity, continuity, identity, dignity and destiny, the essential themes and motifs of the nationalist drama of salvation for the community as it moves forward through time. The past is as necessary to the nationalist mythology as is the future, and the ‘golden age’ is as relevant as the nation’s glorious destiny. So nationalism must always connect its vision to the nation’s past, that is, to the collective memories of the people. The past is not some neutral terrain to be explored and dissected; it is the locus of exempla virtutis, of the sacred, of the ancestral homeland, of the golden age, and of communal authenticity and identity. The past embodies the peculiar values and traditions of the community, without which there could be no nation and no national destiny. For nationalism, these are the sacred elements of the national spirit, which must be preserved and revitalised.¹⁵

 

In this sense, then, nationalism becomes the ‘religion of history’, sacralising the authentic past of the community in its ancestral homeland. Elie Kedourie was right to point out the way in which nationalists have used history selectively, viewing it through a special political lens. But this is not to say that the present entirely shapes the past, that immediate preoccupations and current intellectual fashions determine our view of the past. They do, of course, suggest some of the questions we ask of the past. Other questions may be raised by tradition and upbringing. Here the past, reinforced by the panoply of institutions, mores and symbols we have inherited from previous generations, shapes our understanding of the present. The idea that nationalist or other intellectuals can entirely break asunder these bands of the past sits strangely with Kedourie’s overall religious conservatism, and suggests that he has greatly overestimated the political role and the autonomy from society of these Europeanised intellectuals.

 

That the intellectuals are freed from social constraints is, of course, a prerequisite for a psychological and diffusionist theory of ‘political religion’, one whose mainspring is anomie and alienation. This parallels Liah Greenfeld’s emphasis on the alienation and discontent of significant strata, and particularly the ressentiment of segments of the upper classes whose status and career prospects are blocked, as occurred with certain orders of the French aristocracy. But Greenfeld does not remove the alienated from social and political constraints, even if, like Kedourie, she does not fully explain the origin and nature of the ideal of the nation to which the thwarted and alienated turn. This means that she ties ideology much more firmly to status group interests, and thereby shows us the variations and parameters of the ideologies espoused. In contrast, Kedourie wants to convince us of the evil that nationalism represents. He does so by showing how restless, alienated intellectuals operating in a social and political vacuum are driven by unbridled nationalist ideology to violence and terror, and how unattainable but godless virtue in an era of revolutionary change leads ineluctably to mass destruction. Concentrating on what Michael Billig calls ‘hot’ nationalism, Kedourie fails to see how nations and nationalism have become part of the very structure of modern society, and how they have been absorbed and assimilated by the vast majority of the world’s populations for whom the

 

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colourful rhetoric and slogans of some intellectuals are at best decorative extras, ‘icing on the cake’. In other words, nationalist intellectuals are important only to the extent that they articulate and help organise fundamental popular sentiments, perceptions and attitudes which derive as much from pre-existing symbols, memories, myths, values and traditions on which the intellectuals draw for their ideologies of the nation, as from the needs of the modern moment.¹⁶

 

Ideology is undoubtedly a key element in the widespread appeal and success of nationalism. It serves to unify and focus the many grievances and aspirations of different social groups within a particular community or state, and to explain to and activate ‘the people’, wherever circumstances and technologies permit. But these ideologies are not simply the product of intellectuals, nor are most intellectuals, even those who are caught between competing cultures, free-floating and disoriented, nor are most of them able to exercise the kind of influence that Kedourie attributes to them. The same is true of their ideas, which are effective in society to the extent that they mesh with pre-existing popular notions and collective memories. Only then can they mobilise large numbers of people to demonstrate and march, join movements and work for the liberation and unity of their nation. Only then will people put aside their daily cares and overcome their fears for a time to struggle for some improvement in their lot. Only the most extreme conditions breed apocalyptic visions and only minorities are likely to be attracted to their exponents.

 

But nationalism is a majority movement, not in the purely numerical sense (after all, most people do not join political organisations, at least not for longer periods) but because in every continent the nation has become the norm of political organisation and nationalism has become the main legitimating belief system. It is unlikely that this state of affairs would have obtained if it were simply the product of deranged intellectuals operating in a social vacuum created by modernisation, or that the mass of the people who adhered to their traditional religions and cultures could have been seduced by such visionary fantasies to create a world of nations.

 

6       Invention and imagination

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The year 1983 saw the publication of two seminal books for the study of nationalism. The first, entitled The Invention of Tradition, contained a series of essays on a variety of political rituals, and was edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, with an introductory chapter by Hobsbawm. The second, by Benedict Anderson, under the title Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, put forward some general hypotheses about the development of nationalism in various parts of the world, together with some case studies. Both books stemmed from a Marxist tradition, but sought to move beyond its usual concerns with political economy into the realm of culture by reworking and supplementing them with themes drawn from the analysis of narratives and discourse developed by ‘postmodernist’ deconstructionism. In both cases, this led to a reading of the nation and nationalism as a central text of modern times, which needed to be unmasked and deconstructed. For both, nations and nationalism are constructs and cultural artefacts; the task of the analyst is to uncover their forms and contents, in order to reveal the needs and interests of those elites and strata which benefit or use their narratives. Hence, in both books a modernist project is overlaid by ‘postmodernist’ themes and language. The implications of this for the modernist paradigm of nationalism will be explored later.¹

 

Inventing nations

 

Nations as ‘invented traditions’

 

In his introduction to The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm put forward some general propositions about invented traditions, national traditions and the nation. His message was that we can best understand the nature and appeal of nations by analysing national traditions, and that national traditions are one kind of invented traditions. If we could understand the genesis and function of invented traditions, we would be in a position to explain national traditions and therefore nations. What is an ‘invented tradition’? Hobsbawm defines it as follows:

 

 

 

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‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past. A striking example is the deliberate choice of a Gothic style for the nineteenth-century rebuilding of the British parliament, and the equally deliberate decision after World War II to rebuild the parliamentary chamber on exactly the same basic plan as before.

 

(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983:1–2)

 

Hobsbawm regards such references to an historic past as implying a continuity that is largely factitious, and concludes that ‘invented traditions’ are

 

responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.

(ibid.: 2)

 

Invented traditions must be clearly distinguished from both custom and convention or routine. Traditions, whether old or new, are invariant; the past to which they refer imposes fixed patterns. Custom is more flexible; it sanctions change up to a point through the sanctity of precedent and continuity.

 

Custom is what judges do; ‘tradition’ (in this instance invented tradition) is the wig, robe and other formal paraphernalia and ritualised practices surrounding their substantial action.

 

(ibid.: 2–3)

 

As for conventions, though they too become invariant, their functions are purely technical, designed to facilitate readily definable practical operations, and they can be changed when practical needs change, as can the rules of a game. Thus soldiers wearing steel helmets is conventional, whereas the hunting pink and hard hats of fox-hunters is a case of tradition.

Hobsbawm does not deny the importance of old traditions adapting to meet new needs, such as those of the Catholic Church or nineteenth-century universities. Nor does he deny that traditions have been ‘invented’ in past ages. What he claims is that it is the modern age, because it has seen such rapid change, where one would expect to find the ‘invention of tradition’ occurring most frequently, whether such traditions are invented by a person, such as the Boy Scouts rituals by Baden-Powell, or by a group, such as the Nuremberg rally rituals by the Nazi party. The reason is that

 

a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional

 

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carriers and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible, or are otherwise eliminated.

(ibid.: 4–5)

 

Now every society accumulates large stores of ancient materials to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes. Sometimes new traditions can be grafted onto old ones, and sometimes they can be devised by ‘borrowing from the well-supplied warehouses of official ritual, symbolism and moral exhortation’; Hobsbawm gives the example of Swiss nationalism which extended, formalised and ritualised ‘existing customary traditional practices’ like folksong, physical contests and marksmanship, combining religious with patriotic elements (ibid.: 6–7).²

 

Not only did entirely new symbols and devices come into existence with the rise of national states, such as flags and anthems and emblems of the nation, but also

 

historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by semi-fiction (Boadicea, Vercingetorix, Arminius the Cheruscan) or by forgery (Ossian, the Czech medieval manuscripts).

 

(ibid.: 7)

 

Even genuinely ancient traditions, like English Christmas carol folksongs are ‘new’ in the sense of being revived in new settings for new purposes in the nineteenth century. But movements that revive the past and invent traditions ‘can never develop or even preserve a living past’; on the other hand, ‘where the old ways are alive, traditions need neither be revived nor invented’ (ibid.: 7–8).

Modern ‘invented traditions’ belong to three overlapping types. The first type establishes or symbolises social cohesion or membership of groups, real or artificial communities; the second kind establishes or legitimises institutions, status or relations of authority; while a third type aims to socialise, by inculcating beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour. Hobsbawm claims that the first was the dominant type; other functions flowed from identification with a ‘community’ and its institutions (ibid.: 9).

 

There is an important difference between old and invented practices. The former are specific and strongly binding, whereas the latter are unspecific and vague in the content of the values and obligations of group membership they inculcate—such as ‘patriotism’, ‘loyalty’, ‘duty’ and ‘playing the game’. But the practices symbolising these ideals are specific and compulsory, for example, the flag ritual in American schools (ibid.: 10–11). For Hobsbawm, the crucial element is the invention of emotionally and symbolically charged signs of group membership, such as flags and anthems. Even though invented traditions occupy a much smaller part of the social space left by the decline of old traditions and customs, especially in the private domain, these neo-traditional practices remain prominent in the public life of citizens, including mass schooling and the

 

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institutions and practices of state; and most of them ‘are historically novel and largely invented—flags, images, ceremonies and music’ (ibid.: 12).

In conclusion, Hobsbawm claims that the study of ‘invented traditions’ is

 

highly relevant to that comparatively recent historical innovation, the ‘nation’, with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest. All these rest on exercises in social engineering which are often deliberate and always innovative, if only because historical novelty implies innovation. Israeli and Palestinian nationalism or nations must be novel, whatever the historic continuities of Jews or Middle Eastern Muslims, since the very concept of territorial states of the currently standard type in their region was barely thought of a century ago, and hardly became a serious prospect before the end of World War I.

 

(ibid.: 13–14)³

 

We should not be misled by the paradox that nationalists claim their nations are rooted in antiquity and self-evidently natural, when they are in fact quite recent and novel constructs.

 

Whatever the historic or other continuities embedded in the modern concept of ‘France’ and ‘the French’—and which nobody would seek to deny—these very concepts must include a constructed or ‘invented’ component. And just because so much of what subjectively makes up the modern ‘nation’ consists of such constructs and is associated with appropriate and, in general, fairly recent symbols or suitably tailored discourse (such as ‘national history’), the national phenomenon cannot be adequately investigated without careful attention to the ‘invention of tradition’. (ibid.: 14)

 

To give flesh and blood to this programmatic statement, Hobsbawm and the other contributors give us a series of case-studies of the relatively recent invention of the Highland tradition in Scotland, the cultural revival in Wales, the British coronation ceremony, the symbolism of authority in Victorian India, the invention of traditions in colonial Africa, and, in the last chapter by Hobsbawm himself, the efflorescence of mass-produced traditions in late nineteenth-century Europe. In this final chapter, Hobsbawm demonstrates the widespread use of ‘invented traditions’ of all kinds—Boy Scouts rituals, May Day celebrations, sports competitions like the Olympics, alumni organisations, military parades and national days, jubilees, statuomania, the spate of huge public buildings and monuments, mass school manuals and the like. All these were, to a large extent, state-inspired: they were felt to be socially necessary by state elites intent on controlling rapid social change and managing the influx of enfranchised citizens into the political arena (ibid.: 263–8). In France of the Third Republic and Second Empire Germany, the ‘invention of tradition’ reached its climax during the period before the First World War, with a spate of official and local ceremonies, a mania for statuary, monuments and public architecture, and the inculcation of

 

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national values and ideals in the textbooks of the mass education system (ibid.: 270–9). Some of these new traditions proved ephemeral, others like the mass ceremonies proved more durable. In any case, concedes Hobsbawm, only those consciously invented traditions which ‘broadcast on a wavelength to which the public was ready to tune in’ succeeded in the long run (ibid.: 263).⁴

 

Two stages of nationalism

 

In 1990, Hobsbawm amplified his views in his Nations and Nationalism since 1780. This offered a historical analysis of the rise of nations from about 1830 until the postwar period. Like Gellner, Hobsbawm contended that nations are the product of nationalism, conceptually and historically, but went on to assert that nationalism’s main characteristic and goal, as well as its sole claim to be treated seriously, is its drive to build a ‘nation-state’. Nationalism is a political programme; without the goal of creating a nation-state, nationalism is of little interest or consequence.

 

Nations only exist as functions of a particular kind of territorial state or the aspiration to establish one—broadly speaking, the citizen state of the French Revolution—but also in the context of a particular stage of technological and economic development.

 

(Hobsbawm 1990:9–10)

 

For Hobsbawm, nations are made by nationalists. More than a little artefact, invention and social engineering enters into the making of nations. Moreover, national loyalty is only one of many allegiances, which are always shifting with circumstances.

 

Hobsbawm distinguishes two types of nationalism and two kinds of analysis of nations and nationalism. The first type is that of mass, civic and democratic political nationalism, modelled on the kind of citizen nation created by the French Revolution; this type flourished in Europe from about 1830–70, notably in Germany, Italy and Hungary, and it operated a ‘threshold principle’, namely that only nations large enough in territory and population to support a large capitalist market economy were entitled to claim self-determination as sovereign, independent states. It was swiftly followed by a second type of ‘ethno-linguistic’ nationalism, in which smaller groups asserted their right to separate from large empires and create their own states on the basis of ethnic and/or linguistic ties. This type of nationalism prevailed in Eastern Europe from 1870–1914, and resurfaced in the 1970s and 1980s, after the anti-colonial civic political nationalisms in Asia and Africa had spent their force.

 

Associated with these types, but not entirely, are two kinds of analysis. The first focuses on official or governmental ideas and institutions, and is ‘top-down’ and elite-based. The other is concerned with popular beliefs and sentiments, and so becomes a community-based view ‘from below’. While Hobsbawm

 

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considers nations to be ‘constructed essentially from above’, he concedes that they must also be analysed from below, in terms of the hopes, fears, longings and interests of ordinary people. In this context Hobsbawm introduces the concept of ‘proto-national’ bonds to describe either supra-local regional, religious or ethnic communities, or political bonds of select groups linked to pre-modern states. But he regards neither as the ancestor or progenitor of modern nationalism,

 

because they had or have no necessary relation with the unit of territorial political organisation which is a crucial criterion of what we understand as a ‘nation’ today.

 

(ibid.: 47)

 

Hobsbawm regards language as in part a product of state formation and national languages as semi-artificial constructs, only of indirect consequence for modern nationalism. Ethnicity, too, whether in the sense of ‘race’ or culture, is largely irrelevant to modern nationalism, except where visible differences in physique constitute a means to categorise ‘the other’ (ibid.: 66). Only the memory of having belonged to a lasting political community of some kind had the potential for extension and generalisation to the mass of a country’s inhabitants, as in England or France, in Russia or even Serbia with its memories of a medieval kingdom preserved in song and heroic story and ‘in the daily liturgy of the Serbian church which had canonised most of its kings’ (ibid.: 75–6).

 

For Hobsbawm, the crucial phase of nationalism came in the period 1870– 1914, when the mass civic-democratic political type was transformed into an ethnic-linguistic type of nationalism. This new type differed in three ways from the earlier ‘Mazzinian phase of nationalism’.

 

First, it abandoned the ‘threshold principle’ which, as we have seen, was so central to nationalism in the Liberal era. Henceforth any body of people considering themselves a ‘nation’ claimed the right to self-determination which, in the last analysis, meant the right to a separate sovereign independent state for their territory. Second, and in consequence of this multiplication of potential ‘unhistorical’ nations, ethnicity and language became the central, increasingly the decisive or even the only criteria of potential nationhood. Yet there was a third change which affected not so much the nation-state national movements, but national sentiments within the established nation-states: a sharp shift to the political right of nation and flag, for which the term ‘nationalism’ was actually invented in the last decade(s) of the nineteenth century.

 

(ibid.: 102, original emphasis)

 

The efflorescence of ethno-linguistic nationalisms was the product of a number of factors: the conflation of ‘race’, language and nationality during this period; the rise of new classes and the resistance of old classes to modernity; and the unprecedented migrations of peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

 

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centuries—all this in the context of the democratisation of politics and the massive new powers of centralised states (ibid.: 109–10).

For Hobsbawm, the new linguistic nationalism centred on the vernacular was, ‘among other things, a vested interest of the lesser examination-passing classes’, especially when it became a medium of secondary-school instruction; and these classes veered to the political right, seeing themselves as embattled and endangered, especially by the ‘menace’ represented by foreigners like the Jews. This kind of ethnic nationalism, essentially a politics of fear, led to the creation of ethnically homogeneous states and the exclusion and ultimately extermination of minorities (ibid.: 111, 121, 133).

 

The demise of nationalism

 

The late twentieth century has, for Hobsbawm, witnessed a revival of this fissiparous ethno-linguistic type of nationalism. While not denying the dramatic efflorescence and impact of nationalist or ethnic politics, Hobsbawm argues that ‘It is no longer a major vector of historical development’. Rather, these latterday ethno-linguistic nationalisms are the successors, or even the heirs, of the Eastern European small-nationality movements of the late nineteenth century:

 

The characteristic nationalist movements of the late twentieth century are essentially negative, or rather divisive. Hence the insistence on ‘ethnicity’ and linguistic differences, each or both sometimes combined with religion.

 

(ibid.: 164)

 

Though operating in the name of a model of political modernity, the nation-state, they simultaneously reject modern modes of political organisation, national and supranational.

 

Time and again they seem to be reactions of weakness and fear, attempts to erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world, similar in this respect to the resentment of Prague Germans pressed into a corner by Czech immigration rather than to that of the advancing Czechs.

 

(ibid.: 164)

 

Massive economic transformations on a global scale, together with huge population movements, disorientate and frighten many people.

 

Wherever we live in an urbanised society, we encounter strangers: uprooted men and women who remind us of the fragility, or the drying up of our own families’ roots.

 

(ibid.: 167)

 

But, claims Hobsbawm,

 

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The call of ethnicity or language provides no guidance to the future at all. It is merely a protest against the status quo or, more precisely, against the ‘others’ who threaten the ethnically defined group.

 

(ibid.: 168)⁵

 

For nationalism, despite the advantage of its vagueness, excludes all who do not belong to the nation, and is hostile to the real ways of the past or arises on its ruins. It is a reaction to the ‘overwhelmingly non-national and non-nationalist principles of state formation in the greater part of the twentieth-century world’ (ibid.: 173).

The central point is that today, nationalism has lost its state-making and economy-forming functions. In the nineteenth century, nationalism was plainly at the centre of historical development: it carved out states and constituted territorially bounded ‘national economies’. But globalisation and the international division of labour has removed these functions, and the revolutions in mass communications and international migration have undermined the possibility of territorially homogeneous nation-states. Nationalism is simply irrelevant to most contemporary economic and social developments, and the basic political conflicts have little to do with nation-states (ibid.: 175–6).

 

This leads to Hobsbawm’s conclusion. Nationalism ‘is a substitute for lost dreams’, a reaction to the disappointment of larger hopes and aspirations. Despite its evident prominence today, nationalism

 

is historically less important. It is no longer, as it were, a global political programme, as it may be said to have been in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. It is at most a complicating factor, or a catalyst for other developments.

 

(ibid.: 181)

 

Nation-states and nations will be seen as retreating before, resisting, adapting to, being absorbed or dislocated by, the new supranational restructuring of the globe. Nations and nationalism will be present in history, but in subordinate, and often rather minor roles.

 

(ibid.: 182)

 

The progress of late twentieth-century historians in analysing nations and nationalism ‘suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak’.

And recalling Kedourie’s invocation of Hegel’s owl of Minerva, Hobsbawm hopefully concludes:

 

The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling round nations and nationalism.

(ibid.: 183)

 

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Ethnic and civic nationalisms?

 

Of course, Kedourie’s conclusion was anything but hopeful. He was asked whether one should oppose or try to placate nationalism, and his reply was that we could only be wise after the event. Hobsbawm, however, sets out to explain nationalism from Marxist premisses, from the ‘movement of history’. Even if he supplements this basic framework with some ‘postmodernist’ themes and language, his main concern is to locate nationalism firmly within a specific period of high to late capitalism, a period of industrialisation, urbanisation and democratisation; and within a specific social and geographical milieu—Western and Central, later Eastern, Europe of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. This framework enables Hobsbawm to provide a variety of rich historical characterisations and incisive analyses of various kinds of mainly European nationalism, particularly linguistic movements, and their social composition.

 

Throughout Hobsbawm seeks to support his thesis of the ultra-modernity of nations by demonstrating their engineered and constructed nature. Far from being primordial or even relatively long-lived, nations are quite recent constructs and artefacts of elites bent on preserving order in the turbulence of late capitalism. There are some interesting similarities here with Kedourie’s ideological modernism. Both agree on the nineteenth-century origins of nationalism, though Kedourie is more insistent on its German Romantic provenance. Both stress the artificial nature of nationalist ideology, but Hobsbawm goes further, underlining the contingent and constructed nature of nations. Hobsbawm shares Kedourie’s instrumentalist attitude to nationalism and his belief in its uses for elites to tap the emotions of the masses and provide them with social and psychological security; but for Kedourie it is restless intellectuals rather than capitalist power elites who seek to manipulate the masses. Finally, Hobsbawm evinces a contempt and hatred for nationalism no less than Kedourie’s, though he is prepared to concede the historical importance of the earlier form of mass civic and political nationalism in the nineteenth century.

 

On another point, too, there is a curious agreement between two historians whose political views represent the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Both put aside, as it were, the impact of the French Revolution on nations and nationalism; or rather, they see its importance in terms of the European reaction to its excesses, and more particularly to Napoleon’s ambitions, rather than in its own terms, as the first European example of fully fledged nationalism. For Kedourie, this is because only the organic version of nationalism represents the true doctrine; and the organic version was developed by German, not French intellectuals. For Hobsbawm, despite the early date in the title of his second book, nationalism did not come into its own as a state-making project until 1830, when agitation for German and Italian unification really became a political issue and the first national states created by nationalism (Greece, Belgium, possibly Spain) came into being. In other words, France, like England, was an example of a civic nation (and the Revolution was a legend), but it had emerged long before the age of nationalism.

 

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Now, while it is true that both France and England had emerged several centuries earlier, as indeed had Holland, Sweden, Poland, Russia, Switzerland and Spain, and later ‘nation-states’ were often created—usually with a bit of geopolitical luck— by nationalists and other elites, this should not mislead us into omitting, or belittling, the role of the French Revolution as a nationalist (and not simply a bourgeois) revolution. Already in its first phases, the French revolutionaries disseminated and politicised even earlier ideas of la nation, la patrie and le citoyen, and chose a new French flag, the tricolor, to replace the old royal standard. In the crisis of war from 1792 they adopted the levée en masse and a new anthem, the Marseillaise. Likewise, the Estates General became the National Assembly and Convention, new oaths for la patrie were sworn on the Champ de Mars, new hymns were sung, new Roman-style heroes and latterday martyrs were adopted and commemorated, the great journées acquired a new nationalist liturgy, internal customs and dues were done away with throughout France, regional assemblies and their dialects were abolished and la belle langue disseminated, a new calendar was adopted, and all citizens were urged to fight and the for the fatherland. Even the ideas of national mission and destiny, to depose tyrants and liberate the peoples of Europe, were enshrined in the revolutionary French nationalism of the Jacobins (see Kohn 1967b; Herbert 1972; Gildea 1994).⁶

 

The spectacle of this nationalism in Europe’s most populous and civilised nation, and not just Napoleon’s dissemination of its ideas and conquests, helped to galvanise the intellectuals in various parts of Europe into formulating their own nationalisms. The period from 1790 to 1820 saw the formation and dissemination of nationalist ideas throughout Europe and the Americas, but Hobsbawm has little to say of this crucial period, perhaps because it saw little in the way of state-making (except in the Americas), and for Hobsbawm, it is its ability to create and underpin large states and markets that alone justifies the historian’s interest in nationalism. But this, as we saw with Breuilly, is an unduly restrictive criterion; it omits all the other functions and dimensions of nationalism—social, cultural and psychological—that make it so central to the modern world.⁷

 

Nor can we distinguish quite so readily the two kinds of nationalism that Hobsbawm uses to characterise the development of nations in Europe. The distinction between an ethnic-linguistic and a civic-political kind of nationalism is well entrenched in the literature; but it is an analytical and a normative one. It does not describe particular nationalisms, nor can it be used to trace the trajectory of nationalism-in-general. For even the most ‘civic’ and ‘political’ nationalisms often turn out on closer inspection to be also ‘ethnic’ and ‘linguistic’; this is certainly the case with French nationalism during the Revolution, let alone afterwards, with its appeal to ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ and a single French people, and its suppression of regional languages in favour of Parisian French. Conversely, Breuilly has pointed to the territorial and civic elements alongside the ethnic ones in German nationalism in 1848, as revealed in speeches and debates of the Frankfurt Parliament. Sometimes these civic and ethnic elements are aligned, as has occurred in Czechoslovakia, Scotland and Switzerland, at

 

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other times they come into conflict, as they did in the Dreyfus Affair in France, or as they are doing in India and Israel today. It is impossible to trace a clear overall pattern of historical development with these concepts (see Poliakov 1974: ch. 1; Breuilly 1993: ch. 4).⁸

 

Besides, Hobsbawm’s use of the term ‘ethnic’ is unclear. He dismisses a ‘genetic’ usage (though he returns to it) but cannot accept a cultural usage. This is because he tends to conflate it with language, or confuse it with actual descent, and fails to consider the importance of myths, memories, traditions and symbols of sociocultural groupings—including shared memories of historical events, however selective or idealised, and shared myths and symbols of (presumed) ancestry. This is one reason why Hobsbawm must dismiss all the popular memories and beliefs about kinship, ancestry, origins and golden ages as being either fabricated or irrrelevant, or both; and why they must not be allowed to undermine or deflect from his insistence on the ultra-modernity of nations and nationalism, even though he is prepared, in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, to acknowledge the continuing force of ethnic ties and sentiments (see Hobsbawm 1996).⁹

 

‘Proto-national’ bonds

 

In fact, what Hobsbawm has given us in modern terminology is the old Hegelian idea of ‘historyless peoples’, in which only memories of earlier statehood can be extended to the masses and provide the basis for later nationalisms and states. Otherwise, Hobsbawm can accord no role to ‘the masses’ as subjects of history. They are passive, acted upon, and usually manipulated by elites for political ends, but their cultures and social networks, even where they have a measure of autonomy, have no political relevance. Hence their popular ‘proto-national’ bonds (a curious term, in view of their radical disconnection with subsequent nations or nationalisms) are, as it were, stillborn; they cannot have any political extension, they cannot provide the basis for a subsequent nation. Only where, as in Russia, there was a popular myth of the holy land and a holy people identified with the kingdom, could such proto-national ties provide the basis for a subsequent nation (Rosdolsky 1964; Hobsbawm 1990: ch. 2; cf. Cherniavsky 1975).

 

There are a number of objections to this restrictive view. To begin with, many peoples, apart from the Russians (and the Irish and Tyroleans) have entertained vivid ideas of a holy land, and of a chosen kingdom and people. In France, this association was already made in the Frankish kingdom, and disseminated under the Capetians. The Jews retained the most vivid sense of their lost holy land and kingdom of David through all their wanderings, as did the Armenians, Greeks (under Ottoman rule), Amhara, Poles, Czechs and Scots. Why could their ‘proto-national’ bonds not have provided the basis for subsequent nations? Hobsbawm’s explicit assertion that there could have been no connection between medieval German ethno-linguistic and political ties in the Holy Roman Empire and modern German nationalism, or between ancient Jewish political (Davidic, Hasmonean) and cultural bonds, or medieval ones, and modern

 

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Zionism, flies in the face of much evidence. Second, why must the ‘holy land’ be connected to a kingdom or state? The Swiss soon became convinced of their chosen status and the holiness of their mountain and valley confederation; but land and people could form the basis for a subsequent nation without memories of early statehood. The same is true of the Welsh, who were only briefly united in the thirteenth century; and of the Finns whose lands had been part of the Swedish kingdom for centuries. Third, nations have been formed on the basis of ethnic cultures which had little benefit of popular ideas and sentiments about holy lands, let alone kingdoms. Yet their nationalisms emerged and agitated for independence, successfully in the end; this was the case with Slovenes, Slovaks and Estonians, who were conquered and apparently absorbed by more powerful neighbours in me early Middle Ages, yet have become separate national states today (see Armstrong 1982; Im Hof 1991; Brock 1976; Williams 1982; Singleton 1985; Raun 1989).

 

Perhaps more serious is the implication that this passivity of the masses must have its counterpart in the manipulations of the elites, that the emotions of an inert mass are waiting to be aroused and channelled by elites as part of an exercise in social engineering. This is a very rationalist view of human conduct. Apart from assuming that the popular strata carry few indigeneous traditions and beliefs, or such as are only local, this view fails to account for the passion and fervour of mass followings for nationalist movements, and the frequent willingness on the part of the unlettered and poor to make great sacrifices and even court death to defend their countries and drive out tyrants. One has only to recall the many sacrifices made by the poor masses in countries occupied by the Axis powers during the Second World War—Karens and other hill peoples in Burma, Poles, Czechs and Serbs, French, Dutch and Norwegians—in the name of national liberation.¹⁰

 

This view also credits elites with more instrumental rationalism than the record suggests. Of course, there have been many attempts to manipulate the sentiments of the masses, and some have met with success, as in the well known Indian examples of Tilak and Gandhi. But even here the cultural distance between elites and masses was less than this schema suggests; elites were often as much in the grip of nationalist passions, and prepared for idealistic self-sacrifice, as ‘the masses’ from whom many of them had, after all, emerged. Nationalism did not erase class differences or antagonisms, but it certainly could override them in moments of external danger, and temporarily unify the classes to achieve common goals (Nairn 1977: ch. 2; A.D.Smith 1981b).

What all this suggests is that Hobsbawm has overlooked the possibility that his popular ‘proto-national’ bonds are, in fact, the very ethnic ties that he dismissed as a basis for nations. But once that equation is accepted, we can begin to see why ethnicity is such a powerful force in the modern world, and why so many nations are, or seek to be, formed on the basis of dominant ethnies, or at least attempt to achieve that sense of cultural unity and intimacy that ethnicity provides. For the sense of cultural intimacy is what binds the various classes and strata of an ethnie, and can provide, and has so often provided, the basis for forging a

 

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modem nation. By ruling this connection out a priori, Hobsbawm is unable to give a convincing account of the involvement of ‘the masses’ in the nation and nationalism.

 

The nation as construct?

 

It has become fashionable to characterise the nation as a social construction, an artefact of cultural engineers, and the idea of ‘invented traditions’ fits well into this perspective. By regarding the nation as a modern construct of elites organising the newly enfranchised masses into new status systems and communities, Hobsbawm aligns himself to a certain extent with ‘postmodernist’ analyses of political discourses and narratives. This approach raises several questions. What does it mean to say that the nation is a social construct and consists largely of invented traditions? Why do the elites select this particular construct? Why does this type of discourse (of nationalism) resonate with ‘the masses’?

For resonate it must, as Hobsbawm recognises, if the idea of the nation—and of this particular nation—is to succeed and retain its efficacy. Hobsbawm provides no clue as to why nationalism has been so successful. He has precluded an account based on pre-existing ethnic ties (‘proto-national’ bonds). The only other candidate, the nation’s functionality for capitalism, is ideological and partial—it cannot explain small-nation ethnic nationalism. Simply to condemn the latter as historically irrelevant (or worse) hardly furthers the cause of explanation.

 

However, an alternative is provided by one of the contributors to the volume edited by Hobsbawm and Ranger. Prys Morgan, in an essay on the revival of Welsh culture and Welsh nationalism, suggests, inter alia, that the revival of the Eisteddfod from 1789, though a new departure, was connected to the ancient eisteddfoddau which had been held from as far back as 1176 right up to the sixteenth century. Though the official bardic contests had died out by the following century, their traditions remained alive at the popular level into the eighteenth century in the ‘tavern’ or ‘almanack’ contests. It was from these local competitions that the Welsh cultural nationalists in London learnt about the traditions of rhyme and metre, and they deliberately incorporated them into their new festivals of Welsh poetry and music (Morgan 1983).

 

Now, what this and similar examples reveal, is the complex interweaving of relationships between old and new cultural traditions, something that Hobsbawm and Ranger’s concept of ‘invented traditions’ ignores or simplifies. It is certainly true, as Hobsbawm and his associates underline, that modern elites and intellectuals deliberately select and rework old traditions, so that what appears today under the same banner is very different from its ostensible model. At the same time, the selection and reworking takes place within strict limits, and, I would suggest, must do so, if the new ‘invented’ tradition is to be ‘on the wavelength to which the public is ready to tune in’, in Hobsbawm’s phrase. These limits are set by the culture, or cultures, of the public in question—its language, law, music, symbols, memories, myths, traditions and so on. The Welsh Eisteddfoddau and the British coronation ceremony may have been

 

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nineteenth-century revivals and rearrangements; but they incorporated several motifs and traditions from previous epochs and earlier ceremonies, and that is, in part, why they resonated with the public. To call them ‘invented’ traditions does scant justice to the complex ways in which these, and other ceremonies, were reconstructed and reinterpreted. Perhaps part of the trouble lies with the very term ‘invention’ which, among its meanings, often carries connotations of fabrication and/or creation ex nihilo—something that Hobsbawm is at pains to repudiate.¹¹

 

To see nations as composed largely of ‘invented traditions’ designed to organise and channel the energies of the newly politicised masses, places too much weight on artifice and assigns too large a role to the fabricators. The passion that the nation could evoke, especially in time of danger, the sacrifices it could command from ‘the poor and unlettered’ as well as the middle classes, cannot be convincingly explained by the propaganda of politicians and intellectuals, or the ritual and pageantry of mass ceremonies—unless, that is, the public was already attuned to both propaganda and ceremonial. It is hard to believe that most people would willingly lay down their lives for an artefact or be duped by propaganda and ritual over a long period, unless that ritual and propaganda expressed and amplified pre-existing popular sentiments which saw the ethnic nation as the family and locality writ large. The problems faced by many new states in Africa and Asia also suggest that the absence of pre-existing state-wide traditions, myths, symbols and memories greatly hampers the process of national integration, and that inventing national traditions does not, and cannot, by itself enable elites to forge a national community out of ethnically heterogenous populations. Where such attempts are being made, they generally proceed on the basis of memories, myths, symbols and traditions of the dominant ethnie in the new state (such as the Kikuyu in Kenya or the Burmese in Burma), that is, on the basis of the pre-existing culture of the dominant ethnic community which resonates with the majority of the population.

 

In arguing against social constructionism and invention as valid categories of explanation, I do not mean to deny the many instances of attempted ‘construction’ and ‘fabrication’. My point is only that, to be successful, these attempts need to base themselves on relevant pre-existing social and cultural networks. Pakistan, both as name and as national state, was quite clearly ‘invented’, the name by a student in Cambridge, the national state by Jinnah’s party. But the idea of a Pakistani state would have had no collective force or meaning, unless the mass of Muslims in northern India had already acquired a vivid sense of common ethnicity based on their shared religion, one which differentiated them from other Indians. In some form, given the strength and geographical concentration of Muslim sentiments in the subcontinent, it was probable that something like Pakistan would have been formed in an age of widespread political nationalism and communal self-assertion (see Kedourie 1971).¹²

 

Similarly, the Polish national state that came into being in 1918 was neither simply a ‘rebirth’, nor an ‘invention’. The Poland that became an independent state in 1918 was quite different from the polity of the Polish nobles, clergy and

 

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gentry which lost its independence in the Partitions of the late eighteenth century. But neither was it an entirely new creation. It was linked in many ways with the earlier Polish state, not least through the shared codes, rituals, memories, myths, values and symbols which bound Poles together during the long nineteenth century of their unfreedom. To some extent, the Poles met Hobsbawm’s (and Hegel’s) political criterion. Like the Russians, they preserved a sense of themselves as a chosen people with a state of their own in a Catholic land, even though they subsequently lost their kingdom. They had, after all, taken Rousseau’s advice to heart and preserved their language, customs and ethnic heritage. So, what the intellectuals and elites had to do was to narrate Polish memories, symbols and myths in Polish verse and music, thereby evoking and heightening the popular ethno-religious sentiments of millions of Poles, and in this way reconstituting and reinterpreting the Polish cultural heritage to meet modern conditions. The element of ‘invention’, where it exists, is therefore confined to the political form of that reconstitution, and is misleading when it is applied to the sense of cultural identity which is the subject of reinterpretation (see Halecki 1955; Davies 1982; cf. Knoll 1993).

 

Imagining the nation

 

Two fatalities

 

A very different solution to the problem of elite construction and mass response in the formation of nations is provided by Benedict Anderson in his seminal and highly influential Imagined Communities. Though springing from the same Marxist heritage, Anderson’s approach to nationalism seeks to emphasise just those subjective and cultural dimensions that Hobsbawm’s account largely subordinates or treats reductively.

 

Anderson’s initial problem is the inadequacy of Marxist theory in dealing with what Marxists termed ‘the national question’. Remarking on the recent (in 1983) and in Marxist terms, theoretically puzzling, wars between the self-styled communist states of Vietnam, Cambodia and China, Anderson argues persuasively that

 

the ‘end of the era of nationalism’, so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight. Indeed, nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.

 

(Anderson 1991:3)

 

It is to this persisting ‘anomaly’, as Marxists view nationalism, that Anderson wishes to address himself; and for this reason, he prefers to regard nations and nationalism as modern cultural artefacts of a particular kind, which arose at the end of the eighteenth century. But, rather than regard ‘Nationalism-with-a-big-N’ as an ideology, he thinks it would

 

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make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ or ‘religion’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’.

(ibid.: 5)

 

In that spirit, Anderson offers his well known definition of the nation: ‘it is an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’ (ibid.: 6).

 

Anderson goes on to explain that the nation is imagined because its members will never know, meet or even hear of most of their fellow-members, ‘yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (ibid.: 6). He concedes that all communities larger than villages with face-to-face contact are imagined; so what distinguishes the nation is the style in which it is imagined. That is, it is imagined as limited, even if its boundaries are elastic—and therefore as one of a comity of nations. It is imagined as sovereign because, in an age of enlightenment and revolution, nations want freedom and this means possessing a sovereign state. It is imagined as a community, because ‘the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (ibid.: 7).

 

This brings Anderson to his theoretical point of departure. What he wants to explain is the problem of mass self-sacrifice for the nation, the fact that

 

Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to the for such limited imaginings.

 

(ibid.: 7)

 

That is why, says Anderson, we must begin our explanation with the two great fatalities of the human condition: death and Babel. Death brings the threat of oblivion. In a secular age we increasingly look to posterity to keep our memory alive; and the collective memory and solidarity of the nation helps us to overcome the threat of oblivion. Nations are characterised by symbols of commemoration, notably the Tombs of Unknown Soldiers. Without name or known remains, these tombs are filled with ‘ghostly national imaginings’. What this suggests is that nationalism, like religion, takes death and suffering seriously—in a way that progressive and evolutionary styles of thought like Marxism and liberalism do not. It does so by ‘transforming fatality into continuity’, by linking the dead and the yet unborn. The nation is particularly suited to this ‘secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning’ (ibid.: 11), since nations

 

always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.

 

(ibid.: 11–12)

 

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That is why we can really only understand nationalism by aligning it ‘with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which— it came into being’ (ibid.: 12).

 

There is another fatality without which nations and nationalism cannot be understood: Babel, or the diversity of languages. This general condition of ‘irremediable linguistic diversity’ is not to be confused with some nationalist ideologies’ insistence on the primordial fatality of particular languages. ‘Particular languages can the or be wiped out, but there was and is no possibility of man’s general linguistic unification’. Yet, like mortality, this linguistic diversity had little political importance ‘until capitalism and print created monoglot reading publics’. Only then did the nation, as an imagined political community, come to dominate human thought and social organisation (ibid.: 43).

 

Historical preconditions

 

How did this come about? If mortality and linguistic pluralism constitute the great underlying fatalities of a diverse humanity in search of posterity, ‘three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity’, had to undergo radical transformations before nations and nationalism could have any plausibility. In fact, all three ‘lost their axiomatic grip on men’s minds’ in the early modern epoch, thereby providing the necessary conditions for the rise of nations and nationalism. They were: sacred script communities, sacred monarchical high centres, and cosmological time (ibid.: 36).

 

The great religious communities of Islam, Christendom and the Middle Kingdom of China saw themselves as overarching and ‘cosmically central, through the medium of a sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power’ (ibid.: 13). The ideograms of their sacred languages were treated as emanations of reality, not arbitrary signs; Church Latin, Qur’anic Arabic and Examination Chinese were truth-languages bent on assimilating everyone, and their expert adepts, who mediated between them and the vernacular, also mediated between heaven and earth. For all that, the power and ‘unselfconscious coherence’ of these ‘great religiously imagined communities’ waned in the late Middle Ages, largely through European explorations of the non-European world and the gradual demotion of the sacred language itself in the sixteenth century (ibid.: 16–19).

 

The second kind of universal cultural conception was monarchy and the dynastic realm, which organised everything around a high centre. These realms expanded both through warfare and sexual politics, which linked them together in a complex political web. But from the seventeenth century, at least in Europe, the ‘automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy’ gradually declined, notably after the French Revolution. For, though by 1914 most states remained dynastic, they had replaced the earlier principle of dynastic legitimacy by a national and ultimately popular principle (ibid.: 19–22).

 

The final and perhaps most fundamental cultural conception to undergo change was the pre-modern idea of time. In pre-modern ages, men and women

 

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had ‘no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present’ (ibid.: 23). Earlier conceptions viewed time as ‘a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’, something like Walter Benjamin’s ‘Messianic time’:

 

What has come to take the place of the medieval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time’, in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.

(ibid.: 24)

 

Anderson goes on to illuminate this novel concept of transverse time, with the importance it accords to the word ‘meanwhile’, through a textual analysis of modern novels from the Philippines, Mexico and Indonesia, all of which portray the solidity of a finite sociological community moving through calendrical time. In the pages of these novels, we are invited to identify with the actions and feelings of their unknown heroes and heroines, which are embedded in realistic yet generalised social landscapes and historical periods, and which are presented in a series of temporally parallel tableaux. The community which the novel represents is an imagined one; yet it is fixed and durable, not only because it comprises a linguistic community which is that of its readers, but also because we are all too familiar with its historical and social landscape of prisons, schools, shops, villages and monasteries. In one such novel, a dinner party is being discussed by hundreds of unnamed people who do not know each other in different quarters of Manila in a particular month, conjuring up the idea of the imagined community of Filipino readers (ibid.: 26–7). In another, we see the hero sitting on a long rattam lounge reading a newspaper in deserted Semarang and being moved by a story about the death of a destitute vagrant on the roadside; and we are made to share his emotions, and his anger at the social inequality that caused this poverty. Anderson comments that the phrase ‘our young man’ used of the unnamed hero, locates the action and people in a specific imagined community, of Indonesians; but also that ‘the imagined community is confirmed by the doubleness of our reading about our young man reading’ (ibid.: 31–2).

 

This selective fictiveness is just what we experience every day when we read the newspapers, which are nothing more than books on a colossal scale, what Anderson terms ‘one-day best-sellers’. For they link together unrelated events worldwide through our imaginations in two ways: by subsuming them under a single calendrical date and by ensuring that they are simultaneously read at specific moments of each day by masses of people who are part of the same print-language community. More than anything else, the newspaper and its market reassures us that ‘the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life’; and in the longer term it thereby helps to create ‘that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations’ (ibid.: 36).

 

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Print-communities

 

It was Gutenberg’s invention that made possible the idea of a secular, imagined linguistic community, but it was commodity capitalism that made a particular kind of such community, the nation, likely. The masses were, and are, largely monoglot. So the need to expand markets in the mass commodity of the printed book, once the elite Latin market was saturated, gave capitalism a wholly unforeseen and revolutionary vernacularising thrust. This was aided by three factors. First, the sacred tongue, Latin, itself became, in the hands of the antiquarian classical humanists, increasingly Ciceronian, arcane and remote from everyday life and the masses. Second and far more important, Protestantism ably exploited the vernacular market in order to reach the masses in its war against the Papacy and the monarchy; if print-capitalism aided the spread of Protestant ideas, the latter increasingly required familiarity with the Bible on the part of every believer, and hence put a premium on literacy and understanding in the local vernacular. And third, certain dialects, usually those in the political centre, were haphazardly selected by courts and bureaucrats as official vehicles of administration and political centralisation even before the sixteenth century, and were thereby gradually elevated to the status of fixed vernacular languages by means of mass print circulation, challenging the dominance of Latin and its sacred script community (ibid.: 39–42).

 

Yet, claims Anderson, none of these factors alone is a necessary condition for the rise of nations; rather,

 

What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-forfuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.

 

(ibid.: 42–3)

 

Anderson is at pains to underline the element of fatality—of both death and linguistic diversity—but also the interaction between these fatalities and the new mode of production and technology (ibid.: 43). Capitalism played a crucial role in ‘assembling’ print-languages, within definite grammatical and syntactical limits, from the immense variety of related local vernaculars or idiolects. Once in being, these print-languages encouraged the growth of national consciousness in a number of ways: by creating fields of communication below Latin and above the local spoken vernaculars; by fixing the language in a standard form and thereby inducing a sense of national antiquity; and finally by creating new languages-of-power in a new cultural hierarchy of dialects and languages. So the stage was set for the global diffusion of the idea of the nation.¹³

 

In subsequent chapters, Anderson fleshes out this basic structure of explanation by singling out the essential elements of each main cultural and geo-historical type of nationalism. He stresses the way in which the idea of the nation could be ‘pirated’ by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands (ibid.: 67).

 

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Thus in Latin America and North America, which he claims were the earliest cases of nationalism, creole printmen were important in delineating the ideas of the nation and of republicanism. But equally vital in Latin America were the ‘administrative pilgrimages’ made by provincial officials of the Spanish empire, whose circuits as officials created a sense of the political separateness of each province as well as a community of like-minded officials (ibid.: ch. 4).

 

In Europe, on the other hand, history and language became crucial. In the wake of the great discoveries, it was the mass-mobilising nationalisms of vernacular intelligentsias intent on providing national histories and modernising print-languages through grammars, dictionaries and the like, that kindled the fires of national consciousness and furnished new models of the nation for pirating across the continent, and outside (ibid.: ch. 5). And again, the threat of such popular vernacular mobilisations created an imperial response in the form of ‘official nationalisms’ on the part of dynastic rulers and their bureaucracies, especially in Eastern Europe and Asia (ibid.: ch. 6). Finally, the last wave of ‘colonial nationalisms’ in Asia and Africa responds to the earlier creole and vernacular forms of nationalism in Europe and the Americas, as well as the official nationalisms, taking something from each, under the impact of a global imperialism (ibid.: ch. 7). In each case, the particular agencies and characters of a group of nationalisms differed considerably from those of other groups, but at the same time they bore the marks of their common origin in the conditions that favoured the rise of mass reading-publics joined together by printing and commodity capitalism. Hence, any general theory requires supplementation by a more detailed historical and sociological analysis of circumstances in particular culture areas and periods.

 

An imagined community?

 

This is a novel and path-breaking account of nationalism. For all his Marxist provenance, Anderson’s great achievement is to provide a postmodernist reading of the nation within a modernist framework. What has attracted most attention is his striking use of the concepts of an imagined political community and print-capitalism, whereas his ideas about the decline of large-scale sacred communities and the emergence of linear time, which lie at the heart of his modernism, have received less recognition. But, as I shall argue, it is a mistake to divorce these concepts from the larger modernist framework, in order to produce a postmodernist reading of Anderson’s position. At the same time, the implications of his emphasis on the bond of imagination take us beyond the confines of modernism and look forward to its dissolution.

 

It could be said that the idea of an imagined political community is the most problematic aspect of Anderson’s account. That nations, like other large communities, are imagined is, as Anderson notes, a fairly common notion. What makes it novel is its link with representation. That which is imagined can, and has to be, re-presented, if it is not to remain in the purely private realm of the individual’s mental processes. For Anderson, ‘imagination’ implies ‘creation’

 

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rather than ‘fabrication’; in this vein he speaks of the ‘inventions of the imagination’, to include both national communities and their modes of representation in plays, novels, scores and newspapers.

 

There are several problems here. The first is semantic. Terms like ‘invention’ and ‘imagination’ can mean different things and are commonly used in just those senses from which Anderson wishes to distance himself: it is so easy to slide from ‘imagined’ in the sense of ‘created’ to ‘imaginary’ in the sense of ‘illusory’ or ‘fabricated’, a tendency encouraged by his insistence on regarding the nation as a cultural artefact portrayed/narrated by other cultural artefacts (novels, etc.). The result is to suggest that, once deconstructed, the nation must appear to fragment and dissolve into its individual parts, and that the nation is no more than the sum of its cultural representations. As such, the nation possesses no reality independent of its images and representations. But, such a perspective undermines the sociological reality of the nation, the bonds of allegiance and belonging which so many people feel, and obscures both the institutional political and territorial constitution of nations, and the powerful and popular cultural resources and traditions that underpin so many nations and endow them with a sense of tangible reality.¹⁴

 

Second, there is the problem of intellectualism in Andersen’s account. Anderson admits that changed consciousness and social change alone cannot account for collective attachments. He recognises the specific ‘love’ that inheres in the nation (ibid.: 141–3). At the same time his emphasis upon a form of individual cognition—imagination—as the key to the rise and spread of nationalism, deflects attention away from collective attachment and sentiment. How can emphasis upon imagination and the imagined community enable us to grasp the power of the nation and nationalism? ‘Imagination’ certainly helps us to understand how easily the concept of the nation can be spread and transplanted; but why should it be spread, and why should it (the nation) be transplanted? What was it about the nation, and what was it about so many people’s circumstances, that made them feel bound into ‘nations’ and assert their ‘national’ rights? For the nation, as we shall see, is not only known and imagined: it is also deeply felt and acted out.¹⁵

A third problem is that of voluntaristic individualism. Anderson admits that

 

Seen as both an historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed.

(ibid.: 146)

 

But he claims:

 

For it shows that from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and that one could be ‘invited into’ the imagined community.

(ibid.: 145)

 

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The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations.

(ibid.: 149)¹⁶

 

Now, it is quite true that, compared to racism, nationalism has a much more open, historical character. But, as these quotations confirm, the thrust of Anderson’s definition of the nation is individualistic and voluntarist, not only because he thinks nations are largely imagined civic communities, but because he singles out language—something that individuals can, acquire—as the main criterion of the nation. In his definition, language is not mentioned, only implied; yet the individualistic and voluntarist character of his definition of the nation has no room for other criteria like ethnicity, religion or colour. This means that, provided it is political, finite and sovereign, any imagined community—be it a city-state, a kingdom or even a colonial empire with a single lingua franca—can be designated by its members as a nation. For a definition of the nation, this is rather too large a trawl of political communities for comfort.¹⁷

 

What, I think, underlies these difficulties is an excessive emphasis on the idea of the nation as a narrative of the imagination, a text to be read and grasped and deconstructed through literary categories and devices. The result is that causal explanations of the character and spread of a specific type of community and movement tend to be overshadowed or relegated. There is much to be gained from cultural analysis, in conveying the nature and feel of particular sociological communities through their literary portrayals. But to describe the nation almost exclusively in these terms is to miss other important elements which define the concept and mark it off from other types of imagined community. National communities do purvey great historical and linguistic narratives, which are vital to their survival and renewal. But they contain much else besides—symbols, myths, values and memories, attachments, customs and traditions, laws, institutions, routines and habits—all of which make up the complex community of the nation.

 

Print-capitalism and re-presentation

 

This view of the nation as primarily a text and discourse inevitably suggests a leading causal role for print technology and print-capitalism, one which leaves little room for other modes of cultural representation and omits other vital factors in the rise of nations and the spread of nationalism.

 

Now the rise of reading publics through the dissemination of print vernaculars undoubtedly had a special importance in various parts of Europe in the nineteenth century, notably in bringing to the fore the various intelligentsias who rediscovered and reconstructed the past or pasts of the nation-to-be. But it would be a mistake to overgeneralise the role of the printed word. Anderson himself is well aware of its secondary role in Latin America, and we can point to many cases in Africa and Asia where literacy, and hence the power of the printed word, was confined to a very small stratum of the designated population. Even in Europe, literacy

 

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was often confined to small coteries of intellectuals and upper classes; many more Italians joined and fought in the Risorgimento wars than could read and write (let alone in [Tuscan] Italian). The portrayals of the nation that stirred people into action were oral, audial and visual rather than literary, a matter of symbols, songs, images, reports and rituals. It was the nationalists who, on coming to power, set about educating their populations and turning them into citizens of the nation. Anderson’s account captures some of the rhythms of the genesis of nations in Europe; but language and literacy never assumed so central a role outside Europe, being often replaced in public consciousness by religion, about which Anderson has surprisingly little to say.¹⁸

 

Outside Europe, in fact, the community of the nation was imagined and portrayed by a variety of media which, with the rise of cheap technologies, percolated to the majority of the designated populations. There were, of course, the traditional media of song, dance, costume, ritual object, artwork; even in Europe Herder had stressed their importance in establishing the cultural authenticity and popular depth of the nation. Unlike print, which for long was confined to elites and some middle strata, these were genuinely popular media, and the works they purveyed were shared by large numbers of people as part of their daily lives. To which we might add: landscapes, monuments, buildings, tomb-styles, the more durable elements of collective cultures, which provided their historical environment. More recently, as Anderson recognises, print has been supplemented, and then overtaken, by radio, cassette, film and television, which can reach vast audiences unknown to the purveyors of pamphlets and novels (ibid.: 135).¹⁹

 

In other words, while discursive networks provide a key to the role of elites in portraying the nation and disseminating nationalism, other cultural media from music and art to radio and television have penetrated and mobilised the majority of the people, provided always that they ‘spoke’ to them in a ‘language’ and culture that they understood, and conveyed messages of myth and symbol, memory and tradition, that resonated with them. By widening the role of cultural media far beyond the relatively limited purview of print and the press, we can also overcome the limitations of an explanation of nations and nationalism in terms of ‘print-communities’. For, quite obviously, as Anderson himself recognises, a global map of ‘print-communities’ does not correspond with one of emergent nations. Too many other factors intervene for so neat a congruence. That is why Anderson supplements an explanation of the rise of nations in Latin America through the work of creole printmen with an analysis of the provincial administrative ‘pilgrimages’ of creole functionaries. That is why, too, in considering the emergence of such unlikely national states as Indonesia out of its mass of territorial and ethnic groupings, Anderson underscores the importance of colonial state education systems producing literate and bilingual intelligentsias (ibid.: 116, 121–30). Indeed, in the second edition of his book, Anderson points to the crucial role of the colonial state, and its census-takers, ethnographers and cartographers, in defining the nations of Southeast Asia from the end of the nineteenth century (ibid.: ch. 10).

 

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Yet at the end, Anderson reverts to his original thesis: though language is inclusive, ‘Print-language is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se’ (ibid.: 134). If that is so, then we would expect nations to correspond to the limits of print-languages. But, since this is clearly not the case, we cannot accord a pivotal role to print-language and print-capitalism. It becomes just one among many contributory causes, especially in Europe.

 

Mass self-sacrifice

 

I said earlier that the concepts of imagined community and print-capitalism took their meaning from Anderson’s modernist historical framework. They can only emerge at specific historical junctures, and only within a determinate sequence which starts with mortality and linguistic diversity, moves on to the long-term decline of sacred monarchies and sacred script-communities and ends in the revolution of linear, ‘empty, homogeneous time’. Of course, these processes are long-drawn-out and overlap, but the point for Anderson is that you cannot have one without the other if you want a convincing account of nations and nationalism, and especially of the attachments that make it possible for so many people to die willingly for the nation. But it is here that we find ourselves in greatest difficulty. We already saw how problematic it becomes to account for mass self-sacrifice through an approach that emphasises imagination and cognition. How do we get from knowing and imagining the nation to feeling it and loving it? Is it because we think the nation is interestless? Anderson rightly points to the way in which the nation is likened to a family, and the family is treated in most of human history as a domain of disinterested love, purity and solidarity. Yet it is not because it is pure and disinterested that the family engenders such powerful attachments. On the contrary: as history too often proves, families have powerful interests, and their members equally fervent attachments bound up with those interests. Similarly with the nation; it is because we know that our interests, indeed our very identities and survival, are bound up with the nation, that we feel such devotion to the nation and are prepared to make such sacrifices for it when it is in danger. Hence the peculiar passion and violence which it elicits from its members, the feeling too that the nation insures us against mortality, or rather against the oblivion that our death so clearly threatens. Nationalism, by its ability to unite the dead, the living and the yet unborn in a single community of fate, and through its vision of the judgment of posterity, provides humanity with a secular version of immortality through absorption into the nation (see Mosse 1994).²⁰

 

The concept of me nation, then, is not only an abstraction and invention, as is so often claimed. It is also felt, and felt passionately, as something very real, a concrete community, in which we may find some assurance of our own identity and even, through our descendants, of our immortality. But transcending death is what the world religions sought in their different ways; so, we may ask, does this not make of nationalism some latterday religion in secular guise? And does not the current revival of religion, and the spate of religious nationalisms today,

 

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cast doubt on the validity and utility of the modernist sequence which frames Andersen’s post-modernist insights? (see James 1996).

Just as kings and their ministers used nationalism for their own ends well into this century, so priests and prophets have continued to make use of ethnic ties and nationalism, and the passions to which they give rise, to support their own brands of religious politics. It is simply not the case that all the great sacred-script communities declined and thereby made space for the nation. Islam, in states like Pakistan, Malaysia and Iraq, has experienced a massive revival while simultaneously intensifying their national identities and profiles. Something of the same kind has been happening to Jews in Israel, where a vigorous orthodox Judaism is being strengthened while itself reinforcing Israeli nationalism. In other cases, such as Greece, orthodox religion, though subordinated to the state, nevertheless continues to define and underpin the sense of national identity. As we saw, Juergensmeyer’s review of religious nationalisms reveals the explosive resilience of this alliance between religion and nationalism, with their combined demands for mass self-sacrifice and their ability to guarantee to their adherents a kind of double insurance for survival through both posterity and the afterlife (Marty and Appleby 1991; Juergensmeyer 1993).

 

This suggests that the modernist framework employed by Anderson is in need of considerable revision, especially its tendency to over-generalise from the Western experience; and much the same caution applies to Anderson’s claim for a revolutionary change in our conceptions of time. After all, linear time, measured by clock and calendar, was well known in antiquity (and not only among the ancient Jews), not to mention the medieval period. We can also find examples of the use of cyclical and cosmological time in modern nationalisms like that of Burma under U Nu. But the real question is: is there any causal connection between the admittedly linear-progressive narratives of nationalism and the growing adoption of linear, chronological time in the West? How could such a link be established? And how important was such a link? (Sarkisyanz 1964; Johnson 1995).

 

Or was the rise of nationalism rather a result of that democratisation of purposive religion, whereby all adult males were required to hear, if not to read, the Bible with its sacred Old Testament histories and its message of social freedom and justice set in linear time? For Liah Greenfeld, indeed, the return to the Old Testament with its myth of ethnic election marked a crucial phase in the growth of the first nationalism, in early modern England, and therefore of all nationalism— an argument supported by the many peoples, especially in the Protestant tradition, who developed myths of ethnic election and returned to the linear Old Testament ethnic histories. For Michael Walzer, too, the return to biblical Exodus history has shaped the civic-political aspirations of national liberation movements. The implication is that the particular messages and contents of religious and ethnic traditions undermine the validity and detract from the utility of an overall modernist framework. More specifically, modern capitalism encounters in religion another tenacious foe. Only by paying closer attention to these religious myths, symbols and traditions can we hope to understand which nations emerged, and

 

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where; and why it was the nation that triumphed as the norm of social and political organisation (Greenfeld 1992, ch. 1; cf. Walzer 1985).²¹

 

None of this is to gainsay the achievement of Andersen’s twofold synthesis of cultural analysis with a basically Marxist socioeconomic framework, and his postmodernist reading of the concept of the nation with a modernist account of its genesis and diffusion. Yet for all its originality, Anderson’s synthesis is only partly successful. The postmodernist reading, and its accompanying cultural analysis, can always be detached from its modernist moorings. In the hands of his followers, this is what has tended to happen. Though print-capitalism has been accorded a respectful hearing, it is the role of imagination, and the idea of the nation as a discourse to be interrogated and deconstructed, that have proved most influential. These are the fruitful concepts that have been taken up and developed by the many theorists in the postmodernist traditions who have drawn their inspiration from a partial reading of Anderson’s work.

 

In a longer perspective, Anderson’s role in the modernist theory of nationalism has proved to be double-edged. On the one hand, it has strengthened the modernist paradigm by redirecting the focus of its materialist versions onto the plane of psychology and culture. On the other hand, it has provided, doubtless unintentionally, the means to negate its basic premisses by undermining the ontological status of me nation as a real community grounded in the historical and social life of cultural collectivities. In this way it has bypassed the need to give an overall structural explanation of historical groups of nations, as opposed to specific cultural explanations in different areas and periods. For the many postmodernist writers influenced by his vision, Anderson’s methodological legacy has been, not only to replace attempts at causal explanation by literary and textual analyses (something he himself refuses to countenance), but to sacrifice sociological investigation of the origins, spread and effects of nationalism for a more descriptive, and deconstructive, analysis of the characteristics of national projects. Insofar as modernism and the modernist theory of the nation was linked to a fundamentally sociological and historical causal analysis of the origins, spread and effects of nations and nationalism, the introduction of postmodernist readings and methods in such concepts as the ‘imagined community’ and ‘invented tradition’ have signalled the dissolution of classical modernism and its replacement by the many smaller, and more limited, ‘postmodern’ analyses of the nation. To this phase of dissolution I shall return in the last chapter. It is only one of several kinds of response to the crisis of the modernist theory of nations and nationalism which came to a head in the 1980s. The nature of that crisis, and the attempts to replace modernism by more viable paradigms and analyses, form the subject of the second part of my study.

 

Part II

 

Critics and alternatives

 

 

 

• Primordialism and perennialism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The modernist paradigm of nations and nationalism constitutes the most fruitful and comprehensive of the grand narratives in the field. It is also one of the last. It emerged in opposition to the older nationalist, or perennialist, paradigms. But, as in other fields of study in the social sciences, these kinds of all-encompassing explanatory paradigm have been increasingly abandoned in favour of limited models and accounts of particular, usually contemporary, aspects of the study of nations and nationalism. Responding to specific cultural and political problems in specific areas of the world, scholars seek now to account for particular developments, rather than frame a perspective that takes in the whole sequence of processes and full range of phenomena that fall under the rubric of ‘nations and nationalism’.

 

This is not to say that there were no alternative grand narratives, no rival paradigms, in terms of which more or less radical critiques of modernism could be mounted. As we shall see, there have been significant attempts to reveal the flaws and exaggerations in the modernist grand narrative and to provide alternative paradigms of nations and nationalism. Yet despite the validity of many of these criticisms, the proposed alternatives have to date generally failed to attract the support of the majority of scholars in the field. Moreover, the main assumptions of modernism have been so firmly entrenched that even those who seek to ‘go beyond’ them and, in doing so, undermine and fragment those assumptions, have abandoned all attempts at grand theorising rather than embrace any of the alternatives on offer. The result is that students are faced with an unenviable choice between inadequate or untenable paradigms and a series of limited analytical accounts of specific problems in the field.

 

In Part II, I seek to explain how this unsatisfactory situation has arisen. In this chapter I shall attempt to show why the alternative ‘primordialist’ and ‘perennialist’ paradigms are unacceptable; in the next, why the one alternative that might be acceptable should be viewed largely as an internal critique and expansion of modernism; and in the last chapter, why the more limited, analytical accounts of specific problems do little to advance the overall theory of nations and nationalism. Finally, in the conclusion, I attempt to sketch some of the areas where advances might be made, or where some kind of theoretical convergence could take place.

 

 

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Primordialism I: inclusive fitness

 

The oldest paradigm of nations and nationalism, the one against which modernism has always battled, is the nationalist. Or rather, one version of the nationalist ideology, the organic version. Back in 1944, Hans Kohn had made an important distinction between a ‘voluntarist’ type of nationalism which regarded the nation as a free association of rational human beings entered into voluntarily on an individual basis, and an ‘organic’ type which viewed the nation as an organism of fixed and indelible character which was stamped on its members at birth and from which they could never free themselves. Kohn thought the first type was characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon world, whereas the second kind of ideology was typical of nationalist movements east of the Rhine (Kohn 1967a).¹

 

If we forget Kohn’s highly questionable geographical applications and retain only his ideological distinction, we can see that the ‘organic’ theory first developed by the German Romantics provided an overall account of nations and nationalism which, were it tenable, would make the modernist paradigm irrelevant and superfluous. Organic nationalism holds that the world consists of natural nations, and has always done so; that nations are the bedrock of history and the chief actors in the historical drama; that nations and their characters are organisms that can be easily ascertained by their cultural differentiae; that the members of nations may, and frequently have, lost their national self-consciousness along with their independence; and that the duty of nationalists is to restore that self-consciousness and independence to the ‘reawakened’ organic nation (see Pearson 1993).²

 

Now, to a modernist, each and every one of these tenets is questionable, if not unacceptable. The world does not consist of ‘natural’ nations, except thinking makes it so, nor are nations to be likened to evolving organisms; on the contrary, nations and nationality are logically and historically contingent phenomena. Before the modern epoch, nations were largely unknown, and human beings had a multiplicity of collective loyalties; religious communities, cities, empires and kingdoms were the chief collective actors, above the village and district level, and the outlook of most human beings was strictly local. Nor is it easy to define the character and ascertain the cultural differentiae of many nations in the contemporary world, given the multiplicity of overlapping identities in which individuals are enmeshed. In fact, we often witness nationalists disputing among themselves about the ‘true’ characteristics of their nation. Nor can nationalists explain why the members of particular nations should come to ‘forget’ their nationality, or why so many should ‘slumber’ so determinedly for so many centuries and be ready to be ‘awakened’ at the appointed hour. Might it be that nations have no existence apart from the ideas and goals of nationalism, that we can only verify the existence of the nation ex post facto from the activities of the nationalists? Perhaps it is the nationalists themselves who have legitimised their political aspirations and mobilising activities, using the metaphor of ‘reawakening’ a population who

 

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had never for a moment even entertained the idea that they were members of a particular, designated nation (see esp. Gellner 1983: ch. 5).

Now, there is nothing particularly odd about an ideology with such scant regard for logic and historical evidence proving so enduringly influential in so many parts of the world. This is, in fact, part of the data of the problem of nationalism. What is more important about the organic version is its introduction of the concepts of biology and the ‘primordial’ tie of nationality, albeit in rudimentary form. Both of these ideas have entered into two well known theoretical critiques of modernism. Both can be termed ‘primordialist’; one of them is fundamentally biological in character, the other cultural. However, apart from these references to biology and culture, neither of these ‘primordialist’ critiques has, or seeks to have, anything in common with organic nationalism.

 

Sociobiology furnishes the basis for the first of these primordialist critiques. Broadly speaking, it claims that ethnic groups and nations should be seen as forms of extended kin groups, and that both nations and ethnic groups, along with ‘races’, must be ultimately derived from individual genetic reproductive drives. For Pierre van den Berghe, the main exponent of a sociobiological approach to ethnicity and nationalism, the modernity of nations is purely formal, a matter of supplementing underlying structures of ‘inclusive fitness’ with political forms. As he puts it, ‘the very concept of the nation is an extension of kin selection’, and so nations are to be treated as descent groups in the same manner as ethnic groups. What is important are the ways in which the individual’s needs to maximise his or her genetic pool and progeny, favour kin groups and thereby larger genetic pools through extended kin groupings, that is, through ‘nepotism’ and ‘inclusive fitness’ (van den Berghe 1978, 1979).

 

Van den Berghe argues that human sociality is based on three principles: kin selection, reciprocity and coercion. The larger and more complex the society, the more important become reciprocity and coercion. But ethnicity, caste and ‘race’ ‘tend to be ascriptive, defined by common descent, generally hereditary, and often endogamous’. Hence they are based exclusively on kinship and kin selection. Van den Berghe traces such groups from small ‘tribes’; linked by ties of kinship, they made ‘the tribe in fact a superfamily’. It was only the cultural inventions of unilineal descent and lineage exogamy that permitted the

 

extension of that primordial model of social organisation to much larger societies running into tens of thousands of people.

(van den Berghe 1978:403–4)

 

For Pierre van den Berghe, ethnic groups were in-breeding superfamilies for most of human history, and signalled that fact by maintaining clear social and territorial boundaries with other ethnic groups. Of course, the common ancestry of ‘the people’ (the tribe) was always partially fictive, as a result of migration, conquest and interbreeding. But the putative character of some ethnic groups’ extended kinship ties is irrelevant.

 

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Just as in the smaller kin units, the kinship was real often enough to become the basis of these powerful sentiments we call nationalism, tribalism, racism and ethnocentrism. The ease and speed with which these sentiments can be mobilised even in modern industrial societies…the blind ferocity of the conflicts to which these sentiments can lead, the imperviousness of such sentiments to rational arguments are but a few indications of their continued vitality and primordiality.

 

What I am suggesting is that ethnocentrism evolved during millions, or at least hundreds of thousands of years, as an extension of kin selection.

 

(ibid.: 404)

 

For van den Berghe, ethnic sentiments are to be understood as an extended and attenuated form of kin selection. That is why ethnocentrism is the norm, and why

 

those societies that institutionalised norms of nepotism and ethnocentrism had a strong selective advantage over those that did not (assuming that any such ever existed), because kin selection has been the basic blueprint for animal sociality.

 

(ibid.: 405)

 

Genetic relatedness, in other words, determines the extent of animal, and human, cooperation, and thereby the degree to which they enhance each other’s fitness (‘inclusive fitness’).

 

But how do we know who is genetically related, outside our immediate family, and to what degree? If we are programmed to invest only in those who are genetically related to us, how do we recognise ‘kin’? What are the quickest and most reliable indicators of probable common ancestry? Any cultural marker which can finely discriminate us from our near neighbours will do: it may be language, religion, customs, dress, hairstyles or manners, or other cultural diacritica. These suggest that people sharing these cultural traits are descended from the same ancestor; and that myths of common ancestry are correlated with actual biological ancestry.

 

Here van den Berghe meets an important objection to his theory. Ethnicity is, in part, defined by myths of common ancestry. But a myth is not a biological reality. Hence the theory is invalid. Yet to be effective, a myth has to be believed; and it

 

will only be believed if members of an ethnic group are sufficiently alike in physical appearance and culture, and have lived together and intermarried for a sufficient period (at a minimum three or four generations) for the myth to have developed a substantial measure of biological truth…. Ethnicity or race cannot be invented or imagined out of nothing. It can be manipulated, used, exploited, stressed, fused or subdivided, but it must correlate with a

 

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pre-existing population bound by preferential endogamy and a common historical experience. Ethnicity is both primordial and instrumental.

(van den Berghe 1995:360, original emphasis)

 

Here, it seems, we have the heart of the matter. What van den Berghe has done is to bracket physical appearance with culture, and equate living together and having common myths and historical experiences with preferential endogamy. But some of the best known ethnic descent myths suggest a quite different and more ambiguous interpretation. The Roman myth of common ancestry emphasised their varied origins (Latins, Etruscans, Sabines, etc.) and Rome was a magnet for various cultural populations from a fairly early period. This did not prevent a powerful ancestry myth (or two, to be precise) from developing, alongside equally powerful shared historical experiences (the Samnite wars, the Gallic invasions, Pyrrhus, and above all, Hannibal…) to give rise to its first literary expressions (see Gruen 1993; Garman 1992). The English, too, developed strong origin myths with references to various descent lines—Briton, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Norman—and the content of these myths changed considerably over time (MacDougall 1982; Mason 1985). The same is true of the medieval and modern French ancestry myths, with its celebrated contest between Franks and Gauls (not to mention Romans during the Revolution) (Poliakov 1974: ch. 1; Weber 1991: ch.1). If it were really a matter of actual biological descent and kin selection, why these mixed references and transformations? In the light of these examples, can we really assert the correspondence of imputed and actual ancestry? Van den Berghe concedes that group definitions were always partly fictive, but believes this to be unimportant. But, as Vernon Reynolds (1980:311) points out:

 

Unless his primordial inter-group theory based on sociobiology can explain why the new non-genetic transmission of kinship and group affiliation has to follow the logic of the old genetic one, it breaks down.

 

Myths of ethnic descent generally contain a kernel of factual truth, but they typically elaborate, exaggerate and idealise that kernel in a one-sided fashion (see Tudor 1972; A.D.Smith 1984a).

 

Van den Berghe is surely right to remind us that there are limits to ethnic plasticity and malleability. He points out that:

 

It is impossible to constitute an ethnie on a basis other than a credible concept of common descent, and the concept is only credible if it corresponds at least partly to reality.

 

Ethnicity always involves the cultural and genetic boundaries of a breeding population, that is, a population bounded by the rule or practice of endogamy.

 

(van den Berghe 1988:256, original emphasis)

 

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But his genetic and physical inference from cases of ethnic durability cannot account for the considerable variability, wide range and frequent absorptions and dissolutions of instances of ethnic affiliation, and the fact that many ethnies have undergone large-scale changes of culture and, in some cases, of demography. This is the case even in such a culturally long-lived example as the Greeks, where undoubted evidence of massive rupture of demographic continuity by the influx of Albanians and Slavs on the Greek mainland from the sixth to eighth centuries AD and of considerable, though not complete, culture change after the conversion to Orthodoxy, call into question the continuity and influence of a common ancient Greek biological and genetic inheritance on modern Greeks (see Just 1989).³

 

More generally, we have to ask how family and clan loyalties of ‘inclusive fitness’ can be extended to the members of ethnic groups who, running often into the millions, can never know or see their ‘ethnic kinsmen’, except in imagination and feeling? Without running to the other extreme, and regarding ethnies and even more so nations as purely abstract communities of the imagination, how can we know that our sentiments of ethnic kinship have a genetic basis, or that family and clan ties can be extended through large-scale nepotism on the same physical and reproductive basis to relative strangers because they happen to speak the same language and share the same religion and customs, etc.? This seems to me the central difficulty of any kind of genetic explanation in terms of individual reproductive success. One answer would be to invoke psychoanalytical mechanisms of ‘projection’ and ‘identification’. But even if these mechanisms could be rendered precise, this shifts the basis of ethnic kinship away from the realm of the purely physical and genetic to the domain of the social psychological—something that van den Berghe for one opposes—thereby invoking an alternative structural and/or cultural explanation, without recourse to genes or phenotypes; and so the powerfully felt ‘primordiality’ of ethnicity and nationality becomes a purely cultural, rather than a biological, phenomenon.⁴

 

A further problem with sociobiological explanations is their failure to discriminate historically between phenomena of differing degrees of power, inclusiveness and complexity. Nations are elided with ethnic groups, and any differences between them are relegated to the superstructural, i.e. sociopolitical and non-biological realm, making redundant all attempts to provide separate explanations for the rise of nations and nationalism. In the interests of explanatory economy, important differences between historical periods and culture areas are treated as secondary or omitted. If modernists insist on a historical and sociological gulf between the agrarian and capitalist industrial epochs, sociobiological accounts disregard epochal differences altogether in their desire to provide reductionist explanations for a wide range of social and cultural phenomena. The idea that individual kin selection in families and clans slowly evolved, over hundreds of thousands of years, by a process of nepotistic extension into ethnocentrism and ethnic groups, is a plausible speculation only insofar as it allows for all the other factors of conquest, migration and intermarriage that van den Berghe admits undermine the separateness and biological ‘purity’ of

 

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extended clan groupings or small-scale ethnies. In the end, as societies become more evolved and complex, and as migration and intermarriage undermine group endogamy, individual ‘kin selection’ becomes an increasingly residual factor, and we must look elsewhere for an understanding of the power and passion of ethnic ties and nationalism. This is the point of departure for the second, cultural version of primordialism.

 

Primordialism II: cultural givens

 

For many, the passions aroused by ethnicity and nationalism must be traced back to the ‘primordiality’ of the ‘cultural givens’ of human society. In fact, so overpowering and ineffable are ethnic and national ties that we need to return to the cultural ‘essence’ behind the many forms that ethnicity and nationalism have taken to grasp their continuing hold on so many people to this day.

It was Edward Shils who first identified various kinds of social bond between members of modern societies. In particular, he distinguished between the public, civil ties of the modern state and the primordial ties of family, religious and ethnic groups. Recalling the Durkheimian argument which saw the retention of a kernel of older kinship, moral and religious ties—the similarities of beliefs and consciences in a ‘mechanical solidarity’—even within modern, industrial societies with their more individualistic, but at the same time cooperative and complementary division of labour or ‘organic solidarity’, Shils argued that primordial ties of kinship and religion remained vital even within modern secular societies, as witnessed by their symbols and public ceremonies (Shils 1957).

 

This theme was taken up by Clifford Geertz who applied the idea to the new states, but often old societies, of Asia and Africa. Here modern states were emerging on colonial territorial and political foundations, but their populations were bound together less by the civil ties of a rational society than by the primordial ties which arose on the basis of language, custom, race, religion and other cultural givens. For Geertz, it was these underlying cultural realities that explained the continuing power of ethnicity, and the sense of overriding commitment and loyalty to the cultural identities that they forged.

 

Geertz began by distinguishing

 

two powerful, thoroughly interdependent, yet distinct and actually opposed motives—the desire to be recognised as responsible agents whose wishes, act, hopes and opinions ‘matter’, and the desire to build an efficient, dynamic, modern state. The one aim is to be noticed: it is a search for an identity, and a demand that the identity be publicly acknowledged as having import, a social assertion of the self as ‘being somebody in the world’. The other aim is practical: it is a demand for progress, for a rising standard of living, more effective political order, greater social justice, and beyond that of ‘playing a part in the larger arena of world politics’, of ‘exercising influence among the nations’.

 

(Geertz 1973:258)

 

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Geertz argues that, though these two motives are intimately related, they are often opposed, and the tension between them is particularly severe and chronic in the new states of Africa and Asia, both because of the growing importance of the sovereign state and because of the ‘great extent to which their peoples’ sense of self remains bound up in the gross actualities of blood, race, language, locality, religion, or tradition’. People in these multi-ethnic states ‘tend to regard the immediate, concrete, and to them inherently meaningful sorting implicit in such “natural” diversity as the substantial content of their individuality’ (ibid.: 258).

Geertz claims that, considered as societies, the new states are abnormally susceptible to serious disaffection based on primordial attachments. He explained:

 

By a primordial attachment is meant one that stems from the ‘givens’—or, more precisely, as culture is inevitably involved in such matters, the assumed ‘givens’—of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them givenness that stems from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language, or even a dialect of a language, and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom, and so on, are seen to have an ineffable, and at times overpowering, coerciveness in and of themselves. One is bound to one’s kinsman, one’s neighbour, one’s fellow believer, ipso facto; as the result not merely of personal affection, practical necessity, common interest, or incurred obligation, but at least in great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself. The general strength of such primordial bonds, and the types of them that are important, differ from person to person, from society to society, and from time to time. But for virtually every person, in every society, at almost all times, some attachments seem to flow more from a sense of natural—some would say spiritual—affinity than from social interaction.

 

(ibid.: 259–60)

 

I have quoted Clifford Geertz’s celebrated essay of 1963 at length, because it has given rise to a fierce debate about the concept of ‘primordialism’. Geertz himself does not use this term. Rather he is concerned with the immediate problem of how to explain what came to be known as ‘subnationalism’ in the new states, and cites in support Ambedkar’s frank defence of the sense of primordial ties, of the fellow feeling that they are ‘kith and kin’, a ‘consciousness of kind’, but at the same time ‘a longing not to belong to any other group’ (ibid.: 260).⁵

 

For Geertz, disaffection based on primordial sentiments threatens the very existence of the new states. He lists the main sources of such sentiments:

 

Assumed blood ties or ‘quasi-kinship’; and he explains this:

 

‘Quasi’ because kin units formed around known biological relationship (extended families, lineages and so on) are too small for even the most

 

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tradition-bound to regard them as having more than limited significance, and the referent is, consequently, to a notion of untraceable but yet sociologically real kinship, as in a tribe.

 

(ibid.: 261–2)

 

race, which refers to phenotypes rather than any definite sense of common descent;

language, though not necessarily divisive, can give rise to linguism as the basis of primordial conflicts;

 

region, which can be especially troublesome in geographically heterogenous areas;

 

religion, a force which can undermine the comprehensive civil sense; custom, which with life-style often opposes sophisticated groups to what they

 

see as more barbarian populations.

 

Geertz distinguishes intra-state from inter-state primordial attachments, which encourage respectively separatism and pan- or irredentist movements. Using this distinction, he builds a preliminary classification of ethnic-state relationships, emphasising that their patterns of primordial cleavage and identification ‘are not fluid, shapeless and infinitely various, but are definitely demarcated and vary in systematic ways’ (ibid.: 268). He then goes on to argue that the rise of a modern political consciousness centred on the state actually stimulates primordial sentiments among the mass of the population:

 

Thus, it is the very process of the formation of a sovereign, civil state that, among other things, stimulates sentiments of parochialism, communalism, racialism, and so on, because it introduced into society a valuable new prize over which to fight and a frightening new force with which to contend.

 

(ibid.: 270)

 

This, then, is the ‘integrative revolution’, and it is clearly a double-edged process. It is particularly noticeable in the new states, where a modern efficient state seeks to unite diverse ethnic groups in a single national territory, but, as Geertz notes in a 1972 addition, it can also be found in Canada, Belgium, Ulster and other ‘modern’ countries, making the general argument even more germane (ibid.: 260–1, note).

 

The instrumentalist critique

 

Geertz’s arguments, or at any rate a simplified version of them, have come in for a good deal of criticism. In a debate on the formation of political identities in South Asia, specifically Pakistan, Paul Brass in a measured critique highlighted some of the limitations of what he called a ‘primordialist’ approach. Brass concedes that people form deep emotive attachments which persist into adult life and which may provide a basis for social and political groupings. But he

 

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argues that some primordial attachments are variable. Many people are bilingual, change or shift their language, or do not think about their language at all. Religions too are subject to change by reformers, and to conversions and syncretism. Even place of birth and kinship may lose their emotional significance for many people. Massive migration has severed a sense of attachment to their place of birth for many people; besides, place of birth is not usually of political significance, at least until recently. Similarly, the range of genuine kinship relationships is too small to be of political significance.

 

Fictive kinship relationships may extend the range of some ethnic groupings rather broadly, but their fictive character presumes their variability by definition.

 

(Brass 1979:37)

 

And, while a belief in shared descent is widespread among ethnic groups, it cannot encompass all culturally defined groups who claim special privileges because of some shared cultural features and who are united by their attachment to them (Brass 1979:35–7).

 

There are two further objections to the primordialist position. One is the untenable assumption that recognition of distinct primordial groups ‘is sufficient to predict the future development out of them of ethnic communities or nations’, an assumption held by the early European ideologists of nationalism. The second, derived from Geertz, is that

 

ethnic attachments belong to the non-rational part of the human personality and, as such are potentially destructive of civil society.

(ibid.: 38)

 

But ethnic identities may be felt or adopted for quite rational reasons, for survival or for gain. As for primordial attachments, they have not been shown to be more dangerous to civil order than class conflicts or less amenable to compromise (ibid.: 38).

 

Brass, indeed, makes an important distinction between those ethnic groups that can ‘draw upon old and rich cultural heritages with a persisting core’—he cites here the Jews with their core Talmudic tradition transmitted through the rabbinate—and those ‘other groups whose core cultures are less easy to identify, but that have nevertheless formed a basis for cohesive and sometimes successful ethnic and nationalist movements’—and here he cites the mushroom growth of ethnic political movements in the United States in recent years (ibid.: 38). Brass also claims that knowledge of the substance of a persisting core tradition, say of Orthodox Judaism or of traditional Islam in India,

 

may not be of much use in predicting either the development or the form of ethnic movements on behalf of the cultural groups in question.

(ibid.: 39)

 

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Nevertheless, it is possible to reconcile the positions of primordialists and instrumentalists simply by recognising ‘that cultural groups differ in the strength and richness of their cultural traditions and even more importantly in the strength of traditional institutions and social structures’ (ibid.: 40).

 

Brass himself adopts a moderate political ‘instrumentalist’ approach. Like Thomas Eriksen, he distances himself from the extreme instrumentalists for whom culture is infinitely malleable and elites free to choose whatever aspect of a culture that can serve their political purposes or mobilise the masses. Brass sees various kinds of elites selecting from the range of symbols of the received ethnic cultural traditions those that serve to unite their communities and mobilise them for social and political advantage. He emphasises the advantages accruing to different kinds of elite and counter-elite in symbol selection, but agrees with Francis Robinson in acknowledging the constraints placed upon them by their communities’ cultural traditions. The competition of elites and their consequent selections of cultural resources have the effect of politicising the culture and changing the self-definition of the community from that of an ethnic group to one of a nationality competing with others in the political arena. Hence we may infer that it is the competition between elites within a community, and between the elites of different communities, using multiple symbol selection, that mobilises the members of communities and forms them into cohesive nationalities (Brass 1991: ch. 2; cf. Eriksen 1993).⁶

 

If Paul Brass is prepared to concede a modicum of truth to the primordialist position on ethnicity, Jack Eller and Reed Coughlan would prefer to dispense altogether with so unintelligible and unsociological a concept. For them, the concept of primordiality contains three distinct ideas:

 

• the ‘given’, a priori, underived nature of primordial attachments, which precedes all social interaction;
• their ineffable, overpowering, coercive qualities;

 

• the emotional, affective nature of primordial sentiments and attachments.

 

Together, these three ideas place primordial attachments and sentiments outside the realm of socially constructed emotions and bonds (Eller and Coughlan 1993:187–8).

 

Eller and Coughlan then set out to demonstrate, by citing a variety of empirical studies, the variable and socially constructed nature of ethnic ties, which are continually being renewed, reinterpreted and renegotiated according to changing circumstances and interests. In particular, they point to the many instances of ‘new primordials’ which are ‘made’, not ‘given’. They do concede that in some cases of ethnicity ‘some old realities and resources were being activated which might arguably be part of a “primordial heritage”’. But in other cases appropriate cultural givens, or ‘objective indicators’, may be lacking, and they can often be constructed by political entrepreneurs. Eller and Coughlan then go on to criticise the followers of Shils and Geertz who, regardless of their possible intentions, treat primordial attachments as ineffable and therefore unanalysable. But their

 

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main objection is to the idea that primordial attachments are exclusively affective, and affective ties are somehow just there, implicit in the ethnic or kin relationship itself, and not born in social interaction.

 

This leads to a mystification of emotion, a desocialising of the phenomenon, and in extreme cases can lead to the positing of a biological imperative of bond-formation. In other words, if bonds simply are, and if they are to have any source at all, then they must have a genetic source. Sociobiological explanations thus become, curiously, the last bastion of any kind of analytic enterprise, albeit a dead-end one.

 

(ibid.: 192, original emphasis)

 

But is all this not to seriously misunderstand the import and utility of the concept of the ‘primordial’ for the study of ethnicity and nationality? Certainly, for Steven Grosby, the concept of primordiality has to do more with cognition of certain objects which the emotions that Eller and Coughlan erroneously single out, accompany. Grosby argues that we should return to the sociological tradition that distinguishes between fundamental patterns of human experience, and which recognises a plurality of orientations of human action, with specific beliefs peculiar to each type of orientation; examples would be Weber’s types of social action, Parsons’ and Shils’ pattern variables, and Shils’ primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties. Against the current reductionist vogue, this tradition recognises the importance of different kinds of cognition, or belief, which attach to different kinds of object, in this case, beliefs about ancestry and territory (Grosby 1994:166–7).

 

For Steven Grosby, human beings perceive certain objects to be in the category of the primordial. This is an act of interpretative cognition. Human beings participate in historically evolving patterns of belief and action, and act in ways that are meaningful to one another. ‘The patterns are the legacy of history; they are tradition’.

 

Ethnic groups and nationalities exist because there are traditions of belief and action towards primordial objects such as biological features and especially territorial location.

 

(ibid.: 168)

 

The reason for the significance human beings always attach to primordial objects is that

 

the family, the locality, and one’s own ‘people’ bear, transmit, and protect life. That is why human beings have always attributed and continue to attribute sacredness to primordial objects and the attachments they form to them. This is one of the reasons why human beings have sacrificed their

 

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lives and continue to sacrifice their lives for their own family and for their own nation.

(ibid.: 169)

 

Human beings have always stood in awe of these objects and their powers over life, and regarded them as ineffable and coercive. That is why the instrumentalist critique is so fundamentally misguided and its sociological analysis so shallow.

 

The significance of this fundamental debate for our problem, the explanation of nations and nationalism, is both methodological and theoretical. Despite their protestations to the contrary, there is a reductionist tendency in both polar positions: an attempt to explain ethnicity and nationality as either instruments of rational self-interest, or as collective outgrowths of beliefs about the primordial. For instrumentalists as for primordialists, any distinction between ethnic groups and nations is secondary or irrelevant. Instrumentalists tend to view ethnicity and nationality as sites and resources for collective mobilisation by interest-maximising (and often rationally discriminating) elites; hence their analysis is largely voluntaristic, elite-driven and top-down. Primordialists view ethnicity and nationality as groupings formed on the basis of classifications of self and others in accordance with primordial criteria, i.e. beliefs about life-bearing and life-enhancing objects; hence their analysis tends towards a limited cultural determinism, though ultimately it is based on the slowly changing patterns of popular beliefs and perceptions.

 

Theoretically, the instrumentalist-primordialist debate appears to pit ‘interest’ against ‘affect’, elite strategies of cultural manipulation against the power of underlying cultural cleavages. Certainly, at the extremes of social engineering and organic nationalism, there is no possibility of a plurality of cultural and social orientations or a synthesis of motives. But in between there are a variety of positions on a continuum, which in one way or another recognise what Daniel Bell saw in ethnicity, its unique combination of ‘interest’ with ‘affect’ and its consequent superiority to other collectivities as sites of mass mobilisation (Bell 1975; cf. Eriksen 1993: chs 5–6).⁷

 

In fact, there has been considerable misunderstanding of what might be termed the ‘cultural primordialism’ of Shils and Geertz. It is quite clear that their views are far removed from the genetic primordialism of the sociobiologists; speaking of ‘quasi-kinship’, Geertz is careful to underline the ‘untraceable but yet sociologically real kinship’ of ethnicity, and to stress that real biological kinship units are too small to have political significance. Neither Geertz nor Shils regarded primordial ties as purely matters of emotion; they were careful to circumscribe the domain of primordiality and reveal how it was but one of several sources of beliefs, actions, attachments and sentiments. In fact, Geertz gives a prominent place in his essay to the role of the modern state in actually stimulating beliefs and sentiments of primordiality. Nor did they regard primordiality as inhering in the objects themselves, but only in the perceptions and emotions they engendered. Geertz, in the well known passage cited above, talks about ‘assumed “givens”’, of congruities ‘seen to have an ineffable…coerciveness’, of ‘some

 

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unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself, of ‘a sense of natural… affinity’ (my emphasis). This is the language of perception and belief, of the mental and emotional world of the individuals concerned. Geertz is underlining the power of what we might term a ‘participants’ primordialism’; he is not saying that the world is constituted by an objective primordial reality, only that many of us believe in primordial objects and feel their power (see Stack 1986: Introduction).

 

Here lies the vital insight of this kind of ‘primordialism’. It lays out starkly the nature of the data which the problem of ethnicity and nationalism raises. It draws attention to the powerful perceptions, beliefs and emotions that can inspire and excite human beings, and rouse them to collective action and self-sacrifice. It reveals how the participants endow certain objects with primordial qualities and base some of their actions on such perceptions and beliefs. A theory of ethnicity and nationalism that fails to address the power of the resulting ties and their capacity for rousing and guiding mass self-sacrifice, whatever its other merits, is seriously deficient in addressing those elements that so signally distinguish these phenomena from others. One often has the sense that instrumentalist and social constructionist models framed for the explanation of ‘identity politics’ and civic nationalism in the affluent, stable democracies of the West are totally unsuited to provide convincing accounts of what Michael Billig terms the ‘hot’ nationalisms of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa and Asia. Like sweetwater fish, they cannot survive in the turbulent oceans of rampant ethnic nationalism. In Bosnia, the Caucasus, India and the Middle East, a ‘blood-and-homeland’ primordialism seems more apposite.⁸

 

But this too would be a mistake. For, while the students of cultural primordiality have highlighted the special dimensions of the problems of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism, and shown how unamenable they are to the kind of analyses proposed by the ‘instrumentalist’ models, their own preferred ‘explanation’ turns out to be no more than an interesting tautology. It consists in re-describing at a higher level of analysis the peculiar features and dimensions of ethnicity and nationality; and those in very general, if suggestive, terms. It consists in isolating a particular class of beliefs, attachments and sentiments which differ from others and showing how ethnicity and nationality exemplify their characteristics. Though this throws light on their character, it does not thereby explain the formation, course and decline of instances of these phenomena.

 

Moreover, taken seriously, the concept of primordiality precludes the need for a historical sociology of ethnicity or nationalism, even though some of its adherents are profoundly imbued with a sense of the historical importance of these phenomena. It accords no separate role for the rise of nations or for the cultures and ideologies of nationalism, nor does it provide any tools for explaining the historical development of different forms of ethnic and national attachments. But, if cultural primordialism is devoid of explanatory power, what students of primordiality have done is to reveal some special features of ethnic and national phenomena, and especially the powerful popular primordialism of the participants;

 

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and thereby provided the necessary point of departure for more convincing explanations.

 

Perennialism I: ethnic continuity

 

The primordialist-instrumentalist debate, which I have only briefly outlined here, is largely concerned with ethnicity and ethnic identity rather than with nations and nationalism. It is, nevertheless, germane to our problem because the competing assumptions of instrumentalists and primordialists have overshadowed and influenced the two main grand narratives of nations and nationalism: modernism and perennialism.⁹

 

In the past, one could be sure that modernists were also instrumentalists (and vice-versa), while perennialists were always primordialists of one kind or another (and vice-versa). But this simple dualism has given way to more variegated and complex formulations. Not all modernists embrace a robust instrumentalism; and not all perennialists turn out to be primordialists. We can even find an instrumentalist who is a perennialist of sorts; though the converse, a thorough-going primordialist who could propound a modernist account of nations and nationalism, is rare. What we find instead are theorists who embrace a perennialist view of ethnicity (with some primordialist overtones), only to adopt a modernist approach to nations and nationalism. Here I shall explore some examples of these combinations.

 

What is meant here by the term ‘perennialism’? Broadly speaking, it refers to the historical antiquity of the type of social and political organisation known as the ‘nation’, its immemorial or perennial character. In this view, there is little difference between ethnicity and nationality: nations and ethnic communities are cognate, even identical, phenomena. The perennialist readily accepts the modernity of nationalism as a political movement and ideology, but regards nations either as updated versions of immemorial ethnic communities, or as collective cultural identities that have existed, alongside ethnic communities, in all epochs of human history. On the other hand, the perennialist refuses to see either nations or ethnic groups as ‘givens’ in nature; they are strictly historical and social, rather than natural, phenomena. As perennialists, they could not endorse the central idea of the Abbé Sieyes, for whom nations were sui generis, existing in the natural order as part of the substratum of human and social existence. For the perennialist, the ethnic community or nation is a human and social phenomenon like any other. At the same time it is a constant and fundamental feature of human society throughout recorded history; and for this reason nations and ethnic communities appear to be immemorial to their members.

 

This point of view is very clearly exemplified by Joshua Fishman’s analysis of ethnicity and language in Eastern Europe. Fishman does not use the language of ‘cultural primordialism’, though many of his formulations share its spirit. Instead, he wants to reveal the perennial and highly subjective nature of ethnicity by viewing it ‘from the inside’. Attacking externalist liberal, Marxist and sociological denigrations and misunderstandings of ethnicity, Fishman briefly

 

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traces the history of ethnic belonging from the Greeks and Hebrews, and invokes the spirit of Herder, not only to stress the intimate bond between language and ethnicity, but more fundamentally to reveal the immemorial ubiquity and subjectivity of unmobilised ethnicity as the ‘untutored and largely unconscious ehtnicity of everyday life’. In this vein, he claims that ethnicity is a matter of ‘being’, ‘doing’ and ‘knowing’. As far as ethnic ‘being’ is concerned:

 

Ethnicity has always been experienced as a kinship phenomenon, a continuity within the self and within those who share an intergenerational link to common ancestors. Ethnicity is partly experienced as being ‘bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, and blood of their blood’. The human body itself is viewed as an expression of ethnicity and ethnicity is commonly felt to be in the blood, bones and flesh.

 

(Fishman 1980:84–5)

 

Echoing Harold Isaacs’ analysis of the bodily substance of ethnic ties, Fishman insists on the need to regard ethnicity as a ‘tangible, living reality that makes every human a link in an eternal bond from generation to generation’. Ethnicity has indeed a biological component, but it extents well beyond biological and bodily, or ‘being’, dimension. It also involves ‘doing’. ‘The “doings” of ethnicity preserve, confirm and augment collective identities and the natural order’, and include verbal expressions like songs, chants, rituals, sayings and prayers. Unlike ‘being’, ethnic ‘doings’ can change the direction of ethnicity; they can reinterpret and redirect the past, provided that the change is ‘authentic’. Ethnic expressed in authentic media. Thus ethnic communities undergo change, but their mutuability and modernisaton must be in ‘our own way’ and ‘true to our own genius’, if initmate, deeply rooted belonging—the very meaning of ethnicity—is to be preserved in and through change. Indeed, the same deeply felt need to belong intimately has provided the basis also for modern ethnic nationalisms (ibid.: 94; Fishman 1972; cf. Isaacs 1975; Nash 1989).

 

Though his language resonates with primordial, even quasi-mystic imagery, it is clear that Joshua Fishman does not share the reductionism of sociobiology nor the theoretical interest in primordial beliefs and sentiments of the cultural primordialists. Rather, he is concerned to underline the power, longevity and ubiquity of ethnicity/nationality, to trace its deep roots in both history and the human psyche, and to vindicate the importance of seeing ethnicity empathetically and not to judge it by some externalist criterion of ‘objective reality’.¹⁰

 

Nervertheless, this kind of analysis raises a number of questions. Who exactly feels the tangible, living reality of ethnicity? Is it ethnic leaders and elites alone or ethnic populations as a whole? If the former, cannot such ethnicity be the site of different, and contested, interpretations? If the latter, how can we verify their beliefs and sentiments, especially in pre-modern epochs? Besides, who authenticates the cultural ‘doings’ and ‘knowings’ of the community, and is there anly one standard of authenticity? Granted that many people feel a deep need to belong intimately, and therefore the analyst needs to enter into the beliefs

 

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and sentiments of ethnic members, how do we explain from within the formation and decline of different ethnic communities and nations, the consequences of mass migration and adoption of new ethnic identities, the effects of large-scale inter-marriage on the sense of intimate belonging, and the possibility of mixed heritages and bilingual and dual-ethnic belonging? It seems that Fishman’s analysis, in capturing the deeply felt sense of intimate belonging of ethnic communities with vivid memories and well documented histories, fails to address the problems of communities with more ambiguous and less documented pasts, and the situations of so many people who are in transit from one ethnic community to another or who combine cultural elements of different communities. In other words, the kind of analysis that Fishman embraces may be more suited to the relatively stable ethnic mosaics and hierarchies of pre-modern epochs than to, say, the multiple, cross-cutting identifications and more fluid attachments of modern, Western societies experiencing massive immigration.

 

Nor is there any attempt in Fishman’s kind of analysis to single out a special problem of nations or nationalism. Since nations appear to be equated with ethnic communities, there can be no such special problem, and no periodisation of national phenomena. Nor is there any attempt to disentangle the ideas of ‘ethnic continuity’ and ‘ethnic recurrence’ in perennialism. It would appear that ethnicity (and nationhood) continues from generation to generation, as long as there are some people who feel it as a tangible, living reality and retain the sense of intimate belonging. Fishman provides us with no clues about the effects of conquest, colonisation or genocide for particular ethnic communities or ethnicity in general; his appears to be a form of ‘continuous perennialism’, whereby nations and ethnic communities can be traced back through the generations to their first beginnings, with a corresponding sense of their immemorial character.

 

Perennialism II: perennial ethnicity, modern nations

 

A similar ethnic perennialism informs the scholarship of Walker Connor. In a series of powerful and seminal articles, now reprinted in a single volume, Connor argues that the national bond is fundamentally psychological and non-rational. It is not irrational, only ‘beyond reason’. Basically, a nation

 

is a group of people who feel that they are ancestrally related. It is the largest group that can command a person’s loyalty because of felt kinship ties; it is, from this perspective, the fully extended family.

 

(Connor 1994:202)

 

Connor goes on to show how nationalist leaders have grasped and used this point, while scholars have tended to confuse nationalism with patriotism, the nation with the state. He cites a series of nationalist leaders, from Hitler and Mussolini to Mao Tse Tung and Ho Chi Minh, who appealed to blood and

 

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kinship to mobilise their fellow-nationals. But, lest he be misunderstood, Connor clearly differentiates his position from that of the sociobiologists:

 

The sense of unique descent, of course, need not, and in nearly all cases will not, accord with factual history. Nearly all nations are the variegated offsprings of numerous ethnic strains. It is not chronological or factual history that is the key to the nation, but sentient or felt history. All that is irreducibly required for the existence of a nation is that the members share an intuitive conviction of the group’s separate origin and evolution.

 

(ibid.: 202)

 

The irreducible ethnopsychological element in nations and nationalism means that rational explanations for these phenomena always miss the point. Economic explanations in terms of modernisation and class conflict or relative deprivation, or political explanations in terms of state power and institutions, or individualistic rational-choice theories of the strategic manipulations of the intelligentsia, must by their very nature fail to ‘reflect the emotional depth of national identity’, and the love, hatred and self-sacrifice it inspires. And citing Chateaubriand’s statement that ‘Men don’t allow themselves to be killed for their interests; they allow themselves to be killed for their passions’, Connor updates this as: ‘people do not voluntarily die for things that are rational’ (ibid.: 206).

 

For Connor, there is a clear distinction between patriotism and the much stronger sentiment of nationalism. Patriotism is love of one’s state or country and its institutions; nationalism is love of one’s nation, the largest felt descent group. This shows us that the nation is a more developed form of the ethnic group. For ethnicity too involves a sense of common ancestry, as Weber had already noted when he wrote that

 

We shall call ethnic groups those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent…. Ethnic membership (Gemeinsamkeit) differs from the kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity.

 

(Weber 1968:I, 389, cited in Connor 1994:102)

 

Connor points out that Weber went on to say that, though the idea of the nation shares this sense of common ancestry with the ethnic group, ‘the sentiment of ethnic solidarity does not by itself make a “nation”’. Connor elucidates Weber’s analysis and examples as cases of ‘prenational peoples, or…potential nations’. In these cases a segment of the ethnic group feels a low level of solidarity when confronted with a foreign element; this type of xenophobia consists in knowing ethnically ‘what they are not before they know what they are’ (Connor 1994:102– 3, original emphasis). An ethnic group may therefore be readily discerned by outside observers,

 

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but until the members are themselves aware of the group’s uniqueness, it is merely an ethnic group and not a nation. While an ethnic group may, therefore, be other-defined, the nation must be self-defined.

 

(ibid.: 103, original emphasis)

 

Up to this point, Connor presents a perennialist view of ethnicity, with some hints of primordialism. Ethnicity is a non-rational, psychological essence, a sense of ancestral relationship which is presumably immemorial, if not pristine and hence primordial. Connor offers no explanation for the rise of ethnic groups, except in terms of felt kinship, which is presumably an extension of real (but small-scale and hence politically insignificant) kinship. But he does offer an explanation of the rise of self-aware nations. In fact, it turns out to be a fairly radical version of modernism. He asks: ‘When is the nation?’ and answers: when most of the designated population is nationally self-conscious, that is, when the members of ethnic groups become aware of themselves as such. This means that most nations are very recent,

 

and claims that a particular nation existed prior to the late nineteenth century should be treated cautiously.

(Connor 1990:100)

 

After all, national consciousness is a mass, not an elite, phenomenon, and nation-formation is a process, not an occurrence or an event. Though we cannot know exactly what proportion of the population has internalised the national identity and thereby suffices to confer on the ethnic group the title of nation, there are several clues that suggest that, even in the Western democracies, this process has been recent and, even in Europe, incomplete. In support of this contention, Connor cites the lack of self-conscious national identification displayed by immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and Eugène Weber’s findings that most of the population of France—the ‘peasants’—did not become ‘Frenchmen’ and ‘Frenchwomen’ till the First World War, that is, after they had gone through the mass education system and conscript army of the Third Republic. In fact, enfranchisement of most of the population provides a good test of national inclusion and therefore national identity; in which case, even the Western democracies could not claim the title of nation until the early twentieth century, when voting rights were accorded to women and the working classes (ibid.: 98–9).¹¹

 

Why is this the case? Basically, over the last two centuries the idea that the right to rule is vested in the people has been a potent and ever widening political force, undermining all previous political structures.

 

Since 1789, the dogma that ‘alien rule is illegitimate rule’ has been infecting ethnically aware peoples in an ever-broadening pattern.

(Connor 1994:169)

 

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The result has been a surge of national liberation movements, but it is only from the mid-twentieth century that this wave of nationalism has been extended across the globe and to peripheral hinterlands by the accelerating forces of mass communications and state-sponsored education. Not only, therefore, have Germans, Poles, Italians and Hungarians been stirred into political assertion through ethno-national movements of liberation, but equally have ethnic communities in peripheral areas like the Basques and Bretons, Slovenes and Corsicans. Indeed, what Connor terms ‘ethno-nationalism’ has swept the globe as a result of the mass communications spreading the message that popular sovereignty is wedded to ethnicity coupled with the ‘demonstration effect’ of successful ethno-nationalisms. So, though modernisation is a catalyst rather than a cause, and more important for the tempo than the substance of ethno-nationalism, it has greatly aided its diffusion across the globe (ibid.: 169–74).

 

Connor’s thought-provoking analysis provides a necessary corrective to all those accounts which have attempted to excise the social psychological and presumed kinship basis of ethnic communities and nationalism. In one particularly incisive essay, Connor reveals the erroneous analysis and misplaced optimism of evolutionary modernisation theory, in the light of renewed worldwide ethnic separatism. In another, he demonstrates the inadequacies of economic explanations and particularly those based on the idea of relative deprivation, in accounting for ‘ethno-regional’ nationalisms. But his justified critique of Deutschian assimilation theory can lead to an overestimation of the power of ethnic separatism in relation to state sovereignty and a flexible inter-state system. His exclusively social psychological account of ethnicity, too, omits the often rich cultural elements of memory and symbolism, which nationalists subsequently draw upon. While Connor’s approach illuminates the ways in which ethnic masses are mobilised in nationalist movements, it is perhaps less useful for analysing the more routine sentiments of national identity in advanced, stable and democratic states, particularly where there is a high degree of immigration and intermarriage.¹²

 

Connor’s modernism with regard to the advent of the nation also poses problems. How are we to measure the extent and diffusion of collective awareness? Connor is all too conscious of the limitations of our sources, particularly for pre-modern periods and for lower classes. But should we rely on questionnaires and voting patterns to establish the degree of national formation? Can the nation be said to ‘exist’ only when the majority votes in national elections? This would appear to be too restrictive a criterion. It assumes first that the nation is necessarily a mass phenomenon, second that awareness is tantamount to participation, and third that in democracies, at any rate, participation is measured by voting.

All three assumptions can be contested. While it is true that the ‘modern nation’ is a mass phenomenon, this is no more than an interesting tautology, unless of course we claim a priori that the only kind of ‘nation’ is the ‘modern nation’. If we do not accept this equation, then, presumably, we would have to concede that in pre-modern epochs there was a type of nation that was more of an elite or a middle-class phenomenon. With regard to the second assumption, people

 

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can be aware or be made aware of something without participating in it, for example, the judiciary or the global system of states. We can, moreover, feel a sense of belonging to a community without being able to participate in its political institutions. That is, I suggest, very much what occurred in Europe in the early modern period, if not earlier, as well as in many ethnic communities around the world. As for the third assumption about the franchise, even in democracies people might insist they belonged to a given nation, that they were Frenchmen or Japanese, without having political rights in that nation. They might even volunteer for war service without being able to vote for or against the war. Besides, there are other modes of participation in the nation—education being, perhaps, the most important for mass citizenship, as well as for collective self-awareness.

 

The psychology of ethnic affiliation

 

A similar combination of perennial ethnicity with political modernism can be found in Donald Horowitz’s great study of ethnic group conflict in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, Ethnic Groups in Conflict. He too traces ethnic affiliation to the sense of kinship ties. In the spirit of Weber, he writes:

 

Ethnicity is based on a myth of collective ancestry, which usually carries with it traits believed to be innate. Some notion of ascription, however diluted, and affinity deriving from it are inseparable from the concept of ethnicity.

 

(Horowitz 1985:52)

 

Ethnicity is best viewed as a form of greatly extended kinship. The language of ethnicity is the language of kinship; both havze an ascriptive character; ethnic ties are pyramided on family ties; and ethnicity meets widespread needs ‘for familiarity and community, for family-like ties, for emotional support and reciprocal help, and for mediation and dispute resolution—for all the needs served by kinship, but now on a larger canvas’ (ibid.: 81).

 

Citing Fishman, Horowitz argues that the sense of ethnic intimacy and bondedness is based on kinship ties and laden with familial emotion. Ethnicity builds on kinship, even if it extends the range of ‘kinsmen’ to include neighbours and those who share common cultural traits. It is possible to acquire an ethnic identity by migration, conversion and intermarriage; and ethnic groups vary in the extent to which they are prepared to receive outsiders into the fold. Nevertheless, most people are born into an ethnic group, so that whatever other differences there might be between groups, birth ascription is ultimately the defining element of ethnicity (ibid.: 57–60, 77–81).

 

Of course, group difference and discrimination is near-universal. Horowitz cites Henri Tajfel’s experiments in group formation and discrimination on the basis of quite casual differences, to show the willingness of group members to sacrifice economic gain for positive social identity and comparative group

 

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advantage. But, unlike other random groups, ethnic groups ‘tie their differences to affiliations that are putatively ascriptive and therefore difficult or impossible to change’. In fact, ethnic groups are always comparing themselves with others, and the quest for group worth and collective self-esteem is well nigh universal.

 

This perennial struggle for relative group worth in comparison with significant others also forms me basis of ethnic conflict today (ibid.: 141–3). It is typically expressed in ethnic stereotypes, which categorise groups as economically and culturally ‘advanced’ or ‘backward’ in relation to the (ex-) colonial West. These ethnic categorisations, when combined with judgments about the advanced or backward state of the regions in which ethnic groups reside, form the basis for a broad and influential typology of secessionist (and irredentist) movements in polyethnic states (ibid.: ch. 6), which I examined in an earlier chapter (see pp. 68–9).¹³

 

Ethnically plural national states are characteristic of much of contemporary Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. They are the product of the massive changes wrought by the advent of the modern colonial state and capitalist economy. Here Horowitz makes a crucial point. Until the arrival of colonialism, the struggle for relative group esteem was small-scale, localised and sporadic. Today, the huge scale of the territories enfolded by the modern colonial state and the penetration of the modern cash economy has thrown together in constant interaction many previously separate and isolated ethnic groups, and made the struggle for relative group esteem through ethnic comparison much more intense and pervasive, as ethnic communities compete for the prize of power over the modern state (ibid.: 66–77; cf. Young 1985).

 

Unlike Connor and Fishman, Donald Horowitz’s focus is on the impact of colonialism and its consequences for the plural ethnic states that it created in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, and he gives a rich and illuminating account of the ways in which ethnic parties sought to capitalise on the new opportunities opened up by colonialism and to compete in the new political arena of the modern territorial state. At the same time, Horowitz shares their perennialist and functional analysis of ethnicity. Like Fishman and Connor, Horowitz insists on the presumed kinship basis of ethnicity, and its vital subjective components, though, curiously, in his analysis of the origins of the plural state, he accords little or no role to pre-colonial ethnic communities and conflicts. His marked interest in the underlying social psychological mechanisms of ethnic identification leads Horowitz to underestimate the power of ethnic cultural traditions and religions in providing resources both for ethnic nationalist competition and for the territorial nationalism of the new state and its dominant ethnic community. At the same time, Horowitz gives us a much more historical, structural, and rationalist account of ethnic conflict in the modern plural national state, and this raises the question of why ethnicity itself might not be amenable to a similar kind of historical and structural, if not instrumental, analysis. While on a general level his analysis of the fictive (or better, presumed) kinship basis of ethnicity and ethno-genesis cannot be bettered, one is left wondering how and why particular ethnic communities and identities emerge and decline, and how his analysis relates to the historical fortunes

 

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of these groups. It is also not clear how ethnic conflict in the new states is related to the spread of nationalist ideologies and to the formation of nations and national states.¹⁴

 

The immemorial nation?

 

The analyses of Connor and Horowitz pose a fundamental problem: how can we combine a perennialist account of ethnic ties with a modernist, historical approach to the nation, if it is held that the nation is either a form of, or grew in some way out of the ethnic community? Is not the nation perennial too?

 

This is the position adopted by John Armstrong and by several historians. For Armstrong, the group identity called the ‘nation’ is simply a modern equivalent of pre-modern ethnic identity, which has existed all through recorded history. Armstrong argues that throughout history, the distinction between members of the ethnic community and strangers has permeated every language and provided the basis for durable ethnic group boundaries. Following Earth’s analysis of social organisation and group boundaries, Armstrong sees the clusters of perceptions and attitudes that we call ‘ethnicity’ forming and dissolving in every period of history. Some of these clusters, sustained by various myths and symbols, have endured for centuries, and have provided the bases for the later emergence of ‘national’ identities. Armstrong distinguishes between ethnicity in pre-modern epochs as a persistent group identity that ‘did not ordinarily constitute the overriding legitimisation of polity formation’, and nations in the nationalist era, ‘when consciousness of ethnic identity became a predominant force for constituting independent political structures’ (Armstrong 1982:4).

 

Yet he also regards nations as existing in pre-modern epochs; he speaks of ‘the slow emergence of nations in the pre-modern period’ (ibid.: 7).

 

And elsewhere he distinguishes between pre-modern nations before the advent of the nationalist era about 1800, and modern nations thereafter, with the latter being formed on the basis of an explicit ideology of nationalism (Armstrong 1992).

 

But, given his Barthian approach, which sees ethnicity as maintained by social boundaries rather than primordial attachments or presumed kinship ties, how shall we understand Armstrong’s perennialism? Does he regard modern nations as continuous with, and in some cases growing out of, older ethnic identities? Or does he see ethnic identities and pre-modern nations as recurrent phenomena in every period of recorded history, emerging and dissolving, with particular modern nations having little or no relationship to pre-modern ethnic identities or nations? In other words, is his a version of perennialism that emphasises continuity between modern nations and pre-modern ethnic groups, or one that emphasises recurrence of ethnic and national identities, but little or no continuity?

 

There is evidence in Armstrong’s writings for both positions. But I am inclined to think that he adheres more to a ‘recurrent’ than to a ‘continuous’ version of perennialism, especially when he sees nationalism as part of a long cycle of ethnic identity. Of course, there are some cases of continuity between modern

 

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nations and pre-modern ethnic identities, such as diaspora communities like the Armenians and Jews, or cases like the French and Russians, but for the most part Armstrong seems to stress the ways in which, despite their durable myths and symbols, ethnic identity is subject to long-term emergence, transformation and dissolution, and is therefore a recurrent phenomenon. This would also appear to follow from his largely phenomenological approach, to which I shall return in the next chapter.¹⁵

 

In contrast to Armstrong, many historians have been concerned to trace a continuity between particular modern nations and pre-modern ethnic communities. Theirs is a more ‘continuous perennialism’. This was certainly the position of an older generation of historian who, under the influence of nationalism, tended to see nations and nationalism everywhere in antiquity and the Middle Ages. But we can also see this kind of ‘retrospective nationalism’ at work in a number of more recent historical studies. Thus Brandon treated the ancient Zealots in Roman Judea as nationalist guerillas (a term that might be extended to the Hasmonean revolt of the Hasidim under Judas Maccabeus against the Seleucid Antiochus Epiphanes some two centuries earlier); their response to Roman occupation and oppression was of a piece with modern religious nationalisms, as they regarded the land of Israel as God’s holy land and the property of His people. In a more circumspect treatment, Doron Mendels also speaks of ancient Jewish nationalism’ from the Hasmoneans to Bar-Kochba, but qualifies this by equating the idea of nationality in antiquity with ethnicity and separating it from the modern idea of nations and nationalism. In this respect he approaches the distinction made much more forcefully by Moses Finley with regard to the ancient Greeks. There was, argued Finley, no Greek political nation, since the prevalent political unit was the polis. On the other hand, there was a a wide cultural network and a broad ethnic identity among the Hellenes (Brandon 1967; Mendels 1992; Finley 1986: ch. 7).¹⁶

 

For Steven Grosby, on the other hand, we may use the term ‘nation’ with caution for the people of ancient Israel, from at least the seventh century BC. Memories of a united kingdom under David and Solomon, the sense of being a trans-tribal people of ‘all Israel’, the conviction that this people belonged to a designated territory ‘from Dan to Beer-sheba’, and that it belonged exclusively to them, and finally the belief that the land and people had been sacralised by the covenant with the one God, Yahweh—these were the ‘ingredients of nationality’ which separated Israel from the many surrounding tribal confederacies, city-states and empires of antiquity. Grosby argues that Israel was not alone in this development; we find it in neighbouring Moab, Edom and probably ancient Egypt, whereas ancient Greece and Mesopotamia remained either city-states or empires because they failed to develop a belief in a single land inhabited by a single people under a single ‘god of the land’. Hence, though in the modern epoch nations have become more widespread and numerous, as well as more sharply bordered, and have the benefit of legal citizenship, the idea of the nation was well known in pre-modern epochs, and in the ancient world it had its religiously defined counterparts (Grosby 1991; cf. Wiseman 1973).

 

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Grosby’s argument is in line with his emphasis on cultural primordiality, which we discussed earlier, but here he combines this theoretical concern with a careful examination of the Old Testament and other ancient evidence. But is his use of the term ‘nation’ similar to that of the majority of scholars of modern nations? Does not the substitution of religion for citizenship as a necessary component of the idea of the ‘nation’ separate his concept entirely from that of the ‘modern nation’? Can, and should, we then speak of a ‘pre-modern’ and a ‘modern’ kind of nation, and how would they be related? Certainly for modernists like Breuilly or Gellner, Grosby’s conception of pre-modern nations has little connection with that of the modern nation defined by citizenship and mass culture and education. But Grosby might well reply that the modernist usage is too restrictive, that it quite arbitrarily excludes members of a single broad category which possesses a number of similar features (named group, defined territory, myths and memories of ancestral peoplehood, cultural (religious) unity), but differ in certain other respects like legal citizenship and mass education. Could we, in fact, be dealing with two kinds of ‘nation’, or, better, perhaps a continuum from the one polar type to the other, with particular cases being ranged along it? Such a view would have the merit of being able to avoid the rather arbitrary exclusions which plague the field.

 

Of course, this formulation is necessarily abstract. It misses out the vital element of historical context. Suppose we grant the idea of two kinds of nation, or of a continuum between them; is not the modern type quite different from its predecessors exactly because of the historical context in which it was formed, and from which it derived its quite separate meaning, unknown and indeed unknowable to the ancient or medieval worlds? To bracket together these radically different formations may be simply another case of retrospective nationalism. After all, do not the very meanings of the terms we employ, which are always inadequate to the nuances and complexities of historical development and social life, derive from the changed contexts in which these concepts are used and hence reflect those changes? And were not the changes that inaugurated the modern world massive beyond previous human belief and knowledge?

 

But this is to beg the question of whether radical changes in some spheres of society and history—technology, communications, economics and demography, for example—necessarily have their counterparts in other spheres like culture, community and collective identity; and whether, if they have, the changes wrought are such as to make it necessary to treat more recent forms of culture, community and identity as utterly different and quite incommensurable with older forms, or whether, per contra, certain elements like kinship, memory and symbol, while differing in their particular contents between cases, remain constants of the human condition and are found in every historical context. Certainly, the case of ancient Israel gives us cause to reflect both on the definitional quandary of nationalism, and on the relationship between human communities like the ethnic group or the nation and the historical contexts in which beliefs and attachments to them have been formed.

 

8       Ethno-symbolism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the writings of scholars on nations and nationalism, three antinomies are frequently proposed: the ‘essence’ of the nation as opposed to its constructed quality; the antiquity of the nation versus its purely modern appearance; and the cultural basis of nationalism contrasted with its political aspirations and goals. These antinomies are built into both the theories of scholars and the historical scholarship and political activities of nationalists themselves; and it is well to recall how deeply nationalist formulations (which themselves are quite varied) have influenced the development of historical analysis of nations and nationalism, and through the historians the whole range of theories that we have been exploring.

 

As far as the historians are concerned, a great debate has raged over the second and third antinomies, the antiquity of nations and the nature of nationalism in the Middle Ages (and indeed in general), a debate that harks back to the conflicting views of Heinrich Treitschke and Ernest Renan over the origins and nature of nations, and of the German and French nations respectively. By the early twentieth century, the lines of division between the ‘objectivists’ who stressed the role of culture, and more especially language, in the definition and formation of nations, and the ‘subjectivists’ for whom nations are formed by popular will and political action, were well entrenched in European historiography. One consequence of this debate was that for the ‘objectivists’, nations and national sentiment could be found as far back as the tenth century, whereas for ‘subjectivists’ both were products of the eighteenth century (Renan 1882; Tipton 1972; Guenée 1985:216–20; Guibernau 1996: ch. 1).

 

‘Old, continuous’ nations

 

The debate has its more recent echoes. While most historians would accept that nationalism, the ideology and movement in general, was a modern phenomenon dating at the earliest to the late eighteenth century, there remain important divisions over the antiquity of nations and the nature of national sentiment. For many historians, national sentiment and nations can already be found as far back as the sixteenth century. Indeed, Liah Greenfeld’s massive study presents

 

 

170

 

Ethno-symbolism  171

 

a wealth of literary evidence of the period to make a cogent case for the first manifestation of national sentiment and the nation in England in the early sixteenth century—in fact, somewhat earlier than Hans Kohn had argued for English nationalism. It is clear from her detailed and wide-ranging account that ‘nationalism’ signifies ‘national sentiment’ rather than ‘nationalist ideology’, although by the early seventeenth century, with its return to Old Testament ideals of chosenness and its development of a Protestant martyrology, English national sentiment had become political in content and turned to outright nationalist ideology couched in religious language. Theoretically, Greenfeld argues that we can only speak of nationalism when significant segments of the population come to identify the ‘nation’ with the ‘people’, that is the whole population of the realm, and it was in early sixteenth-century England, she claims, that the fusion took place for the first time, and the totality of the population was defined as the ‘nation’ (Kohn 1940; Greenfeld 1992: introduction and ch. 1).¹

 

The Henrician Reformation is certainly an important moment in the evolution of national sentiment and political ideology in England, but for medieval historians like John Gillingham and Adrian Hastings, it is not clear why it should be preferred to an earlier period like the fourteenth century, when English became prevalent in administration and law, or even late Anglo-Saxon England, when an early nation-state with a common religion, vernacular language, administration and compact territory came into being. While we are unable to find explicit expressions of nationalism in this period, there are clear examples of an English national sentiment, such as the leading ecclesiastical writer, Aelfric, who explained in a letter to a nobleman why he had translated the Book of Judith into English:

 

It is set down in English in our manner, as an example to you people that you should defend your land against the invading army with weapons.

(cited in Hastings 1997:42)

 

Hastings argues, along with some other medieval historians, and against the modernist interpretations of Hobsbawm, Gellner and Anderson, that in England certainly, and less clearly in other West European countries, we can discern the features of nations and strong national feelings (including a similar use of terms like ‘nation’ to the modern sense) at least from the later medieval period. By the eleventh century, at least,

 

England is seen in biblical terms, a nation to be defended as the Israel of the Old Testament was defended. One feels aware of the sense of a people, kingdom and land, something regularly called ‘England’ though sometimes more grandly ‘Britain’, holding together local loyalties.

 

(Hastings 1997:42; cf. Gillingham 1992)

 

172  Critics and alternatives

 

For Hastings, indeed, the Vulgate version of the Bible, translated into the vernacular and read regularly to the people, proved the decisive factor in the development of a sense of nationhood in the Christian West.

 

The Bible, moreover, presented in Israel itself a developed model of what it means to be a nation—a unity of people, language, religion, territory, and government. Perhaps it was an almost terrifyingly monolithic ideal, productive ever after of all sorts of dangerous fantasies, but it was there, an all too obvious exemplar for Bible readers of what every other nation too might be, a mirror for national self-imagining.

 

(Hastings 1997:18)

 

Hastings admits that Protestantism multiplied the effect of the Israelite model through its dissemination of vernacular translations of the Bible, as well as through the Book of Common Prayer.

 

The impact of the two books on the intensification and re-formation of English consciousness cannot be over-emphasised.

(ibid. 1997:58)

 

By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the many editions of the Bible, but even more the compulsory weekly church services, brought an English Protestantism to almost everyone, heightening and redirecting a long-standing English national sentiment, which came to see the English as a ‘peculiar people’ engaged in a long struggle for freedom, first from Catholic Spain and then from Catholic France, and as, in Milton’s words, a

 

Nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Sion should be proclaim’d and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation.

(John Milton: Areopagitica, vol. II, cited in Hastings 1997:57)

 

By the early eighteenth century a more secularising and politicised version of this Protestant nationalism had become prevalent among the elites, although after the Union with Scotland the sense of ‘Englishness’ began to be conflated with, though never obscured by, ideas of a Protestant ‘British’ nation directed against France. Nevertheless, fully fledged secular political nationalisms, the first examples of Gellner’s ‘nationalism-in-general’, a vast wave of nationalisms which for Adrian Hastings are ‘said to constitute the “Age of Nationalism”’ and represent ‘a sort of Mark II nationalism’, had to wait until the American and French Revolutions, which proclaimed the supremacy of the ‘nation’, conceived as a willed political union of fellow-feeling and culturally similar ‘citizens’ (Kohn 1967b; Newman 1987; Colley 1992: ch. 1; Hastings 1997:28).²

 

The examples of England and France have provided the litmus test of the antiquity of the concept of the nation and the nature of national sentiment, as well as of the historical continuity of particular nations. This is epitomised in

 

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the well known distinction made by Hugh Seton-Watson between the ‘old, continuous’ nations and the deliberately created, new nations, those that Charles Tilly called ‘nations by design’. For both historians, the distinction related mainly to the advent of political nationalise, the ideology and movement. ‘Old, continuous nations’ were those that existed before 1789, well before nationalist ideologies and movements demanded, and provided vehicles for, the creation of nation-states; ‘new nations’ were those that nationalists set out to create according to their ideological blueprints (Seton-Watson 1977:6–13; cf. Tilly 1975: Introduction and Conclusion).³

 

For Hugh Seton-Watson, the distinction is essentially European. He lists the nations that evolved gradually, and describes the process by which they were formed over several centuries:

 

The old nations of Europe in 1789 were the English, Scots, French, Dutch, Castilians and Portuguese in the west; the Danes and Swedes in the north; and the Hungarians, Poles and Russians in the east.

 

(Seton-Watson 1977:7)

 

 

The process of formation of national identity and national consciousness among the old nations was slow and obscure. It was a spontaneous process, not willed by anyone, though there were great events which in certain cases clearly accelerated it.

 

(ibid.: 8)

 

The new nations, on the other hand, were formed over much shorter periods, by well known leaders using the written word and modern communications. Language and linguistic politics were the main factors in creating national consciousness in modern European new nations. Economic and geographical causes were more important in the formation of overseas nations of European origin, while state boundaries imposed by imperial governments formed the matrix of ex-colonial nations in much of Asia and Africa (ibid.: 9).

 

Pre-modern nations?

 

Seton-Watson’s narrative is impressive in its scope and the wealth of historical evidence he adduces, but it is not without its problems. Seton-Watson himself concedes the inevitability of some anachronism in singling out elements derived from the study of new nations in the formation of national consciousness of the old nations. And he admits to the impossibility of finding a ‘scientific definition’ of the nation, claiming that

 

a nation exists when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.

(ibid.: 5, 11)

 

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This formulation, of course, begs the question not only of the number of people considered to be ‘significant’, but also of the nature of the ‘community’ in which they are located. In practice, it is the politically or culturally defined ethnic community that Seton-Watson has in mind, as the rest of his great book demonstrates; where this is absent, as in much of Asia and Africa, the ‘nation’ to be created is an imposition of European ideas through imperial state institutions.

 

There is a basic problem with this kind of continuous perennialism. As Susan Reynolds points out, there is the temptation to read back into the formation of the ‘old’ nations the assumptions of modern nationalism, and in particular the idea that ‘nations are objective realities, existing through history’. This tends to promote a ideological emphasis on the ‘predestined nation-states’. As Reynolds notes:

 

A more fundamental distortion arises from the fact that belief in the objective reality of nations inevitably diverts attention from itself: since the nation exists, belief in it is seen not as a political theory but as a mere recognition of fact. The history of nationalism becomes less a part of the history of political thought than of historical geography, while the starting-point of political development becomes the nation, with its national character or national characteristics. This pre-existing nation is then seen as moving through the attainment of ‘national consciousness’ to find its own rightful boundaries in the nation-state.

 

(S.Reynolds 1984:251, 252–3)

 

It is from this standpoint that Susan Reynolds takes issue with the ideological framework of historians like Seton-Watson for whom

 

The long process by which in Europe sovereign states arose and nations were formed has its origins in the collapse of the Roman empire, the attempts to revive an imperial power, the slow decay of the revival, and the still slower withering away of its mythology.

 

(Seton-Watson 1977:15)

 

According to Reynolds, this kind of perspective prevents us from appreciating the ideas and sentiments of the early (or later) Middle Ages for what they were in themselves, without imposing a retrospective relationship

 

between the medieval ‘people’ and its kingdom on the one hand and the modern ‘nation’ and its state on the other.

(S.Reynolds 1984:253)

 

To avoid confusion, Susan Reynolds proposes to use the adjective ‘regnal’ in place of ‘national’, since the medieval kingdom

 

Ethno-symbolism  175

 

corresponded to a ‘people’ (gens, natio, populus), which was assumed to be a natural, inherited community of tradition, custom, law and descent.

(ibid.: 250)

 

By about 900, the idea of peoples as communities of custom, descent and government was well entrenched. Soon it became attached to the highest form of medieval government, the kingdom, and was provided with supporting genealogies and myths of origin, which were often traced back to Aeneas or Noah by writers from Isidore of Seville in the seventh century to Fredegar, Orderic Vitalis and Geoffrey of Monmouth, right up to the authors of the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 (S.Reynolds 1983).⁴

 

This suggests that, in the medieval West at any rate, a regnal consciousness, which married ideas of kinship and custom with royal government, defined the ‘peoples’ of the area; and, though Reynolds regards the term ‘ethnic’ as nearly always combining ‘connotations of both descent and culture’ (and is therefore akin to ‘racial’), her own idea of a ‘people’ (gens) as a community having beliefs of common descent, custom and law, associated with the residents of a particular territory, is fairly close to the perennialist’s view of recurrent subjective ethnicity— although it is, in her case, clearly differentiated from modern nations and nationalism. For, like Connor and Grosby, Reynolds’ analysis focuses on popular ideas, beliefs and perceptions of the participants, rather than on the analyst’s view of the referents of those ideas, perceptions and beliefs (ibid.: 255, esp. note 8; 256–9).⁵

 

This still leaves open the question of whether we can speak of a measure of continuity between medieval (or ancient) ethnic or regnal formations and modern nations, in at least some cases. For organic nationalists, of course, the quest for ‘our true ancestors’ was essential to the cause of the nation. Even voluntarist political nationalists looked for some kind of ideological affinity with an ancient and preferably renowned exemplar, as the French patriots harked back to Roman virtue and glory, as well as their ‘Gallic ancestors’ (Rosenblum 1967: ch. 2; Herbert 1972; Poliakov 1974, ch. 1; cf. Viroli 1995).

 

But this kind of organic assumption has come in for sharp criticism. Lesley Johnson, who applies the Andersonian view of the nation as an imagined political community to the medieval world, cites a popular example from the introduction to an exhibition catalogue on the Anglo-Saxons, The Making of England, where the author argues that ‘The Anglo-Saxons…were the true ancestors of the English of today.’ The search for ‘true ancestors’ of the nation is part of the nationalist heritage and its concern for cultural authenticity. As such, it tends to assume what has to be proved, and posits a historical continuity which, given the silences and complexities of the historical evidence, is at best problematic (Johnson 1995).⁶

It is, of course, possible to find historical examples where a strong case for some measure of continuity between pre-existing ethnic communities (ethnies) and modern nations can be made. This is particularly true of peoples whose identities have been shaped and ‘carried’ by a scriptural religion, the Armenians

 

176  Critics and alternatives

 

and Jews being the outstanding, but by no means the only, examples. At the same time, as John Hutchinson remarks:

 

The point here is that one cannot deduce from the prior existence of ethnie that they necessarily have any causal status in the formation of modern national societies. To do so without empirical examination is to make uncritical assumptions about continuities between premodern ethnic and modern national identities and to fall into the post hoc propter hoc fallacy.

(Hutchinson 1994:26)

 

What is needed, then, is more hard evidence of links—social, cultural and political—between medieval regnal or ethnic formations and modern nations. In the nature of things, such evidence is often difficult to obtain, especially if it is stipulated that both ethnicity and nationhood must be mass phenomena, and that in the medieval world, the peasants must therefore be aware of their ethnic and regnal ties, if we are to grant the existence of ethnic communities or nations.

 

But this is exactly what medievalists refuse to countenance. Hastings, for example, argues that

 

one cannot say that for a nation to exist it is necessary that everyone within it should want it to exist or have full consciousness that it does exist; only that many people beyond government circles or a small ruling class should consistently believe in it.

 

Equally it does not invalidate the existence of a nation in early modern Europe that many of the peasantry had little sense of being part of it. But, of course, if a specific society was overwhelmingly one of peasants and nobles only, then that might indeed be a decisive difficulty.

 

(Hastings 1997:26)

 

As against Connor, Gellner and Hobsbawm, Adrian Hastings cites France as a case of a nation centred on Paris long before most of the peasants could speak French or have some sense of being French, as described by Eugène Weber, and therefore, like England, largely preceding ‘its’ nationalism (ibid.: 26–7). For Hastings, this is a crucial aspect of the ‘historiographical schism’ between modernists like Hobsbawm, Gellner, Kedourie, Breuilly and Anderson, and their critics, because ‘the key issue at the heart of our schism lies in the date of commencement’ (sc. of nations and nationalism) (ibid.: 9). It is equally, of course, a sociological and political schism, and the vital issue of ‘commencement’ takes us back to rival definitions of the nation and of nationalism. It is one to which I shall return.

 

For the moment, I want to focus on the third antinomy, the contrast between the cultural basis and political goals of nationalism, because it throws a different light on both the nature and the antiquity of nations.

 

Ethno-symbolism  177

 

Cultural and political nationalism

 

For Susan Reynolds, the conjunction of regnum and ‘people’ meant that medieval ‘regnalism’ was always both political and cultural in content. This refutes the common idea that modern nationalism is simply the later politicisation of purely cultural or ethnic sentiments in pre-modern periods, and that the distinctive feature of modern nations is their sovereignty as mass political communities. The Middle Ages were full of loose but politically independent communities or ‘peoples’, each with its own ruler. It also appears to refute the separation of a purely cultural from an exclusively political type of national (or regnal) sentiment. In the Middle Ages, at any rate, and perhaps also in antiquity, if Mendels is correct, no such distinction was made (Mendels 1992: ch. 1; Grosby 1991; but cf. E.Hall 1992).

 

In the modern world, however, such a separation is much more feasible. John Breuilly, as we saw, wished to confine the use of the term ‘nationalism’ to a purely political movement; and Eric Hobsbawm also argued that nationalism’s only interest for the historian lay in its political aspirations, and especially its capacity for state-making (Breuilly 1993: Introduction; Hobsbawm 1990: Introduction).

 

But, as we saw, such a usage is unduly restrictive. It omits other important dimensions of ‘nationalism’ such as culture, identity and ‘the homeland’, and pays little attention to the character of the object of nationalist strivings, the ‘nation’. The result is a serious underestimation of the scope and power of nationalism, and of its ethnic roots.

 

This is the point made by John Hutchinson in his pioneering and thought-provoking analysis of cultural nationalism. Hutchinson does not deny the importance of ‘a political nationalism that has as its aim autonomous state institutions’. But he thinks that we cannot overlook the recurrent significance of cultural forms of nationalism; despite their much smaller scale and often transient character, we must accord due weight to ‘a cultural nationalism that seeks a moral regeneration of the community’ (Hutchinson 1994:41). In fact, we often find the two kinds of nationalism alternating in strength and influence; as political nationalism falters and ebbs, cultural nationalists, as it were, pick up the torch and seek to rejuvenate a frustrated and oppressed community.

 

What exactly is the vision of cultural nationalism and how does it differ from that of political nationalism? The latter’s ideal is of

 

a civic polity of educated citizens united by common laws and mores like the polis of classical antiquity.

Their objectives are essentially modernist: to secure a representative state for their community so that it might participate as an equal in the developing cosmopolitan rationalist civilisation.

 

By contrast, the cultural nationalist perceives the state as an accidental, for the essence of a nation is its distinctive civilisation, which is the product of its unique history, culture and geographical profile.

 

(Hutchinson 1987:12–13, original emphasis)

 

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For cultural nationalists, the nation is a primordial expression of the individuality and the creative force of nature. Like families, nations are natural solidarities; they evolve in the manner, so to speak, of organic beings and living personalities. Hence the aim of cultural nationalism is always integrative: it is a

 

movement of moral regeneration which seeks to re-unite the different aspects of the nation…by returning to the creative life-principle of the nation.

 

(ibid.: 14)

 

Hence the importance of historians who rediscover the national past and chart its destiny, and of artists who celebrate the heroes of the nation and create out of the collective experience of the people. So the small circles of cultural nationalists form clubs and societies, read poetry, edit journals and engage in rituals, and seek to promote national progress through communal self-help. If popularised by educators and journalists, cultural nationalism can spawn a

 

loose network of language societies, dramatic groups, publishing houses, lending libraries, summer schools, agricultural cooperatives and political parties.

 

(ibid.: 16–17)

 

Under the influence of Herder, this kind of cultural nationalism took root especially in Eastern Europe, for example among the Czechs and Ukrainians of the mid- to late nineteenth century. It could be found both among populations that existed only as ethnic categories, without much self-consciousness, such as the Slovaks, Slovenes and Ukrainians, who had few ethnic memories, distinctive institutions or native elites; and among well defined nations with definite borders, a self-aware population and rich memories, like the Croatians, Czechs, Hungarians and Poles; or among peoples with religious memories and institutions like the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians (ibid.: 17–18, 21–2).⁷

 

Hutchinson draws three conclusions from his analysis of the dynamics of cultural nationalism. The first is ‘the importance of historical memory in the formation of nations’. The second is ‘that there are usually competing definitions of the nation’, and their competition is resolved by trial and error during interaction with other communities. And the third is ‘the centrality of cultural symbols to group creation’, which are only significant because ‘of their power to convey an attachment to a specific historical identity’ (ibid.: 29–30).

 

This does not mean that cultural nationalism is a regressive force. It may look back to a presumed glorious past, but it repudiates both traditionalism and modernism. Instead, cultural nationalists should be seen

 

as moral innovators who seek by ‘reviving’ an ethnic historicist vision of the nation to redirect traditionalists and modernists away from conflict and

 

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unite them in the task of constructing an integrated distinctive and autonomous community, capable of competing in the modern world.

(ibid.: 34)

 

Such movements are recurrent. They continually re-emerge in times of crisis even in advanced industrial societies, because they answer to ‘a deep-seated conflict between the worlds of religion and science’. Here Hutchinson disputes Hans Kohn’s account of the transient nature of cultural nationalism in Eastern Europe as a response to the misalignment of ethnic and political boundaries there and its socioeconomic backwardness. Kohn had argued that once a middle class entered the political arena in Eastern Europe after 1848, cultural nationalism was superseded by a ‘rational’ political nationalism. But this very common assumption, echoes of which reverberate in today’s debate about ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism, fails to acknowledge that the

 

continuing hold of the historic religions suggests that there is no final resolution to this conflict (sc. between religion and science).

(ibid.: 40)

 

It is better, therefore, to see

 

cultural and political nationalism as competing responses—communitarian and state-oriented—to this problem. They form typically in alternating cycles, each eliciting the other. Their effect…is frequently to reinforce rather than to attenuate religious sentiments.

 

(ibid.: 40–1; Hutchinson 1994: ch. 3; cf. Kohn 1967a: ch. 7)⁸

 

As a sociological historian, Hutchinson underpins this theory with a rich and detailed analysis of the three national-cultural ‘revivals’ in modern Irish history: that of eighteenth-century intellectuals which culminated in the founding of the Royal Irish Academy in 1785; the romantic archaeological and literary movement of the early nineteenth century under George Petrie which culminated in the Young Ireland movement of Thomas Davis; and finally the much larger Gaelic revival of the 1890s around the Gaelic League and later the journals edited by Moran, Ryan and Arthur Griffith. Hutchinson is at pains to highlight the alternations between failed political nationalism and resurgent cultural movements, and the reasons why the cultural movements appealed to an intelligentsia whose mobility was blocked by professional and occupational restrictions under British rule. For an instrumentalist concerned with ethnic responses to state penetration, an explanation in terms of blocked mobility and frustrated class interests might well suffice. But Hutchinson’s analysis is concerned to reveal how the interests and needs of particular classes and strata, caught between religious tradition and modern science, are met by historicist visions which derive from memories and symbols of Ireland’s often distant past, and how these rediscoveries could fire the disaffected youth to political action (ibid.: chs 4–5).

 

In his later judicious discussion of the main approaches and debates in the

 

180   Critics and alternatives

 

field, Hutchinson distances himself from the modernist positions, while approving of their role in exposing ‘the anachronistic Eurocentric and national assumptions of much scholarship about the human past’ and ‘exploding the primordialist account’ of nations and nationalism (Hutchinson 1994:37). For Hutchinson, Walker Connor’s insistence on the either/or nature of collective identities is misplaced. In all ages, most people have had multiple identities and the question we need to ask is: ‘do national identities become primary under certain circumstances in pre-modern periods?’ (ibid.: 12). This means that, pace the modernists,

 

a politicised ethnicity is neither entirely absent before the eighteenth century nor all-pervasive after it, but may be one of many identities that individuals might simultaneously adopt. There is a reluctance, therefore, to recognise that there may be recurring factors in the relationship between populations (e.g. military and cultural conflict) that may embed ethnicity as a political and cultural force in human history.

 

(ibid.: 37, original emphasis)

 

If this is so, then ‘the premodern structure of ethnic groups should have an important bearing on how the modern nation does form’. In other words, leaders and elites do not have the autonomy from previous ethnic traditions and cultures in their projects of nation-building that modernist instrumentalists claim for them. They are constrained by beliefs and ideas about the past and by the cultures of particular communities.⁹

 

For Hutchinson, then, memories and symbols play an important role in defining the nature and history of the nation, and in securing the attachment of many people to particular nations. He is rightly concerned to vindicate a separate realm for culture in the formation of nations, and argues convincingly for a distinct politics of cultural nationalism. Hutchinson is more cautious about accepting perennialist notions, perhaps because he is concerned to repudiate any form of primordialism and essentialism; his acceptance of a recurrent ethnicity throughout history is qualified. However, his historical analysis of Ireland and other nations and his emphasis on historical memory and historic religion, suggest a continual interest in the importance of the process of ‘reaching back’ into the ethnic past and in the revival of older cultural traditions. This implies a rejection of any idea that nations are ‘invented’.

 

Nevertheless, it could be argued that Hutchinson does not go far enough; the movement back, from the present to the (ethnic) past, needs to be supplemented by the movement forward, from the past to the (national) present, even though that method is fraught with problems, something of which Hutchinson is acutely aware. But if we make no attempt to move forward from the past, in an open empirical manner, we risk reading the past only through the eyes of the present, as the product of the needs and preoccupations of present generations and elites. That is as unsatisfactory as to assume the converse, that the past shapes the present, thus leaving no room for rupture and innovation.¹⁰

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Myth-symbol complexes

 

Reaching back into the past and moving forward from it to the present, implies a concern and a method based on a conception of long-term history. This is the starting-point of John Armstrong’s monumental, path-breaking analysis of medieval Middle Eastern and European civilisations and ethnic identities, Nations before Nationalism. Its overall aim is to explore ‘the emergence of the intense group identification that today we term a “nation”’, and its basic assumption is that ‘the key to the significance of the phenomena of ethnic identification is persistence rather than genesis of particular patterns’. For this reason,

 

A time dimension of many centuries (similar to the longue durée emphasised by the Annales school of French historiography) is essential for disentangling independent ethnic experiences from the effects of diffusion and mimesis. An extended temporal perspective is especially important as a means of perceiving modern nationalism as part of a cycle of ethnic consciousness. Because the epoch of Absolutism that immediately preceded European nationalism involved, at least for elites, an exceptionally strong rejection of ethnic differentiation, nationalism is often seen as utterly unprecedented. A longer look suggests that widespread intense ethnic identification, although expressed in other forms, is recurrent.

 

(Armstrong 1982:4)

 

Here it is quite clear that, as we saw earlier, the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘nation’ form part of a continuum, and that what matters is not the form they take in different epochs, but the persisting group perceptions and sentiments themselves. Although pre-modern persistent group identities, whether labelled ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’, are distinguished from ‘nations’ after the late eighteenth century, ‘where consciousness of ethnic identity became a predominant force for constituting independent political structures’, the body of Armstrong’s book suggests that he regards ethnicity and nationhood as continuous, even though it is ethnic identities that form the subject of his analysis.¹¹

 

Armstrong’s point of departure is ethnic exclusion, the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the universal comparison with the ‘stranger’.

 

Terms like ‘goyim’, ‘barbaroi’ and ‘nemtsi’ all imply such perception of the human incompleteness of persons who could not communicate with the in-group, which constituted the only ‘real men’.

 

(ibid.: 5)

 

The universality of ethnic opposition is why John Armstrong finds Fredrik Earth’s boundary approach so illuminating. Whereas previous approaches to ethnicity had started from the unique cultural traits of each group, Barth’s anthropological model focused on the interactions and perceptions of members of a social group, which was no longer defined by some cultural ‘essence’, but rather by its self-

 

182   Critics and alternatives

 

perceived boundaries. For Barth, ethnicity is a socially bounded type of category, and one that is both ascribed by others and self-ascribed. In Earth’s own words:

 

A categorical ascription is an ethnic ascription when it classifies a person in terms of his basic, most general identity, presumptively determined by his origin and background. To the extent that actors use ethnic identities to categorise themselves and others for the purposes of interaction, they form ethnic groups in this organisational sense.

(Barth 1969:14)

 

If ethnic continuity depends on ascription and the maintenance of a social boundary, then cultural features that signal the boundary may change over time, as may the members’ cultural characteristics.

 

The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff it encloses.

(Barth 1969:15)¹²

 

From Armstrong’s point of view, this means that we cannot distinguish ‘ethnic’ from other types of group in a purely definitional manner.

 

The boundary approach clearly implies that ethnicity is a bundle of shifting interactions rather than a nuclear component of social organisation.

(Armstrong 1982:6)

 

We must also abandon the idea of every ethnic community occupying an exclusive territory; and this in turn means that ethnicity is part of a continuum of social collectivities, especially classes and religious bodies. Though certain tendencies mark out each of these types of community, over long time periods, each of these may transmute into one of the others. The dividing line between class and ethnicity is sharper, but also harder to define than that between religion and ethnicity. However, lower classes in themselves rarely constitute ethnic collectivities; they lack an elite with the necessary skills in communications and bargaining, and so are unable to maintain a distinct identity within a larger polity (ibid.: 6–7).

 

For John Armstrong, as for Barth, symbols are crucial to the survival of ethnic identification, because they act as ‘border guards’ distinguishing ‘us’ from ‘them’. But symbols such as words act as signals both to others outside and to members of the group, and so symbolic interaction is always a type of communication, with symbols as the content and communication the means by which they become effective. The content of symbols, such as linguistic ‘border guards’, is often established generations before they act as cues to group members; that is why ‘ethnic symbolic communication is communication over the longue durée, between the dead and the living’ (ibid.: 8).

 

Ethno-symbolism  183

 

As important as symbols are legitimising myths. Symbols usually persist because they are incorporated in a mythic structure, and over long periods of time

 

the legitimising power of individual mythic structures tend to be enhanced by fusion with other myths in a mythomoteur defining identity in relation to a specific polity.

 

(ibid.: 8–9)

 

The recital of myths can engender an intense awareness among group members of their ‘common fate’, by which is meant the extent to which an episode

 

arouses intense affect by stressing individuals’ solidarity against an alien force, that is, by enhancing the salience of boundary perceptions.

(ibid.: 9)

 

 

 

A framework of national emergence

 

Myth, symbol and communication, then, are the three major components in any attempt to analyse the persistence of ethnic identities in pre-modern periods. It is impossible, argues Armstrong, to present a single coherent theory of ethnogenesis, and more broadly, ethnic and national identity, except at a purely abstract and very general level. Instead, we can only isolate recurrent cultural, social, political and economic factors, and try to build up a picture of the patterns of influences which bear on the rise and persistence of such collective cultural identities, proceeding from the broadest and most long-term to the most circumscribed and immediate. Here I can only summarise the main points of Armstrong’s argument.

 

Perhaps the broadest of all factors, but also the most general and hence remote, concerns different ways of life. The most striking thing here is not material attributes, but mental attitudes. Of these, the most important are different kinds of nostalgia, defined as ‘a persistent image of a superior way of life in the distant past’ (ibid.: 16). Two kinds of nostalgia for a lost ‘golden age’ are historically significant: nomadic attachment for the vast expanses of the desert, typified in the Arab idea of paradise as shady, watered oases with date-palms—despite Islam’s urban setting— or the Central Asian ideal of luxuriant pasture with cool mountain conifers. Compare this with the European, and Christian, peasant ideal of secure, tranquil plots of earth, derived from semi-nomadic Jewish roots and the pastoral background of Indo-European peoples such as the Greeks and Romans who sought compact territorial settlements. This contrast between nomadic and sedentary lifestyles and nostalgias found its cultural counterpart in the two main principles of social organisation: the genealogical which was characteristic of the Middle East, and the territorial which was most highly developed in Europe (ibid.: ch. 2).

 

These contrasts tended to be reinforced, with some variations, by the creeds

 

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of medieval Christendom and Islam, which provided legitimising myths and symbols for two great civilisations.

 

Indeed, their common origins, as well as their geographical proximity, made the Islamic and the Christian civilisations the major negative reference points for one another. In this respect, the two civilisations resembled on a grand scale ethnic groups that commonly define themselves by reference to out-groups.

(ibid.: 90)

 

Armstrong them explores the legacies of different types of city and empire and the effect of their legal systems and especially their universal myths, derived ultimately from Mesopotamian models, for the persistence of ethnic identities. As important to these empires as their economic and military power was their legitimising constitutive political myth, or mythomoteur. The growth of capital cities and centralised administrations has been critical to the diffusion of such mythomoteurs and the penetration of ‘myth-symbol complexes’ in wider populations.

 

This part of the analysis is predicated on Armstrong’s belief that politics, notably state formation, was critical in ethnic evolution, though it could never be a sufficient condition, and care must be taken not to ascribe causal roles to earlier institutions that bear superficial resemblances to those familiar in our own time (ibid.: 129).

 

As important for Armstrong are religious organisations. This is especially clear in the archetypal diasporas of the Jews and Armenians, with their relatively decentralised ecclesiastical organisation, which has been as effective in penetrating the population in symbolic communication as the more hierarchical organisations of the established churches or the Islamic courts and ulema. Heretical sects and diasporas also illustrate the way in which ethnoreligious identities were as crucial for preserving ethnic identities as language (ibid.: ch. 7).

 

Indeed, the two main diaspora cases demonstrate how sacral language is separable from everyday vernaculars, and how language itself functions as a marker and symbol of ethnicity, at least within the major ‘fault lines’ of language groups (Slav, Latin and Germanic). Language as a definer of ethnic boundaries may therefore be regarded as a product of the interplay of other factors.

 

In other words, in the long run politics and religion have been the independent variables in the linguistic interaction within each European language family. For somewhat different reasons and with considerably different effects, politics and religion also constituted the principle formative variables in Islam.

(ibid.: 282)

 

In conclusion, Armstrong reiterates his belief in the centrality of myths and symbols in cultural history.

 

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Whatever the ultimate source of the myths, symbols and patterns of communication that constituted ethnic identity, their persistence is impressive.

 

(ibid.: 283)

 

Armstrong sees ethnic identity as a particular affect phenomenon and a specific value conditioned by the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’, whereas the great religions have been the major sources of a range of values and value differentiation (ibid.: 291). They have also provided much of the myth-symbol content of ethnic identities in Islam and Christendom. Hence Armstrong’s typological schema, entitled ‘Emergence of national identity’, presents a complex matrix of factors influencing the rise of national identity, in which religion and the legitimising myths and mythomoteurs it inspires, plays the central role.

 

Culture and the border

 

In so bald a summary, it is impossible to do justice to the scope and richness of the historical and sociological materials which John Armstrong presents in his analysis of particular themes and cases, as he compares historical patterns from the medieval Islamic and Christian civilisations. No other work attempts to bring together such a variety of evidence—administrative, legal, military, architectural, religious, linguistic, social and mythological—from which to construct a set of patterns in the slow formation of national identity. Few other works pay such attention to the importance of tracing causal chains over the longue durée to disentangle the multiple effects and reciprocal influence of so many factors in the persistence of ethnic identities. In doing so, Armstrong makes a strong case for grounding the emergence of modern national identities on these patterns of ethnic persistence, and especially on the long-term influence of ‘myth-symbol complexes’. This represents, by implication, a powerful rebuttal of the more extreme modernist views that reject any connections between modern nations and nationalism and earlier ethnic identities.¹³

 

This does not mean that Armstrong has given us a complete, alternative ‘grand narrative’ to that of the modernists. It is indeed doubtful that he would aspire to do so. It is vain, therefore, to look to him for an alternative ‘theory’ of the kind that Gellner offered, or indeed for a single line of argument through his taxonomy of historical factors. For those in search of a single theory, that may be a criticism. For others, it is a virtue, since it sensitises us to the vast range of influences that go into the making and persistence of cultural identities, and thereby puts us on our guard against the temptation to think of ethnicity as something infinitely malleable and ‘inventable’.

 

Nevertheless, in a sense, Armstrong has provided, if not a theory, then a definite perspective from which to judge and research the rise and persistence of both ethnic and national identities. We may regret that he has not sought to detail the differences between pre-modern ethnic and modern national identities or the part played by nationalist ideologies in those differences. This is liable to

 

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cause confusion, and to raise questions about the influence of ‘retrospective nationalism’ and the danger against which Armstrong himself had cautioned, of conflating the effects of earlier collectivities which bear only superficial or very general resemblances to later ones.

 

There are other, more serious, problems. They spring from John Armstrong’s peculiar combination of Earth’s transactionalism and the phenomenological approach to social attitudes over the longue durée. One problem concerns the difficulty of reconciling a description of ethnic identities as ‘affect phenomena’, clusters of attitudes and bundles of shifting interactions, with the many examples of ethnic communities that have survived over the centuries, and even millennia. In his concern to recognise the fluctuations of attitudes and sentiments that members of ethnic groups display, Armstrong opts for a phenomenological approach which may be useful in delineating the mixed and changing ethnic identities of the modern West, but is less suited to the much slower rhythms of ethnic identification and communication in pre-modern epochs.

 

It is clear that other factors must be invoked in the very definition of ethnicity if we are to explain such long-term persistence. That definition comes near the end of Armstrong’s analysis: it is myths, symbols and patterns of communication that ‘constitute’ ethnic identity, and it is myths, including mythomoteurs, that entrench sets of values and symbols over long time-spans (ibid.: 283). But this raises a further problem, this time for the Barthian framework which Armstrong has adopted. In fact, Barth’s approach is much more ‘transactional’ than phenomenological; it focuses on the ways in which transactions between ascriptive categories, far from fragmenting and dissolving them, reinforce the social boundary between them. This element is rather underplayed in Armstrong’s own analysis, except in relation to the Crusades and religious heresies. But, more important, Fredrik Barth’s own approach suggests that ethnic identities cannot be regarded solely, or even mainly, as bundles of shifting interactions and expressions of affect alone; the ascriptive boundary creates an inter-generational as well as inter-ethnic social organisation of identification, and so is not easily subject to alteration by individuals and their attitudes.¹⁴

 

In fact, Armstrong supplies what Barth was at pains to reject: the ‘cultural stuff’ which the border encloses—in the form of myths, symbols and patterns of communication. The fact that these are often broadly (but not wholly) similar in neighbouring ethnic groups does not mean that the border encloses a black box or that ‘culture’ lacks potency. On the contrary: the myths, memories, symbols, values and patterns of communication that constitute ethnic identity constitute the distinctive elements of culture which the border encloses. This can be appreciated the moment we focus on the boundary mechanisms and ask: what does the border guard? Why is it that people within the border respond to particular signals and recognise certain myths and memories, while the same myths, symbols and memories leave those outside cold and unmoved? Even more, given the ubiquitous presence of the stranger, why is there so much variation in the scope and intensity of arousal of group members’ passions?

 

Symbols represent to particular human groups distinctive shared experiences

 

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and values, while myths explain to them the meanings of those experiences and exemplify and illuminate those values. If myths and symbols fail to resonate with the members of the group, it is because they do not, or no longer, perform these functions; they no longer represent, explain and exemplify. Hence they can no longer unite the members of the group, and they are correspondingly weakened and fragmented. Culture, therefore, the meanings and representations of symbols, myths, memories and values, is not some inventory of traits, or a ‘stuff’ enclosed by the border; culture is both an inter-generational repository and heritage, or set of traditions, and an active shaping repertoire of meanings and images, embodied in values, myths and symbols that serve to unite a group of people with shared experiences and memories, and differentiate them from outsiders. Such a conception supplements the boundary approach and suggests a fuller method for explaining ethnic persistence (see A.D.Smith 1984b).

 

‘Dual legitimation’

 

If Armstrong reached forward from the distant past to the age of nationalism, my own work has taken the opposite route: working back from the modern epoch of nation-states and nationalism to the earliest manifestations of collective cultural sentiments.

 

My starting-point was the ideology and movement of nationalism itself. Given the problems of definition in this field, it was necessary to observe certain methodological procedures. The first was to distinguish the various usages of the term ‘nationalism’, as

 

• doctrines or ideologies,

 

• movements,

 

• sentiments, and

 

• processes of ‘nation-building’, to which later we could add

 

• symbols and languages (of nationalism).

 

The ideology of nationalism itself could be reduced to its essential propositions, and its main tenets summarised:

 

• the world is naturally divided into nations, each of which has its peculiar character and destiny;
• the nation is the source of all political power, and loyalty to it overrides all other loyalties;
• if they wish to be free, and to realise themselves, men must identify with and belong to a nation;
• global freedom and peace are functions of the liberation and security of all nations;
• nations can only be liberated and fulfilled in their own sovereign states.

 

(A.D.Smith 1973a:10)¹⁵

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Thus we might term these propositions the ‘core doctrine’ of nationalism. In practice, specific nationalisms have added all kinds of secondary ideas and motifs, peculiar to the history and circumstances of each ethnic community or nation.

 

Next it was important to distinguish ‘nationalism’, the movement and ideology, from ‘national sentiment’, feelings on behalf of the welfare and strength of the nation, because one could have elite nationalisms without nations or widely diffused national sentiments, and vice-versa. Third, we should examine the basic ideals of the self-styled nationalists to establish a baseline for working definitions. This allowed one to define ostensively ‘nationalism’ as

 

an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of self-government and independence on behalf of a group, some of whose members conceive it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’.

 

(A.D.Smith 1983a:171)

 

Fourth, the ‘independence ideal’ of nationalism has a number of ideological correlates, including national integration and fraternity, territorial unification, economic autarchy, national expansion, cultural renewal and the accentuation of cultural individuality, and each of these can be selected as the goal of particular nationalisms at various times and in differing degrees. However, three basic leitmotifs can be found in every kind of nationalism: the ideals of national autonomy, national unity and national identity.

 

Finally, as a first step towards explanation, we need to distinguish different kinds of nationalist movement, and especially between voluntarist and organic varieties, and between territorially grounded and ethnically based nationalisms. Nevertheless, the three ideals of autonomy, unity and identity are always present in all these sub-types. In my view, they could even be traced in the ‘ethnocentric’ nationalisms of the ancient world, even though the idea of the nation tended to be submerged in other ideals, as well as in the more outward-looking ‘polycentric’ nationalisms of the modern world.¹⁶

 

This attempt to relate nationalism to ethnocentrism suggested a view of the ‘nation’, as deriving from the ‘ancient social formation of the ethnie’, where the term ‘ethnic’ represented those elements of a group’s culture that derived from its origins and history. In accordance with its etymology, the ‘nation’ should therefore be defined as

 

a group of human beings, possessing common and distinctive elements of culture, a unified economic system, citizenship rights for all members, a sentiment of solidarity arising out of common experiences, and occupying a common territory.

 

(A.D.Smith 1973a:18, 26)¹⁷

 

With the above important proviso, I accepted the modernity of both nations and nationalism, as befitted a student of Ernest Gellner. However, the initial sketch of the origins of ethnic nationalism which I offered stressed the role of

 

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political and religious, rather than social and cultural, factors. It argued that the modern epoch is characterised by the rise of the ‘scientific state’, a state whose efficacy depends on its ability to harness science and technology for collective purposes. The advent of this type of state challenges the legitimacy of religious explanations, and especially the theodicies which they offer in response to human suffering and evil. This gives rise to situations of ‘dual legitimation’, in which rival grounds of authority dispute for the allegiance of humanity. Particularly affected by this duality are the modern equivalents of pre-modern clerisies, the intellectuals. Typically, they respond to the painful mental dislocations of the ‘dual legitimation’ situation in one of three ways. The first is ‘neo-traditionalist’: adopting modern ways and means to reject the authority of the secular state and reassert traditional divine authority. The second response is ‘assimilationist’, a kind of messianic leap into the secular future, rejecting divine authority for that of the scientific state. The final response is ‘revivalist’, an attempt to combine in different ways the two kinds of authority, on the basis that ‘God works through the scientific state’ and that, when tradition is no longer relevant, human reason and divine providence can bring material progress and spiritual salvation. In this schema, the road to a nationalist solution to the deep crisis of dual legitimation is twofold. First, the messianic assimilationists are disappointed, their mobility is blocked and they are rejected by the (Western) scientific state, so they turn back to their ethnic communities and indigenous values. Second, the religious revivalists despair of abstract reason as the essence of a purified religion, and seek in indigenous culture and ethnic ‘history’, the specific pasts of their ethnic communities, that ‘authentic value’ which traditional religion no longer possesses and the secular state by itself can never acquire. From this twofold return to an ethnic past springs the desire to determine the course of the community oneself, without outside interference, and so become a ‘nation’ (A.D.Smith 1983a: ch. 10; 1973a:86–95).

 

To this general schema, The Ethnic Revival (1981) attempted to add a more rounded picture of the rise of romantic historicism of which nationalism was the political outgrowth, and a fuller account of the reasons why the intellectuals, and more especially the intelligentsia, turned to nationalism as a cure for their status discontents. Basically, the continual overproduction of high-skill professionals by the scientific state and the rigidities of their line bureaucracies, coupled with the contrast between the imperialist rhetoric of impersonal merit and frequent cultural discrimination, meant that highly educated men and women were being turned away from the centres of wealth and power in increasing numbers, and were thereby made available for mobilisation by historicist intellectuals seized by their community’s plight (A.D.Smith 1981a: chs 5–6). If we add die tendency for neo-romantic nationalism, of the kind that flourished in Western Europe’s ‘ethnic revival’ of the 1960s and 1970s, to surface as the result of a bureaucratic cycle of centralisation, alienation and fragmentation, followed by a renewed cycle of centralisation and state penetration, the inevitability of the nation and nationalism in an era of bureaucratic modernity becomes assured (A.D.Smith 1979: ch. 7).

 

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However, by the early 1980s, I came to feel that, while this analysis of alienated and deracinated indigenous intelligentsias radicalised by alien bureaucratic states helped to explain part of the phenomenon of nationalism, it signally failed to account for the broader social picture or explain the configurations of nations and the incidence and intensity of nationalisms. Its rather intellectualist analysis of the elites’ movement towards nationalism, from abstract ‘reason’ to ethnic ‘history’, hardly explained the passion with which they and their followers embraced indigenous ‘history’ and culture. Moreover, emphasis on intellectuals and elites obscured the broad, often cross-class nature of the movement and the national attachments of middle and lower strata. Such a ‘top-down’ modernism failed to do justice to the constraints on elite action and the limits on intellectual ‘construction’ set by popular ideas and culture. Finally, by using the same term ‘nationalism’ for both, I had overlooked the real ideological differences between ancient religious motifs and modern political ideologies, while obscuring the possible links between ancient and modern social formations. ‘Ethnocentric nationalism’ did not mark out a type peculiar to pre-modern epochs, and it assumed an ideological similarity across the ages which could not be supported by historical evidence. The problem, and its resolution, lay elsewhere.¹⁸

 

Ethnies and ethno-symbolism

 

In effect, what was needed was an historical sociology of nations and nationalism. In terms of ideologies, the specific concepts and movements of nationalism could be fairly securely dated to the later eighteenth century, even if there were earlier religious nationalisms in England and Holland. But in terms of national structures, sentiments and symbolism, the picture was much more complicated. It was possible to trace examples of all three, in sufficient and well documented quantities, back to at least the late medieval period in a number of European nations from England and France to Poland and Russia. Here was evidence of some measure of national continuity. But more important, it was possible to find examples of social formations in pre-modern periods, even in antiquity, that for some decades or even centuries approximated to an inclusive definition of the concept of the ‘nation’, notably among the ancient Jews and Armenians, but also to some extent among the ancient Egyptians, and perhaps the medieval Japanese and Koreans. In other words, the concept of the ‘nation’ was perennial, insofar as recurrent instances of this formation could be found in various periods of history and in different continents. Here, then, one could speak of national recurrence (see Greenfeld 1992: chs 1–3; A.D.Smith 1994; cf. Lang 1980; Lehmann 1982).

 

Though hardly sufficient to undermine the modernist paradigm, these examples seemed to cast doubt on Gellner’s insistence on the impossibility of nations in pre-modern periods. But there was a further problem. Throughout history and in several continents, there was considerable evidence, not just of ‘objective’ cultural (linguistic, religious, etc.) differences and categories, but of ‘subjective’ ethnic identities and ethnic communities, many of them locked into

 

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paired antagonisms. Again, one could point to both ethnic continuity and ethnic recurrence. Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Persians, Chinese and Japanese could be cited as examples of ethnic continuity, since, despite massive cultural changes over the centuries, certain key identifying components—name, language, customs, religious community and territorial association—were broadly maintained and reproduced for millennia. In other cases, such as the peoples of Ethiopia, the Fertile Crescent, northern India and the Balkans, ethnicity has been more of a recurrent phenomenon. That is to say, these regions have seen a succession of often well defined and well documented ethnic communities, with different groups forming, flourishing and being dissolved, usually through conquest, absorption or fragmentation (see Wiseman 1973; Ullendorff 1973; A.D.Smith 1981b, 1986a: chs 2–5).

 

In the light of these considerations, the focus of my analysis began to shift from nationalisms to nations, and from nations to ethnic communities. The study of ethnies (the French term for ‘ethnic communities’) became central to the understanding of why and where particular nations are formed, and why nationalisms, though formally alike, possess such distinctive features and contents. The focus of this analysis was the role of myths, memories, values, traditions and symbols. Already in The Ethnic Revival, I singled out

 

the myth of a common and unique origin in time and place that is essential for the sense of ethnic community, since it marks the foundation point of the group’s history, and hence its individuality.

 

(A.D.Smith 1981a:66)

 

Symbols, too—emblems, hymns, festivals, habitats, customs, linguistic codes, sacred places and the like—were powerful differentiators and reminders of the unique culture and fate of the ethnic community. So were shared memories of key events and epochs in the history of the community: memories of liberation, migration, the golden age (or ages), of victories and defeats, of heroes and saints and sages. So, in The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986), ethnic communities (ethnies) were defined as

 

named human populations with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a specific territory, and a sense of solidarity.

 

(A.D.Smith 1986a:32)

 

and their main components—collective name, myth of ancestry, historical memories, shared cultural elements, association with a homeland, and (partial) collective sentiments—were explored (ibid.: 22–32).¹⁹

 

In the ancient and medieval worlds, ethnicity played a much larger role than modernists, who rightly rejected the conflation of earlier collective cultural identities with modern nations and nationalisms, were willing to concede. There were ethnic minorities, diaspora communities, frontier ethnies, ethnic amphictyonies and even ethnic states, states dominated by particular ethnic

 

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communities such as ancient Egypt or early medieval Japan. In particular, the role of ethnic cores of empires such as the Assyrian had to be distinguished from that of peripheral ethnies, and the chances of survival of each assessed. The problem of ethnic survival seemed particularly important for later nationalisms: the ability to call on a rich and well documented ‘ethno-history’ was to prove a major cultural resource for nationalists, and myths of origins, ethnic election and sacred territories, as well as memories of heroes and golden ages, were crucial to the formulation of a many-stranded ethno-history. All this points to the importance of social memory; as the example of the relationship between modern and ancient Greeks shows,

 

ethnies are constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i.e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population.

 

(A.D.Smith 1991:29; cf. A.D.Smith 1992a)

 

This also reveals the distance between my ‘historical ethno-symbolic’ type of analysis and any version of primordialism. It is the sense of cultural affinities, rather than physical kinship ties, embodied in a myth of descent, shared historical memories and ethnic symbolism, that defines the structure of ethnic communities; and the same is true for any nations created on the basis of cultural affinity.²⁰

 

In line with Armstrong’s perspective, but without his specific phenomenological analysis, I came to see clusters of myths, symbols, memories, values and traditions, emerging from the shared experiences of several generations of cohabiting populations, as the defining cultural elements from which ethnic groups emerged. On the other hand, their crystallisation as self-aware communities, as opposed to other-defined ethnic categories, was the product of external factors such as folk cultures resulting from shared work and residence patterns; group mobilisation in periodic inter-state warfare producing memories and myths of defeat and victory; and especially the impact of organised religions with scriptures, sacred languages and communal priesthoods. From time to time, outside attacks on the homelands or customs of the community could inspire a heightened ethnicism, and a determined ethnic resistance, as occurred among some Greeks at the time of the Persian invasions or among some Jews under the hellenisation policies of the Seleucid monarch Antiochus Epiphanes IV But on the whole, ethnicity in pre-modern periods was not normally the basis of alternative polity formation, except where it combined with religion (A.D.Smith 1986a:32–41).²¹

 

As John Armstrong points out, this was to alter significantly in the modern world. Here the modernists make an important point. It was the revolutionary nature of the economic, administrative and cultural transformations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe that brought culture and ethnic identity to the fore as a basis for polity formation. But the origins of such a

 

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transformation can, in some cases, be traced even further back than the growth of vernacular printed literature stemming from Gutenberg and Luther’s Bible. A recent study of elite Scottish identity found that the crucial moment came in the reflective aftermath of Bannockburn and the Wars with England, with the rise of a distinctive ethno-history in historical and literary writings of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The same is true of the early formation of Swiss national identity. Its foundations in the Rütli Oath and Tell exploits were first recorded in The White Book of Sarnen (c. 1470) and subsequent writings. In these and other cases, we can trace the beginnings of an elite nationalism, and of the coalescence and gradual transformation of ethnic communities into early nations (Webster 1997; Im Hof 1991).²²

 

Origins and types of nation

 

How then is this transformation effected? Basically, there are two routes in the formation of nations, and they depend on the kind of ethnic community that served as their point of departure.

 

Of the two kinds of pre-modern ethnie,

 

The first is lateral and extensive, the second is vertical and intensive. In the first, we find communities that rarely penetrate deep in the social scale, but extend in ragged and imprecise fashion in space. Typically, ‘lateral’ ethnie are aristocratic, though usually clerical and scribal strata are included, along with some of the wealthier urban merchants. Equally typically, ‘vertical’ ethnie are urban-based, priestly, trading and artisan in their composition, with their ruling strata often thrown up from the wealthy and powerful factions in the towns; alternatively, they are loose coalitions of tribesmen under their clan chiefs, united for battle and later amalgamating, or co-existing with a dominant if primitive state and its monarch. In either case, the bond that unites them is of a more intensive and exclusive kind than among the lateral, aristocratic ethnie; hence its often marked religious, even missionary, quality.

 

(A.D.Smith 1986a:77–8)

 

The first route to nationhood, that of bureaucratic incorporation, involves the transformation of a loose, aristocratic ethnie into a territorial nation. The upper-class members of most lateral ethnies had no interest in imbuing their middle classes, let alone their subject lower classes, with their own ethnic culture. But, perhaps because of the failure to recreate the (Holy) Roman empire in Western Europe, the ensuing competition between the various monarchs and courts of France, England and Spain forced them to mobilise their urban middle classes, if only to extract their wealth, in order to wage war and display their pomp, as Henry VIII and Francis I did so conspicuously on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Inadvertently at first, they drew their middle classes into an increasingly accented, territorialised and politicised ‘national’ culture, i.e. one that, from being

 

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a preserve of the court, the aristocracy and the clergy, became a culture of ‘the people’, at first identified with the urban middle classes, but some centuries later with the mass of working men and, later, women. The result has been a more ‘civic’ type of national identity, fuelled by a largely territorial nationalism, although assimilating ethnic and cultural elements are usually to be found in even the most ardent civic nationalisms, such as the republican nationalism in France (A.D.Smith 1995a: ch. 4; cf. Corrigan and Sayer 1985).

 

In these cases, it was the bureaucratic state itself which forged the nation, gradually penetrating to outlying regions from the ethnic core and down the social scale. The second route to nationhood we may term one of vernacular mobilisation. Here a demotic ethnie is transformed largely under the aegis of an indigenous intelligentsia into an ethnic nation. In Central and Eastern Europe, and later in the Middle and Far East, and parts of Africa, native intellectuals and professionals rediscovered and reappropriated a selective ethno-history out of the pre-existing myths, symbols and traditions to be found in the historical record and in the living memories of ‘the people’, the mainly rural lower strata. This latterday return to an ‘ethnic past’ (or pasts) is a corollary of the nationalist quest for ‘authenticity’. Only that which can be shown to be ‘genuine’ and ‘ours’ can form the basis for a national identity, and that in turn requires a cultivation of indigenous history and vernacular languages and cultures, and the vernacular mobilisation of ‘the people’ in and through their own history and culture. The result is a type of nation founded on ‘ethnic’ conceptions, and fuelled by a genealogical nationalism; although even here, the nation, as in Germany or Greece, is simultaneously defined in territorial and political terms and minorities are, albeit more precariously, admitted (A.D.Smith 1989; cf. Kitromilides 1989; Brubaker 1992).

 

There is, in fact, a third route in the formation of nations which consist largely of immigrant fragments of other ethnies, particularly those from overseas. In the United States, Canada and Australia, colonist-immigrants have pioneered a providentialist frontier nationalism; and once large waves of culturally different immigrants were admitted, this has encouraged a ‘plural’ conception of the nation, which accepts, and even celebrates, ethnic and cultural diversity within an overarching political, legal and linguistic national identity (A.D.Smith 1995a: ch. 4; cf. Hutchinson 1994: ch. 6).

 

Of course, none of these routes ensures the automatic attainment of nationhood. To begin with, it depends on the degree to which the great modern revolutions of market capitalism, the bureaucratic state and secular, mass education have penetrated given areas and communities, either directly, as in the West, or through the mediation of imperialism and colonialism (A.D.Smith 1986a: 130–4). Nor should we forget the role of historical accident in specific cases of nation-formation. More generally, human agency, individual and collective, has been vital in the process of uniting ethnies and transforming them into nations. Kings, ministers, generals, merchants, priests, missionaries, lawyers, artists, intellectuals, educators, journalists and many others have contributed to the formation of particular nations, now more consciously and deliberately, now

 

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unintentionally. Among these groups, modern nationalist leaders and their followers have often played a disproportionate role; as ‘political archaeologists’ they have furnished blueprints of the ‘nation-to-be’ by rediscovering an ‘authentic’ popular ethno-history and providing convincing narratives of historical continuity with a heroic, and preferably glorious, ethnic past. By their quest for heroic legends and poetic landscapes, the nationalists aim to provide cognitive ‘maps’ and public ‘moralities’ for the members of their nation-to-be (A.D. Smith 1986a: ch. 8; A.D.Smith 1995b; cf. Just 1989).

 

If nationalism is modern and shapes nations in the image of its weltanschauung, then nations too are the creations of modernity. But this is only half the story. Specific nations are also the product of older, often pre-modern ethnic ties and ethno-histories. Not all nations, of course. There are ‘nations-in-the-making’ (Tanzania, Eritrea, Libya) that are relatively recent and do not appear to be rooted in a longer ethnic past. One may ask how firmly based and secure are these colonial creations; certainly, the recent experience of other African ‘state-nations’ does not give grounds for optimism. But the real point is that the first and most influential examples of the concept of the ‘nation’ did have such pre-modern grounding, as have a great many others, and they provided the basic models, civic and ethnic, for later examples, even if the stages of attaining nationhood have been telescoped and even inverted.

 

The nation, then, as concept and ideal formation, is historically firmly embedded; and so, in varying degrees, are its most influential and successful exemplars. In our day, the nation has become the norm of social and political organisation, and nationalism the most ubiquitous of ideologies. Attempts to construct supra-national unions have to date failed to attract the passions and loyalties commanded by nations; even a European ‘identity’

 

has looked pale and shifting beside the entrenched cultures and heritages that make up its rich mosaic.

If ‘nationalism is love’, to quote Michel Aflaq, a passion that demands overwhelming commitment, the abstraction of ‘Europe’ competes on unequal terms with the tangibility and ‘rootedness’ of each nation.

 

(A.D.Smith 1995a:131)

 

As for the predictions of a global culture, they fail to take into account the rootedness of cultures in time and place, and the ways in which identity depends on memory. A truly non-imperial ‘global culture’, timeless, placeless, technical and affectively neutral, must be memory-less and hence identity-less; or fall into a postmodern pastiche of existing national cultures and so disintegrate into its component parts. To date, we cannot discern a serious rival to the nation for the affections and loyalties of most human beings (A.D.Smith 1990; 1995a: ch. 1).

 

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Ethno-symbolism considered

 

On one level, this account is an empirical tautology, in that my definitions of the nation and of the ethnie are closely aligned. It is, then, not difficult to show nations being based on, and being created out of, pre-existing ethnies. At least, some nations. There is, of course, no necessity about this transformation; otherwise, nationalism and nationalists would be superfluous. But they are not. Hence, we are dealing with something more than an interesting empirical tautology. It is exactly those features of nations that ethnies lack—a clearly delimited territory or ‘homeland’, a public culture, economic unity and legal rights and duties for everyone—that make nations ultimately quite different from ethnies, despite the fact that both possess such features as an identifying name, myths of common origins and shared historical memories. These differences need to be kept in mind when considering the ways in which, as Hastings so clearly shows, nations transcend ethnic communities, and can in principle include more than one culture-community (Hastings 1997:25–31).

 

A more serious objection is that levelled at the versions of perennialism I considered in the last chapter, namely that ethno-symbolism is guilty of ‘retrospective nationalism’, of projecting back onto earlier social formations the features peculiar to nations and nationalisms. But this is to confuse a concern with la longue durée with perennialism. Armstrong may use the terminology of ‘nation’ for pre-modern ethnies, but he clearly differentiates modern nations from these earlier ethnic identities. Hutchinson reserves the term ‘nation’ for the modern period and, like myself, he clearly separates off a modern nationalism from pre-modern ethnic sentiments. The differences in historical context are too great to permit such retrospective generalisation. The ‘family analogy’ in nationalism which Connor, for example, rightly emphasises is not central to the concerns of ethno-symbolists; kinship affords too narrow a social base for larger ethnies, let alone nations. Rather, it is a question of tracing in the historical record the often discontinuous formation of national identities back to their pre-existing cultural foundations and ethnic ties—which is a matter for empirical investigation rather than a priori theorising.

 

A more recent criticism of my position, brought by John Breuilly, is that it assumes too close a connection between pre-modern ethnic identities and modern nations and neglects the necessary role of institutions as historical carriers of national or ethnic identities. Pre-modern ethnic identities, he argues, are essentially local and apolitical.

 

The problem with identity established outside institutions, especially those institutions which can bind together people across wide social and geographical spaces, is that it is necessarily fragmentary, discontinuous and elusive.

 

(Breuilly 1996:151)

 

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In contrast to such kinship-based ethnic identities, only those carried by institutions like dynasties or churches could have their ‘myth-symbol’ complexes codified and reproduced. However, dynasties were actually threatened by modern national identities and churches were universalist. Only when their universal mission had failed did they accomodate to ethnic identities and furnish rallying-points for later movements of national autonomy. On the whole, claims Breuilly, the discontinuities of ethnic sentiments with ‘modern national identity’ are more striking. This is as true of the invention of myths, such as the epic of Ossian, as of the codification of written languages and their institutional uses in law, the polity and the economy. As long as language is simply a repository of national culture, myth and memory, it has significance only for a few self-selected cultural elites; only when it is used for legal, economic, political and educational purposes, does it have real political significance. Breuilly concludes:

 

Pre-modern ethnic identity has little in the way of institutional embodiment beyond the local level. Almost all the major institutions which construct, preserve and transmit national identities, and which connect those identities to interests, are modern: parliaments, popular literature, courts, schools, labour markets, et cetera…. National identity is essentially modern, and any useful approach to the subject must begin from this premiss.

 

(ibid.: 154)

 

That institutions are important as carriers and preservers of collective cultural identities is indisputable; if nothing else, Armstrong’s monumental work demonstrates their crucial role in pre-modern epochs. But I would argue that Breuilly’s understanding of such ‘institutions’ is narrowly modernist. It is quite true that many people in pre-modern epochs were not included in ‘institutions’ to the extent that they are in the modern state and its organs. But significant numbers of people in several pre-modern societies were included, going back to ancient Egypt and Sumer: in schools, for instance, in legal institutions, in temples and monasteries, sometimes even in representative political institutions, not to mention extended aristocratic families like the Alcmaeonids or the Metelli. But perhaps more important was their inclusion in linguistic codes and in popular literature, in rituals and celebrations, in trade fairs and markets, and in ethnic territories or ‘homelands’, not to mention the corvée and army service. Certainly, not all these ‘institutions’ reinforced a straightforward sense of ethnic identity, but many did. Breuilly himself concedes that

 

ethnic identity does have some meaning in past times and that it can impose limits upon claims made in modern nationalism.

(ibid.: 150)

 

I would add there are many more cases of vivid ethnic identities in pre-modern periods than he allows, and some of them do have ‘political significance’, such

 

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as the ethnic states of hellenistic antiquity (see Tcherikover 1970; Wiseman 1973; Mendels 1992).

The question that John Breuilly, like Eric Hobsbawm, raises is whether even widespread ethnic identities can have any connection with modern nationalism. By stressing only its modern features, Breuilly necessarily widens the gap between the modern nation and pre-modern ethnicity. But the historical evidence is often contradictory; it can point to clear links with modern nationalisms, and not just because latterday nationalists sincerely believed in and needed a usable ethnic past. The basic point is the one I raised in connection with Hobsbawm’s account: the ‘inventions’ of modern nationalists must resonate with large numbers of the designated ‘co-nationals’, otherwise the project will fail. If they are not perceived as ‘authentic’, in the sense of having meaning and resonance with ‘the people’ to whom they are addressed, they will fail to mobilise them for political action. Better, then, to ‘rediscover’ and reappropriate an ethnic past or pasts that mean something to the people in question, and so reconstruct anew an existing ethnic identity, even where it appears shadowy and ill documented.

 

Clearly, Breuilly has raised an important issue when he challenges ethno-symbolists to provide the historical links with the past ethnic identities and communities which they postulate as the basis for the formation of subsequent nations. There is clearly much work to be done here. But it requires a broader conception of the channels through which such identities are transmitted and transformed, and of the links which bind them to modern nations. Only then will we be able to gauge the depth of the ties that bind the members of nations and the passions which such ties can arouse. In this task, we should not dismiss the evidence provided by the intense nationalist concern with the ‘heroic legends’ of antiquity, and with the ‘poetic spaces’ of the homeland. They point us in directions which reveal the religious foundations of nationalism and the often sacred status of its concerns (see Hooson 1994; A.D.Smith 1997a, 1997b).

 

9       Beyond Modernism?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In his 1986 lectures entitled Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History, the great world historian William H.McNeill argued that nations and nationalism are phenomena peculiar to a particular period of history, the age of Western modernity, and that just as in pre-modern ages nations and nationalism were unknown, so in the future we shall witness the demise of the nation and the withering away of nationalism. It was only in a short, but vividly documented period of modern European history, from about 1789 to 1945, that the ideal of national unity held sway, and the nation-state became accepted as the political norm. Before and after, the norm was not national unity, but polyethnic hierarchy.

 

Polyethnicity, past and future

 

For McNeill, only barbarism is monoethnic. The moment we reach the stage of civilisation, polyethnicity becomes the norm. The reasons are relatively straight-forward. Civilisation is largely metropolitan, so centres of wealth and power require many kinds of skilled labour, and attract envious outsiders. Military, demographic and economic reasons support the polyethnic character of urban civilisation. After the ‘cavalry revolution’ of the early first millennium BC, we find a common pattern of conquest of civilised societies by nomadic tribesmen. Frequent epidemics among concentrated urban populations also encouraged urban polyethnicity, since depleted centres continually need to be replenished by rural populations to meet labour needs. Finally, long-distance trade gave rise to far-flung, alien merchant communities, often with their own portable religions. The overall result was that pre-modern civilisations with labour specialisation were necessarily culturally pluralist and soon bred ethnic hierarchies of skill; only those populations and polities far removed from the centres of civilisation like Japan, and perhaps England, Denmark and Sweden, could retain their ethnic homogeneity (McNeill 1986: ch. 1).

 

It was only after about 1700 that the ideal of independence for ethnically homogeneous populations, or nations, emerged. This was the result of a confluence of four factors. The first, and least important, was the influence of classical humanism, and hence the models of civic solidarity found in classical

 

 

199

 

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city-states like Athens, Sparta and republican Rome, which captured the imaginations of humanist intellectuals. More important was the growth of reading publics, versed in standardised forms of vernacular languages, which formed the elite basis of future nations. To this we must add the rapid growth of population in Western Europe, which allowed depleted cities to be replenished by ethnically homogeneous migrants from the countryside, and in the process fuelled revolutionary discontent among superfluous labour. Finally, and perhaps most important, was the new emphasis on modern infantry drill, which from this period became increasingly allied to state power, and by encouraging military participation on a large scale, also induced a new sense of civic solidarity and fraternity. McNeill argues that all these factors ‘came together in western Europe at the close of the eighteenth century to give birth to modern nationalism’, first in France and then throughout Europe. Although ethnic pluralism remained the social norm even in Western Europe, no state could henceforth afford to be without a ‘national identity’, for the unitary nation state and ‘the myth of national brotherhood and ethnic unity’ justified self-sacrifice in national wars, sustained public peace domestically and strengthened the state and the hand of government in everyday life (ibid.: 51, 56).

 

All this came apart after 1945. Two world wars revealed the immense costs of nation-states and nationalism. Revulsion against Nazi barbarism and the huge military sacrifices, was followed by a realisation that no nation-state could prosecute such a total war alone. They had to coordinate their efforts, and in the process draft in thousands of ethnically heterogenous soldiers and labourers, free or enslaved. This set the precedent for the flow of Gastarbeiter from alien cultures and lands; with higher birth rates and access to mass communications, these ethnic enclaves were able to perpetuate themselves on Western soil. In addition, the emergence of vast transnational companies and the internationalisation of military command structures have severely curtailed the autarchy of even the richest and most powerful nation-states. All this has undermined the power and the unity of ‘nation-states’, and presages the pluralisation of nations. For McNeill, once again, ‘Polyethnic hierarchy is on the rise, everywhere’. Nations and nationalism are transitory phenomena, reversions to a barbarian ideal of ethnic purity which is crumbling before our eyes because of the urgent need for adequate supplies of alien skilled labour. Only a moment in the much-read histories of the classical city-states made it appear otherwise (ibid.: 82).

 

In fact, for NcNeill as for many others, this short aberrant period of national unity is really only a matter of ideology; the social reality was always that of polyethnic hierarchy, even in the nation-states of Western Europe. One is left wondering how the nationalist mirage was created, and why so few people saw through it.

 

But the point I want to concentrate on here is McNeill’s prognosis of a return to polyethnic hierarchy at the cost of national unity, that is, through the breakdown of the nation-state and nationalism. McNeill appears to assume that the nation-state and its nationalism is the antithesis of polyethnic hierarchy, although in practice, as he himself demonstrates, they are coextensive, if not

 

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symbiotic. But this is to forget the ‘onion character’ of ethnicity, its capacity for forging ‘concentric circles’ of identity and loyalty, the wider circle encompassing the narrower. This is not the same as the much-spoken-of ‘multiple identities’. The latter often create competition and rivalry for people’s loyalties; class, region, religion, gender, ethnicity all create identities and loyalties that may cut across each other. Whereas ethnicity can operate at several levels, the wider identity and community encompassing the narrower, so that a person may be equally and harmoniously a member of a clan, an ethnic group, a national state, even a pan-national federation: a member of a tartan clan, a Scot, a Briton and a European.¹

 

If this was the case in the ‘age of nationalism’, according to McNeill, might it not continue to operate, even within the more continental and global contexts of the next century? This is just as plausible a scenario as the imminent breakdown of the nation-state into its constituent ethnic parts. In other words, it is too easy to assume a zero-sum relationship between ethnicity and nationalism, the ethnie and the nation. Such a relationship needs to be tested empirically in each case, and the conditions for the relationship specified.

 

The post-national agenda

 

McNeill’s tripartite periodisation of history—pre-modern polyethnic hierarchy, modern national unity and postmodern polyethnicity—provides the historical setting for the main themes of discussion and research on nations and nationalism in the last decade. These themes include:

 

• the impact of current population movements on the prospects of the national state, and especially the fragmentation of national identity and the rise of multiculturalism;

 

• the impact of feminist analysis and issues of gender on the nature of national projects, identities and communities, and the role of gendered symbolism and women’s collective self-assertion;

 

• the predominantly normative and political debate on the consequences for citizenship and liberty of civic and ethnic types of nationalism, and their relations with liberal democracy;

 

• and the impact of globalisation trends, and of ‘postmodern’ supranational projects, on national sovereignty and national identity.²

 

With the exception of gender issues, each of these themes is prefigured and encompassed by McNeill’s world-historical framework. Even the changed role of women and the impact of gender divisions can be viewed, on this reading, as the final extension of a ‘post-national’ citizenship to the largest and most underprivileged, because hitherto invisible, ‘minority’, as a result of the pressing needs for skilled labour in civilised polyethnic societies. Immigration and hybridisation; processes of globalisation and supra-nationalism; and the transition to a looser, civic form of liberal nationalism; all these issues and debates can be

 

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seen to form elements in that trend to re-establish polyethnic hierarchies portrayed by McNeill.

Here I can only touch on the most salient of these issues, and try to show that, while they ostensibly turn their backs, not only on modernism, but on all large-scale narratives and higher-level theorising, these discussions and debates, and the research they have spawned, constitute in reality one part (the last epoch) of that larger framework which McNeill’s analysis exemplifies. Theirs is an analysis which attempts to go beyond the modernist paradigm of nations and nationalism, and reveal its necessary supersession alongside the decomposition of its objects of reference, that is, the nation and nationalism. Yet in going beyond modernism they do not mean to challenge its assumption of the modernity of nations and nationalism. The ‘postmodernist turn’ does not seek to overturn the modernist paradigm, as does perennialism; nor does it seek to revise the modernist analysis ‘from within’, by revealing the debts of the modern nation to pre-modern ethnic ties, in the manner of the ethno-symbolists. Rather, it seeks to extend the range of modernism to what it sees as a ‘postmodern’ phase of social development. But in doing so it subtly undermines and problematises some of the basic assumptions of modernism, notably its belief in the sociological reality of nations, and the power of nationalist ideologies.

 

The underlying leitmotif of the most recent phase of theorising in the field of ethnicity and nationalism, which we may very loosely call ‘postmodern’, is that of cultural and political fragmentation coupled, in varying degrees, with economic globalisation. Let me try to sketch this leitmotif in each of the themes listed above.

 

Fragmentation and hybrid identities

 

Of course, Anderson’s analysis of the literary tropes and devices which sustain the narratives of ‘nation-ness’ foreshadowed the uses of deconstructionist techniques in the analysis of ethnic and national phenomena. For many his example has served as the inspiration, and point of departure, for their own more radical application of these techniques. For Homi Bhabha, for example, the very idea of a ‘national identity’ has become problematic. That idea had first emerged in the totalising project of the Enlightenment which sought to incorporate all being, including the Other. Hence the nationalist narratives of the national self (which was, in fact, always constructed and defined by the Other, the significant outsider) always claimed to incorporate the Other and purported to create total cultural homogeneity. But such a claim is fictitious. Cultural difference is irreducible, and it reveals the hybrid quality and ambivalence of national identity in every state (Bhabha 1990).

 

For Bhabha, national identities are composed of narratives of ‘the people’, and they operate under a ‘doubled’ and ‘split’ signifier—split between past and present, the self and the other, and above all between pedagogical and performative narratives. This superimposed dualism fragments the nation. The received versions of national identity inculcated by the nationalists are always

 

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challenged and decomposed into their component cultural parts by the alternative narratives based on the actions and performances of members of the designated community. In the manner of Simmel, Homi Bhabha directs our attention to the impact of the stranger and the outsider in defining the national identity of the host group. Only here the host is an imperialist national community, acting as magnet to the ex-colonised. The great influx of ex-colonials, immigrants, Gastarbeiter and asylum-seekers has eroded the bases of traditional narratives and images of a homogeneous national identity, revealing their fragmented and hybrid character. Today, every collective cultural identity has become plural. Housed in ‘anxious states’, national identities have become precarious and hybridised, as they face in different directions. Composed of cultural elements from the ex-colonial periphery, which are neither able nor willing to be incorporated and assimilated, national identities have fragmented and lost their erstwhile hold on people (ibid.: ch. 16).

 

A similar emphasis on the importance of the cultural fragment, and the irreducibility of its experience and testimony, can be found in the work of Partha Chatterjee. In general, he is concerned with the relationship between the hegemonic nationalist discourses of the West which for Benedict Anderson provide ‘modular’ forms for pirating by nationalist elites in Asia and Africa, and the indigenous nationalisms created by those non-Western elites. In his earlier work Chatterjee had demonstrated how, typically, the nationalist discourses of Asia and Africa both derived from Western models and at the same time opposed a ‘material’ outer world dominated by the West and the colonial state, to an inner, ‘spiritual’ domain which was the preserve of the national culture being created by indigenous elites since the mid-nineteenth century (Chatterjee 1986). In The Nation and Its Fragments (1993) Chatterjee shows, through a richly detailed analysis of nationalism in Bengal, how in such institutions as language, drama and the novel, art, religion, schooling and the family, a new, creative ‘inner domain of national culture’ was fashioned by nationalist Indian elites which is simultaneously modern and non-Western, using both Western and indigenous (Sanskrit) models. At the same time, this dominant Indian nationalist discourse is influenced by those of the many marginalised groups outside the mainstream of politics, the ‘fragments of the nation’ which in this case include Bengalis, women, peasants and outcastes, even when their alternative images of the nation were bypassed or suppressed, and their aspirations ‘normalised’ by an incorporating Indian nationalism. The interesting point here is that such nationalist culture creation precedes the political challenge to the West, and the ensuing nationalist conflict, a point also made by John Peel in his analysis of the ‘cultural work’ of Yoruba ethnogenesis in the same period. The encounter with the Other is certainly crucial, but the forms and contents of the Indian, Middle Eastern or African nationalism which that encounter triggers are also derived from other, non-Western sources within the traditional cultures of the community (albeit greatly modified) (Chatterjee 1993: chs 1, 5; Peel 1989).

 

Such readings still leave intact the cultural differences which fragment the nation. But here too some radical postmodernist theorising has decentred and

 

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decomposed ethnicity. For Stuart Hall, Etienne Balibar and others, ethnicity must be viewed as a plastic and malleable social construction, deriving its meanings from the particular situations of those who invoke it and the relations of power between individuals and groups. Not only is it one among many competing identities, it derives its meanings from its articulation with other kinds of identity, notably class and gender. Shifting, permeable and ‘situational’, ethnicity has no essence or centre, no underlying features or common denominator. For Etienne Balibar, there is only a discourse of ‘fictive ethnicity’. Thus:

 

No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalised, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicised—that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture and interests which transcend individuals and social conditions.

 

(Balibar and Wallerstein 1991:96, original emphasis)

 

Ethnicity itself is produced through two routes, those of the language community and the race, both of which create the idea of predestined, autonomous communities.

 

In similar vein, Stuart Hall views a sense of ethnicity as the expression of a hegemonic national identity, as in the concept of ‘Englishness’. But Hall also sees the new ‘identity politics’ of representation in the West as constructing a new ‘positive conception of the ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery’. This kind of voluntary ethnicity involves a

 

new cultural politics which engages rather than suppresses difference and which depends, in part, on the cultural construction of new ethnic identities.

(S.Hall 1992:257)

 

Once again, the hegemony of a dominant discourse of national (and racial) identity is challenged by alternative discourses of peripheral ethnicity, newly constructed out of popular experiences, and predicated on the celebration of diversity. This is the premise, and justification, of the politics of multiculturalism, to which I shall return.

In sensitising us to the more complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary national identities in the West, and in revealing the differences between the older received traditions of the nation and the much more varied, and contested, understandings of national community among and within the many cultural groups that comprise most modern national states, this kind of postmodern analysis has done much to illuminate the latest phase of national formation, especially in the West. There is little doubt that modern Western nations have become ‘frayed at the edges’, and that their members have had to rethink former assumptions about national community and identity in the light of much larger movements of population. It is also true that different groups in both Western

 

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and non-Western societies such as India have had quite different visions and interpretations of the ‘nation’. At the same time, we should not underestimate the continuing hold of a sense of national identity among the majority of the population in Western states, nor the desire of many members of immigrant communities to become part of a reshaped nation, while retaining their ethnic and religious cultures, perhaps increasingly in the form of a ‘symbolic ethnicity’. Nor should we overestimate the degree to which most Western nations either were or felt themselves to be homogeneous in earlier periods. To do so is to set up a false ‘before-and-after’ dichotomy. National unity was never so assured in the past, even when it was sought by nationalists, nor today are fragmentation and voluntary ethnicity so marked. For most people, even in the West, there remain clear boundaries in determining their ethnic identities and national allegiances, even when they may dissent from them or their power-holders. They can change their national allegiances, though often with difficulty, and perhaps modify their ethnic identities, usually through their children, for example in mixed marriages. But this enhanced individual latitude in the West does not allow people to ‘pick and mix’ or consume at will among ethnic identities; their choices remain restricted by ethnic history and political geography. As Michael Billig put it:

 

One can eat Chinese tomorrow and Turkish the day after; one can even dress in Chinese and Turkish styles. But being Chinese or Turkish are not commercially available options.

 

(Billig 1995:139, original emphasis)

 

For most people, ‘voluntary ethnicity’ is not an option, even in democratic societies, if only because other ethnic communities are unlikely to accept such a radical boundary change; an example is the failure of Mauritian Muslims in the 1970s and 1980s to become accepted as of Arab rather than Indian descent (Gans 1979; Eriksen 1993:72; Billig 1995: ch. 6).³

 

Gender and nation

 

The second major theme which overlaps with that of fragmentation is the mutual impact of gender and nation. Early feminist analyses did not seek to address the issues of ethnicity and nationalism, but from the mid-1980s there has been a growing literature in this area. Gender theorists complain, rightly in my view, of the failure of theories of nationalism to adddress either the role of women in national projects or the impact of gender cleavages on our understanding of nations and nationalism.

 

Of course, modernists might claim that their theories are universal and there is no need for a separate account of the role of women and gender in nationalism. But, if the very nature of nations and nationalism (or national projects) is gendered, then a separate, or at least, a different kind of theory is required, one which takes this key attribute of the explanandum into account—particularly from

 

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those who regard nationalism as linked to ethnicity and ethnicity to kinship, or from ethno-symbolists for whom ethno-history and ‘myth-symbol’ complexes are central to the development of nations.

 

To date, the question of the relations between issues of gender and nationalism has been pursued at a number of levels, and with very different assumptions and methodologies. These are lucidly set out in a masterly survey of the main works in the field to date by Sylvia Walby.⁴

 

The role of women in nationalism

 

The first such level is empirical: the varying role of women in nations and nationalist projects, and the differential impact of such projects on women and their prospects. Here, Walby cites Kumari Jayawardena’s seminal study which demonstrated that women’s movements were active in many non-Western nationalisms, and were an integral part of national resistance movements; they were, according to Jayawardena,

 

acted out against a backdrop of nationalist struggles aiming at achieving political independence, asserting a national identity, and modernising society.

 

(Jayawardena 1986:3)

 

Jayawardena nevertheless emphasised the separate demands and roles of feminist movements alongside, or within, the nationalist movements; they might even be at variance with its goals or interpretations, as Haleh Afshar stresses in her analysis of women’s struggles in Iran (Afshar 1989).

 

Conversely, nationalist movements view the question of women’s emancipation in quite a different light. Walby points out how in the older nations of the West, the formation of nations was long drawn out and women’s emancipation came very late in their ‘rounds of restructuring’; whereas in the new states of Africa and Asia, women were accorded full citizenship rights with independence.

 

Indeed the granting of full citizenship to all was one of the ways in which previously dominated colonies could make a claim to a nationhood.

(Walby 1992:91)

 

But, as Deniz Kandiyoti points out in a scholarly study of the Turkish emancipation movement, it was only on their own terms that nationalists accorded women full rights. In the Turkish case, their emancipation as equals flowed, in the eyes of the influential Turkish social theorist Ziya Gökalp, from ancient Turkish egalitarian mores. Kandiyoti perceptively concludes:

 

Thus, there appears to be one persistent concern which finally unites nationalist and Islamist discourses on women in Turkey: the necessity to establish that the behaviour and position of women, however defined, are

 

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congruent with the ‘true’ identity of the collectivity and constitute no threat to it.

(Kandiyoti 1989:143; cf. Kandiyoti 1991)

 

 

 

Female symbolism of the nation

 

Deniz Kandiyoti here touches on a second level of analysis, the ideological and symbolic uses of women. Symbolism and ideology are two of the main dimensions along which Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, in their pioneering volume, locate women within ethnic and national processes. They regard women as central to the creation and reproduction of ethnic and national projects, and list five major dimensions of their activity and presence. Women, they argue, should be seen as:

 

1. as biological reproducers of members of ethnic collectivities;

 

1. as reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups;

 

1. as participating centrally in the ideological reproduction of the collectivity and as transmitters of its culture;
2. as signifiers of ethnic/national differences—as a focus and symbol in ideological discourses used in the construction, reproduction and transformation of ethnic/national categories;

 

1. as participants in national, economic, political and military struggles.

 

(Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989:7)

 

In a later thought-provoking and systematic survey of the field, Nira Yuval-Davis goes on to apply a deconstructionist analysis to the relationships between gender and nation, and includes the ideological and symbolic modes of locating women (c and d above) as vital components of cultural reproduction. Culture or ‘cultural stuff’, she argues, rather than being fixed and homogeneous, should be seen as

 

a rich resource, usually full of internal contradictions, which is used selectively by different social agents in various social projects within specific power relations and political discourse in and outside the collectivity.

 

(Yuval-Davis 1997:43)

 

As a result, hegemonic symbols and cultures are generally strongest in the centre of the polity and always evoke resistance, particularly at the periphery. Hegemonic nationalist symbols and narratives proclaim the need for men to defend both the ‘Motherland’ and the nation’s women who symbolise and express its ‘purity’. They call on men to sacrifice themselves for their women and children, so that they may be eulogised by their women in the manner of Plutarch’s Spartan women, whom Rousseau so admired.⁵

 

Yuval-Davis points out that women ‘are often constructed as the symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour’:

 

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A figure of a woman, often a mother, symbolises in many cultures the spirit of the collectivity, whether it is Mother Russia, Mother Ireland or Mother India. In the French Revolution its symbol was ‘La Patrie’, a figure of a woman giving birth to a baby; and in Cyprus, a crying woman refugee on roadside posters was the embodiment of the pain and anger of the Greek Cypriot collectivity after the Turkish invasion.

 

(Yuval-Davis 1997:45)

 

This is in line with the central nationalist construction of the ‘home’. In the home gender relations become constitutive of the ‘essence’ of cultures, which in turn are to be seen as intergenerational ways of life that include such facets as family relations, ways of cooking and eating, domestic labour, play and bedtime stories (ibid.: 43).

 

Nationalism as a male phenomenon

 

Yet another level of analysis of gender—nation relationships concerns the nature of nations and nationalisms as largely masculine organisations and projects. For Cynthia Enloe, indeed,

 

nationalism has typically sprung from masculinised memory, masculinised humiliation and masculinised hope.

(Enloe 1989:44)

 

And this is also the burden of Jean Bethke Elshtain’s analysis of masculine patriotic self-sacrifice. Such considerations lead Sylvia Walby to argue that men and women are differentially involved in the nation and nationalism. Perhaps, she reasons, this is why many women, for example those in the Green and anti-nuclear movements, often display more international commitments and less militarism; alternatively, their greater pacifism and internationalism may make women less involved with the nation and nationalism than men (Elshtain 1993; Walby 1992:92–3).

 

Against this view, we have seen plenty of evidence of women’s political and even military involvement in national liberation struggles, even if the reasons are as much instrumental as expressive. This suggests that there are times, at least, when the national struggle supersedes or subsumes all other struggles, including those of class and gender. This does not mean that ‘nationalism’ as a discourse is not oriented primarily to the needs of men and for this reason possesses a ‘masculine’ symbolic content. In an age of revolutionary nationalism, after all, such neo-classic images as David’s painting of the Oath of the Horatii (1784), West’s The Death of Wolfe (1770) and Fuseli’s Oath of the Rütli (1779) focus explicitly on the traditional masculine attributes of energy, force and duty.⁶

 

How do we explain the basic male character of this nationalism? George Mosse draws on his earlier path-breaking analyses of the choreography of mass nationalism to reveal how its rise and development, particularly in Central

 

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Europe, was conditioned by the Western bourgeois family morality with its concern for ‘respectability’, moral character and physical (Greek) beauty. This produced a sharp differentiation, not only in gender roles but also in gendered attributes and stereotypes, already evident in the anti-revolutionary German-speaking regions, which identified the French forces as ‘loose-living’, in opposition to the respectable, masculine German morality, which nationalists like Ernst Moritz Arndt embraced. As the nineteenth century progressed, the integral nationalist search for a specific masculine morality, ‘Aryan’ male beauty and a respectable and distinctive ‘national character’ merged with racist fascism’s cult of male activism and aggressive virility (Mosse 1985, 1995; cf. Leoussi 1997).

 

More recently, Glenda Sluga, in a penetrating historical investigation, traced the gendered nature of both nations and nationalist ideologies further back to their origins in the French Revolution, where by 1793 ‘the legislators of the new French Republic had defined popular national sovereignty in terms of its masculine citizenry’. In the name of social order, women were returned to the private sphere as patriot wives and mothers of citizens, as Rousseau had recommended. Drawing on the work of Joan Landes, Sluga shows how the division between public and private spheres, stemming from the scrutiny of boundaries initiated by the Enlightenment, not only excluded women from the Revolution’s invocation of universal rights, but ensured the entirely masculine character of the nation-state. Like Rousseau, Fichte, Michelet and Mazzini all emphasised the different roles of the sexes in national education, the supportive, nurturing function of women and the heroic, military role of men:

 

Mazzini, like Michelet and Fichte, drew on the image of the patriarchal family (with the father at its head) as a natural unit to shore up the legitimacy of the fraternal nation-state and determine its preference for the male citizen as the active and military patriot.

 

(Sluga 1998:9, 24; see also Landes 1988)

 

 

 

Feminism and identity politics

 

Finally, there is the normative level of analysis: the ways in which feminists should address ‘identity politics’ and the politics of multiculturalism. For Nira Yuval-Davis the problem with ‘identity politics’ is that it tends to harden ethnic and gender boundaries, and homogenise and naturalise categories and group differences (Yuval-Davis 1997:119). Similarly with multiculturalism. Here too the dangers of reifying and essentialising cultures ignore power differences between and within minorities, overemphasise the differences between cultures and privilege as ‘authentic’ the voices of the most unwesternised ‘community representatives’. This can have particularly detrimental effects for women in terms of encouraging minority male control over their behaviour. Even allowing for the ‘counter-narratives’ which emerge from the nation’s margins and ‘hybrids’, there is always the danger that homogeneity and essentialism

 

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are attributed to the homogeneous collectivities from which the ‘hybrids’ have emerged, thus replacing the mythical image of society as a ‘melting pot’ with the mythical image of society as a ‘mixed salad’.

 

(Yuval-Davis 1997:59; cf. Kymlicka 1995)

 

Given the differential positioning of minorities and of women among and within them, there can be no simple approach to a ‘feminist agenda’. For Yuval-Davis, feminists can only construct identities across difference by a ‘transversal politics’ which starts from different cultural roots and aims to ‘shift’ and move towards those from other cultures whose values and goals are compatible with one’s own (ibid.: 130).

 

From this all too brief summary of some of its major themes, it is clear that the ‘gender-nation’ field is rich in potential for analysing the character and effects of nations and nationalism. How far it is useful to deconstruct its concepts and issues in terms of various ‘narratives’ and ‘discourses’, and whether we need to describe them as hegemonic (or otherwise) ‘constructs’, is open to question. Certainly, employing this kind of postmodernist approach sensitises us to the great complexity of women’s positions in ethnic and national projects, and vice-versa, but it does so at a cost: a clear shift away from the task of causal explanation. It is noteworthy that, for all their analytical insights, only a few of the works discussed above (specifically, those that opt for a historical modernist approach) are concerned with the origins and formation of nations and the role of gender relations therein, or with why nations and nationalism have become so ubiquitous, or indeed, except in passing, with the issue of why nations and nationalisms evoke such passions among so many people (including so many women) across the globe. This suggests that ‘nation-gender’ theories have considerable work to do if they are to provide a more comprehensive causal analysis of the ways in which the complex interrelations of gender and nation contribute to the formation of nations and the spread and intensity of nationalism.

 

 

Liberalism and civic or ethnic nationalism

 

Yuval-Davis’ espousal of ‘transversal politics’ makes sense only in a more liberal democracy where the form of nationalism is inclusive, participant and relatively open in character. This is the type of nationalism which the ‘nation-building’ theorists had in mind, and it is this ‘civic’ version of nationalism that has been taken up by some liberals and social democrats, in opposition to its antithesis, ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

 

There is a burgeoning literature on the relationship between liberalism and/ or social democracy and this form of nationalism, but most of it is philosophical and normative, and so lies outside the scope of my enquiry. I should only like to mention the debate provoked by David Miller’s lucid defence of a civic version of the doctrine of nationality (his preferred term to ‘nationalism’). Miller starts by discussing the idea of national identity or the nation, and lists five distinguishing marks of a nation as a community:

 

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it is (1) constituted by shared belief and mutual commitment; (2) extended in history; (3) active in character; (4) connected to a particular territory; (5) marked off from other communities by its distinct public culture.

 

(O’Leary 1996a:414; see Miller 1993:6–8, and Miller 1995: ch. 1)

 

For Miller, nations can be defended on three grounds. First, they are valid sources of personal identity. Second, they are ethical communities, and as members we owe special obligations to our compatriots. Finally, nations have a valid claim to be self-determining, so as to allow their members to decide matters for themselves. Despite our commitment to ethical universalism, Miller argues, in practise we are ethical particularists, and the nation affords a larger and better basis for performing duties and achieving social justice. Moreover, the nation offers a better arena for achieving liberal and social democratic goals than radical multiculturalism, which cannot restrain the rich and strong and only encourages fragmentation. Nationality is also superior to citizenship and a purely abstract ‘constitutional patriotism’ of the type favoured by Jurgen Habermas, since it connects political principles and practice to a sense of shared history and culture, and a sense of place and time (Miller 1995: chs 2–3; O’Leary 1996a: 419–20).

 

One of the difficulties in Miller’s approach, as Brendan O’Leary points out, is that he qualifies the claim to national self-determination in ways that tend to favour the powers-that-be, and is especially critical of the claims of ethnic communities in polyethnic nations. In effect, Miller comes down, as do so many others, in favour of a civic form of nationalism which is ultimately dependant on the state and its liberal practices. Yet Miller is also careful to distinguish nations from states. What then of all those ethnic groups that aspire to the status of nationality and desire to determine their own destinies? How shall we judge the claims of separatists and irredentists? (O’Leary 1996b:445–7; cf. Beitz 1979).⁷

 

Recognition of the political power of ethnicity has inspired a number of cognate debates, mainly in political science, notably about the ways of managing or eliminating ethnic differences and conflict. As McGarry and O’Leary demonstrate, these methods range from the extremes of partition, population transfer and genocide to assimilation, consociationalism and federation, and they reveal much about the consequences of nationalism in a world of mainly polyethnic states. Three topics have provoked particular controversy. The first is the merits (and features) of the ‘consociational democracy’ model associated with the work of Arend Lijphart, and its relationship to both class conflict and liberalism. The second is the meanings and political uses of concepts of ‘ethnic democracy’ and/or ‘herrenvolk democracy’ to characterise exclusive dominant-ethnie democracy in polyethnic states, and the differences of such regimes from liberal democracies. The third theme, the vicissitudes of ethnic minority rights and their relations with states and the inter-state system, has only recently been linked to questions about the nation and nationalism. However, in most of the literature these issues have a strong normative (and legal) content and have only been tangentially related to issues of national identity and nationalism. On the

 

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whole, therefore, they lie outside the scope of this survey (Lijphart 1977; McGarry and O’Leary 1993).⁸

 

The debate about the civic or ethnic character of nationalism, on the other hand, is directly related to our concerns. It has, as one might expect, received much attention from analysts of immigrant societies like Canada and Australia. Raymond Breton’s analysis of the evolution of English-speaking Canada, for example, emphasises a long-term shift from ‘ethnic’ to ‘civic’ nationalism. Even in Quebec, he can trace a similar, albeit slower development: as a result of immigration, both the French language and Catholicism have become increasingly detached from their Québécois ethno-cultural base, and

 

membership cannot be defined in terms of ethnic attributes, but in terms of citizenship. As in English Canada, the collective identity has to be redefined in such a way as to incorporate the people of non-French origins who are legally members of the polity.

 

(Breton 1988:99–102)

 

In reality, few modern national states possess only one form of nationalism. Nevertheless, we can usefully distinguish between ‘ethnic’, ‘civic’ and ‘plural’ types of nation and nationalism; and these analytical distinctions may help to explain, for example, different traditions of state immigration policies. Thus Rogers Brubaker has shown how the territorial conception of belonging which formed the French tradition gave rise to a civic policy that naturalised immigrants on the basis of prolonged residence in France (ius soli); whereas the German conception of ethnic belonging entailed a genealogical policy (ius sanguinis) that till recently denied German citizenship to migrants and Gastarbeiter, however long their residence on German soil, while at the same time according immediate rights of citizenship to dispossessed ethnic Germans from the East. Similarly, Daniele Conversi has contrasted the pattern of cultural values among Basques and Catalans, revealing how Sabino Arana’s influence has incorporated the Basque concern with purity of blood and exclusive rights, whereas the Catalan tradition of linguistic and cultural nationalism has encouraged a more open, assimilationist and inclusive Catalan nationalism, one that is far more respectful to immigrants (Brubaker 1992; Conversi 1997).

 

Yet in practice, these types frequently overlap, and a given national state will often display ethnic as well as civic components in its form of nationalism, sometimes in a historical layering, or its nationalism may move some way from one type to another and back. Moreover, each type, as I have argued, has its peculiar problems. If the ethnic-genealogical type tends towards exclusivity (though not necessarily), the civic-territorial type stemming from the French Revolution is often impatient of ethnic difference; it tends towards radical assimilation, some might call it ‘ethnocide’, of cultural differences and minorities. As for the ‘plural’ type of nationalism found mainly in immigrant societies like Canada and Australia, its celebration of cultural diversity risks a loss of political cohesion and tends towards a national instability which could in turn provoke

 

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reactive nationalisms (and in extreme cases like Quebec, secession movements) (A.D.Smith 1995a: ch. 4).⁹

 

For these reasons, those scholars who, in the tradition of Hans Kohn and John Plamenatz, oppose a ‘good’ civic to a ‘bad’ ethnic nationalism, overlook the problems associated with each type and in particular rewrite the civic version to accomodate the new politics of multiculturalism. Not only does this conflate, unhistorically, the civic and the plural types of nationalism; it fails to see how closely intertwined all three conceptions of the nation tend in practice to be, and how easy it is to move from one version to another as circumstances dictate. Nationalism will not be easily tamed and categorised to fit the prescriptions of moral and political philosophers (Kohn 1967a: ch. 7; Plamenatz 1976; Ignatieff 1993; Kristeva 1993).

Nor can we easily accept the prescriptions of those who, like Habermas, would replace nationalism by a form of ‘constitutional patriotism’ that would make the political institutions and the constitution the focus of collective loyalties. Perhaps the most plausible of these prescriptions is that provided by Maurizio Viroli, who argues for a break with nationalism and a return to a modernised form of democratic republicanism. After a rich survey of the republican and nationalist traditions (nationalism here being exclusively of the German ‘ethno-cultural’ variety), Viroli argues that a territorially and historically grounded republicanism would replace nationalist exclusivity with a truly democratic and civic loyalty appropriate to the modern era. But, we may ask, is such a proposition feasible in large-scale industrial societies? If it were, why is it that nationalism rather than republicanism has swept the globe and drawn so many peoples and areas into its orbit? Besides, as we saw, there is no proof that republicanism might not turn out to be just as exclusive as (ethnic) nationalism; was not Athens after the citizenship law of 451 BC, were not Sparta and republican Rome, or many of the medieval Italian city-states, just as exclusive and rigorous? (Viroli 1995).¹⁰

 

It is a welcome sign that there has been a renewed interest in the ethics of nationalism, after so many decades when nationalism was equated with fascism and was felt to be morally untouchable. But as long as ethnic nationalism—still the most popular and frequent of the versions adopted by elites and peoples around the world—continues to occupy a pariah status, and like the head of Medusa, turns the philosophic mind to stone, a large part of the subject, and that the most vexed and explosive, will remain unaddressed and unanalysed.

 

Nationalism and globalisation

 

Can we envisage a time, not only when ethnic nationalism has run its course, but when nation-states, national identities and nationalism-in-general will have been superseded by a cosmopolitan culture and supranational governance? This, the last major theme in the literature that attempts to move beyond modernism, foresees the inevitable supersession of nation-states and nationalism by broader supranational, or global, organisations and identities in a ‘postmodern’ era.

 

214   Critics and alternatives

 

The general belief in supersession has three main components which are often conflated: first, the imminent demise of the ‘nation-state’, second, the supersession of nationalism, and third, the transcendence of ethnicity. Each of these trends, it is argued, is gathering pace, as nation-states, nationalism and ethnicity are being more or less gradually replaced by supra-national (for example, European) and/or global identities and associations.

 

With the exception of Hobsbawm, most modernists have in fact been reticent about the fate of the national state and the prospects of nationalism. It has been left to so-called ‘postmodernists’ to proclaim the demise of the ‘nation-state’ through an overwhelming combination of political dependence, economic globalisation, mass communications and cultural hybridisation. Thus for Stephen Castles and his colleagues, the nation-state ‘is increasingly irrelevant on both the economic and cultural levels’, as a result of global economic interdependence and cultural homogenisation. In a multicultural state like Australia, attempts to return to primordial themes of nationalism are likely to fail because of a lack of heroic myths and the impact of migrants and their cultures (Castles et al. 1988:140–4).¹¹

 

But even if this is the case, are immigrant societies like Australia typical? Are the forces of globalisation and mass communications producing a similarly ‘non-national nation’ elsewhere? Or, indeed, a move altogether away from no longer viable national states and nationalisms, to allow greater space for the ‘tribe’ and the ‘stranger’, as Zygmunt Baumann argues? Can we consign nationalism to the ‘great museum’ of tourist history, as Donald Horne’s amusing guide would have it? (Baumann 1992; Horne 1984).

 

This is very much the argument, and hope, of those who embrace the notions of ‘supra-nationalism’ and ‘global culture’. They point, not only to the fragmentation of national identities discussed above, but to the loss of economic sovereignty and the growing political dependence of all national states. There is, indeed, considerable evidence to support this contention—provided, of course, that we assume that there was a time when the ‘nation-state’ was largely autonomous in both spheres, something which, as even McNeill concedes, is at best doubtful; one has only to consider the many smaller states like Luxembourg, Nepal or Guatemala that were indeed sovereign states, but could hardly be said to have been ever autonomous. More important, in the post-1945 era, the political and economic dependence of most states has been accompanied by a huge expansion of internal state power and penetration in the social and cultural spheres, notably in such fields as mass education, the cultural media, health and social welfare. This expansion has been legitimated by nationalist ideologies and has done much to offset and ‘compensate’ the ‘nation-state’ for its external dependance (A.D.Smith 1995a: ch. 4; Billig 1995:141).¹²

 

Similar problems arise with the claim that mass communications and electronic technology are creating a global consumerist culture that is making national cultures increasingly permeable, similar and even obsolete. As some scholars have argued, the idea of a ‘global culture’ can be seen as another form of (consumer) imperialism operating through the prism of the cultural media; though

 

Beyond Modernism?  215

 

it presents itself as universal, it bears the imprint of its origins and flows from a single source, the United States. Alternatively, global culture is presented as a playfully eclectic and ‘depthless’ pastiche, attuned to the ‘pastiche personality’ of the affectually attenuated, decentred ego inhabiting ‘an electronic, global world’. Here global culture appears as an entirely new technical construction, what Lyotard called ‘a self-sufficient electronic circuit’, at once timeless, placeless and memory-less, contradicting all our ideas of cultures which embody the distinctive historical roots, myths and memories, and the specific lifestyles, of ethnic communities and nations (Billig 1995: ch. 6; cf. Tomlinson 1991: ch. 3; A.D.Smith 1995a: ch. 1).¹³

 

Besides, as Philip Schlesinger demonstrated, the electronic cultural media and information technology on which much of the cultural globalisation thesis rests, are more variable in their effects on different classes, regions and ethnic communities than this argument allows. Paradoxically, too, the electronic media serve to reinforce old ethnic identities or encourage the (re-)creation of new ones. This is also the burden of Anthony Richmond’s analysis of the ways in which the latest technological revolution is replacing industrial by ‘service societies’. In these ‘post-industrial’ societies, new modes of electronic mass communications are encouraging the resurgence of ethnic communities using these dense networks of linguistic and cultural communications (Schlesinger 1987; 1991: Part III; Richmond 1984).

 

From a more interactionist standpoint, Alberto Melucci also suggests that, with the crisis and decline of the nation-state, the revival of ethnicity in modern societies is to be expected, although for quite different reasons to those proposed by McNeill. In an age of voluntary networks of social interaction based on individual needs and activities, ethno-national organisation provides an important channel for individual identification and solidarity ‘because it responds to a collective need which assumes particular importance in complex societies’. Ethno-national movements are actively political, but they are also pre-eminently cultural:

 

As other criteria of group membership (such as class) weaken or recede, ethnic identity also responds to a need for identity of an eminently symbolic nature. It gives roots, based on a language, a culture and an ancient history, to demands that transcend the specific condition of the ethnic group.

 

(Melucci 1989:89–92)

 

This suggests, not the transcendence of ethnicity but the revitalisation of ethnic ties by the very processes of globalisation that are presumed to be rendering them obsolete, in much the same way, and perhaps for similar reasons, as the resurgence of strong religious identities among ethnic communities in multi-faith and multicultural societies like Britain and the United States, or in ethnically and religiously divided societies like Nigeria and India. As Giddens would argue, the global and the local feed each other (see Igwara 1995; Jacobsen 1997; Deol 1996).¹⁴

216   Critics and alternatives

 

Recent international events seem to have lent some credence to this view of a global ethnic resurgence. We have witnessed a remarkable spate of ethnic secession movements since the end of the Cold War. Yet, despite the recurrent power of ethnic nationalism, the norms of international society remain basically the same, and they have long been hostile to any attempt to change the political map by force or challenge the sovereignty of individual states through separatism or irredentism. The international community will only condone secession in special circumstances, where it is the result of mutual and peaceful agreement (as in Singapore) or where there is a strong regional patron favouring secession, as India did in the bid for secession of Bangla Desh from Pakistan. The recent creation of some twenty new ethnic states is largely the consequence of exceptional events—the break-up of the Soviet and Ethiopian empires—though this will not entirely account for the secession of Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia. For James Mayall, as we saw earlier, the inter-state system has proved largely resilient to the challenge mounted by nationalism since the French Revolution, insisting on the primacy of the principle of state sovereignty over that of national self-determination, despite the Wilsonian attempt to incorporate the latter into the fabric of international society. Mayall endorses the realist view of most theorists of international relations, yet he also demonstrates how territorial nationalism has underpinned state power and, by extension, a community of national states requiring popular legitimacy (Mayall 1991, 1992; see also Chapter 4 above).¹⁵

 

National identity and supra-nationalism

 

But, if we cannot yet expect a leap from ethno-national identity to global cosmopolitanism, are we not at least witnessing a less dramatic, but still unprecedented, shift of loyalties from nations and national states to ‘supra-national’ continental regionalisms that can accommodate sub-national ethnic identities and cultural differences?

Evidence for this more limited and realistic position comes mainly from studies of European political and cultural integration. Once again, the literature is already too vast to summarise here. One theme is the growth of a European citizenship transcending or complementing the existing national citizenships. Thus Gastarbeiter and asylum-seekers are able to obtain most of the social, economic and even political rights of citizens in the form of ‘human rights’, without being granted formal citizenship of the host country to which they have migrated or fled, even if the organisation of those human rights remains national and therefore specific to each host national state. For this reason, scholars like Yacemin Soysal argue that we can see the emergence of a ‘post-national’ type of citizenship in Europe alongside the existing national model, though how widespread and potent such a model has become is open to question in view of the continuing hold of both national state and ethnic allegiances, the resurgence of ethnic nationalism in

 

Beyond Modernism?  217

 

Eastern Europe and the racial nationalist backlashes in the West (Soysal 1994, 1996; cf. Mitchell and Russell 1996; Delanty 1995: ch. 10; Husbands 1991).¹⁶ Another theme is the possibility of creating a European cultural ‘identity’ alongside or overarching existing national identities through the centralised use of the cultural media, planned student exchanges and labour mobility, the invention and dissemination of pan-European myths, memories and symbols, and the selection, reinterpretation and popularisation of pan-European history (see Duroselle 1990; cf. A.D.Smith 1992b). However, as Philip Schlesinger and others have shown, the creation of a European ‘identity’ has become a cultural battlefield. Given the continuing strength of existing national identities within Europe, as well as Europe’s uncertain boundaries and many cleavages, Schlesinger

 

concludes:

 

It is difficult to conceive of engineering a collective [sc. European] identity…. The production of an overarching collective identity can only seriously be conceived as the outcome of long-standing social and political practice.

 

(Schlesinger 1992:16–17)

 

No wonder that confusion surrounds the ‘European’ cultural dimensions of the project of European integration, and that there are different models of the ultimate rationale for ‘Europe’, many of which take the nation as well as the national state as their reference points. Michael Billig points to the continuing importance of boundaries for ‘Europe’, both in respect to trade and defence, and to the prevention of immigration.

 

Thus, Europe will be imagined as a totality, either as a homeland itself or as a homeland of homelands. Either way, the ideological traditions of nationhood, including its boundary-consciousness, are not transcended.

 

(Billig 1995:142)

 

How then can we envisage the creation of a European ‘identity’? Quoting Raymond Aron’s opinion in the 1960s that ‘the old nations will live in the hearts of men, and love of the European nation is not yet born—assuming that it ever will be’, Montserrat Guibernau argues that the construction of Europe will require the development of a ‘European national consciousness’:

 

The engineers of the new Europe will have to look at ‘common European trends’ and design a myth of origin, rewrite history, invent traditions, rituals and symbols that will create a new identity. But, even more important, they will have to discover a common goal, a project capable of mobilising the energy of European citizens.

(Guibernau 1996:114)

 

218   Critics and alternatives

 

But this means that some form of nationalism will have to be invoked, raising problems, not only of a ‘democratic deficit’, but of ethnic and even racial exclusion against immigrants. ‘Europe’ will have to be forged from above after the German (Zollverein) or the United States (federal) models, with all the problems of popular resonance which we discussed vis-à-vis Hobsbawm’s thesis. At the same time, the new European cultural identity would have to compete with and incorporate strongly entrenched national identities, and therefore raise the external cultural (as well as economic) barrier. If the prospect of an ethnic ‘fortress Europa’ is unattractive, so is the assimilatory potential of a civic model, which in any case may fail to command the affections and loyalties of most of Europe’s citizens who remain locked into a historically embedded mosaic of ethno-cultural nations (see Pieterse 1995; A.D.Smith 1995a: ch. 5).¹⁷

 

Beyond modernism?

 

Does all this suggest that we have moved beyond the nationalist epoch, in tandem with the shift away from modernism? Is a ‘postmodern’ epoch ipso facto a ‘post-national’ one, and are both reflected in ‘postmodernist’ styles of analysis?

 

The suspicion that ‘objective’ referents and empirical trends are, in some sense, a reflection of a particular style of analysis suggests a measure of caution in accepting the last part of McNeill’s tripartite periodisation. Perhaps the reality we see here is the reflection of the kind of mirror ‘held up to nature’; the evidence of ‘fragmentation’ may be as much a product of the deconstructive modes of analysis employed as of any empirical trends. Just as a perennialist paradigm looks for and finds continuity and rootedness, so the various postmodernist modes of analysis seek out and discover contestation, flux and fragmentation. And, of course, one can find plenty of evidence for both.

 

Looked at strictly from the standpoint of a theory of, or at least a fruitful perspective on, nations and nationalism, neither approach appears very helpful. Both have important things to tell us about aspects of the field of ethnic and national phenomena; and surely even from the brief survey I have conducted, it is clear that the themes of fragmentation and globalisation of the loosely labelled ‘postmodern/post-national’ approaches are rich in suggestion and insight into contemporary problems of ethnicity and nationalism. But here lies the rub. Except for some of the feminist accounts, there is a lack of historical depth to so many of the analyses under this broad heading, in a field that above all demands such depth, and for phenomena that are so historically embedded. It is as if the analysts had entered the drama in the third act (in terms of William McNeill’s periodisation), taking for granted some version of modernism’s script for the two previous acts. But which version, and why modernism? After all, both McNeill and the cultural fragmentation school of postmodernists stress the hard bedrock of ‘cultural difference’. That suggests a joining of hands with perennialism over the heads of the modernists. Yes, the nation, the nation-state and all its works may be modern, contested, multi-stranded and fluid; but, in surpassing it and them, contemporary societies have rediscovered the power of fundamental

 

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cultural differences. Is this not, as Nira Yuval-Davis pointed out, just another form of ‘essentialism’, perhaps even of primordialism? (Yuval-Davis 1997:59).

It is not only in their lack of historical depth that most of the recent analyses appear partial and ‘fragmentary’. Again, with the exception of some feminist analyses, they propose no general explanation of nations and nationalism, and make no attempt to uncover the mechanisms by which they were formed, developed and spread. This is, in many cases, a consequence of postmodernism’s anti-foundationalism and decentred analysis. But it is also evident in discussions of globalisation and Europeanisation, and of the civic or ethnic types of nationalism, which adhere to the usual canons of subject-centred and causal analysis. They too tend to take the phenomena of ethnicity and nationalism, and their cultural and political significance, as historical givens, even when they recast them as discursive narratives and deconstruct their meanings. But they offer no general explanation for their presence, variations and significance, no understanding of which nations emerged and where, why there are nations and nationalisms at all, and why they evoke so much passion.

 

This lack of theorising may have something to do with the deep ambivalence or, in the case of nationalism, downright hostility to these phenomena on the part of most of the analysts. This is not without its interest in that unpoliticised ethnicity, by itself, often evokes some sympathy, as ‘cultural difference’; and, on the other side, a purely civic form of nationalism is commended by some analysts. It is the fatal combination of ethnicity and nationalism, as ‘ethno-nationalism’, that, in the tradition of Elie Kedourie, provokes the greatest fear and condemnation. But, as many of these analysts realise, it is precisely this combination that, whether it is tacit and ‘unflagged’, as in parts of the West, or explicit and explosive, as in Eastern Europe and parts of Africa and Asia, most requires to be addressed and explained. The fact that it is so deeply ingrained and routinised (‘enhabited’, in Michael Billig’s term) in the West, also requires explanation. To see it as a de-ethnicised, civic form of nationalism is, I would suggest, not only a historical and analytical, but also a policy, error, and to that extent, misleading and unhelpful (see Billig 1995:42–3).

 

Common to most of these analyses, with the exception of McNeill’s brief account and a few of the historical gender analyses, is a turning away from any ‘grand narrative’ like modernism or perennialism at the very moment when ethno-nationalism is resurgent and when the national state and national identity have once again become central to arguments about the direction of politics and society. Without an explicit theory of the character, formation and diffusion of nations and nationalism, such arguments will lack depth and validity. In the absence of a new encompassing grand narrative, all the partial ‘little narratives’ will have to lean on, and tacitly take their meaning from one or other version of the existing grand narratives. That can be good neither for systematic social understanding nor for political and social policy. Of course, research can be conducted on only a small part of the overall canvas; but equally its meaning and significance can only be clarified in terms of that wider framework or canvas. If that framework is tacitly assumed in the research without it being subjected to

 

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scrutiny, then the results of that research will be called into question along with its research programme. In these circumstances it is more helpful to relate the research directly to one or other version of the major paradigms, or fashion a new one that can justify the particular research programme.

 

In my view, most of the analyses I have all too briefly considered in this chapter assume one or other version of the modernist paradigm, which they then seek to ‘go beyond’ in time-period as well as in the ‘phase’ of development of the phenomena themselves. It is doubtful whether, in their theoretical understanding, deconstructionist analyses go much beyond the ways in which modernists like Gellner or Anderson or Hobsbawm characterised and understood the nation and nationalism. But whereas these modernists (including some ‘gender-nation’ theorists) provide us with full and rounded historical, political and sociological accounts of nations and nationalism, postmodernist and allied analyses, in their desire to demonstrate the fluid, fragmented and constructed qualities of these phenomena, repudiate the need for such overall accounts or simply assume them as given. In doing so, they illuminate a corner of the broader canvas only to leave the rest of it in untraversed darkness. From the standpoint of a theory of nations and nationalism, this development can only represent a retreat from the advances made by modernism.

 

This is not to say that analyses that focus on the postmodern character and phase of nationalism have not made important empirical contributions to our understanding, only that their empirical discoveries have not been matched by similar broad theoretical advances. Some of these findings, notably those of the ‘gender-nation’ perspectives, which have drawn on concepts from other fields, can be fruitfully integrated with, while modifying, one or other of the existing paradigms and thereby enrich our understanding of the wider phenomena of ethnicity, nations and nationalism. Whether it will be possible to create a new overarching paradigm, or whether it will be enough to integrate gender concepts with existing (but modified) paradigms in the field, remains to be seen. But, in general, until the analyses of ‘fragmentation’ and ‘post-modernity’ make their assumptions explicit within a broader sociological and historical framework, they will be unable to advance the theory of nations and nationalism and elucidate the many problems in this field.

 

Conclusion

 

Problems, paradigms and prospects

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So where does the theory of nations and nationalism stand today?

 

Problems

 

Many years ago, Max Weber warned of the difficulties facing the attempt to construct a ‘sociological typology’ of ‘community sentiments of solidarity’, and his warning applies equally to a general theory of nations and nationalism. The problems that our survey has revealed include:

 

• The failure to reach a consensus on the delimitation of the field; in particular, the disagreement between those who wish to treat problems of nations and nationalism as quite separate and distinct from issues of ethnicity, and those who regard ethnic and national phenomena as comprising different aspects of a single theoretical and empirical field, a distinction that corresponds to that between the modernist and the perennialist (and primordialist) paradigms.

 

• The notorious terminological difficulties in the field, and the failure to reach even a preliminary agreement on the definitions of key concepts. It is also clear that scholars have quite different approaches to the question of definitions, and in particular whether the concept of the ‘nation’ can only apply where a majority of the designated population is included (and participates) in the nation.

 

• The problems of definitions arise, in part, from the deep divisions between basic paradigms and methodological approaches in the field. Once again, there is no agreement about the fundamental theoretical objectives, let alone substantive elements, of explanations, for example: whether explanations should be causal, whether they ought to be framed in purely individualistic terms, how far they should be reductionist, and so on.

 

• From these broad differences spring the many divergent research programmes and interests in the field. Coupled with the swiftly evolving politics of ethnicity and nationalism, it is hardly surprising if research should be carried out on a wide range of topics and problems within the vast terrain of ethnic and national phenomena; and that it is often quite difficult to relate various

 

 

221

 

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research concerns to each other to form a more composite picture of progress in the field.

• Finally, there is the problem of different value-orientations to issues of ethnicity and nationalism. From these spring often quite opposed ideological positions vis-à-vis ethnic and national phenomena, which in turn help to determine different research problems and interests—as, for example, with the current interests in civic nationalism, hybridised identity and globalisation.

 

There is a further difficulty: the problem of defining the relevant questions in the field. Very often, we are dealing with theories, models and approaches which are equally plausible and valid, even if they appear to be based on opposed premisses, because they seek answers to quite different questions. The most obvious distinction here is between accounts of the causes and of the consequences of nationalism. But equally, as we have seen, various theories and perspectives may be concerned with quite different objects of explanation, for example, ethnic identity and community as opposed to nations and/or nationalism, or politically significant nationalisms as opposed to national identity. This means that, in an important sense, we cannot easily assess the relative merits of rival theories and models; and that their vaunted rivalry is more apparent than real, given the very different questions they seek to answer and hence the varied dimensions on which they focus. In the place of genuine theoretical dialogue, we often find monologues that intersect.

 

In fact, none of the theories begins to cover the full range of even the most general questions one might ask of phenomena in this field. These would include questions about the origins and formation of ethnies, the conditions of ethnocentrism, the basis of ethnic community, as well as the nature and significance of ethnic identity; the origins and formation of nations, the nature and significance of national identity, the social, cultural and political bases of nations and the modernity or otherwise of nations; the (gendered, class and cultural) character of nationalist ideologies and movements, their role in forging nations and national identities, and the contribution of nationalist intellectuals and others; and finally, the consequences for society and culture of a world of national states, the geopolitical impact of nations and nationalism, and the chances of creating an orderly community of states.

 

Paradigms

 

Given these difficulties and problems, one might be forgiven for thinking the task of evolving a theory of nations and nationalism both undesirable and impossible. Yet such a conclusion would be unwarranted and overly pessimistic. A general theory is desirable for both intellectual and sociopolitical reasons: to understand and explain ever larger segments of the field of ethnic and national phenomena, and grasp the mechanisms and linkages between various aspects, dimensions and processes in this ramified field, both for their own

 

Conclusion 223

 

sake and because of the considerable impact of ethnic and national phenomena on other fields of human existence, notably international politics and global security. Given the interrelations between phenomena in this field, a general theory would enable us to understand lower-level, more specific phenomena or aspects, and thereby reveal the possibilities of and constraints upon policy-making.

 

But is such a theory possible? Is there any likelihood of explaining the great variety of phenomena, and addressing the many and varied questions and dimensions, in and through a single theory? In the light of the preceding critical survey of approaches, the answer at present can only be negative. The field is so riven by basic disagreements and so divided by rival approaches, each of which addresses only one or other aspect of this vast field, that a unified approach must seem quite unrealistic and any general theory merely Utopian.

 

Nevertheless, even if we are as yet far from any theoretical convergence, we can still point to a number of significant contributions which have advanced our knowledge of the field. Compared to the relatively crude models of the 1950s and early 1960s, these contributions reveal a much greater level of sophistication and understanding of the complexities of the field. Unlike the earlier approaches and models which focused either on the ideologies of nationalism per se or on the sociodemographic correlates of ‘nation-building’, the contributions of the last three decades have paid much greater attention to the subjective dimensions of collective cultural identities—the impact of language and mass culture, the strategies of political and intellectual elites, the properties of discursive networks and ritualised activities, and the influence of ethnic symbol, myth and memory. These advances have greatly enlarged our understanding of ethnic and national phenomena. Here, surely, are grounds for limited optimism.

 

In fact, each of the major paradigms in the field has generated research contributions that have enhanced our grasp of the dynamics of nations and nationalism. Let me give a few examples.

 

Primordialists attempt to understand the passion and self-sacrifice characteristic of nations and nationalism by deriving them from ‘primordial’ attributes of basic social and cultural phenomena like language, religion, territory, and especially kinship. Primordialist approaches, whether of the cultural or the sociobiological varieties, have sensitised us to the intimate links between ethnicity and kinship, and ethnicity and territory, and have revealed the ways in which they can generate powerful sentiments of collective belonging. This is evident, not only in the work of van den Berghe and Geertz, but also in Grosby’s research on ancient Israel.

 

Perennialism views nations over the longue durée and attempts to grasp their role as long-term components of historical development—whether they are seen as temporally continuous or recurrent in history. Perennialists tend to derive modern nations from fundamental ethnic ties, rather than from the

 

224   Conclusion

 

processes of modernisation. Perennialist approaches, like those of Fishman, Armstrong, Seton-Watson and, in respect of ethnicity, Connor and Horowitz, have contributed greatly to our understanding of the functions of language and ethnic ties, and the power of myths of origin and familial metaphors, in rousing popular support for nationalism. Here they serve as valuable correctives to the more extreme modernist interpretations and remind us of continuities and recurrences of ethnic phenomena.

 

Ethno-symbolism aims to uncover the symbolic legacy of ethnic identities for particular nations, and to show how modern nationalisms and nations rediscover and reinterpret the symbols, myths, memories, values and traditions of their ethno-histories, as they face the problems of modernity. Here too the attempts by Armstrong, Hutchinson and myself to trace the role of myths, symbols, values and memories in generating ethnic and national attachments and forging cultural and social networks, have added to our appreciation of the subjective and historical dimensions of nations and nationalism. This is matched by a parallel concern with investigating the ways in which nationalists have rediscovered and used the ethno-symbolic repertoire for national ends, in particular the myths and memories of ethnic election, sacred territory, collective destiny and the golden age.

 

Modernists seek to derive both nations and nationalism from the novel processes of modernisation, and to show how states, nations and nationalisms, and notably their elites, have mobilised and united populations in novel ways to cope with modern conditions and modern political imperatives. Modernist approaches like those of Anderson and Hobsbawm have been particularly illuminating in uncovering the role of discursive networks of communication and of ritualised activities and symbolism in forging national communities. Scholars such as Mann, Breuilly, Tilly and Giddens have done much to demonstrate the formative role of the state, warfare and bureaucracy, while the often decisive role of political elites and their strategies has been explored by scholars like Brass and Hechter. This is paralleled by the work on the intelligentsia’s seminal role by Hroch, Nairn and others, who have developed the powerful insights and wide-ranging analyses of Gellner and Kedourie.

 

Postmodern analyses have revealed the fragmentation of contemporary national identities, and suggest the advent of a new ‘post-national’ order of identity politics and global culture. Analyses of such postmodern themes as fragmentation, feminism and globalisation can be seen as continuations of components of the modernist paradigm. Some of them, notably those of Bhabha, Chatterjee and Yuval-Davis, have embraced a ‘postmodernist’ deconstructionism, whereas others—for example, those of Mosse, Schlesinger, Kandiyoti, Brubaker and Billig—are intent on exploring novel postmodern dimensions. Though they may eschew a more general theory of nationalism,

 

Conclusion 225

 

they embody significant advances in our understanding of the dynamics of identity in plural Western societies.

 

These five perspectives reveal, I think, a certain order and coherence in what at first sight appears to be an inchoate and indeterminate field of phenomena. While some research interests and problems may still fall outside their scope, most of the issues of central concern to scholars in the field can be encompassed, and grasped, in terms of one or other of these major paradigms. They in turn allow us to gauge the main contributions and advances in the field, revealing a field with a high level and wide range of research activity, and one in which several new theoretical advances have been made in recent decades. While most have been monologues, there have also been some important theoretical debates such as those between primordialists and instrumentalists, and between modernists and perennialists; and compared to the position in the 1960s, when so few scholars had entered the field, the theoretical study of nations, nationalism and ethnicity has matured considerably in scope, depth and sophistication.

 

Prospects

 

We are left with a not unfamiliar paradox. On the one hand, there is little sign of any theoretical convergence in the field, let alone a unified theory or agreed paradigm. The study of nations and nationalism is rent by deep schisms. On the other hand, a host of significant theoretical and empirical advances and contributions have widened our horizons and deepened our understanding of issues in the field. For all that, the analysis of nationalism remains elusive. So many basic questions continue unanswered, so few scholars are prepared to agree even on first principles. Given the rate at which new ideas and findings are thrown up, our bafflement is likely to increase. Though we may see a measure of consolidation, as the field becomes a subject for teaching and courses proliferate, the theoretical assumptions, research interests and value-orientations of scholars remain too divergent to ensure that greater coherence can be introduced into the analysis of ethnicity and nationalism. For the present, all we can hope for is the generation of new ideas which will illuminate one or other corner of the broad canvas, especially as so many scholars have abandoned the larger narratives and operate with tacit paradigms according to their particular interests. Hopefully, in some years, scholars will return to the major paradigms and seek some resolution of outstanding problems. Certainly, progress in the field depends as much on systematic attempts to answer questions and deal with debates thrown up by the major paradigms as it does on generating new ideas and research.

 

Does this mean that there is no prospect of bridging the gulf between the various paradigms, and especially that between perennialists and modernists? Such a conclusion would, again, be unduly pessimistic. I can see two ways in which we could envisage some kind of accommodation, if not agreement, between

 

226   Critics and alternatives

 

not just medieval (and ancient) and modern historians, but also between perennialist and modernist social scientists.

The first is on the level of theory. We can envisage scenarios of at least partial theoretical convergence, in which the concerns and assumptions of some of the paradigms might be fruitfully combined. But this can only be achieved by accepting the close links between ethnicity and nations and nationalism and the perennialist historians’ argument that some nations and their particular nationalisms have existed well before the advent of modernity (however defined). This in turn means that we must decouple nations and specific nationalisms from ‘modernisation’. At the same time, the modernists are surely right to insist on the modernity of many nations, as well as of ‘nationalism-in-general’ (the ideology and theory). The conditions of modernity clearly favour the replication of nations, national states and nationalisms in all parts of the globe. This would also allow us to accept the ethno-symbolist contention that most nations are formed on the basis of pre-existing ethnic ties and sentiments, even if in time they go well beyond them, and that their nationalisms necessarily use those ethnic symbols, memories, myths and traditions which most resonate with the majority of the designated ‘people’ whom they wish to mobilise. This kind of combined approach might also help us to explain some of the characteristic postmodern concerns with globalisation, ethnic fragmentation, and the revitalisation of ethnic ties, while also suggesting deep historical grounds for the sense of immemoriality and continuity which underpins the profound attachments of so many people to their ethnies and nations.

 

Second, we can also seek some accommodation of paradigm assumptions at the level of research. Here I have in mind a research programme that would encourage historians and social scientists to compare the various forms of key institutional and cultural dimensions of nations and nationalism, with a view to discovering how their recent and ‘modern’ forms differ from earlier, ‘pre-modern’ ones. As a first step, we might envisage comparisons along six main institutional dimensions, namely:

 

• The state. A comparison of forms of polities from early kingship and city-state forms to the most recent polyethnic democratic national states would help to reveal how far the sentiments of loyalty associated with each resembled, or differed, from each other; and how far each was able to mobilise different strata and forge unity within the polity. In particular, this project should throw light on how far ‘citizenship’ and citizens’ rights constituted a necessary component of any view of the nation and its nationalism.
• Here too we might compare ancient, medieval and modern forms of territorial attachments, and the nature of boundaries of both communities and polities in each period and continent. It would also be necessary to explore the more elusive issues of how landscapes and sacred sites contributed to the generation of ideas of ‘homeland’ and national territory, as well as the related questions of ethnoscapes, ‘natural frontiers’ and national borders.

 

Beyond Modernism?  227

 

• In the light of the importance attached to language by various theories of nationalism, this project would need to compare the ways in which languages and scripts contributed to ethnic and national feelings in different periods of history; and especially to what extent, and when, various vernacularising movements and language revivals, as well as their associated literatures, contributed to the rise of ethnic attachments and national sentiments.

 

• Given the resurgence of religious nationalisms, it becomes even more important to determine how far earlier forms of ethnic sentiment and later forms of nationalism were similarly imbued with religious beliefs and sentiments. Here we would need to undertake comparative studies of the impact of the belief-systems of the various world religions, and notably of their ideas of ethnic election, to see how far they were able to mobilise people and influence modern, even secular, nationalisms. We would also need to discover to what extent scriptures, liturgies, clergies and shrines were successful in propagating these beliefs and sentiments in various ethnic cultures and in successive periods of history.

 

• In view of the centrality of ‘history’ and history-writing in the creation of national communities, we need to compare the various forms of historical consciousness and historiography in different cultures and periods, in order to determine how far modern modes differ from earlier forms and how far, in each period, a sense of history was vital to the creation and maintenance of ethnic communities and nations. Such a project would concentrate especially on the various kinds of ‘ethno-history’ and the significance of different images of communal ‘golden ages’.

 

• Rites and ceremonies. This project would explore the role of public ceremonies, festivals, symbols and rituals in the creation and maintenance of collective identity and solidarity in different cultures and historical periods. Given the centrality of foundation and origin myths, the place of ancestral monuments and remembrance ceremonies, especially those that commemorate the ‘glorious dead’ and fallen heroes in both pre-modern and modern societies, needs particular attention.

 

A combination of perspectives and paradigms, and a set of research programmes along these lines, does not seek to mask the deep theoretical divisions which have been highlighted throughout this survey. Nor is it meant to suggest that we can somehow ‘transcend’ the very real problems which the paradigm debates have thrown up. The problems will not go away, nor will the divisions disappear. But what the above sketches suggest is that the paradigm divisions are not set in stone, that scholars do in fact cross the divide, and that we can envisage fruitful permutations and research programmes which may produce further advances in our understanding of ethnicity and nationalism. Here, too, we have grounds for guarded optimism.

 

What we can be sure of is that, just as the old red lines of nationalism erupt once again across the globe, and just as the field of ethnic and national phenomena

 

228   Critics and alternatives

 

is becoming a magnet for scholarship and research everywhere, so the need to explain and understand the many issues that it throws up becomes all the more urgent. This means that we cannot evade the task of theory-construction. If the former grand narratives of nations and nationalism no longer command respect, the imperatives of the times in which we live urge us to fashion new explanations more attuned to our perceptions and to the problems that we face.

 

Notes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

• For a critique of such group realism and essentialism, from the standpoint of the ‘new institutionalism’ in sociology, see Brubaker (1996: ch. 1). Brubaker argues that the conventional ‘substantialist’ view reifies nations and treats them as real communities and as ‘substantial, enduring collectivities’. We should avoid reifying the concept of the ‘nation’ and rather ‘think about nationalism without nations’. For a brief discussion of this view, see Chapter 4.
• This kind of individualistic ‘recipe’ analysis was applied, in a rather psychologistic manner, to national development by Daniel Lerner (1958) and, in a much more sociologically sophisticated way, by W.Smith (1965) and Ronald Dore (1969). I have discussed this approach in A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 5).

 

• Brubaker rightly calls our attention to the developments in social theory that have challenged the conventional ‘realist’ understanding of the nation: these include the flourishing of ‘network theory’, the theories of rational action, the rise of ‘constructivist’ theoretical stances, and finally an emergent postmodernist sensibility that emphasises ‘the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the erosion of fixed forms and clear boundaries’ (Brubaker 1996:13). In fact, not all these developments point in the same direction; see my discussions of the rational choice model in Chapter 3, of ‘constructivist’ theory in Chapter 6, and of ‘postmodernist’ approaches in Chapter 9.

 

• Unfortunately, we lack adequate, up-to-date bibliographies of the field, at least in the English language. The earlier one by Koppel Pinson (1935) was superseded by the more ambitious one by Karl Deutsch (1956); this was supplemented by short annotated bibliographies by Stein Rokkan and his colleagues (1972) and by A.D.Smith (1973a). Brief bibliographies may also be found in the Readers on Nationalism and Ethnicity edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D.Smith (Hutchinson and A.D. Smith 1994, 1996).

 

• For this emphasis on the shaping of the (ethnic) past by the present and by contemporary preoccupations and interests, see Tonkin et al. (1989: Introduction). For a critique which sees this approach as embodying a ‘blocking presentism’, see the essay on Yoruba ethnogenesis by Peel (1989) in the same volume.

 

• The rise of classical modernism

 

• Michelet: Historical View of the French Revolution, tr. C.Cocks, London: S.Bell & Sons, 1890:III, chs 10–12, 382–403, cited in Kohn (1955:97–102). For Michelet, see Kohn (1961); and on the Abbe Siéyès, Cobban (1957).
• On Herder and Moser, see Barnard (1965) and Berlin (1976); see also the argument in Viroli (1995: ch. 4). For Mill’s views, see Mill (1872). On the early development

 

 

229

 

230   Notes

 

of nationalist thought, see the detailed study of Kemilainen (1964) and the concise survey by Llobera (1994: ch. 7).

 

• For the racist schemas of nationalism, see Poliakov (1974) and A.D.Smith (1979: chs 3–4). Marxism’s Hegelian legacy and especially its influence on Engels is explored in Rosdolsky (1964); cf. also Davis (1967: chs 1–3).

 

• See Bauer (1924) and the long extract in English in Balakrishnan (1996:39–77). For the Austro-Marxists, see Talmon (1980: Part III, ch. 7) and Nimni (1994).

 

• I know of no study of these dilemmas in the thought of the founding fathers or leading exponents of nationalism. But see Baron (1960) and A.D.Smith (1979: ch. 5). On Mazzini, see Mack Smith (1994).

 

• For example, in Stalin’s well known essay of 1912 (Stalin 1936). On early Marxist assumptions about nationalism, see Fisera and Minnerup (1978); for latterday Marxist assumptions, see the discussion of Tom Nairn’s account by Eric Hobsbawm (1977).

 

• For functionalist developments of crowd behaviour models, see Kornhauser (1959) and Smelser (1962); cf. my critique in A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 3). For debts to the later Freud, Simmel and Mead, see Grodzins (1956), Doob (1964) and Barbu (1967).

 

• We can trace this influence especially on what I call theorists of state-centred modernism like Giddens, Breuilly and Mann, whom I discuss in Chapter 4.
• See also the analyses of Hertz (1944) and Shafer (1955). For a critique of Kohn’s schema, see Hutchinson (1987: ch. 1); for critiques of the typologies of Kohn, Hayes and Snyder and others: see A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 8).

 

• For the French Revolution and nationalism, see Shafer (1938), Cobban (1969), Kohn (1967b) and O’Brien (1988b). For the view that nationalism emerged in the sixteenth century, see Marcu (1976) and the critique in Breuilly (1993:3–5). For the question of the European sources of nationalism in Asia and Africa, see Hodgkin (1964) and Kedourie (1971), and the critical discussion in Chatterjee (1986).
• See, for example, Walek-Czernecki (1929), Handelsman (1929), Levi (1965) and Brandon (1967). See also the debates in Tipton (1972) and the critique of Hugh Seton-Watson (1965 and 1977) by Susan Reynolds (1984) discussed in Chapter 8.

 

• This is especially true of Gellner’s theory, for example, ‘nationalism is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force…. Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men…are a myth’ (1983:48–9). On the ‘naturalisation’ of nationalist constructions of the nation, see Penrose (1995) and Brubaker (1996: ch. 1). On primordialism, see Chapter 7.

 

• For the concept of ‘state-nation’, see Zartmann (1964) who derives it from the African experience of territorial nationalisms; cf. A.D.Smith (1983b: chs 1–3).
• The sources of this model are to be found in the work of Karl Deutsch (1966, 1st edn 1953), Daniel Lerner (1958) and Karl Deutsch and William Foltz (1963). See also, inter alia, Pye (1962), Apter (1963a), Binder (1964), Almond and Pye (1965), Bellah (1965) and Eisenstadt (1965, 1968). For a critique of their functionalist assumptions, see A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 3; 1973b).
• I have analysed these early modernist perspectives and theories up to 1970 in A.D. Smith (1983a: chs 1–6).

 

• The culture of industrialism

 

• See also Gellner’s lecture of 1982 (reprinted in 1987: ch. 2). For critiques of this early formulation, see Kedourie (1971:19–20, 132); A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 6).
• Gellner adds that, although other modern developments, from the Reformation to colonialism, have contributed to its spread, nationalism is basically a product of industrial social organisation, exactly because cultural homogeneity is imposed by the requirements of an industrial society, with the result that every modern state must be legitimated in terms of the national principle (Gellner 1983:40–3).

 

Notes  231

 

• It is probably the experiences of the Czech migrations into German-speaking Bohemian areas in the Habsburg empire that Gellner has in mind in his depiction of Ruritanians in Megalomania; just as it was the experience of the bidonvilles of Morocco which he encountered during his research on the Berbers that inspired an important part of his earlier formulation.

 

• Here, of course, Gellner has in mind the archetypal diaspora communities of the Armenians and the Jews, who despite being polyglot and flexible economic middlemen, found that their scriptural religion placed an insuperable barrier, a ‘moral chasm’, between them and the host society; cf. Armstrong (1976) and Zenner (1991).
• Gellner uses the term ‘proletariat’, not in the traditional Marxist sense of wage-earning manual labourers, but more inclusively of all peasants and villagers physically and mentally uprooted by modernisation.

 

• See my critique of the historical links between nationalist movements and industrialism, in A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 6); see also Nettl and Robertson (1968: part I).

 

• For general critiques of evolutionary modernisation theories and their applications to contemporary social and political change, see Geiger (1967), Gusfield (1967), Dore (1969), Nisbet (1969) and A.D.Smith (1973b).

 

• In his last debate on the subject at Warwick, Gellner (1996) cited the Estonians as an example of a purely modern ‘high’ culture, which appeared ex nihilo in the nineteenth century. The question remains: why did the Estonians not adopt the high cultures of their German overlords or their Russian neighbours rather than modernise their own ‘low’ culture? See A.D.Smith (1996b). In his posthumously published Nationalism, Gellner (1997) amplified his view of the purely modern origins of nations. On the development of an Estonian national consciousness, see Raun (1987:23–4, 32–3, 53–6, 62–7, 74–80). For Gellner’s application of his theory to Eastern European nationalisms, see Gellner (1994: esp. ch. 2).

 

• For the problem of ethnic volunteering in the First World War, see the discussion in Breuilly (1993: ch. 2).
• On the French Third Republic and Lavisse, see Citron (1988); also more generally, Ozouf (1982). For the case of Japan, see Lehmann (1982); for Turkey, Berkes (1964) and Kushner (1976), and for Nigeria, Igwara (1993).

 

• On Rousseau’s views of the nation and patriotism, see Cohler (1970) and Viroli (1995: ch. 3). For Fichte’s nationalism, see Reiss (1955) and the critique in Kedourie (1960). On Gökalp, see Lewis (1968: ch. 10) and Kedourie (1971: Introduction). For Ben-Zion Dinur, see Dinur (1969).

 

• It was Walker Connor who first drew attention to the ethnically plural nature of ninety per cent of the world’s states in the context of a radical critique of the model of ‘nation-building’, in a celebrated article entitled ‘Nation-building or nation-destroying?’ (Connor 1972; reprinted in Connor 1994: ch. 2). See also my discussion of territorial and ethnic nationalisms in A.D.Smith (1991: chs 5–6). All nationalisms strive for the unity of the nation, but not all of them conceive such unity in terms of ethnic purity or cultural homogeneity. It is this variability in the nature of the explanandum, the concept of the nation, that makes it so difficult to apply a single general theory globally.

 

• The problems of maintaining or reconstructing a national identity in multicultural societies have occupied the attention of theorists of ‘postmodernity’ concerned with cultural difference in western liberal democracies. I touch on some of these issues in Chapter 9 below. See, for example, Miller (1995: ch. 4) and Tamir (1993), and on the politics of multiculturalism, Kymlicka (1995).
• On the Czechs and their nationalism, see Zacek (1969), Seton-Watson (1977:149– 57), Agnew (1993) and Pynsent (1994: chs 2, 4). On the Finns and the rise of Finnish nationalism, see Branch (1985: Introduction), Singleton (1989) and Tagil (1995: part III). On the Ukrainian, see Portal (1969) and, for their growing sense of

 

232   Notes

 

difference from Great Russians, see Saunders (1993). On the Slovaks and the rise of Slovak nationalism, see Brock (1976), Paul (1985) and Pynsent (1994: ch. 2).

 

• For this general view, see Tonkin et al. (1989: Introduction); but cf. A.D.Smith (1997b). For images of national exempla virtutis, see Rosenblum (1967: ch. 2).

 

• On Tilak’s nationalist use of the Hindu religion and episodes from the past, see Adenwalla (1961) and Kedourie (1971:70–4). For the recent development of Hindu nationalism in India, see van der Veer (1994).

 

• On this ‘blocking presentism’, see Peel (1989); for a more general critique, see A.D. Smith (1988, 1997b).
• For discussions of ‘ethnicity’, see Tonkin et al. (1989) and Eriksen (1993). For the relationship of ethnies to nations, see Chapters 7 and 8.

 

• Capitalism and nationalism

 

• There is a large literature on the Marxist approaches to nationalism; see for example, Shaheen (1956), Davis (1967), Fisera and Minnerup (1978) and Connor (1984).
• On the question of historyless peoples, see Rosdolsky (1964) and Cummins (1980).
• For this idea of ‘uneven development’ in Gellner’s early formulation, see Gellner (1964: ch. 7). For Frank’s ideas, see Frank (1969) and for critiques, see Laclau (1971), Warren (1980) and, more directly related to nationalism, Orridge (1981).

 

• For a general discussion of Nairn’s analysis, see James (1996: ch. 6). For the two kinds of nationalism, see A.D.Smith (1991: chs 5–6).
• See Nairn (1977: ch. 5). On early Indian nationalism, see McCulley (1966), Seal (1968) and Chatterjee (1986). On populism, see Gellner and Ionescu (1970); for romantic metaphors of nationalism, see Pearson (1993), and for national romantic movements, see Porter and Teich (1988). Nairn’s emphasis on populist nationalism is criticised from a Marxist standpoint by Hobsbawm (1977).

 

• On the ‘nation-to-be’, see Rotberg (1967). The nationalism of the French revolution eulogised ‘the people’, but in a pre-romantic, neo-classicist, manner; see Minogue (1967) and Kohn (1967b). On the relationship between neo-classicist and romantic elements, see A.D.Smith (1976).

 

• For these criticisms, see the essays in Stone (1979). On late nineteenth-century France, see E.Weber (1979). On the rise of nationalism among ‘overdeveloped’ peoples, see Horowitz (1985: ch. 6) and Gellner (1983:101–9).

 

• This is the thesis propounded by Rostow (1960), but it can hardly be generalised. On the relationship of cultural nationalism to economic growth in Japan, see Yoshino (1992). On the concept of atimia: see Nettl and Robertson (1968: Part I).

 

• This was a favoured theme in the late 1950s and 1960s: the era of decolonisation in Africa and Asia was associated both by colonial rulers and their opponents with the activities of intellectuals and, more generally, intelligentsia who were held responsible for the prevalent socialist nationalisms of so many ‘Third World’ states. See especially Hodgkin (1956), Coleman (1958), Shils (1960), Seton-Watson (1960), J.H.Kautsky (1962), Worsley (1964), Binder (1964), as well as the theories of Gellner (1964), Kedourie (1960, 1971) and A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 10; 1979: chs 4–5, 7; 1981a: chs 5–6). The effect of singling out the intellectuals was to obscure the role of other strata and of the relationship between elites and mass of the population.

 

• For some patterns of relationships between secular nationalists, traditional elites and the mass of the population, see D.Smith (1974) and Brass (1991). For the Eritrean case, see Cliffe (1989); for the Baluch struggle, see the penetrating essay by S. Harrison, ‘Ethnicity and the political stalemate in Pakistan’, in Banuazizi and Weiner (1986:267–98, esp. 271–7); and, more generally, Brown (1989).

 

• As part of the bargain in the negotiations for Union in 1707, the Scottish elites agreed to give up their own Parliament, but retained their autonomy in education,

 

Notes  233

 

local government, the legal system and ecclesiastical organisation; see Hanham (1969) and Webb (1977).

 

• See, for example, the analyses of Quebec by McRoberts (1979) and of Hungarians in Transylvania under the Habsburg empire, by Verdery (1979).

 

• Here I am only concerned with the application of ‘rational-choice’ theory to nationalism, not with the general debate about its validity and utility; but see Olson (1965) and Hechter (1987).

 

• Hechter considers the costs of secession to be widely known and understood. On the middle classes as the main constituency of a secessionist nationalism, see Hroch (1985) and Breuilly (1993: ch. 2). For a detailed empirical confirmation from Quebec, see Pinard and Hamilton (1984).

 

• For a discussion of Horowitz’s general theory, see Chapter 7. For other analyses of secession movements which give greater weight to geopolitical factors, as well as international attitudes and legal norms, see Beitz (1979: Part II), Wiberg (1983), Mayall (1990: ch. 4) and Heraclides (1991).

 

• State and nation

 

• There is a large literature on bureaucracy and the state, but little on its relationship to the nation and nationalism. But see, apart from the theorists discussed in this chapter, Bendix (1996; 1st edn 1964), Poggi (1978) and Tivey (1980). For some case studies, see Corrigan and Sayer (1985), Brass (1985) and Brubaker (1996: ch. 2).
• Again, there is a large literature on Marxist analyses of the state, but little that links it closely with nations or nationalism; but see Alavi (1972), Markovitz (1977), Saul (1979) and Amin (1981); also Poggi (1978).

 

• On the colonial and post-colonial state in Africa, see Montagne (1952), Zartmann (1964), A.D.Smith (1983b: ch. 2) and Neuberger (1986).
• Besides these typical West European and East European models, there are at least two others: the colonial state-to-nation model in Africa and parts of Asia, which is not the same as the indigeneous state-to-nation Western model, being a product of foreign rule; and the immigrant pioneer model, whereby an ethnic fragment creates a state and then seeks to incorporate other immigrant ethnic fragments, as in the United States, Canada and Australia; see Laczko (1994) and Castles et al. (1988).

 

• For the impact of nationalism on the inter-state order and vice-versa, see Hinsley (1973) and Azar and Burton (1986). Posen (1993) and Snyder (1993) stress the security needs of states and communities as vital elements in the rise of nationalism.

 

• Mann cites the case of ‘Sumer’ (Mann 1986:90–3) as a federal ‘people’ whose ‘professional scribes wrote in a common script, learned their trade with the help of identical word lists, and asserted they were indeed one people, the Sumerians’. He warns against adopting the claims of nineteenth century ethnography that ‘the Sumerians were united by ethnicity, by membership in a common gene pool’ (: 92). This seems to confuse ethnic culture with biology, and fails to give sufficient weight to subjective factors, such as Sumerian beliefs about their collective identity. Yet, Mann concedes, the Sumerians may have been an ‘ethnic community’ and had ‘a weak but nonetheless real sense of collective identity, buttressed by language, foundation myths, and invented genealogies’ (ibid.: 92). In general, except for ancient Egypt, pre-modern ethnic communities were ‘small and tribal’, like the Jews, while larger social units (empires or tribal confederacies) ‘were too stratified for communities to cross class barriers’ (ibid.: 159). (The exceptions in the ancient world appear to have been the Assyrians, who developed what Mann regards as an upper-class form of ‘nationalism’, and the Greeks who had three concentric cultural networks, to the polis, Hellas and humanity.) Otherwise, Mann accepts Gellner’s thesis that there was no possibility of a cross-class cultural unity within a particular

 

234   Notes

 

territory, and hence of nations and nationalism, before the onset of modernity (Mann 1993:215–6; cf. Hall 1985).

 

• On German nationalism and unification, see Droz (1967:147–52) and Hughes (1988); on Italian unification, see Beales (1971) and Riall (1994); and on German and Italian unification, see Alter (1989: ch. 3) and Breuilly (1993:96–115).

 

• On nationalism and territory, see Anderson (1991: ch. 10), the essays in Hooson (1994) and A.D.Smith (1996a) and (1997a).

 

• For the intimate connection between vernacular language and ethnicity, especially in Eastern Europe, see Fishman (1972, 1980) and Petrovich (1980). Examples of the close connection between such vernacular mobilisation and nationalism, see Branch (1985) on Finland and the Kalevala, Kitromilides (1979, 1989) on Greek language and nationalism, and Conversi (1990, 1997) on Basque and Catalan nationalism. See also the analysis of the role of vernacular and oral communications in spreading the Sikh ethno-nationalist demand for Kalistan by Deol (1996). For late medieval England, Christianity and the vernacular, see Hastings (1997: ch. 2).
• Breuilly counterposes his set of nationalist propositions to those I outlined (in A.D. Smith 1983a: ch. 1; 1973a: section I), explicitly rejecting my assumption of the universality and polycentrism of modern nationalism.

 

• For other studies of the social composition of nationalist movements, see Hroch (1985) and A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 6).
• John Breuilly is right to oppose the characterisation of nationalism as the politics of the intellectuals (which clearly belittles its power and resonance). At the same time, he underestimates and mistakes the reasons why nationalism holds special attractions for intellectuals. This, I think, resides less in its intellectual abstractions than its appeal to the aesthetic imagination. It is the nation’s aesthetic and poetic properties (as Breuilly himself concedes a propos the importance of Afrikaner ceremonies and rituals), as well as the moral and didactic dimensions of nationalism, that hold such strong attractions for artists, writers, poets, historians, broadcasters and educators. This is well analysed and illustrated in the work of George Mosse (1964, 1976, 1994).

 

• On Afrikaner myths of election and migration, see Thompson (1985) and Cauthen (1997); for myths and nationhood generally, see Hosking and Schöpflin (1997).
• For a similar argument, brought against the Marxist developmentalists, see Orridge (1981) who emphasises the large number of dimensions and issues included in the concept of ‘nationalism’.

 

• Weber, of course, complemented the ‘empathetic’ approach with a ‘causally adequate’ analysis; see Freund (1970) and Giddens (1971); and see Chapter 3 (on Hechter).
• On the question of method in defining the concept of the ‘nation’, see A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 7); Connor (1978); Greenfeld (1992: ch. 1); Hastings (1997: ch. 1); and also Calhoun (1997: Introduction and ch. 1).

 

• On these nationalisms and their culture values, see Conversi (1997) and Brand (1978). Other cases include Wales, Brittany and perhaps Quebec; see Mayo (1974), Williams (1977) and McRoberts (1979).

 

• See Chapter 2 for my response to Gellner’s version of the nationalism-to-nation argument. For a recognition that we cannot separate the analysis of ‘national identity’ from that of ‘nationalism’, see Billig (1995).

 

• On these diaspora nationalisms, see Sheffer (1986) and A.D.Smith (1995c); more

generally on diasporas, see Armstrong (1976) and Cohen (1997).

 

• I exclude here the Nazi example which Breuilly himself highlights, as it includes other racial, and non-nationalist, ideological dimensions and motifs; see A.D.Smith (1979: ch. 3).

 

Notes  235

 

• Political messianism

 

• On the functionalist perspective on politics and religion, see especially Apter (1963b) and Eisenstadt (1968). For a critique, see A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 3).
• On Durkheim and nationalism, see Mitchell (1931). See also A.D.Smith (1983b) and Guibernau (1996:26–31).
• For Kedourie, nationalism is a purely secular and modern, as well as invented, ideology. It is also a doctrine that requires cultural homogeneity, and as such appeals to the intellectuals whose status depends on linguistic and cultural attainments and recognition. Kedourie also points out that literacy and rationalist education were specifically European preoccupations and attainments, and that scholarly European research into overseas peoples and territories, coupled with the spread of literacy, encouraged the discovery and classification of non-Europeans as ethnic groups and nations, and the rise of ‘marginal men’ (Kedourie 1971:27).

 

• For some examples of nationalism’s tendency to assimilate traditional religion, see Binder (1964), A.D.Smith (1973c) and D.Smith (1974). But see the more general analysis of Juergensmeyer (1993) who argues the reverse: the attempt by a revived traditional religion to take the nation into its domain against the secular state.

 

• Kedourie (1971) also analyses the religio-political ideals and activities of Nkrumah, Ghandi, Dedan Kimathi, Simon Kimbangu, André Matswa, John Chilembwe, Kenyatta, Sukarno and Marcus Garvey, among others, all of whom embraced an extremism that was characteristic of the ‘marginal men’; see also Kedourie (1966).

 

• For an account of the reception of nationalist ideas in sub-Saharan Africa which takes the local milieux into account, see Markovitz (1977: ch. 3), and for India, see Chatterjee (1986 and 1993).

 

• There is, for example, no millennial movement in Egypt (rather than the Sudan) preceding the rise of Egyptian nationalism in the 1880s or in Turkey preceding the emergence of a Turkish nationalism in the 1900s. We look in vain for an Indian millennialism preceding the rise of Indian nationalism in the 1880s—or any millennial movements preceding the rise of French or German nationalisms; see A.D. Smith (1979: ch. 2).

 

• Of course, Kedourie is right in one respect: ‘local anomalies’ are legion and their global manifestations attest a wider vision of nationalism whereby the ‘true nature’ of the world must be revealed. It is this ‘naturalising’ quality of nationalism that makes it so radical. Kedourie (1992) analyses the transition to such radical politics in the Middle East.
• These are, of course, seen as predominantly male virtues (with women serving in the role of mothers of warriors), on which see Nira Yuval-Davis (1997) and Sluga (1998) and my brief discussion in Chapter 9. For self-sacrificing, stoic nationalisms, see Herbert (1972) and Draper (1970); and Elshtain (1993).

 

• The title of Pinsker’s classic proto-Zionist pamphlet was AutoEmancipation (1882). Fraternité (this did not include sororite) demanded self-denial and self-sacrifice—on whose visual representation, see Rosenblum (1967: ch. 2), Honour (1968: ch. 3) and Detroit (1975).

 

• It is also not clear whether Kedourie believes ethnies to antedate nationalism and the rise of nations. At times he appears to suggest that there is some kind of pre-existing ethnic community whose (religious) past can be used and perverted, as by modern nationalist Turks, Greeks and Jews.

 

• On the contrasts and similarities between religious and nationalist attitudes and practices, see the early work of von der Mehden (1963); cf. also Brass (1974) and (1991). Kedourie’s view is not a case of simple instrumentalism. For him, the shift from religion to nationalism is part of a profound, if catastrophic, revolution, signalling the end of a tolerant, pluralist world and its replacement by a harsh,

 

236   Notes

 

homogenising and subversive world. This is no aberration, nor is it simply a conspiracy. The damage goes much deeper and the danger is much greater.

 

• One may doubt Juergensmeyer’s method, which leans heavily on interviews with official spokespersons (and in some cases, only a few such representatives), and question his conclusion of an overall opposition between the secular West and religious nationalism, given the absence of any sign of unity between the different forms of religious (including fundamentalist) nationalisms, on which see Marry and Appleby (1991). But Juergensmeyer is surely right to emphasise the continuing importance of religion and religious community in many lands, and the ways in which religious beliefs and sentiments underlie many nationalisms.

 

• Kapferer’s analysis is rich in meaning and suggestion for the relations between religious traditions and nationalism, but one wonders whether the ANZAC example which he so perceptively analyses retains its hold for most Australians today and whether, in consequence of being an increasingly multicultural immigrant society, it can sustain a sense of nationhood; see Castles et al. (1988).
• For fuller discussions of these themes, see A.D.Smith (1996a) and the essays in Hosking and Schöpflin (1997).
• The causal weight of ressentiment for nationalism is open to question, but Greenfeld (1992) offers a rich and wide-ranging analysis which draws together a variety of other causal factors in each of her historical case-studies.

 

• Invention and imagination

 

• The literature on postmodernism is vast, but though postmodernists have much to say about social identities, feminism and post-colonialism, they have not devoted so much attention to nationalism. But see Bhabha (1990: ch. 16) and Chatterjee (1993), briefly discussed in Chapter 9; also some of the essays in Ringrose and Lerner (1993) and in Eley and Suny (1996). It is impossible in such a short survey as this to do justice to this burgeoning literature. On the theme of ‘nationalism and postmodernity’, see the brief overview in Smart (1993:139–45).

 

• Hobsbawm cites the study of Swiss cultural and social development by Rudolf Braun:

 

Sozialer and kultureller Wandel in einem landlichen Industriegebiet im 19. und 20. Jarhundert, ch. 6 (Erlenbach-Zurich 1965). But equally germane is the enquiry into Swiss foundation myths by Kreis (1991); cf. Kohn (1957).

 

• Note that Hobsbawm here shifts the emphasis from the ‘nation’ and nationalism to the ‘nation-state’, since he regards the concept of ‘nation’ as irrelevant unless it is linked to the territorial state. But the real question is how far the Israeli and Palestinian ‘nations’ are novel, without the state; see Kimmerling and Migdal (1994) and Shimoni (1995: ch. 1).

 

• This goes some way to meeting the key point made by his critics, though Hobsbawm is only interested in the spate of production of ‘invented traditions’, rather than their reception. On French memorials and monuments, see the volumes edited by Pierre Nora (1984, 1986) (vols I, La République, and II, La Nation). For German nineteenth-century commemorations and ceremonies, see Mosse (1976). For the deliberate creation of a Zionist culture and art, combining Jewish traditions with secular, Enlightenment ideals, by and for the Western Jewish middle classes, see Berkovitz (1996).
• Here Hobsbawm follows Earth’s (1969) analysis of ethnicity as a social boundary phenomenon of exclusion.
• It is, of course, only by insisting on the primacy of the German Romantic and organic version of nationalism that the seminal role of French nationalism in the Revolution can be overlooked. For pre-Revolutionary ideas about the nation in France, see Palmer (1940), Godechot (1965) and Baker (1990: ch. 2). For the importance of linguistic politics during the Revolution, see Kohn (1967b) and

 

Notes  237

 

Lartichaux (1977). See also Leith (1965) and Crow (1985: ch. 7) on artistic propaganda and representations before and during the Revolution.

 

• On the nationalisms in this period in the West, see Kohn (1967b) and Seton-Watson (1977: ch. 3); and for Latin America, see Phelan (1960), Humphreys and Lynch (1965), Brading (1985) and Anderson (1991: ch. 4).

 

• For the normative and analytical debate about ‘civic’ and ethnic’ nationalisms, see Chapter 9. For the two kinds of nationalism in France, see Kedward (1965) and Gildea (1994).

 

• Eric Hobsbawm’s discussion of ‘ethnicity’ veers between culture and ‘race’ (: 63–7), and his discussion of ethnic community in non-European plural states (ibid.: 153–62), together with his note on the term ethnie (ibid.: 160, note 24), aim to show how far removed ethnic conflicts are from what Marxists referred to as ‘the national question’ and from nationalism. The idea that some ethnies may provide bases (as cultural network, social institution and popular myth, memory and belief-system) for the formation of nations and national states is, for Hobsbawm, as still-born as his ‘proto-nations’. This does not prevent him from recognising the need for ethnic belonging and the persistence of ethnic conflicts since the events of 1989–92.

 

A similar instrumentalism, this time employing Freud’s theory of the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, is invoked by Michael Ignatieff (1998: ch. 2) to explain why the ‘neutral facts about a people’, the ‘“minor differences”—indifferent in themselves’, are transformed by nationalism into major differences; and so why minor ethnic differences between Serbs and Croats became hardened into the battle-lines of Serbo-Croat ethnic hatred. Again, this assumes that both ethnicity and nationalism are largely fictive narratives, constructed to bestow or withold power and privilege on some to the exclusion of others (ibid.: 38–9, 50–3, 56–7). At the same time, Ignatieff assumes the reality of ethnic groups, concedes the history of ethnic differences and even antagonisms in the Balkans, and the frequency with which nationalism answers to genuine needs (ibid.: 39, 44, 59). To which we may add that Tito’s Yugoslavia institutionalised the major ethnic communities in six republics, giving political and economic expression to their ethnic myths and memories.

 

• There is also the fact of the well known mass self-sacrifices of the First World War, on which see Gillis (1994) and Winter (1995).
• Yet the context of his use of the term ‘invention’ does call to mind a powerful instrument for deconstructing and denigrating both nations and nationalisms.

 

• The formation of Pakistan is the subject of a seminal debate on ‘primordial’ versus ‘instrumental’ accounts of ethnicity and nationalism by Paul Brass and Francis Robinson in Taylor and Yapp (1979); and see Brass (1991). See Chapter 7 for further discussion.

 

• Deutsch and the communications theorists had singled out the importance of the mass media in creating ‘publics’ available for political participation and action. But Anderson’s analysis goes beyond the rather crude determinism implicit in the earlier approach, in linking these ‘objective’ technological, economic and political processes with discursive networks and subjective factors.

 

• In contrast to the modernist belief in the powerful sociological reality of nations (though not that of their own myth and self-image) to be found in the work of Ernest Gellner or Tom Nairn, Anderson denies such reality to the nation outside the representations of its members and portraitists. But, in that case, on what basis can we explain the evident fact (which Anderson underlines) of the continuing hold, and indeed renewal, of nations and their nationalisms? See the critique in Hastings (1997: ch. 1) and the discussion of Brubaker in Chapter 4.

 

• ‘Intellectualism’ here is not only a question of the human faculty (of imagination), but also of the particular medium (the printed word) as opposed to other kinds of media. For the idea of the nation as felt and acted out, see my brief discussion of Fishman (1980) in Chapter 7.

 

238   Notes

 

• On racism and nationalism generally, see Poliakov (1974), A.D.Smith (1979: chs 3– 4) and Balibar and Wallerstein (1991: ch. 6). For some case-studies which reveal their complex interrelations, see Geiss (1974), MacDougall (1982), Thompson (1985) and Mosse (1994, 1995).
• See the critique by Gellner (1983: ch. 5) of such subjectivist and voluntarist definitions.
• Massimo d’Azeglio, former Prime Minister of Piedmont, is said to have remarked after the unification of Italy: ‘We have made Italy: now we must make Italians’ (cited in Seton-Watson 1977:107). On the growth of a sense of italianita among the middle classes in Italy, see Riall (1994: ch. 5). On the political importance of an oral culture in sub-Saharan Africa, see Mazrui (1985). It is perhaps surprising that Benedict Anderson underplays the role of religion outside (and within) Europe, given his recognition of its critical importance in relation to death and the desire for immortality. In making an over-sharp dichotomy between ‘religion’ and its successor, ‘nationalism’, Anderson seems to accept the traditional Marxist ‘supersession of religion’ schema.

 

• On Herder’s ‘cultural populism’, see Berlin (1976). The role of the mass media, particularly television, is discussed in Schlesinger (1991); and see Deol (1996).
• See Chapter 7 below for Walker Connor’s ideas about the hold of kinship sentiments and the political role of familial analogy. For the ‘appeal to posterity’ in neo-classical representations of nations and national heroes, see Honour (1968: ch. 3).

 

• On the myth of ethnic election, which appears among a variety of peoples from Armenians, Jews and Greeks to Russians, Poles, Swiss, French, English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Afrikaners, Americans and Mexicans, as well as among non-Christian peoples like the Persians, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese and Sinhalese, see Cherniavsky (1975), Armstrong (1982: ch. 7), A.D.Smith (1992a) and Akenson (1992).

 

• Primordialism and perennialism

 

• Kohn (1967a) differentiated within the ‘Western’ type of nationalism a ‘collectivist’ French version from the ‘individualistic’ Anglo-Saxon version of the nation. Both versions, however, viewed the nation as a rational association of free citizens.
• For the sources of ‘organic’ nationalism among German Romantics, see Reiss (1955) and Barnard (1965); and for a powerful critique, Kedourie (1960).
• Similar problems can be found in other cases of ‘long-lived peoples’—Egyptians, Armenians, Chinese, Japanese and Jews. On the question of Egyptian continuity, see Gershoni and Jankowski (1987: ch. 6); and on Armenian ethno-history, see Lang (1980). On Jewish continuities, see Seltzer (1980) and Zerubavel (1995). For Japan and its culture, see Lehmann (1982) and Yoshino (1992).

 

• This is the solution preferred by Horowitz (1985), whose approach I outline below.
• Geertz refers here to B.R.Ambedkar: Thoughts on Linguistic States, Delhi (ca. 1955, 11). On subnationalism in Africa, see Olorunsola (1972), and in Europe, Petersen (1975).

 

• Francis Robinson argued that the growth of Muslim sentiment in northwest India, and the concentration, collective memories and cultural resources of the Muslims in the United Provinces, acted as important constraints on the freedom of action of Muslim elites in India. But Robinson goes further, claiming that ‘Islamic ideas and values…both provide a large part of the framework of norms and desirable ends within which the UP Muslim elite take their rational political decisions, and on occasion act as a motivating force’, because of the central Islamic tradition of community, the umma (Robinson 1979:78–82).

 

• For an overview of some ‘primordialist’ positions, see Stack (1986: Introduction). For ‘instrumentalist’ views, see inter alia Bonacich (1973), Cohen (1974), Okamura (1981) and Banton (1983, 1994), Eriksen (1993) and most of the essays in Wilmsen

 

Notes  239

 

and McAllister (1996). A range of views is presented in Glazer and Moynihan (1975), who adopt an intermediate position themselves. See also Epstein (1978) who focuses on the creative, subjective aspects of ethnicity. For attempts to synthesise the rival positions, see McKay (1982) and Scott (1990).

 

• For Edwin Wilmsen (in Wilmsden and McAllister 1996:3) ‘Primordialist ethnic claims are nothing more than claims to ownership of the past and rights to its use for present purposes’. This is very different, but perhaps not incompatible with, the understanding of a theorist like Grosby (1995), whose analysis of the significance of national territory as an object of primordial beliefs rests on its widely perceived life-enhancing qualities for those who reside on it and who are, in part, collectively constituted by those beliefs. See also Chapter 9.

 

• For these terms, see Brass (1991), A.D.Smith (1984b, 1995b), as well as McKay (1982) and Scott (1990).

 

• This is also the project of Manning Nash (1989), for whom the most common ethnic boundary markers are kinship, commensality and a common cult. These form ‘a single recursive metaphor. This metaphor of blood, substance, deity symbolise the existence of the group while at the same time they constitute the group…. This trinity of boundary markers and mechanisms is the deep or basic structure of ethnic group differentiation’ (: 1ll). Nash is wary of the concept of ‘primordial ties’ as applied to ethnicity: the building blocks of ethnicity (the body, language, shared history, religion, territory) may be relatively unchanging, but ‘primordial ties’ are ‘like any other set of bonds, forged in the process of historical time, subject to shifts in meaning, ambiguities of reference, political manipulation, and vicissitudes of honour and obloquy’. This means that history, politics and other circumstances vary the kind of building blocks and the nature of the boundaries in each case (ibid.: 4–6).

 

• Weber (1979) is a study of the incorporation of the great majority of the population into the French national state through the mass, compulsory education system, the conscript army after the defeat by Prussia, and the creation of a centralised communications network linking all the French provinces. Connor cites the slow stages of extension of the franchise in Britain, culminating only in 1918 with the enfranchisement of women and the remaining 20 per cent of men; at the same time, a highly elitist view of the French nation obtained in French politics until 1848.
• On which see Doob (1964) and Billig (1995). For a very different view of the power and resilience of the inter-state order, see Mayall (1990); and see Chapter 9.
• See Chapter 3 for Horowitz’s analysis of the causes of secession and irredentism. On the differences between these types of ethnic movement, see Horowitz (1992).

 

• It is not clear whether Horowitz regards nationalism as a mainly state-centred ideology and movement, or whether we can speak of ‘ethno-nations’ in the new states of Asia and Africa. For a different account, see D.Brown (1994).

 

• The title of his book and an article (Armstrong 1992) may imply a leaning towards ‘continuous’ perennialism, but a later article (Armstrong 1997) supports the view that Armstrong is interested in the recurrence of the nation.

 

• On national sentiment in the Middle Ages, see Tipton (1972), Guenée (1985) and Hastings (1997). For antiquity, see Levi (1965), Tcherikover (1970) and Alty (1982).

 

• Ethno-symbolism

 

• Another historian who dates the rise of nationalism to the sixteenth century is Marcu (1976). But most historians regard the late eighteenth century as the watershed which ushers in the ideology of ‘nationalism’.

 

• This might be construed as an argument for the precedence of England, but a similar evolution, in which the state used religious (Catholic) and linguistic homogenisation to forge an (upper- and middle-class) nation, took place in France from at least the

 

240   Notes

 

fifteenth century; see Beaune (1985). But cf. Palmer (1940) and Godechot (1965) on the relative modernity of secular French nationalism.

 

Hastings (1997: ch. 3) also argues for the early formation of the Scots, Irish and Welsh nations, the first on a mainly territorial basis, the others on an ethnic basis, with clear expressions of nationalism consequent on Anglo-Norman invasions from the twelfth century.

 

• But for Tilly it is political and economic activities, notably war-making by the state and the rise of the bourgeoisie, rather than ideas or symbols that shape both the older national states and the nations by design.

 

• A good example is afforded by the chroniclers of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Scotland, on which see Webster (1997: ch. 5); cf. also the Swiss chroniclers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, on which see Im Hof (1991).

 

• In eschewing any notion of primordialism, Reynolds also differs from the analysis of Guenée (1985); cf. also the debates in Tipton (1972), and the very different analyses in Bartlett (1994: ch. 8) and the selective continuous perennialism in Hastings (1997).

 

• For this catalogue, see Webster and Backhouse (1991). The historical introduction by Nicholas Brooks opens with these words:

 

The Anglo-Saxons, whose artistic, technological and cultural achievements in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries are diplayed in this exhibition, were the true ancestors of the English of today. At the time the works were produced, there were several rival Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, each of which had its own dynasty, its own aristocracy and its own separate traditions and loyalties. Spoken English already showed wide regional variations of dialect. None the less the Anglo-Saxons had a sense that they were one people.

 

(ibid.: 9)

 

Guidebooks and museum catalogues also tend to emphasise the continuities of the present with a national past. But for an argument that very rough territorial and cultural continuities can be found in Western Europe, in Hispania, Francia and Germania, for example, see Llobera (1994) and Hastings (1997: ch. 4) and for Spain, Barton (1993).

• For cultural nationalism’s elevation of peasant cultures in Eastern Europe, see Hofer (1980). See also Argyle (1976), Kitromilides (1979) and Hroch (1985).
• Here Hutchinson’s analysis has affinities with those of Kapferer (1988), Juergensmeyer (1993) and van der Veer (1994). See also Petrovich (1980) and the essays in Ramet (1989), which document the continuing power of religious ties, and in some cases religious institutions, in many East European and former Soviet republics. On religion and nationalism, see O’Brien (1988a) and Hastings (1997: ch. 8).

 

• Hutchinson is in sympathy with the position taken by Francis Robinson in his debate with Paul Brass on the origins of Pakistan and the role of religion in shaping elite political actions; see Taylor and Yapp (1979). Hutchinson also, by implication, shares the conviction of John Armstrong that pre-modern ethnic ties have a shaping influence on nations, while otherwise adhering to the modernist position that nations are both recent and qualitatively ‘modern’. See also Hutchinson (1992).

 

• Hutchinson’s stress on culture emphasises the links between modern nations and pre-modern ethnic ties, as does his stress on la longue durée. In that sense, he does not share the view of Tonkin et al. (1989: Introduction) who see the past as inevitably shaped by the interests, needs and preoccupations of the present, but is closer to Josep Llobera’s (1994) argument that pre-modern (medieval) cultural and territorial structures form the long-term foundations for modern European nations. Llobera

 

Notes  241

 

(1996) also emphasises the role of shared memories in shaping modern nations, like Catalonia.

 

• As opposed to his title, and a later essay (Armstrong 1992), which emphasise the premodernity of nations; cf. Hastings (1997: ch. 1, note 10).

 

• For an analysis of Barth’s ‘transactional’ model of ethnic group boundaries, see Jenkins (1988).
• Though a later essay (Armstrong 1995) stresses some areas of convergence with the predominantly modernist analyses of participants in the Prague conference, on which see Periwal (1995: esp. 34–43).

 

• Earth’s emphasis on relatively fixed ascription is the burden of Wallman’s (1988) critique of his model.
• Not all nationalists embrace the fifth tenet. Cultural nationalists tend to be wary of the state, and hence of ‘a state of one’s own’. Moreover, some nationalisms (for example, in Wales and Catalonia, though perhaps no longer in Scotland) are content to pursue ‘home rule’, where the nation has internal social, cultural and economic autonomy, but chooses to remain part of a wider federal state which has control over defence and foreign policy.

 

• For critical analyses of Kohn’s distinction, see A.D.Smith (1983a: ch. 8) and Hutchinson (1987: ch. 1). The term ‘ethnocentric’ signified here a rather weak, solipsistic and diffuse sense of nationalism without clear political goals, and it was conflated with a ‘tradition-modernity’ dichotomy and an associated chronology. Clearly, this confuses a series of analytically separate variables. What this glossed over was the absence of a clearcut ideology of nationalism (an operational theory of ‘nationalism-in-general’) in the ancient or medieval worlds, one which provides a set of concepts and ideas and a symbolic language ready for use and adaptation worldwide, such as we witness today.

 

• This was an earlier and vaguer definition’ of the concept of the ‘nation’, which omitted the features of the proper name and the ‘mass, public’ nature of the common culture, and spoke generally about sentiments of solidarity and common experiences, as the only subjective element.

 

• A number of separate issues helped to reorient my position, including a study of the impact of war on ethnicity and nations; a conference on ‘legitimation by descent’; the impact of Walker Connor’s articles, which pointed to the key role of ethnicity and myths of ancestry; and the rise of religious nationalisms in the 1980s, which compelled a critical reconsideration of the issue of ‘secular nationalism’.
• There was a corresponding change in my definition of the ‘nation’ as a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members (A.D.Smith 1991:14). Compared with the earlier definition (see note 17 above) this revised version sharpens the constituent elements, and seeks to balance the more ‘subjective’ with the more ‘objective’ components (for example, it speaks now of an ‘historic’ territory rather than just a ‘common’ one). This follows, in my opinion, from the method of defining the concept of the nation as an ideal-type drawn, as closely as possible, from the various concepts and ideas of the nation held by self-styled nationalists (see A.D.Smith 1983a: ch. 7).

 

• In this, I share the position on uneven cultural resources of Brass (1991) and Hutchinson (1994). Some of these resources—ethno-history and the ‘golden age’, sacred territory, myths of origin and ethnic election—are enumerated in A.D.Smith (1996a). For the different kinds of pre-modern ethnic communities, see A.D.Smith (1986a: chs 2–5); for the role of ethnic myths, see Hosking and Schöpflin (1997).
• See Tcherikover (1970) on attempted Seleucid hellenisation of Judea and the Maccabean reaction; for Greek ethnic and linguistic divisions, see Alty (1982). For an attempt to apply the ‘ethno-symbolic’ approach to the problem of national identity

 

242   Notes

 

in antiquity and the Middle Ages, see A.D.Smith (1994); on particular nationalisms in the Middle Ages, see Hastings (1997: chs 2–4).

 

• For some other examples of an early elite nationalism, see the studies of France by Beaune (1985), of Anglo-Saxon England by Howe (1989) and Hastings (1997: ch. 2), and of Poland by Knoll (1993). It is a moot point how far, despite their early politicisation, we can or should regard these upper- and middle-class sentiments of collective cultural identity as cases of ethnicity tied to statehood or of a national identity or of particularist nationalism (we can hardly speak of ‘nationalism’ as a generalised ideological movement until the eighteenth century).

 

• Beyond modernism?

 

• For Coleman’s concept of ‘concentric circles of loyalty’ see Coleman (1958: Appendix); cf. Yuval-Davis (1997).
• McNeill does not use the term ‘postmodern’, but his scheme links up with many of its assumptions. Nor does he share any of the ‘postmodernist
• I am well aware of the deeply contested nature of basic approaches to ‘ethnicity’; see, among many others, the essays in Glazer and Moynihan (1975), de Vos and Romanucci-Rossi (1975), Rex and Mason (1988), Wilmsen and McAllister (1996), and the readings in Hutchinson and Smith (1996).

 

To enter into this debate would necessitate a much more extensive discussion and deflect us from the main purpose of this book, to assess explanatory theories of nations and nationalism. I might just add that the problems of the study of ethnicity are exacerbated by a failure to keep the individual and collective levels of analysis distinct, and a tendency to read off characteristics of one level from those of the other; on which, see Scheuch (1966).

 

• Walby’s essay (1992) predated the recent work of Yuval-Davis and others; it is reprinted in Balakrishnan (1996).
• See Elshtain (1993). For other studies concentrating on this symbolic aspect of the field, see, for example, South Bank Centre (1989) and Ades (1989: esp. chs 7, 9).

 

• See Brookner (1980: ch. 7) on David’s Oath of the Horatii and Abrams (1986: ch. 8) on West’s Death of Wolfe; for other exempla, see A.D.Smith (1993). Of course, this is only one side of the matter: stereotypical female attributes of nationalism are also portrayed by romantic artists, for example, the nation as a woman in combat or mourning, as by Rudé, Delacroix or Ingres (see South Bank Centre 1989), or women engaged in ‘male’ activities, such as Joan of Arc (Warner 1983).

 

• The symposium on Miller’s book and his reply can be found in O’Leary (1996a and b).
• There is an extensive literature on each of these subjects, though most of it only touches on the issues of concern here. See, inter alia, Lustick (1979), Smooha (1990), Smooha and Hanf (1992), Baron (1985) and Preece (1997).

 

• On the issue of the definition of nationalism by analysts and (or versus) the ethnic or civic concepts of the participants, see the debate between Dominique Schnapper and myself, in Schnapper (1997).

 

• For these restrictions in ancient Greek and medieval Italian city-states, see Ehrenburg (1960) and Waley (1969).
• This, of course, has become a political issue and is hotly contested by some Australians, including some scholars (for example, the historian Geoffrey Blainey); cf. also the rather different analysis in Kapferer (1988).

 

• Here I have only alluded to an extensive debate on the crisis and/or decline of the ‘nation-state’ (see Tivey 1980). But most of this debate centres on the functions, and sovereignty, of the state, and says little about the transformation of the nation or national identity, which needs separate treatment; see Horsman and Marshall (1994), and, for a brief discussion, A.D.Smith (1996a).

 

Notes  243

 

• For a fuller discussion of the issues of globalisation in relation to nationalism, see Featherstone (1990) and Tomlinson (1991: ch. 3).
• For George Schöpflin (1995), it is rather the nature and extent of modernisation and its political expressions that are significant for the re-emergence of ethnicity and ethnic nationalism in Europe. But the weakness of democracy in the eastern half of the continent makes the appeal of ethnic nationalism much more attractive than in the West, where there is greater commitment to democratic modernity and civic institutions.

 

• Another large and relatively under-explored subject is the growing contribution of international relations theorists to the study of ethnicity and nationalism. Apart from the early classics by Cobban (1969; 1st edn 1945) and Carr (1945), this includes the studies by Hinsley (1973), Beitz (1979), Bucheit (1981), Lewis (1983), Azar and Burton (1986), Buchanan (1991), Ringrose and Lerner (1993) and M.Brown (1993), notably on the geopolitical conditions of success for ethnic secession movements.

 

• Immigration and nationalism is another large and growing field of analysis (see for example Soysal 1994), as is the study of refugees and ethnonationalist conflicts (see Newland 1993). Equally important is the study of genocide and nationalism, on which see inter alia Kuper (1981), Chalk and Jonassohn (1990), Fein (1993) and, in the colonial context, the penetrating analysis in Palmer (1998). A ‘world of nations’ is equally one of diasporas, and the analysis of diaspora communities has increasingly been related to nationalist and Pan movements; see Geiss (1974), Armstrong (1976), Landau (1981) and especially the essays by Jacob Landau, Walker Connor and Milton Esman in Sheffer (1986); also Cohen (1997). Though all these studies have implications for our understanding of nations and nationalisms, few of them have made (or sought to make) a contribution to the theory of nations and nationalism— as opposed to furthering our knowledge of its contemporary manifestations and consequences.

 

• For a wide range of views and analyses of the issues of European integration, see Gowan and Anderson (1996).

 

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Index

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Page references given in bold indicate a significant section on a particular subject in the text.

 

 

Achad Ha’am 90

 

Acton, Lord 9, 109

Aflaq, Michel 195

 

Africa xi, 2, 3, 15, 17–20, 36, 40, 52, 56, 70, 73, 85, 86, 88, 95, 97, 100–1, 104– 7, 120–1, 130, 136, 138, 151–2, 158, 165–6, 173–4, 194–5, 203, 206, 219

 

Afrikaner 87–8 Afshar, Haleh 206 Almond, Gabriel 20 Alsace 14, 39

 

America x, 1, 16–17, 52–3, 70, 74, 84, 114, 126, 136

 

Amhara 127 Amish 64

 

ancestry see descent, myth of ancestry Anderson, Benedict 5, 56, 91, 117, 131– 42, 171, 175–6, 202–3, 220, 224,

 

237n14, 238n18 Anthias, Floya 207

anti-colonialism see colonialism antiquity x, 18, 80, 120, 135, 159, 168–

70, 175, 177, 188, 190–1, 198–9,

233n6

Antonius, George 103

Apter, David 13, 20, 98

Arabs 17, 28, 56, 85, 102–3, 107, 113, 183, 205

Arana, Sabino 212

 

Armenia 54, 62, 91, 127, 168, 175, 184, 190–1

 

Armstrong, John 6, 167–8, 181–7, 192, 196–7, 224

 

Arndt, Ernst Moritz 209 Aron, Raymond 217

art, artists x, 139, 178, 203,

Asia xi, 2–3, 15–20, 40, 52, 56, 70, 86, 88, 95, 97, 100–1, 104–9, 121, 130, 136, 138, 151–3, 158, 165–6, 173–4, 183, 194, 203, 206, 219

 

Athens 200, 213 Atiyah, Edward 103 Aurobindo, Sri 90

 

Australia 1, 36, 40, 114–15, 194, 212 Austria see Habsburg empire authenticity 43–4, 87, 89–91, 112, 139,

 

160, 175, 189, 194–5, 198, 209 autonomy 43–4, 73, 76, 90–1, 99, 111,

178, 188, 197, 204, 214

 

Balibar, Etienne 204

 

Balkans 99, 101, 191 Baltic states 69 Baluchis 57

Banerjea, Surendranath 102–3

 

Bangla Desh 69, 79, 203, 216 Barth, Fredrik 6, 75, 167, 181–2, 186 Basques 54, 62, 69, 164, 212

 

Bauer, Otto 10, 48 Baumann, Zygmunt 214 Belgium 123, 153

Bell, Daniel 157 Bendix, Reinhard 20–1 Bengal see Bangla Desh

Bhabha, Homi 202–3, 224

 

Bible, the 135, 141, 169, 171–2, 193 Billig, Michael 93, 115, 158, 205, 217,

219, 224

Binder, Leonard 13, 20, 98

Black nationalism: homeland 92; ‘Nation of Islam’ 111

Bolingbroke, Henry St John 53

 

 

264

 

 

Bon, Gustav le 13 Bosnia 79, 158

 

boundary, border 6, 83, 88, 167–8, 178, 181–3, 186–7, 205, 207, 209, 217, 226

Brandon, S.G.F. 168 Brass, Paul 6, 153–5, 224 Breton, Raymond 212

Breuilly, John 5, 84–94, 126, 169, 176–7,

196–7, 224, 234n

Britain 12, 18, 53–4, 58–60, 80, 82, 86, 90, 108, 120, 130, 171–2, 179, 200, 215; see also England; Scots, Scotland; Wales

Brittany 54, 61–2, 164

Brubaker, Rogers 76–7, 212, 224, 229n3 Buddhism 14

Bulgaria 178

 

bureaucracy 34, 41, 44, 70, 87, 92–3, 95, 102–3, 107, 135–6, 139, 189–90, 193– 4, 224

Burke, Edmund 53

Burma 128, 130, 141

 

Cambodia 131 Canada 153, 194, 212

 

capitalism 12, 44, 47–55, 58, 70–1, 80–2, 87–8, 93, 121, 125–6, 129, 133, 135– 6, 141, 150, 166, 194

 

Carr, Edward H. 16–17 Castles, Stephen 214

 

Catalonia 51–2, 54, 62, 73, 90, 212 Catholicism 80, 94, 118, 131, 172, 212;

 

see also Christianity Chatterjee, Partha 203, 224

 

China 17, 56, 85, 103, 110, 131, 133, 191, 205

 

Christianity x, 80, 109–10, 133, 150, 172, 183, 184–5

citizen(ship) 20–1, 27, 31, 35, 38–9, 82,

94–5, 97, 121, 126, 165, 168–9, 172, 177, 188, 201, 206, 209, 211–12, 216, 218, 226

city-state 138, 168, 177, 184, 199–200, 226

 

civic (and ethnic) nationalism 121–2, 126, 158, 179, 201, 210–13, 218–19, 222 class 10, 11–12, 17, 27, 42, 47–50, 51, 55,

 

57, 59–60, 62, 80–1, 112, 122–3, 128, 154, 162–4, 179, 182, 190, 193–4, 201, 204, 208, 211, 215

clergy 30–1, 86, 184, 192–4, 227; see also religion

Cobban, Alfred 16, 17

colonialism 48–9, 52, 58–63, 70, 73, 79,

Index   265

 

85, 93, 99–100, 106–8, 136, 151, 161, 166, 194–5, 203, 206, 232n9

colour see race, racism

communications 30, 32–4, 71, 124, 164, 169, 173, 182–4, 186, 200, 214–15, 224

 

Connor, Walker 6, 63, 161–5, 166, 175– 6, 180, 196, 224, 231n12

 

construct(ionism) 120–2, 125, 129–31, 158

 

Conversi, Daniele 212 Corsica 164 Coughlan, Reed 155–6

 

Croat, Croatia 54, 62, 67, 73, 79, 178, 216, 237n9

cultural division of labour 59–61 cultural nationalism 74, 90, 177–80, 212 culture (high/low) 8, 10, 27, 28–9, 30,

 

32–6, 37–44, 50, 52–3, 62–3, 65, 75, 83–4, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 94, 122, 128– 9, 131, 137, 142, 146, 148–9, 151–5, 157–9, 161, 166, 169–70, 175–87, 188– 96, 200, 203, 205, 207, 209–11, 214– 15, 217–18, 223

 

custom 18, 131, 152–3, 175, 191–2 Cyprus 208

 

Czechs, Czechoslovakia xi, 38, 40, 42, 86, 119, 123, 126–8, 178, 231

 

David, Jacques-Louis x, 208 democracy xiii, 12, 17, 83–4, 121, 125,

158, 163–5, 201, 205, 210–13, 218, 226

Denmark 36, 149, 173, 199

 

descent, myth of ancestry 45–6, 62, 72, 127, 148–9, 154, 156, 160–2, 165, 169, 175, 183, 191–2, 194, 196, 212, 224, 227

 

Deutsch, Karl 20, 24, 71, 78, 164 development, uneven 27, 35, 37, 49–54 diaspora 68, 168, 184, 191, 231n4 diffusion(ism) 107, 115

Dinur, Ben-Zion 40

Disraeli, Benjamin 99 Doob, Leonard 13

 

Durkheim, Emile 14–16, 98, 151 Dutch see Netherlands, the dynasty, dynasticism 133, 136, 197

economy 5, 12, 47–51, 54–5, 58, 62–3,

65, 68, 99, 121, 123–4, 162, 164–6, 169, 173, 188, 196–7, 214

education 27, 29, 31–3, 35–6, 38–41, 68,

 

266   Index

 

120–1, 123, 139, 163–5, 169, 194, 197, 203, 214

 

Egypt 54, 113–14, 168, 190–2, 197 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 20, 24

 

election, ethnic 141, 168, 171, 192, 224, 227, 238n21

 

elite 30, 32, 37, 42, 50, 68, 76, 80, 85, 91, 94–7, 108, 111, 113, 117, 120, 125, 127–9, 131, 155, 157, 163–4, 172, 178, 180–2, 190, 200, 203, 213, 223–4

 

Eller, Jack 155–6 Elshtain, Jean Bethke 208 empire see imperialism

 

Engels, Friedrick 10, 11–12, 21, 47–9, 86 England 1, 9, 16–17, 53–4, 58, 62, 79, 94, 122, 125–6, 141, 146, 149, 171–2,

 

173, 175, 190, 193, 199, 204, 212, 240n6; see also Britain

Enlightenment 49–50, 99–101, 110, 202, 209

 

Enloe, Cynthia 208 Eriksen, Thomas xii, 155 Eritrea 57, 195

 

essentialism 4, 19, 208–9, 219, 229n1 Estonia 128, 231n8

Ethiopia xi, 42, 79, 191, 216 ethnicity, ethnie xiii, 13–14, 16, 29, 40,

 

42–3, 45–6, 52–1, 60, 62, 64, 68–9, 74, 77, 82, 89, 94, 96, 102–3, 114,

 

122–4, 126–31, 138, 147–8, 150, 154– 8, 159–69, 174–8, 180–6, 188–9, 190– 8, 199–220, 222–7, 233n6, 237n9,

239n10, 242n3

 

ethno-history 43–5, 55, 62–3, 141, 189– 92, 193–6, 206, 224, 227

ethno-symbolism xiii, 6, 192–3, 196–8, 202, 206, 224, 226

Europe, Eastern 40, 44, 54, 56–7, 74, 86, 112, 121, 123, 125–6, 139, 158–9, 178–9, 194, 216, 219

Europe, European integration 1–2, 10– 13, 16–17, 19, 22, 27, 50, 59, 74, 77,

79–80, 88, 93, 97, 99–100, 102–6,

120–1, 125, 133, 136, 154, 163, 165, 171, 173–4, 176, 180–1, 183–4, 189– 90, 192–3, 195, 199–201, 214, 215–18

Ewe 38

 

Fanon, Frantz 105

 

fascism 2, 84, 132, 209, 213; see also Nazism

 

feminism 6, 201, 205–10, 218, 224; see also gender

Fichte, Johann Gottlob 17, 40, 53, 99, 209

 

Finland 36, 38, 42, 90, 128 Finley, Moses 168

 

Fishman, Joshua 6, 159–61, 165, 166, 224

Flanders 51

 

folk, folk culture 30, 33–4, 44, 50, 52, 54, 192

 

France 1, 9–10, 15–16, 18, 38–9, 42, 53– 4, 61, 79–80, 82, 86, 94, 101, 107–8, 111–12, 115, 120, 122, 125–8, 163, 165, 168, 170, 172–3, 175–6, 181, 190–1, 193–4, 200, 209, 212, 216, 236n6

Frank, André Gunder 49, 58

French Revolution 9, 15, 17, 21, 52, 70, 74, 81, 98–9, 101, 104, 112, 121, 125– 6, 133, 149, 172, 208–9, 212, 216, 236n6

Freud, Sigmund 12–13

 

Gandhi, Mohandas 128

 

Geertz, Clifford 6, 75, 151–4, 155, 157–8, 223

 

Gellner, Ernest xii, 5, 24, 27–46, 51, 56, 106, 169, 171–2, 176, 185, 188, 190, 220, 224, 230n2, 231

 

genealogy see descent, myth of ancestry gender 6, 163, 201, 203–4, 205–10, 219,

220

genocide 40, 161, 211

Germany 10–11, 13, 16, 18, 40, 47, 50, 53–4, 80, 83–4, 86, 93, 95, 99–100, 109–10, 120–1, 123, 125–7, 146, 164, 170, 184, 194, 209, 212–13, 218

Ghana 56, 105, 112

Giddens, Anthony 5, 71–6, 80, 92, 215, 224

Gillingham, John 171

 

globalism, globalisation 6, 12, 78, 124, 195, 201–2, 213–16, 218, 222, 224, 226

Gökalp, Ziya 40, 101, 206

 

‘golden age’ 115, 127, 183, 191–2, 224, 227

 

Greece 54, 62, 79, 92, 101, 112–13, 125, 127, 141, 150, 160, 168, 178, 183, 191–2, 194, 209

 

Greenfeld, Liah 53, 115, 141, 170–1 Grodzins, Morton 13

 

Grosby, Steven 6, 156–7, 168–9, 175, 223 Guibernau, Montserrat xi, 217

 

 

Gypsies 64

 

Habermas, Jurgen 211, 213

 

Habsburg 9, 48, 74, 80–2, 94 Hall, Stuart 204

Halpern, Manfred 98

 

Hastings, Adrian xi, 6, 171–2, 176, 196, 239n2

Hayes, Carlton 16

 

Hechter, Michael 5, 57–69, 106, 224 Hegel, Georg Friedrich 10, 12, 48–9, 78,

93, 104, 124, 127, 131

 

Herder, Johann Gottfried 9, 53, 72, 87, 99, 139, 160, 178

Hertz, Frederick 16

 

Hilferding, Rudolf 99 Hinduism 42, 67, 102, 114 Hinsley, F.H. 78

 

historicism 71–2, 78, 87, 89, 96, 178–9, 189

 

history 14, 16, 39, 42, 48, 62, 100, 112– 16, 119–20, 127, 136, 141, 146, 156, 159, 161–2, 166–7, 169–75, 177–8, 180–1, 190, 193, 211, 215, 217, 223, 226, 227; see also ethno-history

Hitler, Adolf 161

Ho Chi Minh 161

Hobsbawm, Eric xii, 5, 72, 117–31, 171, 176–7, 198, 214, 218, 220, 224, 236,

237

Hobson, J.A. 99 Hodgkin, Thomas 106

Holland see Netherlands, the

homeland 46, 63, 89, 92, 115, 128, 168, 171, 177, 191, 196–8, 217, 226

Horne, Donald 214

 

Horowitz, Donald 6, 68–9, 165–6, 224 Howard, Michael 79–80

 

Hroch, Miroslav 40, 56, 224 Hungary 94, 121, 164, 173, 178 Hutchinson, John 74, 177–80, 196, 224,

240

hybrid(isation) 202–5, 209–10, 214, 219

 

Ibo 68

 

identity see ethnicity, ethnie

ideology 16, 34, 49, 51, 81, 86–7, 92, 93, 97–8, 115–16, 158, 167, 170–1, 173, 175, 190, 195, 200, 207, 217, 222

 

Ignatieff, Michael xi, 237n9 imagination, imagined community 6,

 

131–3, 136–40, 150 immigration see migration

Index   267

 

imperialism 49–51, 99–100, 102–3, 136, 168, 173–4, 184, 192, 194, 203, 214

 

India 1, 17, 40, 42, 52, 56, 85, 101–2, 105, 107–8, 113, 114, 120, 127–8, 130, 154, 158, 191, 203, 205, 208, 215–16

Indonesia 17, 134, 139

 

industrialism, industrialisation 30–3, 34– 7, 41, 58, 60, 62, 81, 125, 150–1, 215 instrumentalism 6, 69, 125, 153–9, 166,

179–80, 225

intellectuals, intelligentsia 17, 27–8, 34–5, 38, 50–7, 81, 86, 91, 93, 99, 101–3, 107–9, 111, 115–16, 125, 129, 131, 136, 139, 162, 179, 189–90, 194, 200, 222, 224, 232n9, 234n12

internal colonialism 57–63

invention, invented tradition 6, 8, 38,

117–21, 129–31, 137, 198 Iran 40, 101, 114, 191–2, 206 Iraq 40

 

Ireland 9, 11, 36, 54, 58, 60–2, 66–7, 74, 90, 127, 179, 180, 208

 

irredentism 68, 79, 95, 153, 166, 211, 216

Isaacs, Harold 160

Islam 30, 98, 101, 113, 130, 133, 141, 154, 183, 184–5, 205–6

Israel 92, 113, 120, 127, 141, 168, 169, 171–2, 223; see also Jews, Judaism

 

Italy 9, 16, 50, 54, 62, 83, 95, 121, 125, 139, 164, 238n18

 

James, Paul xii

 

Japan 2, 17, 36, 39, 42, 55, 59, 74, 112, 165, 190–2, 199

 

Jayawardena, Kumari 206 Jefferson, Thomas 53

 

Jews, Judaism 54, 62, 67, 123, 127, 141, 154, 160, 168, 176, 183–4, 190–2

 

Johnson, Lesley 175 Jones, Sian xi

Juergensmeyer, Mark 5, 114, 141, 235n13

 

Kandiyoti, Deniz 206–7, 224 Kant, Immanuel 99, 106 Kapferer, Bruce 5, 114, 236n14 Kautsky, J.H. 24

Kautsky, Karl 12, 48

Kedourie, Elie xii, 5, 13, 17, 24, 93, 99– 116, 124–5, 176, 219, 224, 235

Kenya 105, 108, 130

 

268   Index

 

kinship 6, 8, 46, 80, 127, 132, 140, 147– 52, 154–6, 157, 160–2, 165, 167, 169, 174, 192, 196–7, 203, 206, 208–9, 223–4

 

Kohn, Hans 16–17, 53, 106, 112, 146, 171, 179, 213

 

Korais, Adamantios 101 Korea 190

 

Kristeva, Julia 76–7 Kurds 38

 

Landes, Joan 209

 

language 27–9, 32, 35, 50–1, 59, 72–3, 80– 1, 87, 94, 99–100, 121–4, 126–7, 131, 133, 135–40, 151–4, 159–60, 170, 171– 3, 178, 182, 184, 191–2, 194, 197, 200, 203–5, 212, 215, 223–4, 227, 234n9

 

Latin America 1, 2, 28, 40, 58, 70, 136, 138–9

Lenin, Vladimir 12, 48, 49 Lerner, Daniel 20

 

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 103, 109, 110 liberalism 6, 78, 122, 132, 159, 201, 210–

13; see also democracy Libya 195

Lijphart, Arend 211

literacy 28, 31–2, 34, 59, 80, 100, 135, 138–9

 

literature 32, 129, 134, 138, 149, 179, 193, 197, 202–3, 227

Llobera, Josep 240n10

 

localism 146, 152, 156, 196–7, 215 longue durée 6, 9, 181–2, 186, 196, 223 Luxemburg, Rosa 12, 48

 

Macedonia 79, 216

 

McGarry, John 211

McNeill, William 199–202, 214, 215, 218, 219

Malay, Malaysia 141

 

Mann, Michael xii, 5, 80–4, 224, 233n6 Mao Tse Tung 161

 

Marx, Karl 10, 11, 47–9, 86, 93, 105 Marxism xi, 5, 10, 11–12, 47–9, 51, 55, 57,

70–1, 77, 117, 125, 131–2, 159, 230n3 Mayall, James 78, 16

 

Mazzini, Giuseppe 9, 11, 110, 122, 209 Mead, George Herbert 13

Melucci, Alberto 215

 

memory 10, 45–6, 62, 67, 122, 127, 130– 2, 161, 164, 169, 178–80, 186–7, 191– 2, 194–7, 215, 217, 223–4, 226

Mendels, Doron 6, 168, 177

Mesopotamia 168, 184

 

Mexico 36, 112, 134

Michelet, Jules 9, 209

 

Middle Ages 80, 103, 109–10, 122, 128, 133, 168–70, 174–5, 177, 181, 184, 190–1, 226

 

Middle East 1, 56, 158, 181, 183, 194, 203

 

migration 3, 122–4, 150–1, 154, 161, 163–5, 191, 194, 200–1, 203, 212, 214, 216, 217–18

 

military, militarism 71, 76, 79–83, 163, 200, 208

Mill, John Stuart 9

millennialism 103–5, 109–13, 235n7 Miller, David 210–11

minority, minority rights 41, 123, 191, 201, 209, 211

modernism xii, 3–6, 16, 18–24, 27–8, 55, 75, 113, 117, 125, 136, 141–2, 145–7, 159, 163–4, 167, 169, 177–8, 180, 185, 190–2, 197, 202, 213, 218–19, 221, 224, 225–6

 

modernity, modernisation x, 4, 28, 31–2, 35, 37, 41, 44, 71–6, 87, 91, 93, 159, 162, 164, 177, 188–9, 195–6, 199, 202, 222, 224, 226

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis 53 Morgan, Prys 129

 

Mosse, George 208–9, 224 multiculturalism 41, 201, 204, 209, 211,

 

213, 215 Mussolini, Benito 161

 

myth(ology) 45–6, 51, 98, 115, 127, 130– 1, 167–9, 174, 183–7, 191–2, 194, 197, 214–15, 217, 223–4, 226

 

myth of descent/origins see descent, myth of ancestry

 

Nairn, Tom 5, 49–55, 106, 113, 224 Napoleon 99, 112, 125, 126

narration, narrative 3, 131, 138, 141–2, 195, 202, 219, 225, 228

 

Nash, Manning 239n10 nation-building 2–4, 19–21 nation-state see state

 

national identity 89–91, 162–3, 167, 170, 185, 188, 193–4, 196–7, 202–4, 217– 18, 222

national self-determination 78–9, 86–7,

121–2, 216

 

nature, naturalism 9, 18–19, 22, 146, 152, 159, 174, 178

 

 

Nazism 16, 67, 118, 200; see also fascism Netherlands, the 1, 16, 74, 101, 126, 128,

173, 190

Nigeria 39, 56, 108, 215 Norway 128

 

O’Leary, Brendan 211

 

organicism 4–5, 10–11, 23, 125, 156–7, 157, 175, 178, 188

 

Orridge, Andrew 78 Ossian 197

Ottoman empire 65, 74, 82, 94, 101

 

Pakistan 101, 114, 130, 141, 153, 216, 238n6

Palestine, Palestinians 120 paradigm see theory (of nationalism) Parsons, Talcott 156

patriotism 161–2, 211, 213

 

peasant, peasantry 30, 41–2, 50, 86, 163, 176, 183, 203

Peel, John 203

perennial(ism) xiii, 6, 18–19, 22–3, 145, 159–69, 175, 180, 190, 196, 202, 218– 19, 221, 223–4, 225–6

 

periphery 49–51, 53–5, 58–61, 164, 192, 203–4, 207

 

Persia see Iran phenomenology 186, 192 Philippines 134 Plamenatz, John 38, 213

 

Poland, Poles 9, 11, 17, 42, 48, 75, 85, 94, 126–8, 130–1, 164, 173, 178, 190

polyethnic, polyethnicity 199–202, 211 populism 51–3

Portugal 173

postmodern(ism) xii, 6, 117, 125, 129,

136–7, 141–2, 195, 202–4, 207, 210,

213, 218, 220, 224, 226, 236n1 primordial(ism) xiii, 6, 19, 23, 89–90,

145–60, 163, 167, 178, 180, 192, 214, 221, 223, 225–6, 239

print, print-capitalism 133, 135–6, 138–42 Protestant(ism) 80, 114, 135, 141, 171–2;

see also Christianity

psychology, psychologism 12–13, 68–9, 72, 75, 108–9, 115, 142, 150, 161–4

Pye, Lucian 13, 20, 98

 

Quebec, Québécois 51, 73, 107, 212, 213

 

race, racism 2, 10, 18, 45, 84, 122, 138, 147–8, 151–3, 175, 204, 216, 218

Index   269

 

Ranger, Terence 117, 129

 

rational choice 63–9, 73, 77, 157, 162–3 rationalism 14, 19, 50, 128, 154, 161–2,

166, 189

 

region(alism) 1, 54, 60, 61–3, 68–9, 82, 126, 153, 164–5, 194, 201, 215

 

religion 5, 13, 15, 28, 34, 80, 82, 94, 97– 8, 100, 102, 112–16, 122–3, 130, 132, 138, 140–1, 151–4, 166, 168–9, 171– 2, 175, 178–80, 182, 184–6, 189, 190– 4, 197–9, 201, 203, 215, 227, 235n12, 238n18

 

Renan, Ernest 9–10, 29, 170 revolution 153, 192, 194, 200, 208; see

 

also French Revolution Rex, John xi

 

Reynolds, Susan 6, 174–5, 177 Reynolds, Vernon 149 Richmond, Anthony 215

 

rites, ritual 80, 113–14, 118–19, 130–1, 139, 160, 178, 197, 217, 223–4, 227

Robespierre, Maximilian 104

 

Robinson, Francis 155, 238n6 Rokkan, Stein 78

 

Romantics, Romanticism 10–11, 40, 47, 50, 51–2, 99–100, 125, 146, 179, 189

 

Rome, Romans 76, 79, 126, 149, 168, 174–5, 183–4, 193, 200, 213

 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 9, 40, 100, 131, 207, 209

Rus (Kievan) 42

 

Russia 1, 2, 12, 44, 48, 74, 77, 82, 122, 126–7, 131, 168, 173, 190, 208

 

Schiller, Friedrich 93 Schopflin, George 242n14

 

Scots, Scotland 51–2, 54, 58, 60–2, 73, 75, 90, 120, 126–7, 172–3, 193, 201, 232n11

secession(ism) 28, 35, 63, 65–9, 79, 166, 213, 216

 

separatism 62–3, 65, 88, 95, 153, 164, 211, 216

 

Serb, Serbia 36, 67, 122, 128, 178, 237n9 Seton-Watson, Hugh 6, 173–4, 224 Shafer, Boyd 16

 

Shils, Edward 151, 155, 156–7 Sieyes, Abbe 9, 53, 159 Simmel, Georg 13, 71, 203 Singapore 216

 

Sinhalese 114 Slavs 12, 160, 184

Slovaks 42, 79, 128, 178, 216

 

270  Index

 

Slovenes 54, 73, 79, 128, 164, 178, 216 Sluga, Glenda 209

Smelser, Neil 13

Smith, A.D. xii, 6, 187–98, 229, 241 Snyder, Louis 16

 

sociobiology 6, 147–51, 152, 156–7, 160, 162, 223

 

sociology 13–16, 20, 30, 33, 55–7, 58, 72, 77, 151, 155–7, 159, 176, 179, 185, 190, 202, 220–1

 

sovereignty 73, 78–9, 88, 121, 132, 152, 164, 177, 209, 214, 216

 

Soviet Union xi, 65, 77, 79, 114, 127, 158, 216; see also Russia

Soysal, Yasemin 216

 

Spain 90, 125–6, 136, 172–3, 193 Spillman, Lynn xi

 

Sri Lanka 14 Stalin, Joseph 12

 

state, nation-state xi, 3, 5, 9, 14, 20, 29– 30, 32–3, 35, 38, 48, 55, 58, 66, 70– 96, 97, 120–2, 124, 126, 130–1, 139, 151–3, 157, 161–2, 164, 166, 171–4, 177, 184, 187, 189, 191, 197, 200, 202, 209, 214, 219, 222, 224, 226

 

Sumer 197, 233

supranationalism 6, 195, 201, 213–14, 216–18; see also globalism, globalisation

Sweden 42, 126, 128, 173, 199 Switzerland, Swiss 14, 79, 119, 126–7,

128, 193

 

symbol(ism) 15, 45–6, 72, 75, 87, 92, 98, 113–14, 117, 119–20, 127, 130–2, 151, 155, 164, 167–9, 178–9, 180, 182–3, 184–5, 186–7, 190–2, 194, 197, 201, 207–8, 215, 217, 223–4, 226

 

Tajfel, Henri 165 Tamils 68, 14 Tanzania 195 Tell, William 193

 

territory 8, 21–2, 39, 63, 71–2, 88, 92, 122, 124, 156, 166, 168–9, 171–2, 175, 182–3, 188, 191–2, 194, 211–12, 223– 4, 226; see also homeland

 

theory (of nationalism) xi–xiii, 2–4, 18–24, 28, 35, 46, 55, 64, 67, 106, 145, 157, 159, 170, 185, 205, 210, 218–20, 221–8

 

Tilak, Bal Gagandhar 42, 102, 128 Tilly, Charles 5, 76, 80, 83, 173, 224 tradition(alism) 37, 97–8, 108, 113, 128,

 

129–30, 141, 152, 155–6, 175, 178, 180, 187, 189, 191–2, 194, 217, 224, 226

 

transnational(ism) see globalism, globalisation

Treitschke, Heinrich 9, 170

 

Trevor-Roper, Hugh 106 Turkey 2, 39, 101, 205–6, 208

 

Ukraine 42, 178; see also Rus Ulster 153

United States 95, 97, 119, 154, 163, 172, 194, 215, 218; see also America

 

unity 44, 46, 125, 169, 172, 188, 199, 200–1

 

van den Berghe, Pierre 147–51, 223 vernacular see language

Vietnam 131

Viroli, Maurizio 213

voluntarism 85, 137–8, 146, 157, 175, 188, 204, 205

 

Walby, Sylvia 206–7, 208

 

Wales 51–2, 54, 58, 60–1, 62, 120, 128,

129

Walzer, Michael 141

war x, 5, 22, 66–7, 71, 78–81, 83, 86, 114, 163, 165, 192–3, 199–200, 206– 7, 208, 224

West, Benjamin x, 208

 

Weber, Eugene 54, 163, 176, 239n11 Weber, Max 13–14, 70–1, 90, 156, 162,

 

165, 221 Worsley, Peter 24, 56

 

Yeats, William Butler 90, 101 Yoruba 203

Yugoslavia xi, 40, 127

Yuva-Davis, Nira 207–8, 209–10, 219, 224

 

Zeitgeist 99, 106

 

Zionism see Israel

Dan

Slide 1:
The chapters in the Book were selected from the English-language papers presented at the conference on “Prescriptivisme & Patriotisme: Language norms and identities from nationalism to globalization / Normes linguistique et identitaires du nationalisme à la mondialisation”, held in August 2009 at New College, University of Toronto, Canada.
Slide 2: Main idea:
a. An apologetic description of language prescriptivism as the societal process which reffers to the standardization of the grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Though rejected nowadays by the mainstream linguists as apparently antidemocratic, it seems in fact to be endorsed by society as a whole.
Mechanisms: – Our group membership is immediately revealed when we speak and there has always been a strong association between cultural and linguistic specifity, and from this there arose the desire to preserve and protect what was seen an important boundary marker.
As such language has a very high symbolic value for the community, as the carrier of its ancestral myths, poetry, beliefs and of its constituent values. Even if a language has lost its communicative function like the Irish, the member of the community will try to preserve it. That´s why language prescriptivism is highly esteemed and valued as a warrant of the community itself.
I am guessing she means not only elegantly written but spoken in a British accent. The implication, I think, is that this accent saved us from nazism and that this accent is therefore the language of valour and virtue, and one we should all emulate. That is what I mean about the conflation of usage and morality
( a comment about a reader of a Canadian newspaper who cited Churchill´s famous wartime speeches)
At the same time every language displays dialectal variation and stands for communicative reasons, especially in the age of print, in need of some standardization and normation. The norms are usually drawn upon the most educated speakers, which the others emulate, as they see them as the best speakers of the language:
“We must not accept as a rule of language any bad habits which have become ingrained in many people. To say nothing of the language of the uneducated, we know that whole theatres and the entire circus crowd commit Barbarisms in the shouting they make. I shall therefore define Usage in speech as the consensus of the educated, just as Usage in life is the consensus of the good.” (Roman rhetorician Quintiliam)

In that case prescriptivism is the conscient efforts of grammarians and lexicographers to help an wider public to get acces to the accepted norms.
Whereas earlier the academia was clearly in favour of the language prescriptivism, nowadays the main stream linguists tend to reject prescriptivism. On the one hand, even this rejection is a prescriptivist attitude itself, on the other hand for some scholars “prescriptivism” is an undesirable activity undertaken by others, while language planning represents their own expertise put into practice.
Even Grammarian and Lexicographers, nowadays, show reluctance to be branded authoritative, nevertheless they keep a strong attitude about “clear and elegant writing and speaking” vs. “imprecise and unclear writing and speaking”

Slide 3:

The book offers a reach multidisciplinary overview on approaches for considering the mechanisms by which language norms more generally emerge, especially in contexts of contact and cross-cultural awareness.
– It documents the historical and geographical persistence of prescriptivisms while revealing their contextual specificity.
– It introduces readers to approaches from range of disciplines, periods and languages on the question of what constitute attitudes and norms in many frameworks of collective identity
Slide 4:
Reflecting the complexity of the subject, the collection is organized thematically. Sub-sections are by no means restrictive in arrangement but constitute an introduction to approaches which are arranged less by methodology than by cultural perspective.
Part 1 “Managing Language Polices” show how gouvernament policies, even if not outspoken can determine the fate of multilingualism.
In part 2 “ Colonialism and Literary Canons” we can see how a language can be standardized or developp a literary tradition not inspite, but due to foreign occupatation. The standard Welsch language was formed and learned by the Welsh themselves due to the Sunday church attendances, which the English made mandatory during the forced conversion from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Also the Scotts language, a sister language of English could survive as it was praised by the English speakers for its literary qualities, the same way the Ancient Greek dialects survived as literary media.
Part 3, “Transmarine and Transatlantic Allegiances” acknowledges that the prevalent oppinion in the society is that nations are ethnically and linguistically homogeneous. Still, not every Englishman was against French loanwords, even in time of military conflict with France and it took some time after the American Revolution till the Americans rejected the London-based norms.
Part 4 “Redifining Boundaries: Ideology and Language Norms” contains two articles: one about the exclusion of other ethnicities from the “core of Anglicity” in the OED during the British Empire inspite of initial inclusive intentions of the authors. Basically, it´s about racism. The other is about the prescriptivism of the American Left Wing politicians, which see them selves as speaking a “better English” in comparison with the Republicans.
Part 5 “Identifying Norms ans Attitudes in Postcolonial contexts” discusses the attitudes towards different kind of Pidgin languages and English in the newly-emerged nations.
Part 6 “Prescribing Norms beyond Borders: Foreign Language Teaching” reveals how studies of second language Acquisition can underline modern nationalist notions of language as participation and belonging.
Slide 5-6
Strengths:
• A sound explanation of prescriptivism: i.e. why and how languages undergo a process of standardization
• A wide range of study cases on prescriptivism
• A wide range of approaches: from sociologic to literary, from linguistic to historical
Slide 7-8
Weaknesses:
• A wide range of study cases on prescriptivism: Sometimes you have the impression everything on this world is only about prescriptivism
• A wide range of approaches: fuzzy structure of the book: Sometimes the articles ranged in the same Chapter show just peripheral similarity. I sometime have the impression that the editors want to see some similarities where there is none, just the way some people wonder why Turkish-speakers don´t understand Arabic, after all speakers of both languages have the same religion and similar look. So, sometimes there are hardly some similarities between articles in the same chapter
Slide 9

The book offers a reach and multifaceted explanation of language prescriptivism as a societal process.
It shows that the symbolic and communicative function of the language are interrelated, as the communication can take place only on the basis of common norms, of which the linguistic ones are the most visible.
It shows that language itself is a collective good and the attitudes for its preservation, cultivation or rejection reflect identity issues and as such are natural.
Slide 10
To read or not to read?
• A clear explanation of the phenomen in the Forward
• A good paradigma of analysis, which helps to understand the value of other linguistic tools
(i.e. Hibridity – a good category of practice, but a bad category of analysis)
• Accepting that “language-Nazis” are normal, even if sometimes annoying
• Diversity of study cases
• Pure enjoyment for sociolinguists

The Age of Empire

 

A  DIVISION      OF   RANDOM    HOUSE,     INC .

NEW   YORK

To the students ofBirkbeck College

First Vintage Books Edition, April 1989

Copyright © 1987 by E.J. Hobsbawm

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in Great Britain, by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd., London, and in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1987.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hobsbawm, EJ. (EricJ.), 1917-

The age of empire, 1875-1914 / E.J. Hobsbawm.—1st Vintage Books ed. p. cm.

Bibliography: p. Includes index.

ISBN 0-679-72175-4 (pbk.)

359. History, Modern— 19th century. I. Title. D359.7.H63 1989

909.81 —dci9

Manufactured in the United States of America

579B86

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Preface

Overture

I    The Centenarian Revolution

• An Economy Changes Gear

 

• The Age of Empire

• The Politics of Democracy

• Workers of the World

• Waving Flags: Nations and Nationalism

• Who’s Who or the Uncertainties of the Bourgeoisie

 

• The New Woman

• The Arts Transformed

IO Certainties Undermined: The Sciences I i Reason and Society

12 Towards Revolution _‘3 From Peace to War

Epilogue

Tables

Maps

Notes

Further Reading

Index

ix xiii

i

‘3

34

56

84

1 12

142

165

192

219

243

262

276

302

328

34i

353

361

379

39i

ILLUSTRATIONS

(between pages 180 and 181)

• Tsar Nicholas n and King George v (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• The Wyndharn Sisters by Sargent, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• A La Bourse by Degas, Musee du Louvre, Paris (photo: Giraudon/Bridgeman)

• John D. Rockefeller (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Tea party on the Isle of Wight (photo: Mrs J. R. Ede, Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• A serving maid (photo: Mansell Collection)

• Le Jour de Premiire Communion by Toulouse-Lautrec, Musee des Augustins, Toulouse (photo: Giraudon/Bridgeman)

• Peasant picnic in France (photo: Roger-Viollet)

• A Russian village council, 1900 (photo: Victoria and Albert Museum)

• Workers in Wandsworth, London (photo: Greater London Council)

• Italian immigrants in the USA (photo: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• Immigrants on their way to America (photo: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• Wilhelm von Rontgen (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Two girls with a bicycle (photo: Mansell Collection)

• French telephone exchange (photo: Musee de la Poste, Paris)

• Instructions for a Kodak camera, 1889 (photo: Science Museum, London)

• Poster for Lumiere cinema (photo: Mary Evans Picture Library)

• Advertisement for HMV gramophone (photo: Mansell Collection)

• Cartoon of lady with car (photo: John Freeman)

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

• Bleriot landing at Dover, 1909 (photo: Mary Evans Picture Library)

• Pears Soap advertisement (photo: Mansell Collection)

• British mission to Rhodesia (photo: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• The European expedition against the Boxers, drawing by Hermann Paul (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Visitors to the Paris Exposition in 1900 (photo: Fondazione Primoli, Rome)

• French settler and his bodyguard on the Ivory Coast (photo: Roger-Viollet)

• Tea party in India (photo: India Office Library, London)

• A missionary postcard (photo: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• Contents page from The Indian Ladies Magazine, 1901 (photo: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• Lord Lugard (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Emiliano Zapata (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Lenin (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Friedrich Nietzsche (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Albert Einstein (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Rosa Luxemburg (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Bernard Shaw (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Pablo Picasso (photo: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• Drawing room designed by Liberty, 1906 (photo: Mansell Collection)

• Slum courtyards in Hamburg (photo: Museum fur Hamburgische Geschichte Bildarchiv)

• Lady golfer (photo: Mary Evans Picture Library)

• Making matchboxes, 1905 (photo: National Museum of Labour History, London)

• Advertisement of Harry Boulter, socialist tailor (photo: National Museum of Labour History, London)

• Paris haute couture, 1913 (photo: Weidenfeld and Nicolson Archives)

• The Reichstag in Berlin (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• The main railway station in Helsinki (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

• Pears Soap advertisement, 1880s (photo: Mansell Collection)

• The New Woman in the new offices of the 1890s (photo: John Freeman)

• Ambroise Vollard by Picasso, Grand Palais, Paris (photo: Giraudon)

• Engraving by Walter Crane, 1895 (photo: Herr Udo Achten)

ILLUSTRATIONS

• German social-democratic engraving, 1897 (photo: Herr Udo Achten)

• Title page of La Lanterne, 1898 (photo: Collection Alain Gesgon, CIRIP, Paris)

• German and Russian workers shake hands, engraving, 1906 (photo: Herr Udo Achten)

• The Olympic and Titanic under construction, 1910 (photo: The Ulster Museum, Belfast)

• Statuette of a suffragette (photo: National Museum of Labour History, London)

• British soldiers at Victoria Station, 1914 (photo: BBC Hulton Picture Library)

MAPS

between pages 353 and ^g i International migrations 1820-1910

• Movements of capital 1875-1914

• Opera and nationalism

• Europe in 1914

• The world divided: empires in 1914

P R E F A C E

Though written by a professional historian, this book is addressed not to other academics, but to all who wish to understand the world and who believe history is important for this purpose. Its object is not to tell readers exactly what happened in the world during the forty years before the First World War, though I hope it will give them some idea of the period. If they want to find out more, they can easily do so from the large and often excellent literature, much of which is easily available in English to anyone who takes an interest in history. Some of it is indicated in the guide to Further Reading.

What I have tried to do in this volume, as in the two volumes which preceded it (The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 and The Age of Capital 1848-

1875) *^{s t o} understand and explain the nineteenth century and its place in history, to understand and explain a world in the process of revolutionary transformation, to trace the roots of our present back into the soil of the past and, perhaps above all, to see the past as a coherent whole rather than (as historical specialization so often forces us to see it) as an assembly of separate topics: the history of different states, of politics, of the economy, of culture or whatever. Ever since I began to be interested in history, I have always wanted to know how all these aspects of past (or present) life hang together, and why.

This book is therefore not (except incidentally) a narrative or a systematic exposition, and still less a display of scholarship. It is best read as the unfolding of an argument, or rather, the tracing of a basic theme through the various chapters. Readers must judge whether the attempt is convincing, though I have done my best to make it accessible to non-historians.

There is no way of acknowledging my debts to the many writers whose works I have pillaged, even as I often disagreed with them, and still less my debts to the ideas I have obtained over the years in conversation with colleagues and students. If they recognize their own ideas and observations, they can at least blame me for getting them or the facts wrong, as I have certainly done from time to time. I can,

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

however, acknowledge those who made it possible to pull a long pre-occupation with this period together into a single book. The College de France enabled me to produce something like a first draft in the form of a course of thirteen lectures in 1982; I am grateful to this august institution and to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie who instigated the invitation. The Leverhulme Trust gave me an Emeritus Fellowship in 1983-5, which allowed me to get research help; the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and Clemens Heller in Paris, as well as the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University and the Macdonnell Foundation, gave me the possibility of a few quiet weeks in 1986 to finish the text. Among the people who assisted me in research I am particularly grateful to Susan Haskins, Vanessa Marshall and Dr Jenna Park. Francis Haskell read the chapter on the arts, Alan Mackay those on the sciences, Pat Thane that on women’s emanci-pation, and preserved me from some, but I am afraid not from all, error. Andre SchifFrin read the entire manuscript as a friend and exemplar of the educated non-expert to whom this book is addressed. I spent many years lecturing on European history to the students of Birkbeck College, University of London, and I doubt whether I would have been able to envisage a history of the nineteenth century in world history without this experience. So this book is dedicated to them.

HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

The Age of Empire

O V E R T U RE

Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unaware of its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation. Sometimes it remains latentfor long periods, then suddenly revives. History is the always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there. Memory always belongs to our time andforms a lived bond with the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.

Pierre Nora, 1984¹

Merely to recount the course of events, even on a world-wide scale, is unlikely to result in a better understanding of the forces at play in the world today unless we are aware at the same time of the underlying structural changes. What we require first of all is a new framework and new terms of reference. It is these that the present book will seek to provide.

Geoffrey Barraclough, 1 g64²

I

In the summer of 1913 a young lady graduated from secondary school in Vienna, capital of the empire of Austria-Hungary. This was still a fairly unusual achievement for girls in central Europe. To celebrate the occasion, her parents decided to offer her a journey abroad, and since it was unthinkable that a respectable young woman of eighteen should be exposed to danger and temptation alone, they looked for a suitable relative. Fortunately, among the various interrelated families which had advanced westwards to prosperity and education from various small towns in Poland and Hungary during the past generations, there

was one which had done unusually well. Uncle Albert had	built up
a chain of stores in the Levant –  Constantinople, Smyrna,	Aleppo,

Alexandria. In the early twentieth century there was plenty of business

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THE AGE OF EMPIRE

to be done in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, and Austria had long been central Europe’s business window on the orient. Egypt was both a living museum, suitable for cultural self-improvement, and a sophisticated community of the cosmopolitan European middle class, with whom communication was easily possible by means of the

French  language,  which  the  young  lady  and			her  sisters had			per-
fected at a boarding establishment in the neighbourhood					of Brussels.
It also,	of course, contained  the Arabs. Uncle		Albert	was happy  to
welcome his		young relative, who  travelled  to	Egypt	on	a  steamer
of  the	Lloyd	Triestino,  from  Trieste,  which	was	then	the	chief

port of the Habsburg Empire and also, as it happened, the place of residence of James Joyce. The young lady was the present author’s future mother.

Some years earlier a young man had also travelled to Egypt, but from London. His family background was considerably more modest. His father, who had migrated to Britain from Russian Poland in the 1870s, was a cabinet-maker by trade, who earned an insecure living in East London and Manchester, bringing up a daughter of his first marriage and eight children of the second, most of them already born in England, as best he could. Except for one son, none of them was gifted for business or drawn to it. Only one of the youngest had the chance to acquire much schooling, becoming a mining engineer in South America, which was then an informal part of the British Empire. All, however, were passionate in the pursuit of English language and culture, and anglicized themselves with enthusiasm. One became an actor, another carried on the family trade, one became a primary school teacher, two others joined the expanding public services in the form of the Post Office. As it happened Britain had recently (1882) occupied Egypt, and so one brother found himself representing a small part of the British Empire, namely the Egyptian Post and Telegraph Service, in the Nile delta. He suggested that Egypt would suit yet another of his brothers, whose main qualification for making his way through life would have served him excellently if he had not actually had to earn a living: he was intelligent, agreeable, -musical and a fine all-round sportsman as well as a lightweight boxer of championship standard. In fact, he was exactly the sort of Englishman who would find and hold a post in a shipping office far more easily in ‘the colonies’ than anywhere else.

That young man was the author’s future father, who thus met his future wife where the economics and politics of the Age of Empire, not to mention its social history, brought them together – presumably at the Sporting Club on the outskirts of Alexandria, near which they would establish their first home. It is extremely improbable that such

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OVERTURE

an encounter would have happened in such a place, or would have led to marriage between two such people, in any period of history earlier than the one with which this book deals. Readers ought to be able to discover why.

However, there is a more serious reason for starting the present volume with an autobiographical anecdote. For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one’s own life. For individual human beings this zone stretches from the point where living family traditions or memories begin – say, from the earliest family photo which the oldest living family member can identify or explicate – to the end of infancy, when public and private destinies are recognized as inseparable and as mutually defining one another (‘I met him shortly before the end of the war’; ‘Kennedy must have died in 1963, because it was when I was still in Boston’). The length of this zone may vary, and so will the obscurity and fuzziness that characterizes it. But there is always such a no-man’s land of time. It is by far the hardest part of history for historians, or for anyone else, to grasp. For the present writer, born towards the end of the First World War of parents who were, respectively, aged thirty-three and nineteen in 1914, the Age of Empire falls into this twilight zone.

But this is true not only of individuals, but of societies. The world we live in is still very largely a world made by men and women who grew up in the period with which this volume deals, or in its immediate shadow. Perhaps this is ceasing to be so as the twentieth century draws to its close – who can be certain? – but it was certainly true for the first two-thirds of our century.

Consider, for instance, a list of names of political persons who must be included among the movers and shapers of the twentieth century. In 1914 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was forty-four years old, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Stalin) thirty-five, Franklin Delano Roosevelt thirty, J. Maynard Keynes thirty-two, Adolf Hitler twenty-five, Konrad Adenauer (maker of the post-1945 German Federal Republic) thirty-eight. Winston Churchill was forty, Mahatma Gandhi forty-five, Jawaharlal Nehru twenty-five, Mao Tse-tung twenty-one, Ho Chi-minh twenty-two, the same age as Josip Broz (Tito) and Francisco Franco Bahamonde (General Franco of Spain), that is two years younger than Charles de Gaulle and nine years younger than Benito Mussolini. Consider figures of significance in the field of culture. A sample from a Dictionary of Modern Thought published in 1977 produces the following result:

3

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE
Persons born 1914 and after	23%
Persons active in 1880-1914
or adult in 1914	45%
Persons born 1900-14	17%
Persons active before 1880	15%

Quite patently men and women compiling such a compendium three-quarters of the way through the twentieth century still considered the Age of Empire as by far the most significant in the formation of the modern thought then current. Whether we agree with their judgment or not, this judgment is historically significant.

Hence not only the relatively few surviving individuals who have a direct link with the years before 1914 face the problem of how to look at the landscape of their private twilight, but so, more impersonally, does everyone who lives in the world of the 1980s, insofar as it has been shaped by the era which led up to the First World War. I mean not that the remoter past is of no significance to us, but that its relation to us is different. When dealing with remote periods we know that we confront them essentially as strangers and outsiders, rather like Western anthropologists setting out to investigate Papuan hill peoples. If they are geographically or chronologically, or emotionally, remote enough, such periods may survive exclusively through the inanimate relics of the dead: words and symbols, written, printed or engraved, material objects, images. Moreover, if we are historians, we know that what we write can be judged and corrected only by other such strangers, to whom ‘the past is another country’ also. We certainly start with the assumption of our own time, place and situation, including the pro-pensity to reshape the past in our terms, to see what it has sharpened our eye to discern and only what our perspective allows us to recognize. Nevertheless, we go to work with the usual tools and materials of our trade, working on archival and other primary sources, reading an enormous quantity of secondary literature, threading our way through the accumulated debates and disagreements of generations of our pre-decessors, the changing fashions and phases of interpretation and inter-est, always curious, always (it is to be hoped) asking questions. But nothing much gets in our way except other contemporaries arguing as strangers about a past which is no longer part of memory. For even what we think we remember about the France of 1789 or the England of George in is what we have learned at second or fifth hand through pedagogues, official or informal.

Where historians try to come to grips with a period which has left surviving eyewitnesses, two quite different concepts of history clash, or, in the best of cases, supplement each other: the scholarly and the

4

OVERTURE

existential, archive and personal memory. For everyone is a historian of his or her own consciously lived lifetime inasmuch as he or she comes to terms with it in the mind – an unreliable historian from most points of view, as anyone knows who has ventured into ‘oral history’, but one whose contribution is essential. Scholars who interview old soldiers or politicians will have already acquired more, and more reliable, information about what happened from print and paper, than their source has in his or her memory, but may nevertheless misunderstand it. And, unlike, say, the historian of the crusades, the historian of the Second World War can be corrected by those who, remembering, shake their head and tell him or her: ‘But it was not like that at all.’ Nevertheless, both the versions of history which thus confront one another are, in different senses, coherent constructions of the past, consciously held as such and at least potentially capable of definition.

But the history of the twilight zone is different. It is itself an incoher-ent, incompletely perceived image of the past, sometimes more shadowy, sometimes apparently precise, always transmitted by a mixture of learning and second-hand memory shaped by public and private tradition. For it is still part of us, but no longer quite within our personal reach. It forms something similar to those particoloured ancient maps filled with unreliable outlines and white spaces, framed by monsters and symbols. The monsters and symbols are magnified by the modern mass media, because the very fact that the twilight zone is important to us makes it central also to their preoccupations. Thanks to them such fragmentary and symbolic images have become lasting, at least in the western world: the Titanic, which retains all its power to make headlines three-quarters of a century after its sinking, is a striking example. And these images which flash into our mind when it is, for some reason or another, turned to the period which ended in the First World War are far more difficult to detach from a considered interpretation of the period than, say, those images and anecdotes which used to bring non-historians into supposed contact with a remoter past: Drake playing bowls as the Armada approached Britain, Marie-Antoinette’s diamond necklace or ‘Let them eat cake,’ Washington crossing the Delaware. None of these will affect the serious historian for a moment. They are outside us. But can we, even as professionals, be sure that we look at the mythologized images of the Age of Empire with an equally cold eye: the Titanic, the San Francisco earthquake, Dreyfus? Patently not, if the centenary of the Statue of Liberty is any guide.

More than any other, the Age of Empire cries out for demystification, just because we – and that includes the historians – are no longer in it, but do not know how much of it is still in us. This does not mean that it calls for debunking Qr muckraking (an activity it pioneered).

5

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

II

The need for some sort of historical perspective is all the more urgent because people in the late twentieth century are indeed still passionately involved in the period which ended in 1914, probably just because August 1914 is one of the most undeniable ‘natural breaks’ in history. It was felt to be the end of an era at the time, and it is still felt to be so. It is quite possible to argue this feeling away, and to insist on the continuities and enjambments across the years of the First World War. After all, history is not like a bus-line on which the vehicle changes all its passengers and crew whenever it gets to the point marking its terminus. Nevertheless, if there are dates which are more than con-veniences for purposes of periodization, August 1914 is one of them. It was felt to mark the end of the world made by and. for the bourgeoisie. It marks the end of the ‘long nineteenth century’ with which historians have learned to operate, and which has been the subject of the three volumes of which this is the last.

No doubt that is why it has attracted historians, amateur and pro-fessional, writers on culture, literature and the arts, biographers, the makers offilmsand television programmes, and not least the makers of fashions, in astonishing numbers. I would guess that in the English-speaking world at least one title of significance – book or article – has appeared on the years from 1880 to 1914 every month for the past fifteen years. Most of them are addressed to historians or other specialists, for the period is not merely, as we have seen, crucial in the development of modern culture, but provides the frame for a large number of passionately pursued debates in history, national or international, mostly initiated in the years before 1914: on imperialism, on the development of labour and socialist movements, on the problem of Britain’s economic decline, on the nature and origins of the Russian Revolution – to name but a few. For obvious reasons the best known among these concerns is the question of the origins of the First World War, and it has so far generated several thousand volumes and continues to produce literature at an impressive -rate. It has remained alive, because the problem of the origins of world wars has unfortunately refused to go away since 1914. In fact, the link between the past and present concerns is nowhere more evident than in the history of the Age of Empire.

Leaving aside the purely monographic literature, most of the writers on the period can be divided into two classes: the backward lookers and the forward lookers. Each tends to concentrate on one of the two most obvious features of the period. In one sense, it seems extra-ordinarily remote and beyond return when seen across the impassable

6

OVERTURE

canyon of August 1914. At the same time, paradoxically, so much of what is still characteristic of the late twentieth century has its origin in the last thirty years before the First World War. Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower, a best-selling ‘portrait of the world before the war (1890-1914)’ is perhaps the most familiar example of the first genre; Alfred Chandler’s study of the genesis of modern corporate manage-ment, The Visible Hand, may stand for the second.

In quantitative terms, and in terms of circulation, the backward lookers almost certainly prevail. The irrecoverable past presents a challenge to good historians, who know that it cannot be understood in anachronistic terms, but it also contains the enormous temptation of nostalgia. The least perceptive and most sentimental constantly try to recapture the attractions of an era which upper- and middle-class memories have tended to see through a golden haze: the so-called ‘beautiful times’ or belle tpoque. Naturally this approach has been con-genial to entertainers and other media producers, to fashion-designers and others who cater to the big spenders. This is probably the version of the period most likely to be familiar to the public through cinema and television. It is quite unsatisfactory, though it undoubtedly catches one highly visible aspect of the period, which, after all, brought such terms as ‘plutocracy’ and ‘leisure class’ into the public discourse. One may debate whether it is more or less useless than the even more nostalgic, but intellectually more sophisticated, writers who hope to prove that paradise lost might not have been lost, but for some avoidable errors or unpredictable accidents without which there would have been no world war, no Russian Revolution, or whatever else is held to be responsible for the loss of the world before 1914.

Other historians are more concerned with the opposite of the great discontinuity, namely the fact that so much of what remains charac-teristic ofour times originated, sometimes quite suddenly, in the decades before 1914. They seek these roots and anticipations of our time, which are indeed obvious. In politics, the labour and socialist parties which form the government or chief opposition in most states of western Europe are the children of the era from 1875 to 1914, and so are one branch of their family, the communist parties which govern the regimes of eastern Europe.* So indeed are the politics of governments elected by democratic vote, the modern mass party and nationally organized mass labour union, and modern welfare legislation.

Under the name of ‘modernism’ the avant garde of this period took over most of twentieth-century high cultural output. Even today, when

* The communist parties ruling in the non-European world were formed on their model, but after our period.

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T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE
some avant gardes or other schools no longer accept	this tradition, they
still define themselves in terms of what they reject	(‘post-modernism’).
Meanwhile the culture of everyday life is still dominated  by		three
innovations of this period: the advertising industry in its modern		form,

the modern mass circulation newspaper or periodical, and (directly or through television) the moving photograph or film. Science and technology may have come a long way since 1875-1914, but in the sciences there is an evident continuity between the age of Planck, Einstein and the young Niels Bohr and the present. As for technology, the petrol-powered road-running automobiles and the flying-machines which appeared in our period, for the first time in history, still dominate our landscapes and townscapes. The telephones and wireless com-munication invented at that time have been improved but not super-seded. It is possible that, in retrospect, the very last decades of the twentieth century may be seen no longer to fit into the framework established before 1914, but for most purposes of orientation it will still serve.

But it cannot be enough to present the history of the past in such terms. No doubt the question of continuity and discontinuity between the Age of Empire and the present still matters, since our emotions are still directly engaged with this section of the historical past. Never-theless, from the historian’s point of view, taken in isolation, continuity and discontinuity are trivial matters. But how are we to situate this period? For, after all, the relation of past to present is central to the preoccupations both of those who write and of those who read history. Both want, or should want, to understand how the past has become the present, and both want to understand the past, the chief obstacle being that it is not like the present.

The Age of Empire, though self-contained as a book, is the third and last volume of what has turned out to be a general survey of the nineteenth century in world history – that is, the historians’ ‘long nineteenth century’ which runs from, say, 1776 to 1914. It was not the author’s original intention to embark on anything so crazily ambitious. But insofar as three volumes written at intervals over the years and, except for the last, not intentionally conceived as parts of a single project, have any coherence, it is because they share a common con-ception of what the nineteenth century was about. And insofar as this common conception has succeeded in linking The Age of Revolution to

The Age of Capital and both in turn to The Age of Empire – and I hope it has – it should also be helpful in linking the Age of Empire to what came after it.

Essentially the central axis round which I have tried to organize the history of the century is the triumph and transformation of capitalism

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OVERTURE

in the historically specific forms of bourgeois society in its liberal version. The history begins with the decisive double breakthrough of the first industrial revolution in Britain, which established the limitless capacity of the productive system pioneered by capitalism for economic growth and global penetration, and the Franco-American political revolution, which established the leading models for the public institutions of bourgeois society, supplemented by the virtually simultaneous emerg-ence ofits most characteristic- and linked – theoretical systems: classical political economy and utilitarian philosophy. The first volume of this history, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848, is structured round this concept of a ‘dual revolution’.

It led to the confident conquest of the globe by the capitalist economy, carried by its characteristic class, the ‘bourgeoisie’, and under the banners of its characteristic intellectual expression, the ideology of liberalism. This is the main theme of the second volume, which covers the brief period • between the 1848 revolutions and the onset of the 1870s Depression, when the prospects of bourgeois society and its economy seemed relatively unproblematic, because their actual triumphs were so striking. For either the political resistances of ‘old regimes’, against which the French Revolution had been made, were overcome, or these regimes themselves looked like accepting the econ-omic, institutional and cultural hegemony of a triumphant bourgeois progress. Economically, the difficulties of an industrialization and econ-omic growth limited by the narrowness of its pioneer base were over-come, not least by the spread of industrial transformation and the enormous widening of world markets. Socially, the explosive discontents of the poor during the Age of Revolution were consequently defused. In short, the major obstacles to continued and presumably unlimited bourgeois progress seemed to have been removed. The possible difficul-ties arising from the inner contradictions of this progress did not yet seem to be cause for immediate anxiety. In Europe there were fewer socialists and social revolutionaries in this period than at any other.

The Age of Empire, on the other hand, is penetrated and dominated by these contradictions. It was an era of unparalleled peace in the western world, which engendered an era of equally unparalleled world wars. It was an era of, in spite of appearances, growing social stability within the zone of developed industrial economies, which provided the small bodies of men who, with almost contemptuous ease, could conquer and rule over vast empires, but which inevitably generated on its outskirts the combined forces of rebellion and revolution that were to engulf it. Since 1914 the world has been dominated by the fear, and sometimes by the reality, of global war and the fear (or hope) of

9

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

revolution – both based on the historic situations which emerged directly out of the Age of Empire.

It was the era when massive organized movements of the class of wage-workers created by, and characteristic of, industrial capitalism suddenly emerged and demanded the overthrow ofcapitalism. But they emerged in highly flourishing and expanding economies, and, in the countries in which they were strongest, at a time when probably capitalism offered them slightly less miserable conditions than before. It was an era when the political and cultural institutions of bourgeois liberalism were extended, or about to be extended, to the working masses living in bourgeois societies, including even (for the first time in history) its women, but the extension was at the cost of forcing its central class, the liberal bourgeoisie, on to the margins of political power. For the electoral democracies, which were the inevitable product of liberal progress, liquidated bourgeois liberalism as a political force in most countries. It was an era of profound identity crisis and trans-formation for a bourgeoisie whose traditional moral foundation crum-bled under the very pressure of its own accumulations of wealth and comfort. Its very existence as a class of masters was undermined by the transformation of its own economic system. Juridical persons (i.e. large business organizations or corporations), owned by shareholders, employing hired managers and executives, began to replace real persons and their families owning and managing their own enterprises.

There is no end to such paradoxes. The history of the Age of Empire is filled with them. Indeed, its basic pattern, as seen in this book, is of the society and world of bourgeois liberalism advancing towards what has been called its ‘strange death’ as it reaches its apogee, victim of the very contradictions inherent in its advance.

What is more, the culture and intellectual life of the period show a curious awareness of this pattern of reversal, of the imminent death of one world and the need for another. But what gave the period its peculiar tone and savour was that the coming cataclysms were both expected, misunderstood and disbelieved. World war would come, but nobody, even the best of the prophets,- really understood the kind of war it would be. And when the world finally stood on the brink, the decision-makers rushed towards the abyss in utter disbelief. The great new socialist movements were revolutionary; but for most of them revolution was, in some sense, the logical and necessary outcome of bourgeois democracy, which gave the multiplying many the decision over the diminishing few. And for those among them who expected actual insurrection, it was a battle whose aim, in the first instance, could only be to institute bourgeois democracy as a necessary preliminary to something more advanced. Revolutionaries thus remained within the

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O V E R T U RE

Age of Empire, even as they prepared to transcend it.

In the sciences and the arts the orthodoxies of the nineteenth century were being overthrown, but never did more men and women, newly educated and intellectually conscious, believe more firmly in what small avant gardes were even then rejecting. If public opinion pollsters in the developed world before 1914 had counted up hope against foreboding, optimists against pessimists, hope and optimism would pretty certainly have prevailed. Paradoxically, they would probably have collected proportionately more votes in the new century, as the western world approached 1914, than they might have done in the last decades of the old. But, of course, that optimism included not only those who believed in the future of capitalism, but also those who looked forward with hope to its supersession.

In itself there is nothing about the historical pattern of reversal, of development undermining its own foundations, which is novel or pecu-liar to this period as distinct from any other. This is how endogenous historical transformations work. They are still working this way. What is peculiar about the long nineteenth century is that the titanic and revolutionary forces of this period which changed the world out of recognition were transported on a specific, and historically peculiar and fragile vehicle. Just as the transformation of the world economy was, for a crucial but necessarily brief period, identified with the fortunes of a single medium-sized state – Great Britain – so the develop-ment of the contemporary world was temporarily identified with that of nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois society. The very extent to which the ideas, values, assumptions and institutions associated with it appeared to triumph in the Age of Capital indicates the historically transient nature of that triumph.

This book surveys the moment in history when it became clear that the society and civilization created by and for the western liberal bourgeoisie represented not the permanent form of the modern indus-trial world, but only one phase of its early development. The economic structures which sustain the twentieth-century world, even when they are capitalist, are no longer those of ‘private enterprise’ in the sense businessmen would have accepted in 1870. The revolution whose memory dominates the world since the First World War is no longer the French Revolution of 1789. The culture which penetrates it is no longer bourgeois culture as it would have been understood before 1914. The continent which overwhelmingly constituted its economic, intellectual and military force then, no longer does so now. Neither history in general, nor the history of capitalism in particular, ended in 1914, though a rather.large part of the world was, by revolution, moved into a fundamentally different type of economy. The Age of Empire,

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THE AGE OF EMPIRE

or, as Lenin called it, Imperialism, was plainly not ‘the last stage’ of capitalism; but then Lenin never actually claimed that it was. He merely called it, in the earliest version of his influential booklet, ‘the latest’ stage ofcapitalism.* And yet one can understand why observers – and not only observers hostile to bourgeois society – might feel that the era of world history through which they lived in the last few decades before the First World War was more than just another phase of development. In one way or another it seemed to anticipate and prepare a world different in kind from the past. And so it has turned out since 1914, even if not in the way expected or predicted by most of the prophets. There is no return to the world of liberal bourgeois society. The very calls to revive the spirit of nineteenth-century capitalism in the late twentieth century testify to the impossibility of doing so. For better or worse, since 1914 the century of the bourgeoisie belongs to history.

* It was renamed ‘the highest stage’ after his death.

12

CHAPTER j

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

‘Hogan is a prophet. …  A prophet, Hinnissy, is a man thatforesees throuble. …

Hogan is th’happyest man in th’wurruld about today, but tomorrah something is goin’ to happen.’

Mr Dooley Says, 19 io¹

I

Centenaries are an invention of the late nineteenth century. Some time between the centennial of the American Revolution (1876) and that of the French Revolution (1889) – both celebrated with the usual international expositions – the educated citizens of the western world became conscious of the fact that this world, born between the Dec-laration of Independence, the construction of the world’s first iron bridge and the storming of the Bastille, was now a century old. How did the world of the 1880s compare with that of the 1780s?*

In the first place, it was now genuinely global. Almost all parts of it were now known and more or less adequately or approximately mapped. With negligible exceptions exploration no longer consisted of ‘discovery’ but of a form of athletic endeavour, often with strong elements of personal or national competition, typified by the attempt to dominate the most severe and inhospitable physical environments of the Arctic and the Antarctic. Peary of the USA was to win the race to reach the North Pole in 1909 against British and Scandinavian competition; Amundsen of Norway reached the South Pole in 1911, one month ahead of the hapless British Captain Scott. (Neither achievement had or was intended to have the slightest practical consequence.) Railway and steamship had made intercontinental or transcontinental travel a matter di$weeks rather than months, except in most of the large land-masses of Africa, continental Asia and parts of the interior of

* The Age of Revolution, chapter i, surveys that older world.

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T HE  AGE OF  EMPIRE

South America, and would soon make it a matter of days: with the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1904 it would be possible to travel from Paris to Vladivostok in fifteen or sixteen days. The electric telegraph now made the communication of information across the entire globe a matter of hours. In consequence men and women from the western world – but not only they – travelled and com-municated over large distances with unprecedented facility and in unprecedented numbers. To take simply one illustration which would have been regarded as an absurd fantasy in the age of Benjamin Franklin. In 1879 almost 1 million tourists visited Switzerland. Over 200,000 of them were Americans: the equivalent of more than one in twenty of the entire US population at its first Census (1790).*²

At the same time it was a much more densely populated world. Demographic figures are so speculative, particularly for the late eight-eenth century, that numerical precision is both pointless and dangerous, but we shall not be far wrong in supposing that the 1500 million or so human beings who may have been alive in the 1880s represented double the world’s population in the 1780s. Much the largest number of them were Asians, as they had always been, but while in 1800 they had constituted almost two-thirds of humanity (according to recent guesses), by 1900 they formed perhaps 55 per cent of it. The next largest block were the Europeans (including Asian Russia, thinly populated). Their numbers had almost certainly more than doubled from, say 200 millions in 1800 to 430 millions in 1900, and what is more, their mass emigration overseas was largely responsible for the most dramatic change in world population, the rise of the Americas from about 30 to nearly 160 millions between 1800 and 1900; and more especially of North America from about 7 to over 80 millions. The devastated continent of Africa, about whose demography we admittedly know little, grew more slowly than any other, perhaps at most by a third in the century. While at the end of the eighteenth century there were perhaps three times as many Africans as Americans (North and Latin), by the end of the nineteenth there were probably substantially more Americans than Africans. The tiny population of the Pacific islands including Australia, though swelled by European migration from a hypothetical 2 millions to perhaps 6, carried little demographic weight.

Yet while in one sense the world was becoming demographically larger and geographically smaller and more global – a planet bound together ever more tightly by the bonds of moving goods and people, of capital and communications, of material products and ideas – in another it was drifting into division. There had been rich and poor

* For a fuller account of this process of globalization, see The Age of Capital, chapters 3 and 11.

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T HE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

regions, advanced and backward economies and societies, stronger and weaker units of political organization and military force, in the 1780s, as in all other ages of history of which we have record. And it is hardly to be denied that a major gulf separated the great belt of the world which had been the traditional home of class societies and more or less lasting states and cities, operating by means of literate minorities and – happily for the historian – generating written documentation, from the zones to the north and south of them upon which the ethnographers and anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated their attention. Nevertheless, within this large belt, which stretched from Japan in the east to the shores of the mid- and North Atlantic and through European conquest into the Americas, and in which the bulk of humanity lived, the disparities, though already large, did not yet seem insurmountable.

In terms of production and wealth, not to mention culture, the differences between the major pre-industrial regions were, by modern standards, remarkably small; say between 1 and 1.8. Indeed a recent estimate calculates that between 1750 and 1800 the per capita gross national product in what are today known as the ‘developed countries’ was substantially the same as in what is now known as the ‘Third World’, though this is probably due to the enormous size and relative weight of the Chinese Empire (with about a third of the world’s population), whose average standard of living may at that stage have actually been superior to that of Europeans.³ In the eighteenth century Europeans would have found the Celestial Empire a very strange place indeed, but no intelligent observer would have regarded it in any sense as an inferior economy and civilization to Europe’s, still less as a ‘backward’ country. But in the nineteenth century the gap between the western countries, base of the economic revolution which was transforming the world, and the rest widened, at first slowly, later with increasing rapidity. By 1880 (according to the same calculation) the per capita income in the ‘developed’ world was about double that in the ‘Third World’, by 1913 it was to be over three times as high, and widening. By 1950 (to dramatize the process) the difference was between 1 and 5, by 1970 between 1 and 7. Moreover, the gap between the ‘Third World’ and the really developed parts of the ‘developed’ world, i.e. the industrialized countries, began earlier and widened even more dramatically. The per capita share of the GNP was already almost twice that in the ‘Third World’ in 1830, about seven times as high in 1913.*

*The figure measuring the per capita share of the GNP is a purely statistical construct: gross national product divided by the number of inhabitants. While it is useful for general comparisons of economic growth between different countries and/or periods, it tells us nothing about the actual

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T HE  AGE OF  EMPIRE

Technology was a major cause of this gap, reinforcing it not merely economically but politically. A century after the French Revolution it was becoming increasingly evident that poorer and backward countries could easily be defeated and (unless they were very large) conquered because of the technical inferiority of their armaments. This was com-paratively new. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 had pitted against each other French and Mamelouk armies with comparable equipment. The colonial conquests of European forces had been achieved not by miraculous weaponry, but by greater aggressiveness, ruthlessness and, above all, disciplined organization.⁴ Yet the industrial revolution, which penetrated warfare in the middle decades of the century (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter 4) tilted the balance even further in favour of the ‘advanced’ world by means of high explosives, machine-guns and steam transport (see chapter 13 below). The half-century from 1880 to 1930 was to be the golden or rather the iron age of gunboat diplomacy for this reason.

We are therefore in 1880 dealing not so much with a single world, as with two sectors combined together into one global system: the developed and the lagging, the dominant and the dependent, the rich and the poor. Even this description is misleading. While the (smaller)

first world,	in spite of its considerable	internal disparities, was united
by history	and as the common bearer	of capitalist development, the

(much larger) second world was united by nothing except its relations with, that is to say its potential or actual dependency on, the first. What else, except a common membership of the human race, had the Chinese Empire in common with Senegal, Brazil with the New Hebrides, Morocco with Nicaragua? The second world was united by neither history, culture, social structure nor institutions, nor even by what we today think of as the most salient characteristic of the dependent world, namely mass poverty. For wealth and poverty as social categories apply only to societies stratified in a certain way, and to economies structured in a certain way, and parts of the dependent world were, as yet, neither. All human societies known to history contain some social inequalities (apart from those between the sexes), but if Indian maharajahs visiting the west could be treated as though they were millionaires in the western sense, the big men or chiefs in New Guinea could not be so assimilated, even notionally. And if the common people of any part of the world, when transported away from their homes, were normally turned into workers, and therefore members of the category of ‘the poor’, it was irrelevant to describe them in this manner in their native habitat. In

income or standard ofliving of anyone in the region or about the distribution of incomes in it, except that, theoretically, in a country with a high per capita figure there would be more to distribute than in a country with a low one.

16

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

any case, there were favoured parts of the world – notably in the tropics – where nobody needed to lack either shelter, food or leisure. Indeed, there were still small societies in which the concepts of work and leisure had no meaning, and no words for them existed.

If the existence of the two world sectors was undeniable, the bound-aries between them were unclear, chiefly because the set of states by and through which the economic – and in our period the political – conquest of the globe was achieved were united by history as well as economic development. They consisted of ‘Europe’ and not only of those regions, mainly in north-western and central Europe and some of their overseas settlements, which plainly formed the core of world capitalist development. ‘Europe’ included the southern regions which had once played a major role in early capitalist developments, but had since the sixteenth century become backwaters, and the conquerors of the first great European overseas empires, notably the Italian and Iberian peninsulas. It also included a great eastern border zone where, for more than a thousand years, Christendom – that is to say the heirs and descendants of the Roman Empire* – had fought the periodic invasions of military conquerors from Central Asia. The last wave of these, which had formed the great Ottoman Empire, had been gradu-ally expelled from the enormous areas of Europe it controlled in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and its days in Europe were clearly numbered, though in 1880 it still controlled a substantial belt across the Balkan peninsula (parts of the present Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and all of Albania) as well as some islands. Much of the reconquered or liberated territories could only be regarded as ‘Euro-pean’ by courtesy: in fact, the Balkan peninsula was still currently referred to as the ‘Near East’: hence South-west Asia came to be known as the ‘Middle East’. On the other hand the two states which had done most to push back the Turks were or became great European powers, in spite of the notorious backwardness of all or parts of their peoples and territories: the Habsburg Empire and, above all, the empire of the Russian tsars.

Large parts of’Europe’ were therefore, at best, on the margins of the core of capitalist economic development and bourgeois society. In some, most of the inhabitants clearly lived in a different century from their contemporaries and rulers – as on the Adriatic coasts of Dalmatia or in the Bukovina, where in 1880 88 per cent of the population were

• Between the fifth century AD and 1453 the Roman Empire survived with varying success, with its capital in Byzantium (Istanbul) and Orthodox Christianity as its state religion. The Russian tsar, as his name implies (tsar = Caesar; Tsarigrad, ‘city of the emperor’, is still the Slav name for Istanbul), considered himself the successor of this empire, and Moscow as ‘the third Rome’.

17

T H E  AGE OF  EMPIRE

illiterate as against i1 per cent in Lower Austria, part of the same empire.⁵ Many educated Austrians shared Metternich’s belief that ‘Asia begins where the eastern highway leaves Vienna’, and most north Italians regarded most south Italians as some kind of African barbarians, but in both monarchies the backward areas formed only part of the state. In Russia the question ‘European or Asiatic?’ cut much deeper, since virtually the entire zone from Byelorussia and Ukraine eastwards to the Pacific was equally remote from bourgeois society, except for a thin film of the educated. It was indeed the subject of impassioned public debate.

Nevertheless, history, politics, culture and, not least, centuries of overseas and overland expansion against the second world bound even the backward parts of the first world to the advanced ones, if we leave aside a few isolated enclaves of Balkan mountaineers and the like. Russia was indeed backward, though its rulers had systematically looked west for two centuries and acquired control over western border territories such as Finland, the Baltic countries and parts of Poland which were distinctly more advanced. Yet economically Russia was distinctly part of’the west’, inasmuch as her government was clearly engaged on a policy of massive industrialization on the western model. Politically the Tsarist Empire was colonizer rather than colony, and culturally the small educated minority within Russia was one of the glories ofnineteenth-century western civilization. Peasants in the Buko-vina, in the remotest north-east of the Habsburg Empire*, might still live in the Middle Ages, but its capital, Czernowitz (Cernovtsi), contained a distinguished European university, and its emancipated and assimilated Jewish middle class was anything but medieval. At the other end of Europe Portugal was small, feeble, backward by any contemporary standard, a virtual semi-colony of Britain, and only the eye of faith could detect much in the way of economic development there. Yet Portugal remained not merely a member of the club of sovereign states but a large colonial empire by virtue of her history; she retained her African empire, not only because rival European powers could not decide how to partition it, but because, being ‘European’, its possessions were not – or not quite – regarded as the mere raw material for colonial conquest.

In the 1880s Europe was not only the original core of the capitalist development which dominated and transformed the world, but by far the most important component of the world economy and of bourgeois society. There has never in history been a more European century, nor will there ever again be such a one. Demographically, the world

• This region became part of Rumania in 1918, and has since 1947 been part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

18

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

contained a higher proportion of Europeans at the end of the century than at the beginning – perhaps one in four as against one in five.⁶ In spite of the millions the old continent sent to various new worlds, it grew faster. Though the sheer pace and impetus of its industrialization already made America’s future as a global economic super-power certain, European industrial output was still more than twice as large as American, and major technological advance still came primarily from east of the Atlantic. Motor cars, cinematography and wireless were first developed seriously in Europe. (Japan was a very slow starter in the modern world economy, though faster off the mark in world politics.)

As for high culture, the world of white settlement overseas still remained overwhelmingly dependent on the old continent; and this was even more obviously so among the tiny educated elites of the non-white societies, insofar as these took ‘the west’ as their model. Economically, Russia could not begin to compare with the headlong growth and wealth of the USA. Culturally, the Russia of Dostoievsky (1821-81), Tolstoi (1828-1910), Chekhov (1860-1904), of Tchaikovsky (1840-93), Borodin (1834-87) and Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) was a great power, and the USA of Mark Twain (1835-1910) and Walt Whitman (1819-92) was not, even if we throw in Henry James (1843-1916), who had long since emigrated to the more congenial atmosphere

of Britain. European	culture and intellectual life still belonged mainly
to a minority of the	prosperous and educated, and was adapted  to

functioning admirably in and for such a milieu. The contribution of liberalism, and the ideological left beyond it, was to call for the achievements of this elite culture to be made freely accessible to all. The museum and the free library were its characteristic achievements. American culture, more democratic and egalitarian, did not come into its own until the era of mass culture in the twentieth century. For the time being, even in matters so closely geared to technical progress as the sciences, the USA still lagged not only behind the Germans

and  the	British,  but  even  behind  the small Netherlands,	to judge
by the geographical distribution of Nobel prizes in their first		quarter-
century.

But if part of the ‘first world’ could have fitted equally well into the zone of dependency and backwardness, virtually the whole of the ‘second world’ clearly belonged to it, except for Japan, systematically ‘westernizing’ since 1868 (see The Age of Capital, chapter 8), and overseas territories settled by large populations of European descent – in 1880 still primarily from north-western and central Europe – except, of course, for such native populations as they did not succeed in elimin-ating. It was this dependency – or, more exactly, the inability either to

19

T HE  AGE OF  EMPIRE

keep out of the way of the trade and technology of the west or to find a substitute for it, or to resist the men armed with its weapons and organization – that put societies which otherwise had nothing in common in the same category as victims of nineteenth-century history against its makers. As a ruthless western wit put it, with a little military oversimplification:

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim Gun, and they have not.⁷

Compared with this difference, the differences between stone-age societ-ies such as those of the Melanesian islands and the sophisticated and urbanized societies of China, India and the Islamic world, seemed insignificant. What did it matter that their arts were admirable, that the monuments of their ancient cultures were wonderful, and that their (mainly religious) philosophies impressed some western scholars and poets at least as much as, indeed probably more than, Christianity? Basically they were all equally at the mercy of the ships that came from abroad bringing cargoes of goods, armed men and ideas against which they were powerless, and which transformed their universes in ways which suited the invaders, whatever the sentiments of the invaded.

This does not mean that the division between the two worlds was a simple one between industrialized and agricultural countries, between the civilizations of city and countryside. The ‘second world’ contained cities more ancient than and/or as enormous as the first: Peking, Con-stantinople. The nineteenth-century capitalist world market generated, within it, disproportionately large urban centres through which the flow of their economic relations was channelled: Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Calcutta, all had about half a million inhabitants each in the 1880s, which was larger than Amsterdam, Milan, Birmingham or Munich, while the three-quarters of a million of Bombay was larger than all but half-a-dozen cities in Europe. Though with a few special exceptions towns were more numerous and played a more significant role in the economies of the first world, the ‘developed’ world remained surprisingly agricultural. In only six European countries did agriculture employ less than a majority – generally a large majority – of the male population: but these six were, characteristically, the core of the older capitalist development – Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland. However, only in Britain was agriculture the occupation of a smallish minority of about one-sixth; elsewhere it employed between 30 and 45 per cent.⁸ There was, indeed, a striking difference between the commercialized and businesslike farming of the ‘developed’ regions and the agriculture of the backward ones. Danish and Bulgarian peasants had little in common economically by 1880

20

T HE CENTENARIAN REVOLUTION

except an interest in stables and fields. Still, farming, like the ancient handicrafts, was a way of living deeply rooted in the ancient past, as the ethnologists and folklorists of the later nineteenth century knew when they looked for old traditions and ‘popular survivals’ primarily in the countryside. Even the most revolutionary agriculture still sheltered them.

Conversely, industry was not entirely confined to the first world. Quite apart from the building of an infrastructure (e.g. ports and railways) and extractive industries (mines) in many a dependent and colonial economy, and the presence of cottage industries in many back-ward rural areas, some industry of the nineteenth-century western type tended to develop modestly in dependent countries such as India even at this early stage, sometimes against strong opposition from metropolitan interests: mainly textiles and food-processing. But even metals penetrated the second world. The great Indian iron and steel firm of Tata began operations in the 188os. Meanwhile small pro-duction by small family artisans or in ‘putting-out’ workshops remained as characteristic of the ‘developed’ world as of much of the dependent world. It was about to enter upon a period of crisis, anxiously monitored by German scholars, faced with the competition of factories and modern distribution. But, on the whole, it still survived in considerable strength.

Nevertheless, it is roughly correct to make industry into a criterion of modernity. In the 1880s no country outside the ‘developed’ world (and Japan, which had joined it) could be described as industrial or even on the way to industrialization. Even those ‘developed’ countries which were still primarily agrarian, or at any rate not immediately associated in the public mind with factories and forges, were, one might say, already tuned to the wavelength of industrial society and high technology. Apart from Denmark, the Scandinavian countries, for instance, had until recently been notoriously poor and backward. Yet within a few decades they had more telephones per head than any other European region,⁹ including Britain and Germany); they won considerably more Nobel prizes in science than the USA; and they were about to become strongholds of socialist political movements specifically organized with the interests of the industrial proletariat in mind.

And, even more obviously, we can describe the ‘advanced’ world as rapidly urbanizing, and indeed in extreme cases as a world of city-dwellers beyond precedent.¹⁰ In 1800 there had been just seventeen cities in Europe with a population of 100,000 or more, with a total population of under 5 million. By 1890 there were 103 with a total population more than six times as large. What the nineteenth century since 1789 had generated was not so much the giant urban ant-heap with its millions of scurrying inhabitants – though by 1880 three more million-cities had joined London since 1800 (Paris, Berlin and Vienna).

2 1

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

Rather it had generated a widely distributed system of medium and large towns, especially large fairly dense zones or conurbations of such urban and industrial development, gradually eating away the countryside of the region. Some of the more dramatic of these were comparatively new, the product of mid-century heavy industrial development like Tyneside and Clydeside in Great Britain, or only just developing on a massive scale, like the Ruhr in Germany or the Pennsylvania coal-steel belt. These, once again, did not necessarily contain any major cities, unless they also contained capital cities, centres of government administration and other tertiary activities, or major international ports, which also tended to generate unusually large populations. Curiously enough, with the exception of London, Lisbon and Copenhagen, no European state in 1880 contained a city which was both.

I I

If it is difficult to describe the economic differences between the two sectors of the world in two or three words, however profound and evident they were, it is not much easier to summarize the political differences between them. There clearly existed a general model of the desirable structure and institutions of a properly ‘advanced’ country, give or take a few local variations. It should form a more or less homogeneous territorial state, internationally sovereign, large enough to provide the basis of national economic development, enjoying a single set of political and legal institutions of a broadly liberal and representative kind (i.e. it should enjoy a single constitution and the rule of law), but also, at a lower level, it should have a fair degree of local autonomy and initiative. It should be composed of’citizens’, i.e. of the aggregate of the individual inhabitants of its territory who enjoyed certain basic legal and political rights, rather than, say, of corporations or other kinds of groups and communities. Their relations with the national government should be direct and not mediated by such groups. And so on. These were aspirations, and not only for the ‘developed’ countries (all of which by 1880 conformed to some degree to this model) but for all others who did not wish to cut themselves deliberately off from modern progress. To this extent the liberal-constitutional nation-state as a model was not confined to the ‘devel-oped’ world. Indeed the largest body of states theoretically operating on this model, generally in the federalist American rather than the centralist French variant, was to be found in Latin America. This consisted at this date of seventeen republics and one empire, which did

22

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

not survive the 1880s (Brazil). In practice it was notorious that political reality in Latin America, or for that matter in some nominally con-stitutional monarchies of south east Europe, had little relation to con-stitutional theory. A very large part of the non-developed world possessed no states of this, or sometimes of any, form. Some of it consisted of the possessions of European powers, directly administered by them: these colonial empires were shortly to be enormously expanded. Some of it, e.g. in the African interior, consisted of political units to which the term ‘state’ in the then current European sense was not seriously applicable, though other terms then current (‘tribes’) were not much better. Some of it consisted of sometimes very ancient empires such as the Chinese, the Persian and the Ottoman, which had parallels in European history but were clearly not territorial states (‘nation-states’) of the nineteenth-century type, and were very obviously (it seemed) obsolescent. On the other hand the same ricketiness, if not always the same antiquity, affected some obsolescent empires which were at least partly or marginally in the ‘developed’ world, if only because of their, admittedly shaky, status as ‘great powers’: the Tsarist and the Habsburg empires (Russia and Austria-Hungary).

In terms of international politics (i.e. of the calculations of govern-ments and foreign ministries of Europe), the number of entities treated as sovereign states anywhere in the world was rather modest, by our standards. Around 1875 there were no more than seventeen in Europe (including the six ‘powers’ – Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy – and the Ottoman Empire), nineteen in the Americas (including one virtual ‘great power’, the USA), four or five in Asia (mainly Japan and the two ancient empires of China and Persia) and perhaps three highly marginal cases in Africa (Morocco, Ethiopia, Liberia). Outside the Americas, which contained the largest collection of republics on the globe, virtually all of these were mon-archies – in Europe only Switzerland and (since 1870) France were not – though in the developed countries most of them were constitutional monarchies or at least made official gestures in the direction of some sort of electoral representation. The Tsarist and Ottoman empires – the one on the margins of ‘development’, the other clearly belonging to the world of the victims – were the only European exceptions. However, apart from Switzerland, France, the USA and possibly Denmark, none of the representative states were based on a democratic (though at this stage exclusively masculine) franchise,* though some nominal white-settler colonies in the British Empire (Australia, New

* The disenfranchisement of illiterates, not to mention a tendency to military coups, makes it impossible to describe the Latin American republics as ‘democratic’ in any sense.

23

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

Zealand, Canada) were reasonably democratic – indeed they were more so than any other areas apart from some Rocky Mountain states in the USA. However, in such countries outside Europe political democ-racy assumed the elimination of the former indigenous population – Indians, Aborigines, etc. Where they could not be eliminated by expul-sion into ‘reservations’ or by genocide, they were not part of the political community. In 1890, out of the 63 million inhabitants of the USA only 230,000 were Indians.”

As for the inhabitants of the ‘developed’ world (and the countries seeking or forced to imitate it), the adult males among them increasingly conformed to the minimum criterion of bourgeois society: that of legally free and equal individuals. Legal serfdom no longer existed anywhere in Europe. Legal slavery, abolished almost everywhere in the western and western-dominated world, was in its very last years even in its final refuges, Brazil and Cuba: it did not survive the 1880s. Legal freedom and equality were far from incompatible with real inequality. The ideal of liberal bourgeois society was neatly expressed in Anatole France’s ironic phrase: ‘The Law in its majestic equality gives every man the same right to dine at the Ritz and to sleep under a bridge.’ Still, in the ‘developed’ world it was now essentially money or the lack of it, rather than birth or differences in legal freedom or status, which determined the distribution of all but the privileges of social exclusiveness. And legal equality did not exclude political inequality either, for not only wealth but de facto power counted. The rich and powerful were not merely politically more influential, but could exercise a good deal of extra-legal compulsion, as any inhabitant of such areas as the hin-terlands of southern Italy and the Americas knew only too well, not to mention American blacks. Still, there was a clear difference between those parts of the world in which such inequalities were still formally built into the social and political system and those in which they were at least formally incompatible with official theory. It was analogous to the difference between countries in which torture was still a legal form of the judicial process (e.g. the Chinese Empire) and those in which it did not officially exist, though policemen tacitly recognized the dis-tinction between the ‘torturable’ and the ‘non-torturable’ classes (to use the novelist Graham Greene’s terms).

The clearest distinction between the two sectors of the world was cultural, in the widest sense of the word. By 1880 the ‘developed’ world consisted overwhelmingly of countries or regions in which the majority of the male and increasingly the female population was literate, in which politics, economics and intellectual life in general had emancipated themselves from the tutelage of the ancient religions, bulwarks of tra-ditionalism and superstition, and which virtually monopolized the sort

24

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

of science which was increasingly essential for modern technology. By the late 1870s any European country or region with a majority of illiterates could be almost certainly classified as non-developed or back-ward, and the other way round. Italy, Portugal, Spain, Russia and the Balkan countries were at best on the margins of development. Within the Austrian Empire (omitting Hungary) the Slavs of the Czech lands, the German speakers and the rather less literate Italians and Slovenes represented the advanced parts of the country, the predominantly illiterate Ukrainians, Rumanians and Serbo-Croats the backward regions. Cities with a predominantly illiterate population, as in much of the then ‘Third World’, would be an even more convincing index of backwardness, since towns were normally much more literate than the countryside. There were some fairly obvious cultural elements in such divergences, for instance the notably greater encouragement of mass education among Protestants and (western) Jews as distinct from Cath-olic, Muslim and other religions. A poor and overwhelmingly rural country like Sweden with no more than 10 per cent illiteracy in 1850 would be hard to imagine elsewhere than in the Protestant zone of the world (i.e. most of the countries adjoining the Baltic, North Sea and North Atlantic, with extensions into central Europe and North America). On the other hand it also, and visibly, reflected economic development and the social divisions of labour. Among Frenchmen (1901) fishermen were three times more illiterate than workers and domestics, peasants twice as illiterate, persons engaged in trade half as illiterate, public service and the professions evidently the most literate of all. Peasants heading their own enterprise were less literate than agricultural workers (though not much), but in the less traditional fields of industry and trade employers were more literate than workers (though not than their office staff).¹² Cultural, social and economic factors cannot be separated in practice.

Mass education, which was by this time secured in the developed countries by increasingly universal primary schooling by or under the supervision of states, must be distinguished from the education and culture of the generally very small elites. Here the differences between the two sectors of that belt of the globe which knew literacy were less, though the higher education of such strata as European intellectuals, Moslem or Hindu scholars and East Asian mandarins had little in common (unless they also adapted to the European pattern). Mass illiteracy, as in Russia, did not preclude an impressive if numerically very restricted minority culture. However, certain institutions typified the zone of’development’ or European domination, notably the essen-tially secular university, which did not exist outside this zone* and, for

*The university was not necessarily yet the modern institution for the advancement of know-ledge on the nineteenth-century German model which was then spreading throughout the West.

25

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

different purposes, the opera house (see the map in 77;« Age of Capital). Both these institutions reflected the penetration of the dominant ‘wes-tern’ civilization.

I l l

Defining the difference between advanced and backward, developed and non-developed parts of the world is a complex and frustrating exercise, since such classifications are by their nature static and simple, and the reality which is to be fitted into them was neither. Change was the name of the nineteenth century: change in terms of, and to suit the purposes of, the dynamic regions along the shores of the Northern Atlantic seas which were at this time the core of world capitalism. With some marginal and diminishing exceptions, all countries, even the hitherto most isolated, were at least peripherally gripped by the ten-tacles of this global transformation. On the other hand even the most ‘advanced’ of the ‘developed’ countries changed in part by adapting the heritage of an ancient and ‘backward’ past, and contained layers and patches of society which resisted transformation. Historians rack their brains about the best way to formulate and to present this universal but everywhere different change, the complexity of its patterns and interactions, and its major directions.

Most observers in the 1870s would have been far more impressed by its linearity. In material terms, in terms of knowledge and the capacity to transform nature it seemed so patent that change meant advance that history – at all events modern history – seemed to equal progress. Progress was measured by the ever rising curve of whatever could be measured, or what men chose to measure. Continuous improvement, even of those things which clearly still required it, was guaranteed by historical experience. It seemed hardly credible that little more than three centuries ago intelligent Europeans had regarded the agriculture, military techniques and even the medicine of the ancient Romans as the model for their own, that a bare two centuries ago there could be a serious debate about whether the moderns could ever surpass the achievement of the ancients, and that at the end of the eighteenth century experts could have doubted whether the population of Britain was increasing.

Progress was most evident and undeniable in technology and in its obvious consequence, the growth in material production and com-munication. Modern machinery was overwhelmingly powered by steam and made of iron and steel. Coal had become overwhelmingly the most important source of industrial energy. It represented 95 per cent of it

26

THE CENTENARIAN REVOLUTION

in Europe (outside Russia). Hill streams in Europe and North America, which had once determined the location of so many early cotton mills – whose very name recalls the significance of water power – once again reverted to rural life. On the other hand the new energy sources, electricity and mineral oil, were not yet of major significance, though by the 1880s large-scale generation of electricity and the internal-combustion engine were both becoming practicable. Even the USA did not claim more than about 3 million electric lights in 1890, and in the early 1880s the most modern European industrial economy, Germany, used less than 400,000 tons of oil per annum.¹³

Modern technology was not only undeniable and triumphant, but highly visible. Its production machines, though not particularly power-ful by modern standards – in Britain they averaged less than 20 HP in 1880 – were usually large, being still made mainly of iron, as any visitor

to museums of technology can verify.14  But by far the largest and		most
powerful engines of the nineteenth century were the most visible		and
audible of all. These were the 100,000 railway locomotives	(200-450
H P ) ,  pulling  their almost  2! million  carriages  and  wagons in		long
trains under banners of smoke. They were part of the most	dramatic
innovation of the century, undreamed of- unlike air travel –	a century

earlier when Mozart wrote his operas. Vast networks of shining rails, running along embankments, across bridges and viaducts, through cuttings, through tunnels up to ten miles long, across mountain passes as high as the major Alpine peaks, the railways collectively constituted the most massive effort of public building as yet undertaken by man. They employed more men than any other industrial undertakings. They reached into the centres of great cities, where their triumphal achievements were celebrated in equally triumphal and gigantic railway stations, and into the remotest stretches of the countryside, where no other trace of nineteenth-century civilization penetrated. By the early 1880s (1882) almost 2 billion people a year travelled on them, most of them, naturally, from Europe (72 per cent) and North America (20 per cent).¹⁵ In the ‘developed’ regions of the west there can by then have been very few men, perhaps even very few of the less mobile women, who had not, at some time in their lives, made contact with the railway. Probably the only other by-product of modern technology, the net of telegraph-lines on their endless succession of wooden poles, about three or four times as great in length as the world’s railway system, was more universally known.

The 22,000 steamships of the world in 1882, though probably even more powerful as machines than the locomotives, were not only much less numerous, and visible only to the small minority of humans who went near ports, but in one sense much less typical. For in 1880

27

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

they still (but only just) represented less shipping tonnage, even in industrialized Britain, than sailing ships. As for world shipping as a whole, there were in 1880 still almost three tons under the power of wind for every ton under steam-power. This was about to change immediately and dramatically, in the 1880s, in favour of steam. Tra-dition still ruled on the water, and notably, in spite of the change from timber to iron and from sail to steam, in the matter of building, loading and discharging ships.

How much attention would serious lay observers in the second half of the 1870s have paid to the revolutionary advances of technology which were already incubating or being born at the time: the various kinds of turbines and internal-combustion engines, the telephone, gramophone and incandescent electric light bulb (all just being invented), the motor car, made operational by Daimler and Benz in the 1880s, not to mention cinematography, aeronautics and radio telegraphy which were produced or worked on in the 1890s? Almost certainly they would have expected and predicted important develop-ments in anything connected with electricity, photography and chemi-cal synthesis, which were familiar enough, and they would not have been surprised that technology should succeed in solving so obvious and urgent a problem as the invention of a mobile engine to mechanize road transport. They could not have been expected to anticipate radio waves and radio activity. They would certainly have speculated – when have human beings not done so? – on the prospects of human flight, and would have been hopeful, given the technological optimism of the age. People were certainly hungry for new inventions, the more dra-matic the better. Thomas Alva Edison, who set up what was probably the first private industrial development laboratory in 1876 in Menlo Park, New Jersey, became a public hero to Americans with his first phonograph in 1877. But they would certainly not have expected the actual transformations brought about by these innovations in consumer society for in fact, except in the USA, these were to remain relatively modest until the First World War.

Progress was most visible, then, in the capacity for material pro-duction and for speedy and massive communication in the ‘developed’ world. The benefits of this multiplication of wealth almost certainly had not in the 1870s reached the overwhelming majority of the inhabi-tants of Asia, Africa and all but a part of the southern cone of Latin America. It is not clear how far they had reached the bulk of people in the peninsulas of southern Europe or in the Tsarist Empire. Even in the ‘developed’ world they were very unevenly distributed as between the 3.5 per cent of the rich, the 13-14 per cent of the middle class and the 82-3 per cent of the labouring classes, to follow the official French

28

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

classification of the Republic’s funerals in the 1870s (see The Age of Capital, chapter 12). Nevertheless, some improvement in the condition of the common people in this zone was difficult to deny. The increase in human height, which makes each generation today taller than its parents, had probably begun by 1880 in a number of countries – but by no means everywhere, and in a very modest way compared to the improvement after 1880 or even later. (Nutrition is overwhelmingly the most decisive reason for this growth in human stature.)¹⁶ The average expectation of life at birth was still modest enough in the 1880s: 43-45 years in the main ‘developed’ zones*, though below 40 in Germany, and 48-50 in Scandinavia.¹⁷ (In the 1960s it was to be about 70 in these countries.) Still, life expectation had pretty certainly risen over the century, though the major fall in infantile mortality, which chiefly affects this figure, was only just beginning.

In short, the highest hope among the poor, even in the ‘developed’ parts of Europe, was probably still to earn enough to keep body and soul together, a roof over one’s head and enough clothes, especially at the most vulnerable ages of their life-cycle, when couples had children below the earning age, and when men and women grew old. In the ‘developed’ parts of Europe they no longer thought of actual starvation as a possible contingency. Even in Spain the last major famine occurred in the 1860s. However, in Russia famine remained a significant hazard of life: there was to be an important one in 1890-1. In what would later be called the ‘Third World’ it remained endemic. A substantial sector of prosperous peasants was certainly emerging, as was also in some countries a sector of ‘respectable’ skilled or otherwise scarce manual workers capable of saving money and buying more than the essentials of life. But the truth is that the only market whose income was such as to tempt entrepreneurs and businessmen was that aimed at the middle incomes. The most notable innovation in distribution was the big-city department store, pioneered in France, America and Britain and just beginning to penetrate Germany. The Bon Marche or Whiteley’s Universal Emporium or Wanamakers were not aimed at the labouring classes. The USA, with its vast pool of customers, already envisaged a massive market of medium-range standardized goods, but even there the mass market of the poor (the ‘five-and-dime’ market) was still left to the petty enterprise which found it worth catering to the poor. Modern mass production and the mass consumer economy had not arrived. They were to arrive very soon.

But progress also seemed evident in what people still liked to call ‘moral statistics’. Literacy was plainly on the increase. Was it not a

‘Belgium, Britain, France, Massachusetts, Netherlands, Switzerland.

29

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

measure of the growth of civilization that the number of letters sent in Britain at the outbreak of the wars against Bonaparte was perhaps two per annum for each inhabitant, but about forty-two in the first half of the 1880s? That 186 million copies of newspapers and journals were issued each month in the USA of 1880 compared to 330,000 in 1788? That in 1880 the persons who cultivated science by joining British learned societies were perhaps 44,000, probably fifteen times as many as fifty years earlier?¹⁸ No doubt morality as measured by the very doubtful data of criminal statistics and the wild guesses of those who wished (as so many Victorians did) to condemn non-marital sex showed a less certain or satisfactory trend. But could not the progress of insti-tutions towards liberal constitutionalism and democracy, which was everywhere visible in the ‘advanced’ countries, be seen as a sign of moral improvement, complementary to the extraordinary scientific and material triumphs of the age? How many would have disagreed with Mandell Creighton, an Anglican bishop and historian, who asserted that ‘we are bound to assume, as the scientific hypothesis upon which history has been written, a progress in human affairs’.¹⁹

In the ‘developed’ countries, few; though some might note how comparatively recent this consensus was even in these parts of the world. In the remainder of the world most people would not even have understood the bishop’s proposition at all, even had they thought about it. Novelty, especially when brought from outside by city folk and foreigners, was something that disturbed old and settled ways rather than something which brought improvement; and indeed the evidence that it brought disturbance was overwhelming, the evidence that it brought improvement was feeble and unconvincing. The world neither progressed nor was it supposed to progress: a point also made forcefully in the ‘developed’ world by that firm opponent of all the nineteenth century stood for, the Roman Catholic Church (see The Age of Capital, chapter 6, 1). At most, if times were bad for reasons other than the vagaries of nature or divinity such as famine, drought and epidemic, one might hope to restore the expected norm of human life by a return to true beliefs which had somehow been abandoned (e.g. the teachings of the Holy Koran) or by a return to some real or putative past of justice and order. In any case old wisdom and old ways were best, and progress implied that the young could teach the old.

‘Progress’ outside the advanced countries was therefore neither an obvious fact nor a plausible assumption, but mainly a foreign danger and challenge. Those who benefited from it and welcomed it were small minorities of rulers and townsmen who identified with foreign and irreligious values. Those whom the French in North Africa typically called ivolues – ‘persons who had evolved’ – were, at this stage, precisely

30

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

those who had cut themselves off from their past and their people; who were sometimes compelled to cut themselves off (e.g. as in North Africa by abandoning Islamic law) if they were to enjoy the benefits of French citizenship. There were as yet few places, even in the backward regions of Europe adjoining or surrounded by the advanced regions, where countrymen or the miscellaneous urban poor were prepared to follow the lead of the frankly anti-traditionalist modernizers, as many of the new socialist parties were to discover.

The world was therefore divided into a smaller part in which ‘pro-gress’ was indigenous and another much larger part in which it came as a foreign conqueror, assisted by minorities of local collaborators. In the first, even the mass of ordinary people by now believed that it was possible and desirable and even that in some respects it was taking place. In France no sensible politician campaigning for votes and no significant party described themselves as ‘conservative’; in the United States ‘progress’ was a national ideology; even in imperial Germany – the third great country with universal male suffrage in the 1870s – parties calling themselves ‘conservative’ won less than a quarter of the votes in general elections in that decade.

But if progress was so powerful, so universal and so desirable, how was this reluctance to welcome it or even to participate in it to be explained? Was it merely the dead weight of the past, which would gradually, unevenly but inevitably, be lifted off the shoulders of those parts of humanity which still groaned under it? Was not an opera house, that characteristic cathedral of bourgeois culture, soon to be erected in Manaus, a thousand miles up the River Amazon, in the midst of the primeval rainforest, out of the profits of the rubber boom – whose Indian victims, alas, had no chance to appreciate // Trovatore? Were not groups of militant champions of the new ways, like the typically named cientificos in Mexico, already in charge of their country’s fate, or preparing to take charge of it like the equally typically named Committee for Union and Progress (better known as the Young Turks) in the Ottoman Empire? Had not Japan itself broken centuries of isolation to embrace western ways and ideas – and to turn itself into a modern great power, as was soon to be demonstrated by the conclusive proof of military triumph and conquest?

Nevertheless, the failure or refusal of most inhabitants of the world to live up to the example set by the western bourgeoisies was rather more striking than the success of the attempts to imitate it. It was perhaps only to be expected that the conquering inhabitants of the first world, still able to overlook the Japanese, should conclude that vast ranges of humanity were biologically incapable of achieving what a minority of human beings with notionally white skins – or, more

31

T HE  AGE OF  EMPIRE

narrowly, people of north European stock – had alone shown themselves to be capable of. Humanity was divided by ‘race’, an idea which penetrated the ideology of the period almost as deeply as ‘progress’, into those whose place in the great international celebrations of progress, the World Expositions (see The Age of Capital, chapter 2), was at the stands of technological triumph, and those whose place was in the ‘colonial pavilions’ or ‘native villages’ which now supplemented them. Even in the ‘developed’ countries themselves, humanity was increasingly divided into the energetic and talented stock of the middle classes and the supine masses whose genetic deficiencies doomed them to inferiority. Biology was called upon to explain inequality, particularly by those who felt themselves destined for superiority.

And yet the appeal to biology also dramatized the despair of those whose plans for the modernization of their countries met with the silent incomprehension and resistance of their peoples. In the republics of Latin America, inspired by the revolutions which had transformed Europe and the USA, ideologues and politicians considered the progress of their countries to be dependent on ‘Aryanization’-i.e. the progressive ‘whitening’ of the people through intermarriage (Brazil) or virtual repopulation by imported white Europeans (Argentina). No doubt their ruling classes were white or at least considered themselves so, and the non-Iberian surnames of European descent among their political elites were and are disproportionately frequent. But even in Japan, improbable though this looks today, ‘westernization’ seemed sufficiently problematic at this period to suggest that it could only be successfully achieved by an infusion of what we would today call western genes (see

The Age of Capital, chapters 8, 14).

Such excursions into pseudo-scientific quackery (cf. chapter 10 below) dramatize the contrast between progress as a universal aspir-ation, and indeed reality, and the patchiness of its actual advance. Only some countries seemed to be turning themselves, with varying degrees of speed, into industrial-capitalist economies, liberal-constitutionalist states and bourgeois societies on the western model. Even within coun-tries or communities, the gap between the ‘advanced’ (who were also, in general, the wealthy) and the ‘backward’ (who were also, in general, the poor) was enormous, and dramatic, as the comfortable, civilized, assimilated Jewish middle classes and rich of western countries and central Europe were just about to discover when faced with the a? millions of their co-religionists who emigrated westwards from their east European ghettos. Could these barbarians really be the same people ‘as ourselves’?

And was the mass of the interior and exterior barbarians perhaps so great as to confine progress to a minority which maintained civilization

32

THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

only because it was able to keep the barbarians in check? Had it not been John Stuart Mill himself who said, ‘Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement’?²⁰ But there was another, and more profound, dilemma of progress. Whither, in fact, did it lead? Granted that the global conquest of the world economy, the forward march of a tri-umphant technology and science on which it was increasingly based, were indeed undeniable, universal, irreversible and therefore inevitable. Granted that by the 1870s the attempts to hold them up or even slow them down were increasingly unrealistic and enfeebled, and that even the forces dedicated to conserving traditional societies already some-times tried to do so with the weapons of modern society, as preachers of the literal truth of the Bible today use computers and broadcasts. Granted even that political progress in the form of representative governments and moral progress in the form of widespread literacy and reading would continue and even accelerate. Would it lead to the advance of civilization in the sense in which the youthful John Stuart Mill had articulated the aspirations of the century of progress: a world, even a country, ‘more improved; more eminent in the best charac-teristics of Man and Society; farther advanced in the road to perfection; happier, nobler, wiser’?²¹

By the 1870s the progress of the bourgeois world had led to a point where more sceptical, even more pessimistic, voices began to be heard. And they were reinforced by the situation in which the world found itself in the 1870s, and which few had foreseen. The economic foundations of advancing civilization were shaken by tremors. After a generation of unparalleled expansion, the world economy was in crisis.

33

CHAPTER    2

AN ECONOMY CHANGES GEAR

Combination has gradually become the soul of modern commercial systems.

1. V. Dicey, 1905′

The object of any amalgamation of capital and production units … must always be the largest possible reduction in the costs ofproduction, administration and s with a view to achieving the highest possible profits by eliminating ruinous competition.

Carl Duisberg, founder of I. G. Farben, 1903-4²

There are times when development in all areas of the capitalist economy – in t field of technology, thefinancialmarkets, commerce, colonies – has matured to t point where an extraordinary expansion of the world market must occur. Wor production as a whole will be raised to a new and more all-embracing level. A this point capital begins to enter upon a period of tempestuous advance.

1. Helphand (‘Parvus’), 1901³

I

A distinguished American expert, surveying the world economy in 1889, the year of the foundation of the Socialist International, observed that it had, since 1873, been marked by ‘unprecedented disturbance and depression of trade’. ‘Its most noteworthy peculiarity’, he wrote,

has been its universality; affecting nations that have been involved in war as well as those which have maintained peace; those which have a stable currency based on gold, and those which have an unstable currency …; those which live under a system of free exchange of commodities and those whose exchanges are more or less restricted. It has been grievous in old communities like England and Germany, and equally so in Australia, South Africa and Cali-fornia, which represent the new; it has been a calamity exceeding

34

AN ECONOMY CHANGES  GEAR

heavy to be borne, alike by the inhabitants of sterile Newfoundland and Labrador, and of the sunny, fruitful sugar-islands of the East and West Indies; and it has not enriched those at the centers of the world’s exchanges, whose gains are ordinarily greatest when business is most fluctuating and uncertain.⁴

This view, usually expressed in a less baroque style, was widely shared by contemporary observers, though some later historians have found it difficult to understand. For though the trade cycle which forms the basic rhythm of a capitalist economy certainly generated some very acute depressions in the period from 1873 to the mid-i8o,os, world production, so far from stagnating, continued to rise dramatically. Between 1870 and 1890 iron output in the five main producing countries more than doubled (from 11 to 23 million tonnes), the production of steel, which now became the convenient index of industrialization as a whole, multiplied twentyfold (from half a million to 11 million tonnes). International trade continued to grow impressively, though admittedly at a less dizzy rate than before. These were the very decades when the American and German industrial economies advanced with giant steps, and industrial revolution extended to new countries such as Sweden and Russia. Several of the overseas countries newly integrated into the world economy boomed as never before – thus, incidentally, preparing an international debt crisis very similar to that of the 1980s, especially as the names of the debtor-states are much the same. Foreign investment in Latin America reached the dizziest heights in the 1880s, as the length of the Argentine railway system doubled in five years and both Argentina and Brazil attracted up to 200,000 immigrants per year. Could such a period of spectacular productive growth be described as a ‘Great Depression’?

Historians may doubt it, but contemporaries did not. Were these intelligent, well-informed and troubled Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Americans subject to a collective delusion? It would be absurd to suppose so, even if the somewhat apocalyptic tone of some commentaries might have seemed excessive even at the time. By no means all ‘thoughtful and conservative minds’ shared Mr Wells’ sense of the menace of a mustering of the barbarians from within, rather than as of old from without, for an attack on the whole present organization of society, and even the permanence of civilization itself’.⁵ Still, some did, not to mention the growing body of socialists who looked forward to a collapse of capitalism under its insurmountable internal con-tradictions which the era of depression appeared to demonstrate. The note of pessimism in the literature and philosophy of the 1880s (see pp. 97, 258-9 below) can hardly be entirely understood without this

35

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

sense of a general economic, and consequently social, malaise.

As for economists and businessmen, what worried even the less apocalyptically minded was the prolonged ‘depression of prices, a depression of interest, and a depression of profits’, as Alfred Marshall, the future guru of economic theory, put it in 1888.⁶ In short, after the admittedly drastic collapse of the 1870s (see The Age of Capital, chapter 2), what was at issue was not production but its profitability.

Agriculture was the most spectacular victim of this decline in profits, and indeed some parts of it constituted the most deeply depressed sector of the economy, and the one whose discontents had the most immediate and far-reaching social and political consequences. Its output, vastly increased during previous decades (see The Age of Capital, chapter 10), now flooded the world markets, hitherto protected by high transport costs against massive foreign competition. The consequences for agr-arian prices, both in European agriculture and in the overseas exporting economies, were dramatic. In 1894 the price of wheat was only a little more than a third of what it had been in 1867 – a splendid bonus for shoppers, but a disaster for the farmers, and farmworkers, who still formed between 40 and 50 per cent of working males in the industrial countries (with the single exception of Britain) and anything up to 90 per cent in the others. In some regions the situation was made worse by coincident scourges, such as the phylloxera infection after 1872, which cut French wine output by two-thirds between 1875 and 1889. The decades of depression were not a good time in which to be a farmer in any country involved in the world market. The reaction of agriculturalists, depending on the wealth and political structure of their countries, ranged from electoral agitation to rebellion, not to mention death by famine, as in Russia in 1891-2. Populism, which swept the USA in the 1890s, had its heart in the wheatlands of Kansas and Nebraska. There were peasant revolts, or agitations treated as such, between 1879 and 1894 in Ireland, Spain, Sicily and Rumania. Coun-tries which did not have to worry about a peasantry because they no longer had one, like Britain, could let their farming atrophy: here two-thirds of the wheat-acreage disappeared between 1875 and 1895. Some countries, like Denmark, deliberately modernized their agriculture, switching to profitable animal products. Other governments, such as the German, but especially the French and American, chose tariffs, which kept up prices.

However, the two commonest non-governmental responses were mass emigration and co-operation, the former mainly by the landless and land-poor, the latter mainly by peasants with potentially viable hold-ings. The 1880s saw the highest ever rates of overseas migration for the countries of the old emigration (omitting the exceptional case of the

36

AN ECONOMY CHANGES  GEAR

Irish in the decade after the Great Famine) (see The Age of Revolution, chapter 8, v), and the real start of mass emigration from such countries as Italy, Spain and Austria-Hungary, to be followed by Russia and the Balkans.* This was the safety valve which kept social pressure below the point of rebellion or revolution. As for co-operation, it provided modest loans for the small peasant – by igo8 more than half of all independent agriculturalists in Germany belonged to such rural mini-banks (pioneered by the Catholic Raiffeisen in the 1870s). Meanwhile societies for the co-operative buying of supplies, co-operative marketing and co-operative processing (notably of dairy products and, in Denmark, bacon-curing) multiplied in various countries. Ten years after 1884, when a law designed to legalize trade unions was seized on by French farmers for their own purposes, 400,000 of them were in almost 2000 such syndicats.¹ By 1900 there were 1600 co-operatives manufacturing dairy products in the USA, mostly in the Middle West, and the dairy industry in New Zealand was firmly under the control of farmers’ co-operatives.

Business had its own troubles. An era brainwashed into the belief that a rise in prices (‘inflation’) is an economic disaster may find it difficult to believe that nineteenth-century businessmen were much more worried about a fall in prices – and in an, on the whole, deflation-ary century, no period was more drastically deflationary than 1873-96, when the level of British prices dropped by 40 per cent. For inflation – within reason – is not only good for debtors, as every householder with a long mortgage knows, but provides an automatic boost for the rate of profit, as goods produced at a lower cost were sold at the higher price-level prevailing when they reached the point of sale. Conversely, deflation cut into the rate of profit. A large expansion of the market could more than offset this – but in fact the market did not grow fast enough, partly because the new technology of industry made enormous increases of output both possible and necessary (at least if plant were to be run at a profit), partly because the number of com-petitive producers and industrial economies was itself growing, thus vastly increasing the total capacity available, and partly because a mass market for consumer goods was as yet slow to develop. Even for capital goods, the combination of new and improved capacity, more efficient use of the product, and changes in demand could be drastic: the price of iron fell by 50 per cent between 1871/5 and 1894/8.

A further difficulty was that their costs of production were in the short run stickier than prices, for – with some exceptions – wages could

*The only part of southern Europe which had significant emigration before the 1880s was Portugal.

37

T H E  AGE OF  EMPIRE

not be or were not proportionately reduced, while firms were also saddled with considerable quantities of obsolete or obsolescent plant and equipment or with expensive new plant and equipment which, given low profits, were slower than expected to pay for themselves. In some parts of the world the situation was further complicated by the gradual, but in the short run fluctuating and unpredictable, fall in the price of silver and its exchange rate with gold. So long as both remained stable, as they had for many years before 1872, international payments calculated in the precious metals which formed the basis of world money were simple enough.* When the exchange rate became unstable, business transactions between those whose currencies relied on different precious metals became rather less simple.

What could be done about the depression of prices, profits and interest rates? A sort of monetarism-in-reverse was one solution which, as the enormous and now forgotten contemporary debate on ‘bi-metal-lism’ suggests, appealed to many, who attributed the fall in prices primarily to a global shortage of gold, which was increasingly (via the pound sterling, with a fixed gold parity – i.e. the gold sovereign) the exclusive basis of the world payments system. A system based on both gold and silver, which was available in vastly increased quantities especially in America, would surely raise prices through monetary inflation. Currency inflation, which appealed notably to hard-pressed prairie farmers, not to mention the operators of Rocky Mountain silver mines, became a major plank in American populist movements, and the prospect of mankind’s crucifixion on a cross of gold inspired the rhetoric of the great people’s tribune, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925). As with Bryan’s other favourite causes, such as the literal truth of the Bible and the consequent need to ban the teachings of the doctrines of Charles Darwin, he backed a loser. Banking, big business and governments in the core countries of world capitalism had no intention of abandoning the fixed parity of gold which they regarded in much the same manner as Bryan did the Book of Genesis. In any case, only countries like Mexico, China and India, which did not count, rested primarily on silver.

Governments were more inclined to listen to the very substantial interest groups and bodies of voters who urged them to protect the home producer against the competition of imported goods. For these included not only – as might be expected – the enormous bloc of agriculturalists, but also important bodies of domestic industrialists, seeking to minimize ‘overproduction’ by at least keeping out the rival foreigner. The Great Depression ended the long era of economic lib-

* Roughly 15 units of silver= i unit of gold.

38

AN ECONOMY CHANGES  GEAR

eralism (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter 2), at least in the matter of commodity trade.* Starting with Germany and Italy (textiles) in the late 1870s, protective tariffs became a permanent part of the inter-national economic scene, culminating in the early 1890s in the penal tariffs associated with the names of Meline in France (1892) and McKinley in the USA (1890).!

Of all the major industrial countries only Britain held fast to unre-stricted free trade, in spite of powerful occasional challenges from protectionists. The reasons were obvious, quite apart from the absence of a large peasantry and therefore of a large built-in protectionist vote. Britain was by far the greatest exporter of industrial products, and had in the course of the century become increasingly export-oriented – probably never more so than in the 1870s and 1880s – much more so than her main rivals, though not more than some advanced economies of much smaller size, such as Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands. Britain was incomparably the largest exporter of capital, of ‘invisible’ financial and commercial services, and of transport services. Indeed, as foreign competition encroached on British industry, the City of London and British shipping became more central than ever before to the world economy. Conversely, though this is often forgotten, Britain was by far the largest outlet for the primary exports of the world, and dominated – one might even say constituted – the world market for some of them, such as cane sugar, tea and wheat, of which in 1880 she bought about half of the total traded internationally. In 1881 the British bought almost half of all the world’s meat exports and far more wool and cotton (55 per cent of European imports) than anyone else.⁹ Indeed, as Britain let her own food production decline during the Depression, her propensity to import became quite extra-ordinary. By 1905-9 she imported not only 56 per cent of all the cereals she consumed but 76 per cent of all her cheese and 68 per cent of her eggs.¹⁰

Free trade therefore seemed indispensable, for it allowed  primary

* The free movement of capital, financial transactions and labour became, if anything, more marked.

t Average level of tariff in Europe 1914^s

	/ 0
United Kingdom	O	Austria-Hungary, Italy
Netherlands	4	France, Sweden
Switzerland, Belgium	9	Russia
Germany	*3	Spain
Denmark	14	USA (1913)

per cent (1897),

°/

/0

18

20

38

4′

30″

^{a n} d 3^ P ” ^{c e n} *

39

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

producers overseas to exchange their products for British manufactures, and thus reinforced the symbiosis between the United Kingdom and the underdeveloped world on which British economic power essentially rested. Argentine and Uruguayan estancieros, Australian wool-growers and Danish farmers had no interest in encouraging national manu-factures, for they did very well out of being economic planets in the British solar system. The costs for Britain were not negligible. As we have seen, free trade meant the readiness to let British agriculture sink if it could not swim. Britain was the only country in which even Conservative statesmen, in spite of the ancient commitment of such parties to protection, were prepared to abandon agriculture. Admit-tedly the sacrifice was easier, since the finances of the ultra-rich and politically still decisive landowners now rested on the income from urban property and investment portfolios as much as on the rents of cornfields. Might it not also imply a readiness to sacrifice British indus-try itself, as the protectionists feared? Looking back a century from the deindustrializing Britain of the 1980s, the fear does not seem unrealistic. What capitalism exists to make, after all, is not any particular selection of products but money. Yet while it was already clear that in British politics the opinion of the City of London counted far more than that of provincial industrialists, for the time being City interests did not yet appear to be at odds with those of the bulk of industry. So Britain remained committed to economic liberalism,* and in doing so gave protectionist countries the freedom both to control their home markets and to have plenty of scope for pushing their exports.

Economists and historians have never ceased to argue about the effects of this revival of international protectionism, or, in other words, about the strange schizophrenia of the capitalist world economy. The basic building-blocks of its core in the nineteenth century were increas-ingly constituted by ‘national economies’ – the British, German, US, etc. However, in spite of the programmatic title of Adam Smith’s great work, The Wealth of Nations (1776), the ‘nation’ as a unit had no clear place in the pure theory of liberal capitalism, whose basic building-blocks were the irreducible atoms of enterprise, the individual or the ‘firm’ (about which not much was said), moved by the imperative to maximize gains or minimize losses. They operated in ‘the market’, which, at its limits, was global. Liberalism was the anarchism of the bourgeoisie and, as in revolutionary anarchism, it had no place for the state. Or rather, the state as a factor in the economy existed only as something which interfered with the autonomous and self-acting operations of’the market’.

* Except in the matter of unrestricted immigration, since the country was one of the first to produce discriminatory legislation against mass influx of (Jewish) foreigners in 1905.

40

AN  ECONOMY     CHANGES    GEAR

In a way this view made some sense. On the one hand, it seemed reasonable to suppose – particularly after the liberalization of economies in the mid-century (The Age of Capital, chapter 2) – that what made such an economy function and grow were the economic decisions of its basic particles. And on the other hand the capitalist economy was, and could not but be, global. It became steadily more so during the nineteenth century, as it extended its operations to ever more remote parts of the planet, and transformed all areas ever more profoundly. Moreover, such an economy recognized no frontiers, for it functioned best where nothing interfered with the free movement of the factors of production. Capitalism was thus not merely international in practice, but internationalist in theory. The ideal of its theorists was an inter-national division of labour which ensured the maximum growth of the economy. Its criteria were global: it was senseless to try to produce bananas in Norway, because they could be produced much more cheaply in Honduras. They waved aside local or regional arguments to the contrary. The pure theory of economic liberalism was obliged to accept the most extreme, even absurd consequences of its assumptions, provided they could be shown to produce globally optimal results. If it could be shown that the entire industrial production of the world should be concentrated in Madagascar (as 80 per cent of its production of watches was concentrated in a small part of Switzerland),” or that the entire population of France should transfer itself to Siberia (as a large proportion of Norwegians were actually transferred by migration to the USA),* there was no economic argument against such developments.

What could be shown to be economically wrong about the British quasi-monopoly of global industry in the mid-century, or the demo-graphic development of Ireland, which lost almost half its population between 1841 and 1911? The only equilibrium liberal economic theory recognized was a worldwide one.

But in practice this model was inadequate. The evolving world economy of capitalism was a collection of solid blocs, as well as a fluid. Whatever the origins of the ‘national economies’ which constituted these blocs – i.e. the economies defined by the frontiers of states – and whatever the theoretical limitations of an economic theory based on them – mainly by theorists in Germany – national economies existed because nation-states existed. It may be true that nobody would think of Belgium as the first industrialized economy on the European continent if Belgium had remained a part of France (as she was before 1815) or a region of the united Netherlands (as she was between 1815 and 1830).

* Between 1820 and 1975 the number of Norwegians emigrating to the USA – some 855,000 – was almost as large as the total population of Norway in 1820.^1!

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T H E  AGE OF  EMPIRE

However, once Belgium was a state, both her economic policy and the political dimension of the economic activities of her inhabitants were shaped by this fact. It is certainly true that there were and are economic activities such as international finance which are essentially cosmo-politan and thus escaped from national constraints, insofar as these were effective. Yet even such transnational enterprises took care to attach themselves to a suitably important national economy. The (largely German) merchant banking families thus tended to transfer their headquarters from Paris to London after i860. And the most international of all great banking houses, the Rothschilds, flourished where they operated in the capital of a major state, and wilted where they did not: the Rothschilds of London, Paris and Vienna remained major forces, but the Rothschilds of Naples and Frankfurt (the firm refused to transfer to Berlin) did not. After the unification of Germany, Frankfurt was no longer enough.

These observations, naturally, apply primarily to the ‘developed’ sector of the world, i.e. to the states capable of defending their indus-trializing economies against competition, and not to the remainder of the globe, whose economies were politically or economically dependent on the ‘developed’ core. Either such regions had no choice, since a colonial power decided what was to happen to their economies, or an imperial economy was in a position to turn them into a banana or coffee republic. Or else, such economies were not usually interested in alternative development choices, since it clearly paid them to turn themselves into specialized producers of primary products for a world market constituted by the metropolitan states. In the world periphery, the ‘national economy’, insofar as it can be said to have existed, had different functions.

But the developed world was not only an aggregate of ‘national economies’. Industrialization and the Depression turned them into a group of rival economies, in which the gains of one seemed to threaten the position ofothers. Not only firms but nations competed. Henceforth the flesh of British readers was made to creep by journalistic exposes of German economic invasion – E. E. Williams’ Made in Germany (1896) or Fred A. Mackenzie’s American Invaders (1902).¹³ Their fathers had remained calm in the face of (justified) warnings of the technical superiority of foreigners. Protectionism expressed a situation of inter-national economic competition.

But what was its effect? We may take it as established that an excess ofgeneralized protectionism, which seeks to barricade each nation-state economy against the foreigner behind a set of political fortifications, is harmful to world economic growth. This was to be adequately demonstrated between the two world wars. However, in the period

42

AN ECONOMY CHANGES  GEAR

1880-1914 protectionism was neither general nor, with occasional exceptions, prohibitive, and, as we have seen, it was confined to com-modity trade and did not affect the movements of labour and inter-national financial transactions. Agricultural protection on the whole worked in France, failed in Italy (where the response was mass migration), and sheltered large-scale agrarians in Germany.¹⁴ Indus-trial protection on the whole helped to broaden the world’s industrial base by encouraging national industries to aim at the domestic markets of their countries, which happened also to be growing by leaps and bounds. Consequently it has been calculated that the global growth of production and commerce between 1880 and 1914 was distinctly higher than it had been during the decades of free trade.¹⁵ Certainly in 1914 industrial production within the metropolitan or ‘developed’ world was somewhat less unevenly distributed than it had been forty years earlier. In 1870 the four main industrial states had produced almost 80 per cent of total world manufacturing output, but in 1913 they produced 72 per cent of an output which was five times as great.¹⁶ How far protection contributed to this is open to argument. That it cannot have seriously held up growth seems clear.

However, if protectionism was the worried producer’s instinctive political reaction to the Depression, it was not the most significant economic response of capitalism to its troubles. This was the com-bination of economic concentration and business rationalization, or in the American terminology, which now began to set global styles, ‘trusts’ and ‘scientific management’. Both were attempts to widen profit margins, compressed by competition and the fall of prices.

Economic concentration should not be confused with monopoly in the strict sense (control of the market by a single business), or in the more usual wider sense of market control by a handful of dominating firms (oligopoly). Certainly the dramatic examples of concentration which attracted public obloquy were of this kind, generally produced by mergers or market-controlling arrangements between firms which, according to free-enterprise theory, ought to have been cutting each other’s throats for the benefit of the consumer. Such were the American ‘trusts’, which provoked anti-monopolist legislation like the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) of uncertain efficacy, and the German ‘syn-dicates’ or ‘cartels’ – mainly in the heavy industries – which enjoyed government favour. The Rhine-Westphalian Coal Syndicate (1893), which controlled something like 90 per cent of the coal output in its region, or the Standard Oil Company, which in 1880 controlled 90-95 per cent of the oil refined in the USA, were certainly monopolies. So, for practical purposes, was the ‘billion-dollar Trust’ of United States Steel (1901) with 63 per cent of American steel output. It is also clear

43

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

that a trend away from unrestricted competition and towards ‘the combination of several capitalists who formerly operated singly’¹⁷ became strikingly obvious during the Great Depression, and continued in the new period of global prosperity. A tendency towards monopoly or oligopoly is undeniable in the heavy industries, in industries closely dependent on government orders such as the rapidly growing arma-ments sector (see pp. 307-9), in industries generating and distributing revolutionary new forms ofenergy, such as oil and electricity, in transport, and in some mass consumer goods such as soap and tobacco.

However, market control and the elimination of competition were only one aspect of a more general process of capitalist concentration, and were neither universal nor irreversible: in 1914 there was rather more competition in the American oil and steel industries than there had been ten years earlier. To this extent it is misleading in 1914 to speak of what was by 1900 clearly recognized as a new phase of capitalist development, as ‘monopoly capitalism’. Still, it does not much matter what we call it (‘corporation capitalism’, ‘organized capitalism’, etc.) so long as it is agreed – and it must be – that combination advanced at the expense of market competition, business corporations at the expense of private firms, big business and large enterprise at the expense of smaller; and that this concentration implied a tendency towards oligopoly. This was evident even in so powerful a fortress of old-fashioned small-scale and medium competitive enterprise as Britain. From 1880 on the pattern of distribution was revolutionized. ‘Grocer’ and ‘butcher’ now meant not simply a small shopkeeper but increasingly a nationwide or international firm with hundreds of branches. In banking, a handful of giant joint-stock banks with national networks of branches replaced the smaller banks at great speed: Lloyds Bank swallowed 164 of them. After 1900, as has been noted, the old-fashioned – or any – British ‘country bank’ had become ‘a historical curiosity’.

Like economic concentration ‘scientific management’ (the term itself only came into use around 1910) was the child of the Great Depression. Its founder and apostle, F. W. Taylor (1856-1915), began to evolve his ideas in the problem-racked American steel industry in 1880. It came to Europe from the west in the 1890s. Pressure on profits in the Depression, as well as the growing size and complexity of firms, sug-gested that the traditional, empirical or rule-of-thumb methods of running business, and especially production, were no longer adequate. Hence the need for a more rational or ‘scientific’ way of controlling, monitoring and programming large and profit-maximizing enterprises. The task on which ‘Taylorism’ immediately concentrated its efForts, and with which ‘scientific management’ was to become identified in

44

AN ECONOMY CHANGES  GEAR

the public mind, was how to get more work out of workers. This aim was pursued by three major methods: (i) by isolating each worker from the work group, and transferring the control of the work process from him, her or the group to the agents of management, who told the worker exactly what to do and how much output to achieve in the light of (2) a systematic breakdown of each process into timed component elements (‘time and motion study’), and (3) various systems of wage payment which would give the worker an incentive to produce more. Such systems of payment by result spread quite widely, but for practical purposes Taylorism in its literal sense had made virtually no progress before 1914 in Europe – or even in the USA – and only became familiar as a slogan in management circles in the last pre-war years. After 1918 Taylor’s name, like that of that other pioneer of mass production, Henry Ford, was to serve as a convenient shorthand label for the rational use of machinery and labour to maximize production, para-doxically among Bolshevik planners as well as among capitalists.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the transformation of the structure of large enterprises, from shop-floor to office and accountancy, made substantial progress between 1880 and 1914. The ‘visible hand’ of modern corporate organization and management now replaced the ‘invisible hand’ of Adam Smith’s anonymous market. The executives, engineers and accountants therefore began to take over from owner-managers. The ‘corporation’ or Konzern replaced the individual. The typical businessman, at least in big business, was now much more likely to be not a member of the founder’s family but a salaried executive, and the man looking over his shoulder was more likely to be a banker or shareholder than a managing capitalist.

There was a third possible way out of business troubles: imperialism. The chronological coincidence between the Depression and the dynamic phase of the colonial division of the globe has often been noticed. How far the two were connected is much debated among historians. In any case, as the next chapter will show, the relation was rather more complex than simple cause and effect. Nevertheless it is quite undeniable that the pressure of capital in search of more profitable investment, as of production in search of markets, contributed to policies of expansion – including colonial conquest. ‘Territorial expansion’, said an official of the US State Department in 1900, ‘is but the by-product of the expansion of commerce.”⁸ He was by no means the only person in international business and politics to take such a view.

One final result, or by-product, of the Great Depression must be mentioned. It was also an era of great social agitation. Not only, as we have seen, among farmers, shaken by the seismic tremors of agrarian price collapse, but among the working classes. Why the Great

45

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

Depression led to a mass mobilization of the industrial working classes in numerous countries, and from the end of the 188os to the emergence of mass socialist and labour movements in several of them, is not obvious. For, paradoxically, the very price falls which automatically radicalized farmers lowered the cost of living of wage-earners quite markedly, and produced an undoubted improvement in the workers’ material standard of life in most industrialized countries. But here we need only note that modern labour movements are also the children of the Depression period. These movements will be considered in chapter 5.

II

From the middle of the 1890s until the Great War, the global economic orchestra played in the major key of prosperity rather than, as hitherto, in the minor key of depression. Affluence based on booming business formed the background to what is still known on the European con-tinent as ‘the beautiful era’ (belle ipoque). The shift from worry to euphoria was so sudden and dramatic that vulgar economists looked for some special outside force to explain it, a God in the machine, whom they found in the discovery of enormous supplies of gold in South Africa, the last of the great western gold-rushes, the Klondike (1898), and elsewhere. Economic historians have, on the whole, been less impressed by such basically monetarist theses than some late-twentieth-century governments. Still, the speed of the upturn was striking, and almost immediately diagnosed by a particularly sharp-eyed rev-olutionary, A. L. Helphand (1869-1924) writing under the pen-name Parvus, as indicating the start of a new and lengthy period of tem-pestuous capitalist advance. In fact, the contrast between the Great Depression and the following secular boom provided the grounds for the first speculations about those ‘long waves’ in the development of world capitalism, which were later to be associated with the name of the Russian economist Kondratiev. In the meantime it was, at any rate, evident that those who had made gloomy forecasts about the future of capitalism, or even about its imminent collapse, had been wrong. Among the Marxists passionate arguments developed about what this implied for the future of their movements, and whether Marx’s doctrines would have to be ‘revised’.

Economic historians have tended to fix their attention on two aspects of the era: on its redistribution of economic power and initiative, that is to say on Britain’s relative decline and the relative – and absolute – advance of the USA and above all Germany, and on the problem

46

AN ECONOMY CHANGES  GEAR

of long- and short-term fluctuations, that is to say primarily on the Kondratiev ‘long wave’, whose down- and upswing neatly cut our period in half. Interesting though these problems are, they are secondary from the point of view of the world economy.

In principle, it is not really surprising that Germany, its population rising from 45 to 65 millions, and the USA, growing from 50 to 92 millions, should have overhauled Britain, both territorially smaller and less populous. This does not, however, make the triumph of German industrial exports any the less impressive. In the thirty years to 1913 they grew from less than half the British figure to a figure larger than the British. Except in what might be called the ‘semi-industrialized countries – i.e. for practical purposes the actual or virtual ‘dominions’ of the British Empire, including its Latin American economic depen-dencies – German manufacturing exports had beaten the English all along the line. They were a third larger in the industrial world, and even 10 per cent larger in the undeveloped world. Again, it is not surprising that Britain was unable to maintain the extraordinary pos-ition as ‘workshop of the world’ of c. i860. Even the USA, at the peak of her global supremacy in the early 1950s – and representing a share of the world population three times as large as the British in i860 – never achieved 53 per cent of world iron and steel production and 49 per cent of its textile production. Once again, this does not explain precisely why – or even whether – there was a slowing-down in growth and a decline in the British economy, questions which have become the subject of a vast scholarly literature. The important issue is not who, within the growing world economy, grew more and faster, but its global growth as a whole.

As for the Kondratiev rhythm – to call it a ‘cycle’ in the strict sense of the word is to beg the question – it certainly raises fundamental analytical questions about the nature of economic growth in the capi-talist era, or, some students might argue, about the growth of any world economy. Unfortunately, no theory about this curious alternation of phases of economic confidence and uneasiness, together forming a ‘wave’ of about half a century, is widely accepted. The best-known and most elegant theory about them, that ofJosef Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950), associates each ‘downturn’ with the exhaustion of the profit potential of one set of economic ‘innovations’, and the new upswing with a new set of innovations, mainly – but not only – seen as tech-nological, whose potential will in turn be exhausted. Thus new indus-tries, acting as ‘leading sectors’ of economic growth – e.g. cotton in the first industrial revolution, railroads in and after the 1840s – become, as it were, the engines which pull the world economy out of the morass in which it has temporarily been bogged down. The theory is plausible

47

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

enough, since each of the periods of secular upswing since the 1780s has indeed been associated with the rise of new, and increasingly of technologically revolutionary industries: not least the most extra-ordinary of all such global economic booms, the two and a half decades before the early 1970s. The problem about the upsurge of the later 1890s is that the innovatory industries of that period – broadly speaking, chemical and electrical, or those associated with the new energy sources about to compete seriously with steam – do not as yet seem quite imposing enough to dominate the movements of the world economy. In short, since we cannot adequately explain them, the Kondratiev periodicities cannot help us much. They merely enable us to observe that the period with which this volume deals covers the fall and the rise of a ‘Kondratiev wave’; but that is in itself not surprising as the entire modern history of the global economy readily falls into this pattern.

There is, however, one aspect of the Kondratiev analysis which must be relevant to a period of rapid ‘globalization’ of the world economy. This is the relation between the world’s industrial sector, which grew by a continuous revolution of production, and the world’s agricultural output, which grew chiefly by the discontinuous opening of new geo-graphical zones of production, or zones newly specialized in export production. In 1910-13 the western world had, available for consump-tion, almost twice as much wheat as (on average) in the 1870s. But the great bulk of this increase had come from a few countries: the USA, Canada, Argentina and Australia and, in Europe, Russia, Rumania and Hungary. The growth of farm output in western Europe (France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scan-dinavia) only made up 10-15 per cent of the new supply. So it is not surprising, even if we forget about agrarian catastrophes like the eight years of drought (1895-1902) which killed half Australia’s sheep, and new pests like the boll-weevil which attacked the U S cotton crop from 1892 onwards, that the rate of growth of world farm production slowed down after the initial bound forward. Then the ‘terms of trade’ would tend to move in favour of agriculture and against industry, i.e. farmers paid relatively or absolutely less for what they bought from industry, industry relatively or absolutely more for what it bought from agri-culture.

It has been argued that this change in the terms of trade can explain the switch from a striking price fall in 1873-96 to a notable price rise from then until 1914 – and beyond. Perhaps. What is certain is that this change in the terms of trade put pressure on industry’s costs of production, and hence on its profitability. Luckily for the ‘beauty’ of the belle bpoque, the economy was so constructed as to shift this pressure from profits to the workers. The rapid growth in real wages, so charac-

48

AN  ECONOMY     CHANGES     GEAR

teristic of the Great Depression, slowed down visibly. In France and

Britain there was an actual Jail in real wages between 1899 and 1913.
The sullen social tension and outbursts of the last years before 1914 are
partly due to this.
What, then, made the world economy so dynamic? Whatever	the
detailed explanation, clearly the key to the problem is to be found	in

the central belt of industrializing and industrial countries, increasingly stretching round the temperate northern hemisphere, for they acted as the engine of global growth, both as producers and as markets.

These countries now formed an enormous and rapidly growing, and extending, productive mass at the heart of the world economy. They now included not only the major and minor centres of mid-century industrialization, themselves for the most part expanding at a rate ranging from the impressive to the almost unimaginable – Britain, Germany, the USA, France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Czech lands – but a new range of industrializing regions: Scandinavia, the Nether-lands, northern Italy, Hungary, Russia, even Japan. They also formed an increasingly massive body of purchasers for the world’s goods and services: a body increasingly living by purchases, i.e. decreasingly dependent on traditional rural economies. The usual nineteenth-century definition of a ‘city-dweller’ was one who lived in a place of more than 2000 inhabitants. Yet even if we take a slightly less modest criterion (5000), the percentage of Europeans of the ‘developed’ zone and North Americans who lived in towns had by 1910 risen to 41 (from 19 and 14 respectively in 1850) and perhaps 80 per cent of city-dwellers (as against two-thirds in 1850) lived in towns of over 20,000; of these in turn rather more than half lived in cities of over 100,000 inhabitants, that is to say vast stockpiles of customers.¹⁹

Moreover, thanks to the price falls of the Depression, these customers had a good deal more money available for spending than before, even allowing for the sag in real wages after 1900. The crucial collective significance of this accumulation of customers, even among the poor, was now recognized by businessmen. If political philosophers dreaded the emergence of the masses, salesmen hailed it. The advertising indus-try, which first developed as a major force in this period, addressed them. Instalment selling, which is largely a child of this period, was designed to enable people of small income to buy large products. And the revolutionary art and industry of the cinema (see chapter 9 below) grew from nothing in 1895 to displays of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice by 1915, and to products so expensive to make as to beggar the operas of princes, and all on the strength of a public which paid in nickels.

A single figure may illustrate the importance of the world’s ‘devel-

49

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

oped’ zone at this time. In spite of the remarkable growth of new regions and economies overseas; in spite of the haemorrhage of an unprecedently huge mass emigration, the share of Europeans in the world’s population actually rose during the nineteenth century, and its rate of growth accelerated from 7 per cent per year in the first half, 8 per cent in the second, to almost 13 per cent in 1900-13. If we add to this urbanized continent of potential shoppers the USA and some rapidly developing but much smaller overseas economies, we have a ‘developed’ world of something like 15 per cent of the planet’s surface, containing something like 40 per cent of its inhabitants.

These countries thus formed the bulk of the world’s economy. Between them they constituted 80 per cent of the international market. What is more, they determined the development of the rest of the world, whose economies grew by supplying foreign needs. What would have happened to Uruguay or Honduras if they had been left to their own devices, we cannot know. (In any case, they were not likely to be: Paraguay had once tried to opt out of the world market and had been massacred back into it – cf. TAi? Age of Capital, chapter 4.) What we do know is that the one produced beef because there was a market for it in Britain, and the other bananas, because some Boston traders cal-culated that Americans would pay money to eat them. Some such satellite economies did better than others, but the better they did, the greater the benefit to the economies of the central core, for whom such growth meant larger and growing outlets for the export of goods and capital. The world merchant marine, whose growth roughly indicates the expansion of the global economy, had remained more or less static between i860 and 1890. Its size fluctuated between 16 and 20 million tons. Between 1890 and 1914 it almost doubled.

I l l

How, then, can we sum up the world economy of the Age of Empire? In the first place, as we have seen, it was a geographically much more broad-based economy than before. Its industrial and indus-trializing sector was enlarged, in Europe by industrial revolution in Russia and such countries as Sweden and the Netherlands, hitherto little touched by it, outside by developments in North America and, already to some extent, in Japan. The international market in primary products grew enormously – between 1880 and 1913 international trade in these commodities just about tripled – and so, consequently, did both the areas devoted to their production and their integration into the world market. Canada joined the world’s major wheat producers

50

AN  ECONOMY    CHANGES     GEAR

after 1900, its crop rising from an annual average of 52 million bUlhill in the 1890s to one of 200 millions in 1910-13.²⁰ Argentina biSlini * major wheat exporter at the same time – and every year ItftlilN labourers, nicknamed ‘swallows’ (golondrinas), crossed and recrOIKBll 10,000 miles of Atlantic to gather its harvest. The economy of thi A|fl of Empire was one in which Baku and the Donets Basin became part of industrial geography, when Europe exported both goods and J(IrU to new cities like Johannesburg and Buenos Aires, and when opera houses were built on the bones of dead Indians in rubber-boom town* 1000 miles up the Amazon.

It follows, as already noted, that the world economy was now notably more pluralist than before. Britain ceased to be the only fully indus-trialized, and indeed the only industrial, economy. If we add together the industrial and mining production (including construction) of the four chief national economies, in 1913 the USA provided 46 per cent of this total, Germany 23.5 per cent, Britain 19.5 per cent and France 11 per cent.²¹ The Age of Empire, as we shall see, was essentially an age of state rivalry. Moreover, the relations between the developed and the undeveloped worlds were also more varied and complex than in i860, when half of all exports from Asia, Africa and Latin America had been sent to one country, Great Britain. By 1900 the British share was down to one-quarter, and Third World exports to other West European countries were already larger than those to Britain (31 per cent).²² The Age of Empire was no longer monocentric.

This growing pluralism of the world economy was to some extent masked by its continued, indeed its increased, dependence on the financial, trading and shipping services of Britain. On the one hand the City of London was, more than ever, the switchboard for the world’s international business transactions, so that its commercial and financial services alone earned almost enough to make up for the large deficit in its balance of commodity trade (£137 million against £142 million, in 1906-10). On the other, the enormous weight of Britain’s foreign investments and her merchant shipping further reinforced the centrality of the country in a world economy which turned on London and was based on the pound sterling. On the international capital market, Britain remained overwhelmingly dominant. In 1914 France, Germany, the USA, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the rest between them had 56 per cent of the world’s overseas investments; Britain alone had 44 per cent.²³ In 1914 the British steamer fleet alone was 12 per cent larger than all the merchant fleets of all the other European states put together.

In fact, Britain’s centrality was for the moment reinforced by the very development of world pluralism. For as the newly industrializing

5 i

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

economies bought more primary products from the underdeveloped world, they accumulated between them a fairly substantial deficit in their trade with that world. Britain alone re-established a global balance, by importing more manufactured goods from its rivals, by its own industrial exports to the dependent world, but mainly by its massive invisible income from both its international business services (banking, insurance, etc.) and the income which came to the world’s largest creditor from its enormous foreign investments. Britain’s relative industrial decline thus reinforced its financial position and wealth. The interests ofBritish industry and of the City, hitherto compatible enough, began to enter into conflict.

The third characteristic of the world economy is at first sight the most obvious: technological revolution. This was, as we all know, the age when the telephone and the wireless telegraph, the phonograph and the cinema, the automobile and the aeroplane, became part of the scenery of modern life, not to mention the domestication of science and high technology by means of such products as the vacuum cleaner (1908) and the only universal medicament ever invented, aspirin (1899). Nor should we forget that most beneficent of all the period’s machines, whose contribution to human emancipation was immediately recognized, namely the modest bicycle. And yet, before we hail this impressive crop of innovations as a ‘second industrial revolution’, let us not forget that it is so only in retrospect. For contemporaries, the major innovation consisted in the updating of the first industrial revolution by improvements in the tried technology of steam and iron: by steel and turbines. Technologically revolutionary industries based on electricity, chemistry and the combustion engine certainly began to play a major role, especially in dynamic new economies. After all, Ford began to manufacture his Model T in 1907. And yet, to take only Europe, between 1880 and 1913 as many miles of railroad were con-structed as in the original ‘railway age’ between 1850 and 1880. France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the Netherlands more or less doubled their railway network in these years. The last triumph of British industry, the virtual monopoly of shipbuilding Britain estab-lished between 1870 and 1913, was won by exploiting the resources of the first industrial revolution. As yet the new industrial revolution reinforced rather than replaced the old one.

The fourth characteristic was, as we have already seen, a double transformation in the structure and modus operandi of capitalist enter-prise. On the one hand there was the concentration of capital, the growth in scale which led men to distinguish between ‘business’ and ‘big business’ (Grossindustrie, Grossbanken, grande Industrie . . . ) , the retreat of the free competitive market, and all the other developments which,

52

AN  ECONOMY    CHANGES     GEAR

around 1900, led observers to grope for general labels to describe what plainly seemed to be a new phase of economic development (see the next chapter). On the other, there was the systematic attempt to rationalize production and the conduct of business enterprise by apply-ing ‘scientific methods’ not only to technology but to organization and calculation.

The fifth characteristic was an extraordinary transformation in the market for consumer goods: a change in both quantity and quality. With the growth of population, urbanization and real incomes, the mass market, hitherto more or less confined to foodstuffs and clothing, i.e. to basic subsistence needs, began to dominate the industries pro-ducing consumer goods. In the long run this was more important than the notable growth in the consumption of the wealthy and comfortable classes, whose demand patterns did not notably change. It was the Ford Model T and not Rolls-Royce which revolutionized the motor industry. At the same time a revolutionary technology and imperialism helped to create a range of novel goods and services for the mass market – from the gas-cookers which multiplied in British working-class kitchens during this period, to the bicycle, the cinema and the modest banana, whose consumption was practically unknown before 1880. One of the most obvious consequences was the creation of mass media which, for the first time, deserved the name. A British newspaper reached a million-copy sale for the first time in the 1890s, a French one around 1900.²⁴

AU this implied a transformation not only of production, by what now came to be called ‘mass production’, but also of distribution, including credit-buying (mainly by instalments). Thus the sale of tea in standard quarter-pound packages began in Britain in 1884. It was to make the fortunes of more than one grocery tycoon from the working-class backstreets of big cities, such as Sir Thomas Lipton, whose yacht and money attracted the friendship of King Edward vn, a monarch notoriously drawn to free-spending millionaires. Lipton’s branches grew from none in 1870 to 500 in i8gg.²⁵

It also fitted in naturally with the sixth characteristic of the economy: the marked growth, both absolute and relative, of the tertiary sector of the economy, both public and private – work in offices, shops and other services. To take only the case of Britain, a country which, at its peak, had dominated the world economy with a ridiculously tiny amount of office work: in 1851 there were 67,000 public officials and 91,000 persons in commercial employment out of a total occupied population of about 9I millions. By 1881 there were already 360,000 in commercial employment – still almost entirely male – though only 120,000 in the public sector. But by 1911 commerce employed almost 900,000, 17 per

53

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

cent of them women, and the public service had tripled. Commercial employment, as a percentage of the occupied population, had quin-tupled since 1851. We shall consider the social consequence of this multiplication of white collars and white hands elsewhere.

The final characteristic of the economy I shall note here is the growing convergence between politics and economics, that is to say the growing role of government and the public sector, or what ideologues of a liberal persuasion, like the lawyer A. V. Dicey, saw as the threatening advance of ‘collectivism’ at the expense of the good old rugged indi-vidual or voluntary enterprise. In fact, it was one of the symptoms of that retreat of the competitive free-market economy which had been the ideal – and to some extent the reality – of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism. One way or another, after 1875, there was growing scep-ticism about the effectiveness of the autonomous and self-correcting market economy, Adam Smith’s famous ‘hidden hand’, without some assistance from state and public authority. The hand was becoming visible in all sorts of ways.

On the one hand, as we shall see (chapter 4), the democratization of politics pushed often reluctant and troubled governments in the direc-tion of policies of social reform and welfare, as well as into political action to defend the economic interests of certain groups of voters, such as protectionism and – somewhat less effectively – measures against economic concentration, as in the USA and Germany. On the other, political rivalries between states and the economic competition between national groups of entrepreneurs fused, thus contributing – as we shall see – both to the phenomenon of imperialism and to the genesis of the First World War. They also led, incidentally, to the growth of industries such as armaments in which the role of government was decisive.

Nevertheless, while the strategic role of the public sector could be crucial, its actual weight in the economy remained modest. In spite of multiplying examples to the contrary – such as the British government’s purchase of a stake in the Middle Eastern oil industry and its control of the new wireless telegraphy, both of military significance, the readi-ness of the German government to nationalize parts of its industry, and, above all, the Russian government’s systematic policy of indus-trialization from the 1890s – neither governments nor public opinion thought of the public sector as other than a sort of minor supplement to the private economy, even allowing for the marked growth in Europe of (mainly local) public management in the field of public utilities and services. The socialists did not share this belief in the supremacy of the

private sector, though they gave little if any thought to the	problems
of a socialized economy. They might have thought of such	municipal

enterprise as ‘municipal socialism’, but most of it was undertaken by

54

AN ECONOMY CHANGES  GEAR

authorities which had neither socialist intentions nor even sympathies. Modern economies largely controlled, organized and dominated by the state were the product of the First World War. If anything, between 1875 and 1914 the share of public expenditures in the rapidly growing national products of most leading countries tended to fall: and this in spite of the sharp rise in the expenses of preparing for war.²⁶

In these ways the economy of the ‘developed’ world grew and was transformed. Yet what struck contemporaries in the ‘developed’ and industrial world even more than the evident transformation of their economy was its even more evident success. They plainly lived in flourishing times. Even the labouring masses benefited from this expan-sion, at least inasmuch as the industrial economy of 1875-1914 was strikingly labour-intensive and appeared to provide an almost unlimi-ted demand for relatively unskilled or rapidly learned work for men and women streaming into city and industry. It was this which allowed the flood of Europeans who emigrated to the USA to fit themselves into an industrial world. Still, if the economy provided work, it did not yet provide more than a modest, and at times minimal, alleviation of the poverty which most labouring people for most of history had regarded as their destiny. In the retrospective mythology of the working classes, the decades before 1914 do not figure as a golden age, as they do in those of the European rich and even of the more modest middle classes. For these, indeed, the belle ipoque was the paradise that was to be lost after 1914. For businessmen and governments after the war 1913 was to be the point of permanent reference, to which they aspired to return from an era of trouble. From the clouded and troubled post-war years, the extraordinary moments of the last pre-war boom appeared in retrospect as the sunny ‘normality’ to which they both aspired to revert. Vainly. For, as we shall see, the very tendencies in the pre-1914 economy which made the era so golden for the middle classes drove it towards world war, revolution and disruption, and precluded a return to the lost paradise.

55

CHAPTER      3

T H E A G E   O F E M P I R E

Only complete political confusion and naive optimism can prevent the recognition that the unavoidable efforts at trade expansion by all civilized bourgeois-controlled nations, after a transitional period of seemingly peaceful competition, are clearly approaching the point where power alone will decide each nation’s share in the economic control of the earth, and hence its people’s sphere of activity, and especially its workers’ earning potential.

Max Weber, 1894¹

‘Whin ye get among th’Chinee’ … says [the Emperor of Germany], ‘raymimber thatye ar-re the van guard iv Christyanity’ he says, ‘an’ stickye’er baynet through

ivry hated infidel you see’ he says. ‘Lave him understand what our westhern civilisation means…. An’ if be chance ye shud pick up a little land be th’ way, don’t lave e’er a Frinchman or Roosshan take itfrom ye.’

Mr Dooley’s Philosophy, 1900²

I

A world economy whose pace was set by its developed or developing capitalist core was extremely likely to turn into a world in which the ‘advanced’ dominated the ‘backward’; in short into a world of empire. But, paradoxically, the era from 1875 to 1914 may be called the Age of Empire not only because it developed a new kind of imperialism, but also for a much more old-fashioned reason. It was probably the period of modern world history in which the number of rulers officially calling themselves, or regarded by western diplomats as deserving the title of, ’emperors’ was at its maximum.

In Europe the rulers of Germany, Austria, Russia, Turkey and (in their capacity as lords of India) Britain claimed this title. Two of these (Germany and Britain/India) were innovations of the 1870s. They more than offset the disappearance of the ‘Second Empire’ of Napoleon in in France. Outside Europe, the rulers of China, Japan, Persia and –

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perhaps with a larger element of international diplomatic courtesy – Ethiopia and Morocco were habitually allowed this title, while until 1889 ^{a n} American emperor survived in Brazil. One or two even more shadowy ’emperors’ might be added to the list. In 1918 five of these had disappeared. Today (1987) the only titular survivor of this select company of super-monarchs is the ruler of Japan, whose political profile is low and whose political influence is negligible.*

In a less trivial sense, our period is obviously the era of a new type of empire, the colonial. The economic and military supremacy of the capitalist countries had long been beyond serious challenge, but no systematic attempt to translate it into formal conquest, annexation and administration had been made between the end of the eighteenth and the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1880 and 1914 it was made, and most of the world outside Europe and the Americas was formally partitioned into territories under the formal rule or informal political domination of one or other of a handful of states: mainly Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA and Japan. The victims of this process were to some extent the ancient surviving pre-industrial European empires of Spain and Portugal, the former – in spite of attempts to extend the territory under its control in North-west Africa – more than the latter. However, the survival of the major Portuguese territories in Africa (Angola and Mozambique), which were to outlast other imperialist colonies, was due primarily to the inability of their modern rivals to agree on the exact manner of dividing them among themselves. No similar rivalries saved the relics of the Spanish Empire in the Americas (Cuba, Puerto Rico) and in the Pacific (the Philippines) from the USA in 1898. Nominally most of the great traditional empires of Asia remained independent, though the western powers carved out ‘zones of influence’ or even direct admin-istration in them which could (as in the Anglo-Russian agreement over Persia in 1907) cover their entire territory. In fact, their military and political helplessness was taken for granted. Their independence rested either on their convenience as buffer-states (as in Siam – now Thailand – which divided the British and French zones in South-east Asia, or Afghanistan, which separated Britain and Russia), on the inability of rival imperial powers to agree on a formula for division, or on their sheer size. The only non-European state which successfully resisted formal colonial conquest when this was attempted was Ethiopia, which held Italy at bay, the weakest of the imperial states.

Two major regions of the world were, for practical purposes, entirely

* The Sultan of Morocco prefers the title of ‘king’. None of the other surviving mini-sultans in the Islamic world would or could be regarded as ‘kings of kings’.

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divided up: Africa and the Pacific. No independent states were left at all in the Pacific, now totally distributed among the British, French, Germans, Dutch, USA and – still on a modest scale -Japan. By 1914, except for Ethiopia, the insignificant West African republic of Liberia and that part of Morocco which still resisted complete conquest, Africa belonged entirely to the British, French, German, Belgian, Portuguese and, marginally, Spanish empires. Asia, as we have seen, retained a large and nominally independent area, though the older European empires extended and rounded off their large holdings – Britain by annexing Burma to its Indian empire and establishing or strengthening the zone of influence in Tibet, Persia and the Persian Gulf area, Russia by moving further into Central Asia and (less successfully) Pacific Siberia and Manchuria, the Dutch by establishing firmer control in outlying regions of Indonesia. Two virtually new empires were estab-lished by the French conquest of Indochina, initiated in the period of Napoleon in, and by the Japanese at China’s expense in Korea and Taiwan (1895) and later more modestly at Russia’s expense (1905). Only one major region of the globe remained substantially unaffected by this process of partition. The Americas in 1914 were what they had been in 1875, or for that matter in the 1820s, a unique collection of sovereign republics, with the exception of Canada, the Caribbean islands and parts of the Caribbean littoral. Except for the USA, their political status rarely impressed anyone but their neighbours. It was perfectly understood that economically they were dependencies of the developed world. Yet even the USA, which increasingly asserted its political and military hegemony in this vast area, did not seriously try to conquer and administer it. Its only direct annexations were limited to Puerto Rico (Cuba was allowed an admittedly nominal inde-pendence) and a narrow strip along the new Panama Canal, which formed part of another small and nominally independent republic detached from the rather larger Colombia for this purpose by a con-venient local revolution. In Latin America economic domination and such political arm-twisting as was necessary was conducted without formal conquest. The Americas, of course, were the only major region of the globe in which there was no serious rivalry between great powers. Except for the British, no European state possessed more than the scattered relics of (mainly Caribbean) eighteenth-century colonial empire, which were of no great economic or other significance. Neither the British nor anyone else saw a good reason for antagonizing the USA by challenging the Monroe Doctrine.*

* This doctrine, first stated in 1823 and subsequently repeated and elaborated by US govern-ments, expressed hostility to any further colonization or political intervention by European powers in the western hemisphere. This was later taken to mean that the USA was the only power with

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This partition of the world among a handful of states, which gives the present volume its title, was the most spectacular expression of that growing division of the globe into the strong and the weak, the ‘advanced’ and the ‘backward’, which we have already noted. It was also strikingly new. Between 1876 and 1915 about one-quarter of the globe’s land surface was distributed or redistributed as colonies among a half-dozen states. Britain increased its territories by some 4 million square miles, France by some 3.5 millions, Germany acquired more than i million, Belgium and Italy just under 1 million each. The USA acquired some 100,000, mainly from Spain, Japan something like the same amount from China, Russia and Korea. Portugal’s ancient African colonies expanded by about 300,000 square miles; Spain, while a net loser (to the USA), still managed to pick up some stony territory in Morocco and the Western Sahara. Russian imperial growth is more difficult to measure, since all of it was into adjoining territories and continued some centuries of secular territorial expansion of the tsarist state; moreover, as we shall see, Russia lost some territory to Japan. Of the major colonial empires only the Dutch failed, or refused, to acquire new territory, except by extending their actual control over Indonesian islands which they had long formally ‘owned’. Of the minor ones, Sweden liquidated its only remaining colony, a West Indian island, by selling it to France, and Denmark was about to do the same – retaining only Iceland and Greenland as dependencies.

What is most spectacular is not necessarily most important. When observers of the world scene in the later 1890s began to analyse what obviously seemed a new phase in the general pattern of national and international development, notably different from the free-trading and freely competing liberal world of the mid-century, they saw the creation of colonial empires merely as one of its aspects. Orthodox observers thought they discerned, in general terms, a new era of national expan-sion in which (as we have suggested) political and economic elements were no longer clearly separable and the state played an increasingly active and crucial role both at home and abroad. Heterodox observers analysed it more specifically as a new phase of capitalist development, arising out of various tendencies which they discerned in this develop-ment. The most influential among these analyses of what was soon called ‘imperialism’, Lenin’s little book of 1916, actually did not consider ‘the division of the world among the great powers’ until the sixth of his ten chapters.³

Nevertheless, if colonialism was merely one aspect of a more general change in world affairs, it was plainly the most immediately striking.

a right to interfere anywhere in that hemisphere. As the USA grew more powerful, the Monroe Doctrine was taken more seriously by European states.

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It formed the point of departure for wider analyses, for there is no doubt that the word ‘imperialism’ first became part of the political and journalistic vocabulary during the 1890s in the course of the arguments about colonial conquest. Moreover that is when it acquired the econ-omic dimension which, as a concept, it has never since lost. That is why references to the ancient forms of political and military aggrandizement on which the term is based are pointless. Emperors and empires were old, but imperialism was quite new. The word (which does not occur in the writings of Karl Marx, who died in 1883) first entered politics in Britain in the 1870s, and was still regarded as a neologism at the end of that decade. It exploded into general use in the 1890s. By 1900, when the intellectuals began to write books about it, it was, to quote one of the first of them, the British Liberal J. A. Hobson, ‘on everybody’s lips

… and used to denote the most powerful movement in the current politics of the western world’.⁴ In short, it was a novel term devised to describe a novel phenomenon. This evident fact is enough to dismiss one of the many schools in the tense and highly charged ideological debate about ‘imperialism’, namely the one which argues that it was nothing new, perhaps indeed that it was a mere pre-capitalist survival. It was, at any rate, felt to be new and was discussed as a novelty.

The arguments which surround this touchy subject are so impassioned, dense and confused that the first task of the historian is to disentangle them so that the actual phenomenon can be seen for itself. For most of the arguments have not been about what happened in the world of 1875-1914 but about Marxism, a subject which is apt to raise strong feelings; for, as it happens, the (highly critical) analysis of imperialism in Lenin’s version was to become central to the rev-olutionary Marxism of the communist movements after 1917 and to the revolutionary movements of the ‘third world’. What has given the debate a special edge is that one side in it appears to have had a slight built-in advantage, for those supporters and opponents of imperialism have been at each other’s throats since the 1890s, the word itself has gradually acquired, and is now unlikely to lose, a pejorative colouring. Unlike ‘democracy’, which even its enemies like to claim because of its favourable connotations, ‘imperialism’ is commonly something to be disapproved of, and therefore done by others, In 1914 plenty of poli-ticians were proud to call themselves imperialists, but in the course of our century they have virtually disappeared from sight.

The crux of the Leninist analysis (which frankly based itself on a variety of contemporary writers, both Marxian and non-Marxian) was that the new imperialism had economic roots in a specific new phase of capitalism, which, among other things, led to ‘the territorial division of the world among the great capitalist powers’ into a set of formal and

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informal colonies and spheres of influence. The rivalries between the capitalist powers which led to this division also engendered the Firol World War. We need not here discuss the specific mechanisms by which ‘monopoly capitalism’ led to colonialism – opinions differed on this, even among Marxists – or the more recent extension of such analyses into a more sweeping ‘dependency theory’ in the later twentieth century. All assume in one way or another that overseas economic expansion and the exploitation of the overseas world were crucial for capitalist countries.

To criticize these theories would not be particularly interesting, and would be irrelevant in the present context. The point to note is simply that non-Marxist analysts of imperialism have tended to argue the opposite of what the Marxists said, and in doing so have obscured the subject. They tended to deny any specific connection between the imperialism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with capi-talism in general, or with the particular phase of it which, as we have seen, appeared to emerge in the late nineteenth century. They denied that imperialism had any important economic roots, that it benefited the imperial countries economically, let alone that the exploitation of backward zones was in any sense essential to capitalism, and that it had negative effects on colonial economies. They argued that imperi-alism did not lead to unmanageable rivalries between the imperial powers, and had no serious bearings on the origin of the First World War. Rejecting economic explanations, they concentrated on psycho-logical, ideological, cultural and political explanations, though usually careful to avoid the dangerous territory of domestic politics, since Marxists also tended to stress the advantages to metropolitan ruling classes of imperialist policies and propaganda which, among other things, counteracted the growing appeal to the working classes of mass labour movements. Some of these counter-attacks have proved powerful and effective, though several of such lines of argument were mutually incompatible. In fact, much of the pioneer theoretical literature of anti-imperialism is not tenable. But the disadvantage of the anti-anti-imperialist literature is that it does not actually explain that conjunction of economic and political, national and international, developments, which contemporaries around 1900 found so striking that they sought a comprehensive explanation for them. It does not explain why con-temporaries felt that ‘imperialism’ at the time was both a novel and historically central development. In short, much of this literature amounts to denying facts which were obvious enough at the time and still are.

Leaving Leninism and anti-Leninism aside, the first thing for the historian to re-establish is the obvious fact, which nobody in the 1890s

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would have denied, that the division of the globe had an economic dimension. To demonstrate this is not to explain everything about the imperialism of the period. Economic development is not a sort of ventriloquist with the rest of history as its dummy. For that matter, even the most single-minded businessman pursuing profit into, say, the South African gold- and diamond-mines, can never be treated exclusively as a money-making machine. He was not immune to the political, emotional, ideological, patriotic or even racial appeals which were so patently associated with imperial expansion. Nevertheless, if an economic connection can be established between the tendencies of economic development in the capitalist core of the globe at this time and its expansion into the periphery, it becomes much less plausible to put the full weight of explanation on motives for imperialism which have no intrinsic connection with the penetration and conquest of the non-western world. And even those which appear to have, such as the strategic calculations of rival powers, must be analysed while bearing the economic dimension in mind. Even today politics in the Middle East, which are far from explicable on simple economic grounds, cannot be realistically discussed without considering oil.

Now the major fact about the nineteenth century is the creation of a single global economy, progressively reaching into the most remote corners of the world, an increasingly dense web of economic trans-actions, communications and movements of goods, money and people linking the developed countries with each other and with the un-developed world (see The Age of Capital, chapter 3). Without this there was no particular reason why European states should have taken more than the most fleeting interest in the affairs of, say, the Congo basin or engaged in diplomatic disputes about some Pacific atoll. This glo-balization of the economy was not new, though it had accelerated considerably in the middle decades of the century. It continued to grow – less strikingly in relative terms, but more massively in terms of volume and numbers – between 1875 and 1914. European exports had indeed grown more than fourfold between 1848 and 1875, while they only doubled from then until 1915. But the world’s merchant shipping had only risen, between 1840 and 1870, from 10 to 16 million tons, whereas it doubled in the next forty years, as the world’s railway network expanded from a little over 200,000 kilometres (1870) to over i million kilometres just before the First World War.

This tightening web of transport drew even the backward and pre-viously marginal into the world economy, and created a new interest among the old centres of wealth and development in these remote areas. Indeed, now that they were accessible many of these regions seemed at first sight to be simply potential extensions of the developed world,

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which were already being settled and developed by men and women of European stock, extirpating or pushing back the native inhabitants, generating cities and doubtless, in due course, industrial civilization: the USA west of the Mississippi, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Algeria, the southern cone of South America. The pre-diction, as we shall see, was off the mark. Nevertheless, though often remote, such areas were in contemporary minds distinct from those other regions where, for climatic reasons, white settlement was unat-tractive, but where – to quote a leading imperial administrator of the time – ‘the European may come, in small numbers, with his capital, his energy and his knowledge to develop a most lucrative commerce, and obtain products necessary to the use of his advanced civilisation’.⁵

For that civilization now had need of the exotic. Technological development now relied on raw materials which, for reasons of climate or the hazards of geology, were to be found exclusively or profusely in remote places. The internal-combustion engine, that typical child of our period, relied on oil and rubber. Oil still came overwhelmingly from the USA and Europe (Russia and, a long way behind, Rumania) but already the oilfields of the Middle East were the subject of intensive diplomatic confrontation and horse-trading. Rubber was exclusively a tropical product, extracted by the atrocious exploitation of natives in the rainforests of the Congo and the Amazon, the target of early and justified anti-imperialist protest. In due course it was extensively cultivated in Malaya. Tin came from Asia and South America. Non-ferrous metals of previously negligible importance became essential for the steel alloys required by high-speed technology. Some of these were freely available in the developed world, notably the USA, but others were not. The new electrical and motor industries hungered for one of the most ancient metals, copper. Its major reserves, and eventually producers, were in what the late twentieth century called the Third World: Chile, Peru, Zaire, Zambia. And, of course, there was the constant and never satisfied demand for the precious metals which, in this period, turned South Africa into by far the greatest gold-producer in the world, not to mention its wealth of diamonds. Mines were the major pioneers in opening up the world to imperialism, and all the more effective because their profits were sensational enough to justify also the construction of feeder-railways.

Quite apart from the demands of a new technology, the growth of mass consumption in the metropolitan countries produced a rapidly expanding market for foodstuffs. In sheer volume this was dominated by the basic foodstuffs of the temperate zone, grain and meat, now produced cheaply and in vast quantities in several zones of European settlement- in North and South America, Russia and Australasia. But it

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also transformed the market for the products long and characteristically known (at least in German) as ‘colonial goods’ and sold by the grocers of the developed worlds: sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa and its derivatives. With rapid transport and conservation, tropical and sub-tropical fruits became available: they made possible the ‘banana republic’.

Britons, who had consumed 1.51b of tea per head in the 1840s and 3.261b in the 1860s, were consuming 5.7 lb in the 1890s – but this represented an average annual import of 224 million lb compared with less than 98 millions in the 1860s and about 40 millions in the 1840s. While the British abandoned what few cups of coffee they had drunk to fill their teapots from India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Americans and Germans imported coffee in ever more spectacular quantities, notably from Latin America. In the early 1900s New York families consumed i lb of coffee per week. The Quaker beverage and chocolate manu-facturers of Britain, happy in dispensing non-alcoholic refreshment, got their raw material from West Africa and South America. The canny Boston businessmen who founded the United Fruit Company in 1885 created private empires in the Caribbean to supply America with the previously insignificant banana. The soap manufacturers, exploiting the market which first demonstrated to the full the capacities of the new advertising industry, looked to the vegetable oils of Africa. Plantations, estates and farms were the second pillar of imperial economies. Metro-politan traders and financiers were the third.

These developments did not change the shape and character of the industrialized or industrializing countries, though they created new branches of big business whose fortunes were closely tied to those of particular parts of the globe, such as the oil companies. But they transformed the rest of the world, inasmuch as they turned it into a complex of colonial and semi-colonial territories which increasingly evolved into specialized producers of one or two primary products for export to the world market, on whose vagaries they were entirely dependent. Malaya increasingly meant rubber and tin, Brazil coffee, Chile nitrates, Uruguay meat, Cuba sugar and cigars. In fact, with the exception of the USA, even the “white-settler colonies failed to industrialize (at this stage) because they too were caught in this cage of international specialization. They could become exceedingly pros-perous, even by European standards, especially when inhabited by free and, in general, militant European immigrants with political muscle in elected assemblies, whose democratic radicalism could be formidable, though it usually stopped short of including the natives.* A European

* In fact,	white democracy usually excluded them from the benefits won for white skins, or
even refused	to consider them as fully human.

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wishing to emigrate in the Age of Empire would probably have done better to move to Australia, New Zealand, Argentina or Uruguay than anywhere else, including the USA. All these countries developed labour and radical-democratic parties, or even governments, and ambitious systems of public social welfare and security (New Zealand, Uruguay) long before European states did. But they did so as complements to the European (i.e. essentially British) industrial economy, and hence it did not pay them – or at any rate the interests committed to exporting primary products – to industrialize. Not that the metropoles would have welcomed their industrialization. Whatever the official rhetoric, the function of colonies and informal dependencies was to complement metropolitan economies and not to compete with them.

The dependent territories which did not belong to what has been called (white) ‘settler capitalism’ did not do so well. Their economic interest lay in the combination of resources with a labour force which, consisting of’natives’, cost little and could be kept cheap. Nevertheless the oligarchies of landowners and compradore traders – local, imported from Europe or both – and, where they had them, their governments, benefited from the sheer length of the period of secular expansion for their region’s export staples, interrupted only by short-lived, though sometimes (as in Argentina in 1890) dramatic crises generated by trade cycle, overspeculation, war and peace. However, while the First World War disrupted some of their markets, the dependent producers were remote from it. From their point of view the era of empire, which began in the late nineteenth century, lasted until the Great Slump of 1929-33. All the same, in the course of this period they were to become increasingly vulnerable, as their fortunes were increasingly a function of the price of coffee (which by 1914 already produced 58 per cent of the value of Brazilian and 53 per cent of Colombian exports), of rubber and tin, of cocoa, beef or wool. But until the vertical fall in the price of primary commodities during the 1929 slump, this vulnerability did not seem of much long-term significance compared to the apparently unlimited expansion of exports and credits. On the contrary, as we have seen, before 1914 the terms of trade appeared to be, if anything, running in favour of the primary producers.

Nevertheless, the growing economic significance of such areas for the world economy does not explain why, among other things, there should have been a rush by the leading industrial states to carve up the globe into colonies and spheres of influence. The anti-imperialist analysis of imperialism has suggested various reasons why this should have been so. The most familiar of these, the pressure of capital for more profitable investment than could be ensured at home, investment secure from the rivalry of foreign capital, is the least convincing. Since British capital

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exports expanded enormously in the last third of the century, and indeed the income from such investments became essential for the British balance of payments, it was natural enough to connect the ‘new imperialism’ with capital exports, as J. A. Hobson did. But there is no denying that very little indeed of this massive flow went to the new colonial empires: most of British foreign investment went to the rapidly developing and generally old white-settler colonies, soon to be recog-nized as virtually independent ‘dominions’ (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), and to what might be called ‘honorary’ dominions such as Argentina and Uruguay, not to mention the USA . Moreover, the bulk of such investment (76 per cent in 1913) took the form of public loans to railways and public utilities which certainly paid better than investment in the British government debt – an average of 5 per cent as against an average of 3 per cent – but were equally certainly less lucrative than the profits of industrial capital at home, except no doubt for the bankers organizing them. They were supposed to be secure rather than high-yield investments. None of this means that colonies were not acquired because some group of investors did not expect to make a killing, or in defence of investments already made. Whatever the ideology, the motive for the Boer War was gold.

A more convincing general motive for colonial expansion was the search for markets. The fact that this was often disappointed is irrel-evant. The belief that the ‘overproduction’ of the Great Depression could be solved by a vast export drive was widespread. Businessmen, always inclined to fill the blank spaces on the map of world trade with vast numbers of potential customers, would naturally look for such unexploited areas: China was one which haunted the imagination of salesmen – what if every one of those 300 millions bought only one box of tin-tacks? – and Africa, the unknown continent, was another. The Chambers of Commerce of British cities in the depressed early 1880s were outraged by the thought that diplomatic negotiations might exclude their traders from access to the Congo basin, which was believed to offer untold sales prospects, all the more so as it was being developed as a paying proposition by that crowned businessman, King Leopold 11 of the Belgians.⁷ (As it happened, his favourite method of exploitation by forced labour was not designed to encourage high per capita purchases, even when it did not actually diminish the number of customers by torture and massacre.)

But the crux of the global economic situation was that a number of developed economies simultaneously felt the same need for new markets. If they were sufficiently strong their ideal was ‘the open door’ on the markets of the underdeveloped world; but if not strong enough, they hoped to carve out for themselves territories which, by virtue of own-

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ership, would give national business a monopoly position or at least a substantial advantage. Partition of the unoccupied parts of the Third World was the logical consequence. In a sense, this was an extension of the protectionism which gained ground almost everywhere after 1879 (see previous chapter). ‘If you were not such persistent protectionists,’ the British premier told the French ambassador in 1897, ‘y° ^u would not find us so keen to annex territories.’⁸ To this extent the ‘new imperialism’ was the natural by-product of an international economy based on the rivalry of several competing industrial economies, inten-sified by the economic pressures of the 1880s. It does not follow that any particular colony was expected to turn into Eldorado by itself, though this is what actually happened in South Africa, which became the world’s greatest gold-producer. Colonies might simply provide suitable bases or jumping-ofF points for regional business penetration. That was clearly stated by an official of the US State Department round the turn of the century, when the USA followed international fashion by making a brief drive for a colonial empire of its own.

At this point the economic motive for acquiring some colonial terri-tory becomes difficult to disentangle from the political action required for the purpose, for protectionism of whatever kind is economy oper-ating with the aid of politics. The strategic motive for colonization was evidently strongest in Britain, which had long-established colonies which were crucially placed to control access to various zones of land and sea believed to be vital to Britain’s worldwide commercial and maritime interests or, with the rise of the steamship, which could function as coaling stations. (Gibraltar and Malta were old examples of the first, Bermuda and Aden turned out to be useful examples of the second.) There was also the symbolic or real significance for robbers of getting an appropriate share of loot. Once rival powers began to carve up the map of Africa or Oceania, each naturally tried to safeguard against an excessive portion (or a particularly attractive morsel) going to the others. Once the status of a great power thus became associated with raising its flag over some palm-fringed beach (or, more likely, over stretches of dry scrub), the acquisition of colonies itself became a status symbol, irrespective of their value. Around 1900 even the USA, whose kind of imperialism has never before or since been particularly associ-ated with the possession of formal colonies, felt obliged to follow the fashion. Germany deeply resented the fact that so powerful and dynamic a nation as herself should own so notably smaller a share of colonial territory than the British and the French, though her colonies were of little economic and less strategic interest. Italy insisted on capturing notably unattractive stretches of African desert and mountain in order to back her standing as a great power; and her failure to conquer

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Ethiopia in 1896 undoubtedly lowered that standing.

For if great powers were states which acquired colonies, small powers had, as it were, ‘no right’ to them. Spain lost most of what remained of her colonial empire as a consequence of the Spanish-American War of 1898. As we have seen, plans to partition the remainder of Portugal’s African empire between the new colonialists were seriously discussed. Only the Dutch quietly kept their rich and ancient colonies (mainly in South-east Asia), and the King of the Belgians, as we have also seen, was permitted to carve out his private domain in Africa on condition that he allowed it to be accessible to all, because no great power was willing to give others a significant share of the great basin of the Congo river. One ought, of course, to add that there were large tracts of Asia and the Americas where, for political reasons, massive share-outs of territory by European powers were out of the question. In the Americas the situation of the surviving European colonies was frozen by the Monroe Doctrine: only the USA had freedom of action. In most of Asia, the struggle was for spheres of influence in nominally independent states, notably China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire. Exceptions to this were the Russians and the Japanese – the former successful in extending their area in Central Asia but unsuccessful in acquiring chunks of north China, the latter acquiring Korea and Formosa

(Taiwan) as a result of a war with China in	1894-5. The main zones
of competitive land-grabbing  were thus, in	practice, in Africa  and
Oceania.

Essentially strategic explanations of imperialism have thus attracted some historians, who have tried to account for the British expansion in Africa in terms of the need to defend the routes to, and the maritime and terrestrial glacis of, India against potential threats. It is indeed important to recall that, speaking globally, India was the core of British strategy, and that this strategy required control not only over the short sea-routes to the subcontinent (Egypt, the Middle East, the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and South Arabia) and the long sea-routes (the Cape of Good Hope and Singapore), but over the entire Indian Ocean, includ-ing crucial sectors of the African coast and its hinterland. British governments were keenly aware of this. It is also true that the dis-integration of local power in some areas crucial for this purpose, such as Egypt (including the Sudan), drew the British into establishing a much greater direct political presence than originally intended, and even into actual rule. Yet these arguments do not invalidate an econ-omic analysis of imperialism. In the first place, they underestimate the directly economic incentive to acquire some African territories, of which Southern Africa is the most obvious. In any case the scramble for West Africa and the Congo was primarily economic. In the second place

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they overlook the fact that India was the ‘brightest jewel in the imperial crown’ and the core of British global strategic thinking precisely because of her very real importance to the British economy. This was never greater than at this time, when anything up to 60 per cent of British cotton exports went to India and the Far East, to which India was the key – 40-45 per cent went to India alone – and when the international balance of payments of Britain hinged on the payments surplus which India provided. In the third place, the disintegration of indigenous local governments, which sometimes entailed the establishment of European rule over areas Europeans had not previously bothered to administer, was itself due to the undermining of local structures by economic penetration. And, finally, the attempt to prove that nothing in the internal development of western capitalism in the 1880s explains the territorial redivision of the world fails, since world capitalism in this period clearly was different from what it had been in the 1860s. It now consisted of a plurality of rival ‘national economies’ ‘protecting’ themselves against each other. In short, politics and economics cannot be separated in a capitalist society, any more than religion and society in an Islamic one. The attempt to devise a purely non-economic expla-nation of the ‘new imperialism’ is as unrealistic as the attempt to devise a purely non-economic explanation of the rise of working-class parties.

In fact, the rise of labour movements or more generally of democratic politics (see next chapter) had a distinct bearing on the rise of the ‘new imperialism’. Ever since the great imperialist Cecil Rhodes observed in 1895 that if one wanted to avoid civil war one must become imperialist,⁹ most observers have been aware of so-called ‘social imperialism’, i.e. of the attempt to use imperial expansion to diminish domestic discontent by economic improvements or social reform or in other ways. There is no doubt at all that politicians were perfectly aware of the potential benefits of imperialism. In some cases – notably Germany – the rise of imperialism has been explained primarily in terms of ‘the primacy of domestic polities’. Probably Cecil Rhodes’ version of social imperialism, which thought primarily of the economic benefits that empire might bring, directly or indirectly, to the discontented masses, was the least relevant. There is no good evidence that colonial conquest as such had much bearing on the employment or real incomes of most workers in the metropolitan countries,* and the idea that emigration to colonies would provide a safety-valve for overpopulated countries was little more than a demagogic fantasy. (In fact, never was it easier to find

* In individual cases empire might be useful. The Cornish miners left the declining tin-mines of their peninsula en masse for the goldfields of South Africa, where they earned a great deal of money and died even earlier than usual from lung disease. The Cornish mine-owners, at less risk to their lives, bought themselves into the new tin-mines of Malaya.

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somewhere to emigrate to than between 1880 and 1914, and only a tiny minority of emigrants went to anyone’s colonies – or needed to.)

Much more relevant was the familiar practice of offering the voters glory rather than more costly reforms: and what was more glorious than conquests of exotic territories and dusky races, especially as these were usually cheaply won? More generally, imperialism encouraged the masses, and especially the potentially discontented, to identify themselves with the imperial state and nation, and thus unconsciously to endow the social and political system represented by that state with justification and legitimacy. And in an era of mass politics (see next chapter) even old systems required new legitimacy. Here again, con-temporaries were quite clear about this. The British coronation cer-emony of 1902, carefully restyled, was praised because it was designed to express ‘the recognition, by a free democracy, of a hereditary crown, as a symbol of the world-wide dominion of their race’ (my emphasis). In short, empire made good ideological cement.

How effective this specific variant of patriotic flag-waving was is not quite clear, especially in countries where liberalism and the more radical left had acquired strong anti-imperial, anti-military, anti-colonial or more generally anti-aristocratic traditions. There is little doubt that in several countries imperialism was extremely popular among the new middle and white-collar strata, whose social identity largely rested on a claim to be the chosen vehicles of patriotism (see chapter 8 below). There is much less evidence of any spontaneous enthusiasm of the workers for colonial conquests, let alone wars, or indeed of any great interest in the colonies, new or old (except those of white settlement). Attempts to institutionalize pride in imperialism, as by establishing an ‘Empire Day’ in Britain (1902), largely relied for their success on mobilizing the captive audiences of school-children. (The appeal of patriotism in a more general sense will be considered below.)

Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that the idea of superiority to, and domination over, a world of dark skins in remote places was genuinely popular, and thus benefited the politics of imperialism. In its great International Expositions (see The Age of Capital, chapter 2) bourgeois civilization had always gloried in the triple triumphs of science, technology and manufactures. In the era of empires it also gloried in its colonies. At the end of the century ‘colonial pavilions’, hitherto virtually unknown, multiplied: eighteen complemented the Eiffel Tower in 1889, fourteen attracted the tourists in Paris in 1900.¹¹ No doubt this was planned publicity, but like all really successful propaganda, commercial or political, it succeeded because it touched a public nerve. Colonial exhibits were a hit. British jubilees, royal funerals and coronations were all the more impressive because, like

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ancient Roman triumphs, they displayed submissive maharajahs in jewelled robes – freely loyal rather than captive. Military parades were all the more colourful because they contained turbaned Sikhs, moustached Rajputs, smiling and implacable Gurkhas, Spahis and tall black Senegalese: the world of what was considered barbarism at the service of civilization. Even in Habsburg Vienna, uninterested in overseas colonies, an Ashanti village magnetized the sightseers. The Douanier Rousseau was not the only man to dream of the tropics.

The sense of superiority which thus united the western whites, rich, middle-class and poor, did so not only because all of them enjoyed the privileges of the ruler, especially when actually in the colonies. In Dakar or Mombasa the most modest clerk was a master, and accepted as a ‘gentleman’ by people who would not even have noticed his existence in Paris or London; the white worker was a commander of blacks. But even where ideology insisted on at least potential equality, it was dissolved into domination. France believed in transforming its subjects in Frenchmen, notional descendants (as school textbooks insisted, in Timbuctoo and Martinique as in Bordeaux) of’nos ancetres les gaulois’ (our ancestors the Gauls), unlike the British, convinced of the essential and permanent non-Englishness of Bengalis and Yoruba. Yet the very existence of these strata of native ivoluis underlined the lack of ‘evolu-tion’ of the great majority. The Churches set out to convert the heathen to various versions of the true Christian faith, except where actively discouraged by colonial governments (as in India) or where the task was clearly impossible (as in Islamic regions).

This was the classic age of massive missionary endeavour.* Mission-ary effort was by no means an agency of imperialist politics. Often it was opposed to the colonial authorities; pretty well always it put the interests of its converts first. Yet the success of the Lord was a function of imperialist advance. Whether trade followed the flag may still be debated, but there is no doubt at all that colonial conquest opened the way for effective missionary action – as in Uganda, Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (Malawi). And if Christianity insisted on the equality of souls, it underlined the inequality of bodies – even of clerical bodies. It was something done by whites for natives, and paid for by whites. And though it multiplied native believers, at least half the clergy remained white. As for a coloured bishop, it would require a powerful microscope to detect one anywhere between 1880 and 1914. The Catholic Church did not consecrate its first Asian bishops

• Between 1876 and 1902 there were 119 translations of the Bible, compared to 74 in the previous thirty years and 40 in the years 1816-45. The number of new Protestant missions in Africa during the period 1886-95 ^{w a s} twenty-three or about three times as many as in any previous decade.¹²

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until the 1920s, eighty years after observing how desirable such a development would be.¹³

As for the movement most passionately devoted to the equality of all men, it spoke with two voices. The secular left was anti-imperialist in principle and often in practice. Freedom for India, like freedom for Egypt and Ireland, was the objective of the British labour movement. The left never wavered in its condemnation of colonial wars and con-quests, often – as in the British opposition to the Boer War – at considerable risk of temporary unpopularity. Radicals revealed the horrors of the Congo, in metropolitan cocoa plantations on African islands, in Egypt. The campaign which led to the great electoral triumph of the British Liberal Party in 1906 was largely waged by public denunciations of ‘Chinese slavery’ in the South African mines. Yet, with the rarest exceptions (such as Dutch Indonesia), western socialists did little actually to organize the resistance of colonial peoples to their rulers, until the era of the Communist International. Within the socialist and labour movement those who frankly accepted imperial-ism as desirable, or at least an essential stage in the history of peoples not yet ‘ready for self-government’, were a minority on the revisionist and Fabian right wing, though many trade union leaders probably thought discussions about colonies were irrelevant, or considered col-oured peoples primarily as cheap labour threatening sturdy white workers. Certainly the pressure to ban coloured immigrants, which established the ‘White California’ and ‘White Australia’ policies between the 1880s and 1914, came primarily from the working class, and Lancashire unions joined with Lancashire cotton-masters to insist that India must remain deindustrialized. Internationally, socialism before 1914 remained overwhelmingly a movement of Europeans and white emigrants or their descendants (see chapter 5 below). Colonialism remained marginal to their interests. Indeed, their analysis and defin-ition of the new ‘imperialist’ phase of capitalism, which they detected from the later 1890s, rightly saw colonial annexation and exploitation simply as one symptom and characteristic of that new phase: undesir-able, like all its characteristics, but not in itself central. Few were the socialists who, like Lenin, already had their eye fixed on the ‘inflamm-able material’ on the periphery of world capitalism.

Insofar as the socialist (i.e. mainly Marxist) analysis of imperialism integrated colonialism into a much wider concept of a ‘new phase’ of capitalism, it was undoubtedly right in principle, though not necessarily in the details of its theoretical model. It was also sometimes too inclined, as indeed were contemporary capitalists, to exaggerate the economic significance of colonial expansion for metropolitan countries. The imperialism of the late nineteenth century was undoubtedly ‘new’. It

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was the child of an era of competition between rival industrial-capitalist national economies which was new and which was intensified by the pressure to secure and safeguard markets in a period of business uncer-tainty (see chapter 2 above); in short, it was an era when ‘tariff and expansion become the common demand of the ruling class’.¹⁴ It was part of a process of turning away from a capitalism of the private and public policies of laissez-faire, which was also new, and implied the rise of large corporations and oligopolies as well as the increased inter-vention of the state in economic affairs. It belonged to a period when the peripheral part of the global economy became increasingly sig-nificant. It was a phenomenon that seemed as ‘natural’ in 1900 as it would have appeared implausible in i860. But for this link between the post-1873 capitalism and expansion into the unindustrialized world, it is doubtful whether even ‘social imperialism’ would have played such

part as it did in	the domestic politics	of	states adapting  themselves
to mass electoral	politics. All attempts	to	divorce the explanation of

imperialism from the specific developments of capitalism in the late nineteenth century must be regarded as ideological exercises, though often learned and sometimes acute.

II

This still leaves us with the questions about the impact of western (and from the 1890s Japanese) expansion on the rest of the world, and about the significance of the ‘imperial’ aspects of imperialism for the metropolitan countries.

The first of these questions can be answered more quickly than the second. The economic impact of imperialism was significant, but, of course, the most significant thing about it was that it was profoundly unequal, for the relationship between metropoles and dependencies was highly asymmetrical. The impact of the first on the second was dramatic and decisive, even without actual occupation, whereas the impact of the second on the first might be negligible, and was hardly ever a matter of life or death. Cuba stood or fell by the price of sugar and the willingness of the USA to import it, but even quite small ‘developed’ countries – say Sweden – would not have been seriously inconvenienced if all Caribbean sugar had suddenly disappeared from the market, because they did not depend exclusively on that area for sugar. Virtually all the imports and exports of any region in sub-Saharan Africa came from or went to a handful of western metropoles, but metropolitan trade with Africa, Asia and Oceania, while increasing modestly between 1870 and 1914, remained quite marginal. About 80 per cent of Euro-

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pean trade throughout the nineteenth century, both exports and imports, was with other developed countries, and the same is true of European foreign investments.¹⁵ Insofar as these were directed overseas, they went mostly to a handful of rapidly developing economies mainly populated by settlers of European descent – Canada, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, etc. – as well as, of course, to the USA. In this sense the age of imperialism looks very different when seen from Nicaragua or Malaya than it does from the point of view of Germany or France.

Among the metropolitan countries imperialism was obviously of greatest importance to Britain, since the economic supremacy of that country had always hinged on her special relationship with the overseas markets and sources of primary products. In fact it is arguable that at no time since the industrial revolution had the manufactures of the United Kingdom been particularly competitive on the markets of industrializing economies, except perhaps during the golden decades of 1850-70. To preserve as much as possible of its privileged access to the non-European world was therefore a matter of life and death for the British economy.¹⁶ In the late nineteenth century it was remarkably successful in doing so, incidentally expanding the area officially or actually under the British monarchy to a quarter of the surface of the globe (which British atlases proudly coloured red). If we include the so-called ‘informal empire’ of independent states which were in effect satellite economies of Britain, perhaps one-third of the globe was British in an economic, and indeed cultural, sense. For Britain exported even the peculiar shape of her post-boxes to Portugal, and so quintessentially British an institution as Harrods department store to Buenos Aires. But by 1914 much of this zone of indirect influence, especially in Latin America, was already being infiltrated by other powers.

However, not a great deal of this successful defensive operation had much to do with the ‘new’ imperialist expansion, except that biggest of bonanzas, the diamonds and gold of South Africa. This generated a crop of (largely German) instant millionaires – the Wernhers, Beits, Ecksteins, et al. – most of whom were equally instantly incorporated into British high society, never more receptive to first-generation money if it was splashed around in sufficiently large quantities. It also led to the greatest of colonial conflicts, the South African War of 1899-1902, which eliminated the resistance of two small local republics of white peasant settlers.

Most of Britain’s overseas success was due to the more systematic exploitation of Britain’s already existing possessions or of the country’s special position as the major importer from, and investor in, such areas as South America. Except for India, Egypt and South Africa, most British economic activity was in countries which were virtually inde-

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pendent, like the white ‘dominions’, or areas like the USA and Latin America, where British state action was not, or could not be, effectively deployed. For in spite of the cries of pain emanating from the Cor-poration of Foreign Bondholders (established during the Great Depression) when faced with the well-known Latin practice of sus-pending debt-payment or paying in devalued currency, the government did not effectively back its investors in Latin America, because it could not. The Great Depression was a crucial test in this respect, because, like later world depressions (including the one of the 1970s and 1980s) it led to a major international debt crisis, which put the banks of the metropolis at serious risk. The most the British government could do was to arrange for the great house of Baring to be saved from insolvency in the ‘Baring crisis’ of 1890, when that bank had, as banks will, ventured too freely into the whirlpools of defaulting Argentinian finance. If it backed investors with diplomacy offeree, as it increasingly did after 1905, it was to support them against entrepreneurs of other countries backed by their own governments, rather than against the larger governments of the dependent world.*

In fact, taking the good years with the bad, British capitalists did rather well out of their informal or ‘free’ empire. Almost half of all Britain’s long-term publicly issued capital in 1914 was in Canada, Australia and Latin America. More than half of all British savings were invested abroad after 1900.

Of course Britain took her share of the newly colonialized regions of the world, and, given British strength and experience, it was a larger and probably more valuable share than that of anyone else. If France occupied most of West Africa, the four British colonies in this area controlled ‘the denser African populations, the larger productive capacities, and the preponderance of trade’.¹⁷ Yet the British object was not expansion but defence against others encroaching upon territories hitherto, like most of the overseas world, dominated by British trade and British capital.

Did other powers benefit proportionately from their colonial expan-sion? It is impossible to say, since formal colonization was only one aspect of global economic expansion and competition, and, in the case of the two major industrial powers, Germany and the USA, not a major aspect of it. Moreover, as we have already seen, for no country

* There were a few instances of gunboat economics – as m Venezuela, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras and Mexico – but they do not senously modify this picture Of course British govern-ments and capitalists, faced with the choice between local parties or states favouring British economic interests and those hostile to them, would not refrain from backing the side helpful to British profits Chile against Peru in the ‘War of the Pacific’ (1879-82), the enemies of President Balmaceda in Chile in 1891 The issue was nitrates

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other than Britain (with the possible exception of the Netherlands) was a special relationship with the non-industrial world economically crucial. All we can say with fair confidence is this. First, the drive for colonies seems to have been proportionately stronger in economically less dynamic metropolitan countries, where it served to some extent as a potential compensation for their economic and political inferiority to their rivals – and, in the case of France, her demographic and military inferiority. Second, in all cases there were particular economic groups – notably those associated with overseas trade and industries using over-seas raw materials – pressing strongly for colonial expansion, which they naturally justified by the prospects of national advantage. Third, while some of these groups did rather well out of such expansion – the Compagnie Frangaise de l’Afrique Occidentale paid dividends of 26 per cent in 1913¹⁸ – most of the actual new colonies attracted little capital and their economic results were disappointing.* In short, the new colonialism was a by-product of an era of economic-political rivalry between competing national economies, intensified by pro-tectionism. However, insofar as the metropolitan trade with the colonies almost invariably increased as a percentage of its total trade, that protectionism was modestly successful.

Yet the	Age of Empire was not only an economic and political but
a cultural	phenomenon. The conquest of the globe by its ‘developed’

minority transformed images, ideas and aspirations, both by force and institutions, by example and by social transformation. In the dependent countries this hardly affected anyone except the indigenous elites, though of course it must be remembered that in some regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, it was imperialism itself, or the associated phenom-enon of Christian missions, which created the possibility of new social elites based on education in the western manner. The division between ‘francophone’ and ‘anglophone’ African states today exactly mirrors the distribution of the French and British colonial empires.t Except in Africa and Oceania, where Christian missions sometimes secured mass conversions to the western religion, the great mass of the colonial populations hardly changed their ways of life if they could help it. And, to the chagrin of the more unbending missionaries, what indigenous peoples adopted was not so much the faith imported from the west as those elements in it which made sense to them in terms of their own

* France did not even succeed in integrating her new colonies fully into a protectionist system, though in 1913 55 per cent of the French Empire’s trade was with the home country Unable to break the already established economic links of these areas to other regions and metropoles, France had to buy a large share of her needs in colonial products – rubber, skins and leather, tropical timber – via Hamburg, Antwerp and Liverpool

t Which, after 1918, divided the former German colonies between them

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THE AGE OF EMPIRE

system of beliefs and institutions, or demands. Just like the sports brought to Pacific islanders by enthusiastic British colonial admin-istrators (so often selected from among the more muscular products of the middle class), colonial religion often looked as unexpected to the western observer as Samoan cricket. This was so even where the faithful nominally followed the orthodoxies of their denomination. But they were also apt to develop their own versions of the faith, notably in South Africa – the one region in Africa where really massive conversions took place – where an ‘Ethiopian movement’ seceded from the missions as early as 1892 in order to establish a form of Christianity less identified with the whites.

What imperialism brought to the elites or potential elites of the dependent world was therefore essentially ‘westernization’. It had, of course, begun to do so long before then. For all governments and elites of countries faced with dependency or conquest it had been clear for several decades that they had to westernize or go under (see The Age of Capital, chapters 7, 8, 11). And, indeed, the ideologies which inspired such elites in the era of imperialism dated back to the years between the French Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century, as when they took the form of the positivism of August Comte (1798-1857), a moder-nizing doctrine which inspired the governments of Brazil, Mexico and the early Turkish Revolution (see pp. 284, 290 below). Elite resistance to the west remained westernizing even when it opposed wholesale westernization on grounds of religion, morality, ideology or political pragmatism. The saintly Mahatma Gandhi, wearing loincloth and bearing a spindle (to discourage industrialization), was not only sup-ported and financed by the owners of mechanized cotton-factories in Ahmedabad* but was himself a western-educated lawyer visibly

influenced by western-derived ideology. He is quite incomprehensible

if we see in him only a Hindu traditionalist.

In fact, Gandhi illustrates the specific impact of the era of imperialism rather well. Born into a relatively modest caste of traders and money-lenders not previously much associated with the westernized elite which administered India under British superiors, he nevertheless acquired a professional and political education in England. By the late 1880s this was so accepted an option for ambitious young men from his country that Gandhi himself began to write a guide-book to English life for prospective students of modest circumstances such as himself. Written in superb English, it advised them on everything from the journey by P & 0 steamer to London and how to find lodgings, to ways

* ‘Ah/ one such patroness is supposed to have exclaimed, ‘if Bapuji only knew what it costs to keep him in poverty”

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of meeting the diet requirements of the pious Hindu and how to get used to the surprising western habit of shaving oneself rather than having it done by a barber.¹⁹ Gandhi clearly saw himself neither as an unconditional assimilator nor as an unconditional opponent of things British. As many pioneers of colonial liberation have done since, during their temporary stay in the metropole, he choose to move in western circles which were ideologically congenial – in his case those of British vegetarians, who may safely be taken as being in favour of other ‘progressive’ causes also.

Gandhi learned his characteristic technique of mobilizing tra-ditionalist masses for non-traditionalist purposes by means of passive resistance, in an environment created by the ‘new imperialism’. It was, as one might expect, a fusion of western and eastern elements for he made no secret of his intellectual debt to John Ruskin and Tolstoi. (Before the 1880s the fertilization of Indian political flowers by pollen carried from Russia would have been inconceivable, but by the first decade of the new century it was already common among Indian, as it was to be among Chinese and Japanese radicals.) South Africa, the boom country of diamonds and gold, attracted a large community of modest immigrants from India, and racial discrimination in this novel setting created one of the few situations in which the non-elite Indians were ready for modern political mobilization. Gandhi gained his pol-itical experience and won his political spurs as the champion of Indian rights in South Africa. He could hardly as yet have done the same in India itself, where he eventually returned – but only after the outbreak of the 1914 war – to become the key figure in the Indian national movement.

In short, the Age of Empire created both the conditions which formed anti-imperialist leaders and the conditions which, as we shall see (chapter 12 below), began to give their voices resonance. But, of course, it is an anachronism and a misunderstanding to present the history of the peoples and regions brought under the domination and influence of the western metropoles primarily in terms of resistance to the west. It is an anachronism because, with exceptions to be noted below, the era of significant anti-imperial movements begins for most regions at the earliest with the First World War and the Russian Revolution, and a misunderstanding, because it reads the text of modern nationalism – independence, the self-determination of peoples, the formation of ter-ritorial states, etc. (see chapter 6 below) – into a historical record which did not yet, and could not yet, contain it. In fact, it was the westernized elites which first made contact with such ideas through their visits to the west and through the educational institutions formed by the west, for that is where they came from. Young Indian students returning from

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Britain might bring with them the slogans of Mazzini and Garibaldi, but as yet few of the inhabitants of the Pandjab, let alone of regions like the Sudan, would have the slightest idea of what they could mean.

The most powerful cultural legacy of imperialism was, therefore, an education in western ways for minorities of various kinds: for the favoured few who became literate and therefore discovered, with or without the assistance of Christian conversion, the high road of ambition which wore the white collar of the clergyman, teacher, bureaucrat or office worker. In some regions it also included those who acquired new ways as soldiers and policemen of the new rulers, wearing their clothes, adopting their peculiar ideas of time, place and domestic arrangement. These, of course, were the minorities of potential movers and shakers, which is why the era of colonialism, brief even by the measure of a single human life, has left such lasting effects. For it is a surprising fact that in most parts of Africa the entire experience of colonialism from original occupation to the formation of independent states, fits within a single lifetime – say that of Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965).

What of the opposite effect of the dependent world on the dominant? Exoticism had been a by-product of European expansion since the sixteenth century, though philosophical observers in the age of Enlight-enment had more often than not treated the strange countries beyond Europe and European settlers as a sort of moral barometer of European civilization. Where they were plainly civilized, they could illustrate the institutional deficiencies of the west, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters; where they were not, they were apt to be treated as noble savages whose natural and admirable comportment illustrated the corruption of civilized society. The novelty of the nineteenth century was that non-Europeans and their societies were increasingly, and generally, treated as inferior, undesirable, feeble and backward, even infantile. They were fit subjects for conquest, or at least for conversion to the values of the only real civilization, that represented by traders, missionaries and

bodies of armed men full of firearms	and  fire-water.  And in	a sense
the values of traditional  non-western	societies increasingly	became

irrelevant to their survival in an age when force and military technology alone counted. Did the sophistication of imperial Peking prevent the western barbarians from burning and looting the Summer Palace more than once? Did the elegance of elite culture in the declining Mughal capital, so beautifully portrayed in Satyajit Ray’s The Chessplayers, hold up the advancing British? For the average European, such people became objects of contempt. The only non-Europeans they took to were fighters, preferably those who could be recruited into their own colonial armies (Sikhs, Gurkhas, Berber mountaineers, Afghans, Beduin). The Ottoman Empire earned a grudging respect, because

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even in decline it had an infantry which could resist European armies. Japan came to be treated as an equal when it began to win wars.

And yet the very density of the network of global communication, the very accessibility of foreign lands, directly or indirectly, intensified the confrontation and the intermingling of the western and the exotic worlds. Those who knew and reflected on both were few, though in the imperialist period their number was increased by writers who deliberately chose to make themselves intermediaries between them: writers or intellectuals by vocation and by profession mariners (like Pierre Loti and, greatest of them, Joseph Conrad), soldiers and admin-istrators (like the orientalist Louis Massignon) or colonial journalists (like Rudyard Kipling). But increasingly the exotic became part of everyday education, as in the enormously successful boys’ novels of Karl May (1842-1912), whose imaginary German hero ranged through the Wild West and the Islamic east, with excursions into black Africa and Latin America; in the thrillers, whose villains now included inscru-table and all-powerful orientals like Sax Rohmer’s Dr Fu Manchu; in the pulp-magazine school stories for British boys, which now included a rich Hindu speaking the baroque Babu-English of the expected stereotype. It could even become an occasional but expected part of everyday experience, as in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, with its equally exotic cowboys and Indians, which conquered Europe from 1887 on, or in the increasingly elaborate ‘colonial villages’ or exhibits in the great International Expositions. These glimpses of strange worlds were not documentary, whatever their intention. They were ideological, generally reinforcing the sense of superiority of the ‘civilized’ over the ‘primitive’. They were imperialist only because, as the novels of Joseph Conrad show, the central link between the worlds of the exotic and the everyday was the formal or informal penetration of the Third World by the west. When colloquial language, mainly via various forms of slang, notably that of colonial armies, absorbed words from the actual imperial experience, they often reflected a negative view of its subjects. Italian workers called strike-breakers crumiri (after a North African tribe) and Italian politicians called the regiments of docile southern

voters marched into elections by local patrons			ascari (colonial native
troops). Caciques, the Indian	chieftains of	Spain’s American		empire,
had become a synonym for	any political	boss;	caids (North	African

indigenous chiefs) provided the term for leaders of criminal gangs in France.

Yet there was a more positive side to this exoticism. Intellectually minded administrators and soldiers – businessmen were less interested in such matters – pondered deeply on the differences between their own societies and those they ruled. They produced both bodies of impressive

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scholarship about them, especially in the Indian empire, and theoretical reflections which transformed western social sciences. Much of this work was the by-product of colonial rule or intended to assist it, and most of it unquestionably rested on a firm and confident sense of the superiority of western knowledge to any other, except perhaps in the realm of religion, where the superiority of e.g. Methodism to Buddhism was not obvious to impartial observers. Imperialism brought a notable rise in the western interest in, and sometimes the western conversion to, forms of spirituality derived from the orient, or claiming to be so derived.²⁰ Yet, in spite of post-colonial criticism, this body of western scholarship cannot be dismissed simply as a supercilious depreciation of non-Euro-pean cultures. At the very least the best of it took them seriously, as something to be respected and from which to derive instruction. In the field of art, and especially the visual arts, western avant gardes treated non-western cultures entirely as equals. They were indeed largely inspired by them in this period. This is true not only of arts believed to represent sophisticated civilizations, however exotic (like the Japanese, whose influence on French painters was marked), but of those regarded as ‘primitive’, and notably those of Africa and Oceania. No doubt their ‘primitivism’ was their main attraction, but it is undeniable that the avant-garde generations of the early twentieth century taught Europeans to see such works as art – often as great art – in its own right, irrespective of its origin.

One final aspect of imperialism must be briefly mentioned: its impact on the ruling and middle classes of the metropolitan countries them-selves. In one sense imperialism dramatized the triumph of these classes and the societies created in their image as nothing else could possibly have done. A handful of countries, mainly in north-western Europe, dominated the globe. Some imperialists, to the resentment of the Latins not to mention the Slavs, even liked to stress the peculiar conquering merits of those of Teutonic and especially Anglo-Saxon origins who, whatever their rivalries, were said to have an affinity to each other which still echoes through Hitler’s grudging respect for Britain. A handful of men of the upper and middle class within these countries – officers, administrators, businessmen, engineers – exercised that domi-nation effectively. Around 1890 a little over 6000 British officials governed almost 300 million Indians with the help of a little over 70,000 European soldiers, the rank-and-file of whom were, like the much more numerous indigenous troops, mercenaries who took orders, and who indeed were disproportionately drawn from that older reservoir of native colonial fighters, the Irish. The case is extreme, but by no means untypical. Could there be a more extraordinary proof of absolute superiority?

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The number of people directly involved in empire was thus relatively small – but their symbolic significance was enormous. When the writer Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the Indian empire, was believed to be dying of pneumonia in 1899, not only the British and the Americans grieved – Kipling had just addressed a poem on ‘The White Man’s Burden’ to the USA on its responsibilities in the Philippines – but the Emperor of Germany sent a telegram.²¹

Yet imperial triumph raised both problems and uncertainties. It raised problems insofar as the contradiction between the rule of metro-politan ruling classes over their empires and their own peoples became increasingly insoluble. Within the metropoles, as we shall see, the politics of democratic electoralism increasingly, and as it seemed inevi-tably, prevailed or were destined to prevail. Within the colonial empires autocracy ruled, based on the combination of physical coercion and passive submission to a superiority so great as to appear unchallenge-able and therefore legitimate. Soldiers and self-disciplined ‘proconsuls’, isolated men with absolute powers over territories the size of king-doms, ruled over continents, while at home the ignorant and inferior masses were rampant. Was there not a lesson – a lesson in the sense of Nietzsche’s Will to Power – to be learned here?

Imperialism also raised uncertainties. In the first place it confronted a small minority of whites – for even the majority of that race belonged to those destined to inferiority, as the new discipline of eugenics unceas-ingly warned (see chapter 10 below) – with the masses of the black, the brown, perhaps above all the yellow, that ‘yellow peril’ against which the Emperor William 11 called for the union and defence of the west.²² Could world empires, so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many, could they last? Kipling, the greatest – perhaps the only – poet of imperialism welcomed the great moment of demagogic imperial pride, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, with a prophetic reminder of the impermanence of empires:

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget.²³

Pomp planned the building of an enormous new imperial capital for India in New Delhi. Was Clemenceau the only sceptical observer who would foresee that it would be the latest of a long series of ruins of imperial capitals? And was the vulnerability of global rule so

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much greater than the vulnerability of domestic rule over the white masses?

The uncertainty was double-edged. For if empire (and the rule of the ruling classes) was vulnerable to its subjects, though perhaps not yet, not immediately, was it not more immediately vulnerable to the erosion from within of the will to rule, the willingness to wage the Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest? Would not the very wealth and luxury which power and enterprise had brought weaken the fibres of those muscles whose constant efforts were necessary to maintain it? Did not empire lead to parasitism at the centre and to the eventual triumph of the barbarians?

Nowhere did such questions sound a more doom-laden echo than in the greatest and most vulnerable of all empires, the one which in size and glory surpassed all empires of the past, and yet in other respects was on the verge of decline. But even the hard-working and energetic Germans saw imperialism as going hand in hand with that ‘rentier state’ which could not but lead to decay. Let J . A. Hobson give word to these fears: if China were to be partitioned,

the greater part of Western Europe might then assume the appear-ance and character already exhibited by tracts of country in the South of England, in the Riviera, and in the tourist-ridden or resi-dential parts of Italy and Switzerland, little clusters of wealthy aristocrats drawing dividends and pensions from the Far East, with a somewhat larger group of professional retainers and tradesmen and a large body of personal servants and workers in the transport trade and in the final stages of production of the more perishable goods: all the main arterial industries would have disappeared, the staple foods and manufactures flowing in as tribute from Africa and Asia.²⁴

The bourgeoisie’s belle ipoque would thus disarm it. The charming, harmless Eloi of H. G. Wells’ novel, living lives of play in the sun, would be at the mercy of the dark Morlocks on whom they depended, and against whom they were helpless.²⁵ ‘Europe’, wrote the German econ-omist Schulze-Gaevernitz,’… will shift the burden of physical toil, first agriculture and mining, then the more arduous toil in industry – on to the coloured races, and itself be content with the role of rentier, and in this way, perhaps, pave the way for the economic and later, the political emancipation of the coloured races.’²⁶

Such were the bad dreams which disturbed the sleep of the belle tpoque. In them the nightmares of empire merged with the fears of democracy.

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CHAPTER      4

T H E  P O L I T I C S  O F    D E M O C R A C Y

All those who, by wealth, education, intelligence or guile, have an aptitude for leading a community of men and a chance of doing so – in other words, all the cliques in the ruling class – have to bow to universal suffrage once it is instituted, and also, if occasion requires, cajole andfool it.

Gaetano Mosca, 1895′

Democracy is still on trial, but so far it has not disgraced itself; it is true that its full force has notyet come into operation, and thisfor two causes, one more or less permanent in its effect, the other of a more transient nature. In the first place, whatever be the numerical representation of wealth, its power will always be out of proportion; and secondly, the defective organisation of the newly enfranchised classes has prevented any overwhelming alteration in the pre-existing balance of power.

John Maynard Keynes, 1904²

// is significant that none of the modern secular stales have neglected to provide national holidays giving occasionsfor assemblage.

American Journal of Sociology, 18g6~73³

I

The historical period with which this volume deals began with an international outburst of hysteria among the rulers of Europe and among its terrified middle classes, provoked by the short-lived Commune of Paris in 1871, whose suppression had been followed by massacres of Parisians on a scale which would normally have been inconceivable in civilized nineteenth-century states. Even by our more barbarous standards, the scale is still impressive (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter g). This brief, brutal – and for the time uncharacteristic – unleashing of blind terror by respectable society reflected a fundamental problem of the politics of bourgeois society: that of its democratization.

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Democracy, as the sagacious Aristotle had observed, was the govern-ment of the mass of the people, who were, on the whole, poor. The interests of the poor and the rich, the privileged and the unprivileged, are evidently not the same; even if we assume that they are or can be, the masses are rather unlikely to consider public affairs in the same light and in the same terms as what British Victorian writers called ‘the classes’, happily still able to identify class political action only with aristocracy and bourgeoisie. This was the basic dilemma of nineteenth-century liberalism (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter 6, i), devoted as it was to constitutions and sovereign elected assemblies, which it did its best to sidestep by being non-democratic, i.e. by excluding the majority of male citizens of states, not to mention the totality of their female inhabitants, from the right to vote and to be elected. Until the period with which this volume deals, its unshakeable foundation was the distinction between what the logical French in Louis Philippe’s era had called ‘the legal country’ and ‘the real country’ (Ie pays legal, Ie pays reel). From the moment when the ‘real country’ began to penetrate the political enclosure of the ‘legal’ or ‘political’ country, defended by the fortifications of property and educational qualifications for voting and, in most countries, by institutionalized aristocratic privilege, such as hereditary chambers of peers, the social order was at risk.

What indeed, would happen in politics when the masses of the people, ignorant and brutalized, unable to understand the elegant and salutary logic of Adam Smith’s free market, controlled the political fate of states? They would, as likely as not, pursue a road which led to that social revolution whose brief reappearance in 1871 had so terrified the respect-able. In its ancient insurrectional form, revolution might no longer seem imminent, but was it not concealed behind any major extension of the franchise beyond the ranks of the propertied and educated? Would this not, as the future Lord Salisbury feared in 1866, inevitably lead to communism?

Yet after 1870 it became increasingly clear that the democratization of the politics of states was quite inevitable. The masses would march on to the stage of politics, whether rulers liked it or not. And this is indeed what happened. Electoral systems based on a wide franchise, sometimes even in theory on universal male suffrage, already existed in the 1870s in France, in Germany (at any rate for the all-German parliament), in Switzerland and in Denmark. In Britain the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1883 almost quadrupled the electorate, which rose from 8 to 29 per cent of men over the age of twenty. Belgium demo-cratized her franchise in 1894, following a general strike for this reform (the increase was from 3.9 to 37.3 per cent of the adult male population), Norway doubled it in 1898 (from 16.6 to 34.8 per cent). In Finland a

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uniquely extensive democracy (76 per cent of adults) came in with the 1905 revolution; in Sweden the electorate was doubled in 1908 to bring it level with Norway; the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire received universal suffrage in 1907, and Italy in 1913. Outside Europe the USA, Australia and New Zealand were, of course, already democratic, and Argentina became so in 1912. By later standards this democratization was still incomplete – the usual electorate under universal suffrage was between 30 and 40 per cent of the adult population – but it should be noted that even votes for women was already more than a Utopian slogan. They had been introduced on the margins of white-settler territory in the 1890s – in Wyoming (USA), New Zealand and South Australia – and in democratic Finland and Norway between 1905 and

1913-

These developments were viewed without enthusiasm by the govern-ments that introduced them, even when these were committed by ideological conviction to the representation of the people. Readers will already have observed, incidentally, how late even countries we now think of as profoundly and historically democratic, such as the Scan-dinavian ones, decided to broaden the vote; this is not to mention the Netherlands, which unlike Belgium resisted systematic democratization before 1918 (though their electorate did indeed grow at a comparable rate). Politicians might resign themselves to prophylactic extensions of the vote while they, rather than some extreme left, could still control it. This was probably the case in France and Britain. Among conservatives there were cynics like Bismarck, who had faith in the traditional loyalty – or, as liberals might have claimed, the ignorance and stu-pidity – of a mass electorate, calculating that universal suffrage would strengthen the right rather than the left. But even Bismarck preferred to run no risks in Prussia (which dominated the German Empire) where he maintained a three-class franchise strongly skewed in favour of the right. This precaution proved to be wise, for the mass electorate turned out to be uncontrollable from above. Elsewhere politicians yielded to popular agitation and pressure, or to the calculations of domestic political conflicts. In both cases they feared that the consequences of what Disraeli had called a ‘leap in the dark’ might be unpredictable. Certainly the socialist agitations of the 1890s, and the direct and indirect repercussions of the first Russian Revolution, accelerated demo-cratization. Still, whatever the way in which democratization advanced, between 1880 and 1914 most western states had to resign themselves to the inevitable. Democratic politics could no longer be postponed. Henceforth the problem was how to manipulate them.

Manipulation in the crudest sense was still easy. One might, for instance, place strict limits on the political role of assemblies elected by

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universal suffrage. This was the Bismarckian model, in which the constitutional rights of the German parliament (Reichstag) were mini-mized. Elsewhere second chambers, sometimes composed of hereditary members as in Britain, voting by special (and weighted) electoral colleges and other analogous institutions put brakes on democratized representative assemblies. Elements of property suffrage were retained, reinforced by educational qualifications (e.g. additional votes for citi-zens with higher education in Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, and

special	seats	for  universities  in  Britain).  Japan		introduced		par-
liamentarism		with such limitations in  1890.	Such ‘fancy		franchises’,
as the	British	called  them, were reinforced	by the	useful	device of
gerrymandering or what Austrians called ‘electoral				geometry’ –		the

manipulation of constituency boundaries to minimize or maximize support for certain parties. Timid or simply cautious voters could be put under pressure by open ballots, especially where powerful landlords or other patrons watched over the scene: Denmark maintained open voting until 1901, Prussia until 1918, Hungary until the 1930s. Patron-age, as American city bosses knew well, could deliver voting blocs: in Europe the Italian Liberal Giovanni Giolitti proved to be the master of clientelist politics. The minimum age for voting was elastic: it ranged from twenty in democratic Switzerland to thirty in Denmark, and was often raised somewhat when the right to vote was extended. And there

was always	the	possibility of simple sabotage,  by complicating		the
process of	getting on		to electoral  registers. Thus  in Britain it	has
been estimated		that in	1914 about half the working class was de facto
disenfranchised		by such devices.

Nevertheless, such braking devices might slow the movements of the political vehicle towards democracy, but they could not stop its advance. The western world, including after 1905 even tsarist Russia, was plainly moving towards systems of politics based on an increasingly wide electorate dominated by the common people.

The logical consequence of such systems was the political mobi-lization of the masses for and through elections, that is to say for the purpose of putting pressure on national governments. This implied the organization of mass movements and mass parties, the politics of mass propaganda and the developing mass media – at this stage mainly the newly developing popular or ‘yellow’ press – and other developments which raised major and novel problems for governments and ruling

classes. Unfortunately	for  the	historian,	these problems  disappear
from the scene of open	political	discussion	in Europe, as the growing

democratization made it impossible to debate them publicly with any degree of frankness. What candidate wanted to tell his voters that he considered them too stupid and ignorant to know what was best in

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politics, and that their demands were as absurd as they were dangerous to the future of the country? What statesman, surrounded by reporters carrying his words to the remotest corner tavern, would actually say what he meant? Increasingly politicians were obliged to appeal to a mass electorate; even to speak directly to the masses or indirectly through the megaphone of the popular press (including their opponents’ papers). Bismarck had probably never addressed other than an elite audience. Gladstone introduced mass electioneering to Britain (and perhaps to Europe) in the campaign of 1879. No longer would the expected implications of democracy be discussed, except by political outsiders, with the frankness and realism of the debates which had surrounded the British Reform Act of 1867. But as the men who governed wrapped themselves in rhetoric, the serious discussion of politics retreated to the world of the intellectuals and the educated minority public which read them. The era of democratization was also the golden age of a new political sociology: of Durkheim and Sorel, Ostrogorski and the Webbs, Mosca, Pareto, Robert Michels and Max Weber (see pp. 273-4 below).⁴

When the men who governed really wanted to say what they meant, they had henceforth to do so in the obscurity of the corridors of power, the clubs, the private social evenings, the shooting parties or country-house weekends where the members of the elite met each other in a very different atmosphere from that of the gladiatorial comedies of parliamentary debates or public meetings. The age of democratization thus turned into the era of public political hypocrisy, or rather duplicity, and hence also into that of political satire: of Mr Dooley, of bitter, funny and enormously talented cartoon-journals like the German Sim-plicissimus and the French Assiette au Beurre or Karl Kraus’ Fackel in Vienna. For what intelligent observer could overlook the yawning gap between public discourse and political reality, which Hilaire Belloc captured in his epigram of the great Liberal election triumph in 1906:

The accursed power that rests on privilege

And goes with women, and, champagne, and bridge, Broke: and Democracy resumed her reign

That goes with bridge, and women, and champagne.⁵

But who were the masses who now mobilized for political action? In the first place there were classes of social strata hitherto below and outside the political system, several of which might form rather more heterogeneous alliances, coalitions or ‘popular fronts’. The most for-midable of these was the working class, now mobilizing in parties and movements on an explicit class basis. These will be considered in the next chapter.

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There was also that large and ill-defined coalition of discontented intermediate strata uncertain which they feared more, the rich or the proletariat. This was the old petty-bourgeoisie of master artisans and small shopkeepers, undermined by the progress of the capitalist economy, the rapidly increasing new lower-middle class of non-manual and white-collar workers: these constituted the Handwerkerfrage and the Mittelstandsfrage of German politics during and after the Great Depression. Theirs was a world defined by size, of’little people’ against the ‘big’ interests, and in which the very word ‘little’, as in ‘the little

man’, ¹Ie petit commer^anf, ‘der kleine Mann’,         became a slogan and  a

rallying call. How many radical-socialist journals in France did not proudly bear this title: Le Petit Nifois, Le Petit Provengal, La Petite Charente,

Le Petit Troyen? Little, but not too little, for small property needed as much defence against collectivism as big property, and the superiority of the clerk needed to be defended against any confusion with the skilled manual worker, who might have a very similar income; especially as the established middle classes were disinclined to welcome the lower-middle classes as their equals.

This was also, and for good reasons, the political sphere of rhetoric and demagogy par excellence. In countries where the tradition of a radical, democratic jacobinism was strong, its rhetoric, strong or flowery, kept the ‘little men’ on the left, though in France this embodied a heavy dose of national chauvinism and a significant potential of xenophobia. In central Europe its nationalist and especially its anti-Semitic character was unconfined. For Jews could be identified not merely with capitalism, and especially the part of capitalism that impinged on small craftsmen and shopkeepers – bankers, dealers, foun-ders of the new chains of distribution and department stores – but also often with godless socialists and, more generally, with intellectuals who undermined the old and threatened verities of morality and the patriarchal family. From the 1880s on, anti-Semitism became a major component of the organized political movements of ‘little men’ from the western frontiers of Germany eastwards into the Habsburg Empire, Russia and Rumania. Nor should its significance be under-estimated elsewhere. Who would suspect, from the anti-Semitic convulsions which

shook France in the 1890s, the decade of the Panama scandals and				the
Dreyfus affair,* that there were at this period		barely 60,000 Jews		in
that country of 40 million? (See pp. 158-9, 296		below.)
There was also, of course, the peasantry,		which	still formed	the
* Captain Dreyfus	of the French general staff was wrongly convicted		for espionage on behalf
of Germany in 1894	After a campaign to prove his innocence, which polarised and convulsed all

France, he was pardoned in 1899 and eventually rehabilitated in 1906 The ‘affair’ had a traumatic impact throughout Europe

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majority in many countries, the largest economic group in others. Though peasants and farmers from the 188os on – the era ofdepression – increasingly mobilized as economic pressure-groups, and indeed joined new organizations for co-operative purchasing, marketing, product processing and credit in impressive masses in countries as different as the USA and Denmark, New Zealand and France, Belgium and Ireland, the peasantry rarely mobilized politically and electorally as a class – assuming that so varied a body can be regarded as a class. Of course no government could afford to neglect the economic interests of so substantial a body of voters as the agricultural cultivators in agrarian countries. Still, insofar as the peasantry mobilized electorally, they did so under non-agricultural banners, even where it was clear that the force of a particular political movement or party, such as the Populists in the USA of the 1890s or the Social-Revolutionaries in Russia (after 1902), rested on the support of farmers or peasants.

If social groups mobilized as such, so did bodies of citizens united by sectional loyalties such as those of religion and nationality. Sectional, because political mass mobilizations on a confessional basis, even in countries of a single religion, were always blocs counterposed to other blocs, either confessional or secular. And nationalist electoral mobil-zations (sometimes, as in the case of the Poles and Irish, coinciding with religious ones) were almost always autonomist movements within multinational states. They had little in common with the national patriotism inculcated by states – and sometimes escaping from their control – or with political movements, normally of the right, which claimed to represent ‘the nation’ against subversive minorities (see chapter 6 below).

However, the rise of politico-confessional mass movements as a general phenomenon was substantially hampered by the ultra-con-servatism of the body with much the most formidable capacity to mobilize and organize its faithful, namely the Roman Catholic Church. Politics, parties, elections were part of that miserable nineteenth century which Rome had attempted to banish ever since the Syllabus of 1864 and the Vatican Council of 1870 (see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, in). It remained quite unreconciled to it, as witness the proscription of those Catholic thinkers who in the 1890s and 1900s cautiously suggested coming to some sort of terms with contemporary ideas (‘Modernism’ was condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907). What place could there be for Catholic politics in this infernal world of secular politics, except for total opposition and the specific defence of religious practice, Catholic education and such other institutions of the Church as were vulnerable to the state in its permanent conflict with the Church?

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So, while the political potential of Christian parties was enormous, as European history since 1945 was to show,* and while it evidently increased with every extension of the vote, the Church resisted the formation of Catholic political parties formally backed by it, though recognizing, from the early 1890s, the desirability of wresting the working classes away from godless socialist revolution, and, of course, the need to look after its major constituency, the peasants. But, in spite of the Pope’s blessing for the Catholics’ new concern for social policy (in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum, 1891), the ancestors and founders of what were to become the Christian Democratic parties of the second post-war era were viewed with suspicion and periodic hostility by the Church, not only because they also, like ‘Modernism’, seemed to compromise with undesirable tendencies in the lay world, but also because the Church was ill at ease with the cadres from the new Catholic middle and lower-middle strata, urban and rural, of the expanding economies, who found a scope for action in them. When the great demagogue Karl Lueger (1844-1910) succeeded in the 1890s in found-ing the first major Christian Social modern mass party, a strongly anti-Semitic lower-middle-class movement which conquererd the city of Vienna, he did so against the resistance of the Austrian hierarchy. (It still survives as the People’s Party, which governed independent Austria for most of her history since 1918.)

The Church thus usually backed conservative or reactionary parties of various kinds, or, in Catholic nations subordinate within multi-national states, nationalist movements not infected with the secular virus, it kept on good terms with these. Against socialism and revolution, it usually backed anybody. Thus genuine Catholic mass parties and movements were to be found only in Germany (where they had come into being to resist Bismarck’s anti-clerical campaigns of the 1870s), in the Netherlands (where all politics took the form of confessional groupings, including the Protestant and the non-religious, organized as vertical blocs, and Belgium (where Catholics and anti-clerical Lib-erals had formed the two-party system long before democratization).

Even rarer were Protestant religious parties, and where they existed confessional demands usually merged with other slogans: nationalism and liberalism (as in overwhelming by nonconformist Wales), anti-nationalism (as among the Ulster Protestants who opted for union with Britain against Irish Home Rule), liberalism (as in the British Liberal Party, where nonconformity became more powerful as the old Whig aristocrats and important big business interests defected to the Con-

* In Italy, France, West Germany and Austria they emerged as, and except for France have remained, major government parties.

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servatives in the 188os. * In eastern Europe, of course, religion in politics was politically indistinguishable from nationalism, including – in Russia – that of the state. The tsar was not merely the head of the Orthodox Church, but mobilized Orthodoxy against revolution. The other great world religions (Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confu-cianism), not to mention the cults confined to particular communities and people, still operated in an ideological and political universe to which western democratic politics were unknown and irrelevant.

If religion had a vast political potential, national identification was an equally formidable and in practice a more effective mobilizer. When, after the democratization of the British franchise in 1884, Ireland voted for its representatives, the Irish nationalist party captured all Catholic seats in the island. Eighty-five out of 103 members formed a disciplined phalanx behind the (Protestant) leader of Irish nationalism, Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91). Wherever national consciousness opted for political expression, it became evident that the Poles would vote as Poles (in Germany and Austria), the Czechs as Czechs. The politics of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire were paralysed by such national divisions. Indeed, after the riots and counter-riots of Germans and Czechs in the mid-1890s, parliamentarianism broke down com-pletely, since no parliamentary majority was henceforth possible for any government. The grant of universal suffrage in 1907 was not only a concession to pressure, but a desperate attempt to mobilize electoral masses who might vote for non-national parties (Catholic or even socialist) against irreconcilable and squabbling national blocs.

In its extreme form – the disciplined mass party-cum-movement – political mass mobilization remained uncommon. Even among the new labour and socialist movements the monolithic, all-embracing pattern of German Social Democracy was by no means universal (see next chapter). Nevertheless, the elements constituting this new phenomenon could now be discerned almost everywhere. They were, first, the con-stituent organizations which formed its base. The ideal-typical mass party-cum-movement consisted of a complex of local organizations or branches together with a complex of organizations, each also with local branches, for special purposes, but integrated into a party with wider political objectives. Thus in 1914 the Irish national movement consisted of the United Irish League, which formed its national framework, organized electorally – i.e. in each parliamentary constituency. It organized the electoral congresses, chaired by the president (chairman) of the League and attended not only by its own delegates but also by

* Nonconformity = the dissenting Protestant groups outside the Church of England in England and Wales.

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T H E  POLITICS  OF      DEMOCRACY

those of the trades councils (city consortia of trade union branches), of the unions themselves, of the Land and Labour Association which represented farmers’ interests, of the Gaelic Athletic Association, of mutual aid associations like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which incidentally linked the island to the American emigration, and of other bodies. This was the cadre of the mobilized which formed the essential link between the nationalist leadership in and out of Parliament, and the mass electorate which defined the outer boundaries of those who supported the cause of Irish autonomy. The activists thus organized could themselves be a very substantial mass: in 1913 the League had 130,000 members out of a total Irish Catholic population of 3 million.⁶

In the second place the new mass movements were ideological. They were more than simple groupings for pressure and action in favour of particular objects, such as the defence of viticulture. Such organized specific-interest groups naturally also multiplied, since the logic of democratized politics required interests to exert pressure on national governments and assemblies in theory sensitive to it. But bodies like the German Bund der Landwirte (founded 1893 ^an<^ almost immediately – 1894 – joined by 200,000 agriculturalists) were not linked to a party, in spite of the Bund’s obvious conservative sympathies and its almost total domination by the large landowners. In 1898 it relied on the support of 118 (out of 397) Reichstag deputies who belonged to five distinct parties.⁷ Unlike such special-interest groups, however powerful, the new party-cum-movement represented a total vision of the world. It was this, rather than the specific and perhaps changing concrete political programme, that, for its members and supporters, formed something like that ‘civic religion’ which, for Jean-Jacques Rousseau and for Durkheim and other theorists in the new field of sociology, ought to bind together modern societies: only in this instance it formed a sectional cement. Religion, nationalism, democracy, socialism, the precursor ideologies of inter-war fascism: these held together the newly mobilized masses, whatever material interests their movements also represented.

Paradoxically, in countries of strong revolutionary tradition such as France, the USA.and rather more remotely England, the ideology of their own past revolutions allowed old or new elites to domesticate at least part of the new mass mobilization, by strategies long familiar to Fourth ofJuly orators in democratic North America. British Liberalism, which was heir to the Glorious Whig Revolution of 1688 and which did not overlook the occasional appeal to the regicides of 1649 for the benefit of the descendants of the Puritan sects,* succeeded in holding

* The Liberal premier Lord Rosebery personally paid for the statue to Oliver Cromwell erected in front of Parliament in 1899.

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up the development of a mass Labour Party until after 1914. Moreover the Labour Party (founded 1900), such as it was, sailed in the wake of the Liberals. Republican radicalism in France tried to absorb and assimilate popular mass mobilizations by brandishing the banner of Republic and Revolution against its enemies. And not without success. The slogans ‘no enemies on the left’ and ‘unity of all good Republicans’ did much to bind the new popular left to the men of the centre who ran the Third Republic.

In the third place, it follows that the mass mobilizations were, in their way, global. They either shattered the old localized or regional framework of politics, or pushed it to the margin, or integrated it into wider comprehensive movements. In any case national politics in democratized countries left less scope for purely regional parties, even in states with as strongly marked regional differences as Germany and Italy. Thus in Germany the regional character of Hanover (annexed by Prussia as recently as 1866), where anti-Prussian feeling and loyalty to the old Guelph dynasty were still marked, showed itself only by giving a marginally smaller percentage of its vote (85 per cent as against 94-100 per cent elsewhere) to the various nationwide parties.⁸ That confessional or ethnic minorities, or for that matter social and economic groups, were sometimes limited to particular geographical areas should not mislead us. In contrast to the electoral politics of the older bourgeois society, the new mass politics were increasingly incompatible with the old localized politics based on the men of local power and influence, known (in the French political vocabulary) as ‘notables’. There were still many parts of Europe and the Americas – especially in such areas as the Iberian and Balkan peninsulas, in southern Italy and in Latin America – where caciques or patrons, persons of local power and influ-ence, could ‘deliver’ blocs of client votes to the highest bidder or to even greater patrons. The ‘boss’ did not even disappear in democratic politics, but there, increasingly, it was the party which made the notable, or at least which saved him from isolation and political impo-tence, rather than the other way round. Older elites transforming themselves to fit in with democracy might well develop various com-binations between the politics of local patronage and influence and those of democracy. And, indeed, the last decades of the old century and the first of the new were filled with complex conflicts between old-style ‘notability’ and the new political operators, local bosses or other key elements controlling the local party fortunes.

The democracy which thus replaced the politics of notables – insofar as it had already succeeded in doing so – did not substitute ‘the people’ for patronage and influence, but the organization: that is to say the committees, the party notables, the activist minorities. This paradox

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was soon noted by realistic observers of politics, who pointed to the crucial role of such committees (or caucuses, in the Anglo-American term) or even to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ which Robert Michels believed he could derive from his study of the German Social Demo-cratic Party. Michels also noted the tendency for the new mass move-ments to venerate leader-figures, though he made too much of it.⁹ For the admiration which undoubtedly tended to surround some leaders of national mass movements, and which was embodied on many a modest wall in portraits of Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of Liberalism, or of Bebel, the leader of German social democracy, in our period reflected the cause which united the faithful rather than the man himself. More-over, there were enough mass movements without charismatic chiefs. When Charles Stewart Parnell fell, in 1891, victim of the complications of his private life and the joint hostility of Catholic and nonconformist morality, the Irish abandoned him without hesitation – and yet no leader aroused more passionate personal loyalties than he, and the Parnell myth long survived the man.

In short, for its supporters the party or movement represented them and acted on their behalf. Thus it was easy for the organization to take the place of its members and supporters, and in turn for its leaders to dominate the organization. Structured mass movements were thus by no means republics of equals. But their combination of organization and mass support gave them an enormous and barely suspected capacity: they were potential states. Indeed, the major revolutions of our century were to replace old regimes, old states and old ruling classes by parties-cum-movements institutionalized as systems of state power. This potential is all the more impressive, since older ideological organ-izations appeared to lack it. In the west religion, for instance, in this period seemed to have lost the capacity for transforming itself into theocracy, and certainly did not aim to do so.* What victorious Chur-ches established, at least in the Christian world, was clerical regimes operated by secular institutions.

I I

Democratization, though advancing, had barely begun to transform politics. Yet its implications, already sometimes explicit, raised the most serious problems for those who governed states and for the classes in whose interests they governed. There was the problem of maintaining the unity, even the existence, of states, which was already urgent in

* The last example of such a transformation is probably the establishment of the Mormon commonwealth in Utah after 1848.

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multinational politics confronted with national movements. In the Austrian Empire it was already the central problem of the state, and even in Britain the emergence of mass Irish nationalism shattered the structure of established politics. There were the problems of how to maintain the continuity of sensible policies, as seen by the elites of the country – above all in economic affairs. Would not democracy inevi-tably interfere with the operations of capitalism, and – as businessmen considered – for the worse? Would it not threaten free trade in Britain, to which all parties were religiously attached? Would it not threaten sound finance and the gold standard, keystone of all respectable econ-omic policy? This last threat seemed urgent in the USA, as the mass mobilization of Populism in the 1890s, which directed its most pas-sionate rhetorical thunderbolts against – to quote its great orator William Jennings Bryan – the crucifixion of mankind on a cross of gold? More generally, and above all, there was the problem of guaranteeing the legitimacy, perhaps the very survival, of society as then constituted, when it faced the menace of mass movements for social revolution. These threats seemed all the more dangerous because of the undeniable inefficiency of parliaments elected by demagogy and riven by irre-concilable party conflicts, and the undoubted corruption of political systems which no longer rested on men of independent wealth, but increasingly on men whose careers and wealth were based on their success in the new politics.

Both these phenomena were impossible to overlook. In democratic states with divided powers, like the USA, government (i.e. the executive branch represented by the presidency) was in some degree independent of the elected parliament, though quite likely to be paralysed by its counterweight. (But the democratic election of presidents introduced another danger.) In the European pattern of representative govern-ment, where governments, unless still protected by old-style monarchy, were in theory dependent on elected assemblies, their problems seemed insuperable. In fact, they often came and went like tourist parties in hotels, as one brief parliamentary majority broke down and was succeeded by another. France, mother of European democracies, prob-ably held the record with fifty-two cabinets in the less than thirty-nine years between 1875 and the outbreak of war, of which only eleven lasted twelve months or more. Admittedly, the same names tended to reappear in most of them. Small wonder that the effective continuity of government and policy was in the hands of the permanent, non-elected and invisible functionaries of the bureaucracy. As for corruption, it was probably no greater than in the early nineteenth century, when governments such as the British had shared out the correctly named ‘offices of profit under the CrowrC and lucrative sinecures among their

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kinsmen and dependants. Yet even when it was not, it was more visible, as self-made politicians cashed in, in one way or another, on the value of their support or opposition to businessmen or other interested parties. It was all the more visible, since the incorruptibility of permanent senior public administrators and judges, now mostly protected, in constitutional countries, against the twin hazards of election and patronage – with the major exception of the USA* – was now generally taken for granted, at least in western and central Europe. Political corruption scandals occurred not only in countries where the sound of money changing hands was not muffled, like France (the Wilson scandal of 1885, the Panama scandal in 1892-3), but even where it was, as in Britain (the Marconi scandal of 1913, in which two such self-made men, Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs, later Lord Chief Justice and Viceroy of India, were involved).f Parliamentary instability and cor-ruption could, of course, be linked where governments built majorities essentially on what was in effect the buying of votes for political favours which almost inevitably had a financial dimension. As already noted, Giovanni Giolitti in Italy was the master of this strategy.

Contemporaries from the upper ranks of society were acutely aware of the dangers of democratized politics and, more generally, of the growing centrality of’the masses’. This was not merely a worry of men

in public	affairs,  like the editor	of Le	Temps and	La Revue des Deux
Mondes –	fortresses of French respectable opinion –			who in 1897 pub-
lished a	book characteristically	entitled	The Organisation of Universal

Suffrage: The Crisis of the Modern State,.” or the thinking Conservative’s proconsul and later minister Alfred Milner (1854-1925), who in 1902 called the British Parliament (privately) ‘that mob at Westminster’.¹² Much of the pervasive pessimism of bourgeois culture from the 1880s on (see pp. 226, 258-9 below) undoubtedly reflected the sense of leaders abandoned by their former followers of elites whose defences against the masses were crumbling, of the educated and cultured minority (i.e. primarily the children of the well-to-do) invaded by ‘those just being emancipated from … illiteracy or semi-barbarism’,¹³ or cut off by the rising tide of a civilization geared to these masses.

The new political situation developed only by steps, and unevenly,

• And even here a Civil Service Commission was set up in 1883 to lay the foundations of a Federal Civil Service independent of political patronage But patronage remained more important in most countries than is conventionally supposed

t Transactions within a cohesive ruling elite, which would have raised eyebrows among demo-cratic observers and political moralists, were not unusual At his death in 1895 Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, owed some £60,000 to

Rothschild, who might have been expected to have an interest m the national	finances The size
of this debt in our terms is indicated by the fact that this single sum amounted	to about 0 4 per
cent of the total yield of the income tax in Britain in that year 10

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depending on the domestic history of the various states. This makes a comparative survey of politics in the 1870s and 1880s difficult, and almost pointless. It was the sudden international emergence of mass labour and socialist movements in and after the 1880s (see next chapter) which seemed to place numerous governments and ruling classes in essentially similar predicaments, though we can see retrospectively that they were not the only mass movements which caused governmental headaches. Broadly speaking, in most of the European states of limited constitutions or restricted franchise, the mid-century political pre-dominance of the liberal bourgeoisie (see The Age of Capital, chapters 6, i, 13, in) broke down in the course of the 1870s, if not for other reasons, then as a by-product of the Great Depression: in Belgium in 1870, in Germany and Austria in 1879, in Italy in the 1870s, in Britain in 1874. Except for episodic returns to power, they never dominated again. No equally clear political pattern emerged in Europe in the new period, though in the USA the Republican Party, that had led the North to victory in the Civil War, usually continued to win the presi-dency until 1913. Insofar as insoluble problems or basic challenges of revolution or secession could be kept out of parliamentary politics, statesmen could juggle parliamentary majorities with shifting col-lections of those who wished to threaten neither state nor the social order. And in most cases they could be kept out, though in Britain the sudden emergence in the 1880s of a solid and militant bloc of Irish nationalists, willing to disrupt the House of Commons and in a position to hold the balance in it, immediately transformed parliamentary politics, and the two parties which had conducted their decorous pas-de-deux. Or, at least, it precipitated in 1886 the rush of formerly Whig millionaire noblemen and Liberal businessmen into the Tory Party, which, as the Conservative and Unionist Party (i.e. opposed to Irish autonomy), increasingly developed into the united party of both landed wealth and big business.

Elsewhere the situation, though apparently more dramatic, was actually more manageable. In the restored monarchy of Spain (1874) the fragmentation of the defeated opponents of the system – Repub-licans on the left, Carlists on the right – enabled Canovas (1828-97), in power for most of the period 1874-97,^{t 0} manipulate the politicians and an a-political rural vote. In Germany the weakness of the irre-concilable elements enabled Bismarck to manage well enough in the 1880s, and the moderation of the respectable Slav parties in the Austrian

Empire likewise benefited		the elegant aristocratic boulevardier Count
Taaffe  (1833-95, m  °ffice		!879-93). The French right, which refused
to accept the republic,	was a permanent electoral minority, and the
army did not challenge	civilian authority: hence the republic survived

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the numerous and colourful crises which shook it (in 1877, in 1885-7, in 1892-3 and in the Dreyfus affair of 1894-1900). In Italy the Vatican’s boycott of a secular and anti-clerical state made it easy for Depretis (1813-87) to conduct his policy of ‘transformism’, i.e. turning opponents into supporters of government.

In truth, the only real challenge to the system were extra-parliamentary – and insurrection from below did not, for the moment, need to be taken seriously in constitutional countries, while armies, even in Spain, the classic territory of pronunciamentos, kept quiet. And where, as in the Balkans and Latin America, both insurrection and armed men in politics remained familiar parts of the scenery, they were so as parts of the system, rather than as potential challenges to it.

Yet this situation was unlikely to last. And when governments found themselves confronting the rise of apparently irreconcilable forces in politics, their first instinct, more often than not, was to coerce. Bismarck, the master of manipulating the politics of a limited franchise, was at a loss in the 1870s when facing what he regarded as an organized mass of Catholics owing loyalty to a reactionary Vatican ‘beyond the mountains’ (hence the term ‘ultramontane’), and declared anti-clerical war against them (the so-called Kulturkampf or cultural struggle of the 1870s). Faced with the rise of the Social Democrats, he outlawed the party in 1879. Since a return to straightforward absolutism appeared impossible, and indeed unthinkable – the banned Social Democrats were allowed to put up electoral candidates – he failed in both cases. Sooner or later – in the case of the socialists, after his fall in 1889 – governments had to live with the new mass movements. The Austrian emperor, whose capital was captured by the demagogy of the Social Christians, refused three times to accept their leader, Lueger, as mayor of Vienna, before resigning himself to the inevitable in 1897. ^ⁿ “886 the Belgian government suppressed with military force the wave of strikes and riots by Belgian workers – among the most miserable in western Europe – and gaoled socialist leaders, whether they were involved in the disturbances or not. Yet seven years later it conceded a sort of universal suffrage after an effective general strike. Italian governments shot down Sicilian peasants in 1893 and Milanese workers in 1898. Yet after the fifty corpses of Milan, they changed course. Broadly speaking, the 1890s, the decade of the emergence of socialism as a mass movement, mark the turning-point. An era of new political strategies began.

Generations of readers who have grown up since the First World War may find it surprising that no government seriously envisaged the abandonment of constitutional and parliamentary systems at this time. For after 1918 liberal constitutionalism and representative democracy

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were indeed to retreat on a broad front, though partly restored after 1945. In our period this was not the case. Even in tsarist Russia the defeat of the 1905 revolution did not lead to the total abolition of elections and parliament (the Duma). Unlike 1849 (see The Age of Capital, chapter 1), there was no simple return to reaction, even if at the end of his period of power Bismarck played with the idea of suspending or abolishing the constitution. Bourgeois society may have been uneasy about where it was going, but it was confident enough, and not least because the worldwide economic surge forward hardly encouraged pessimism. Even politically moderate opinion (unless it had diplomatic or financial interests to the contrary) looked forward to a Russian revolution, which was generally expected to turn a blot on European civilization into a decent bourgeois-liberal state, and indeed within Russia the 1905 revolution, unlike that of October 1917, was enthusi-astically supported by middle classes and intellectuals. Other insur-rectionaries were insignificant. Governments remained remarkably cool during the anarchist epidemic of assassinations in the 1890s, to which two monarchs, two presidents and one prime minister fell victim,* and after 1900 nobody seriously bothered about anarchism outside Spain and parts of Latin America. At the outbreak of war in 1914 the French Minister of the Interior did not even bother to arrest the (mainly anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist) revolutionaries and anti-militarist subversives regarded as dangers to the state, of whom his police had long compiled a list for just such a purpose.

But if (unlike the decades after 1917) bourgeois society as a whole did not feel seriously and immediately threatened, neither had its nineteenth-century values and historic expectations been seriously undermined as yet. Civilized behaviour, the rule of law and liberal institutions were still expected to continue their secular progress. There was plenty of barbarism left, especially (so the ‘respectable’ were con-vinced) among the lower orders and of course among the now for-tunately colonized ‘uncivilized’ peoples. There were still states, even in Europe, such as the Tsarist and Ottoman empires, where the candles of reason flickered dimly or were unlit. Yet the very scandals which convulsed national or international opinion indicate how high expec-tations of civility were in the bourgeois world in times of peace: Dreyfus (refusal to enquire into a single miscarriage of justice), Ferrer in 1909 (the execution of one Spanish educationalist wrongly accused of leading a wave of riots in Barcelona), Zabern in 1913 (twenty demonstrators locked up for a night by the German army in an Alsatian town). From

* King Umberto of Italy, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, Presidents Sadi Carnot of France and McKinley of the USA, and Premier Canovas of Spain.

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the late twentieth century we can only look back with melancholy incredulity upon a period when massacres such as occur almost daily in the world today were believed to be a monopoly of Turks and tribesmen.

I ll

The ruling classes therefore opted for the new strategies, even as they did their best to limit the impact of mass opinion and mass electorates on their own and state interests, and on the formation and continuity of high policy. Their major target was the labour and socialist movement which suddenly emerged internationally as a mass phenomenon around 1890 (see next chapter). As it turned out, it was to prove easier to come to terms with than the nationalist movements which emerged in this period, or, which if already on the scene, entered a new phase of militancy, autonomism or separatism (see chapter 6 below). As for the Catholics, they were, unless identified with some autonomist national-ism, relatively easy to integrate, since they were socially conservative – this was so even in the case of the rare Social Christian parties such as Lueger’s – and usually content with the safeguarding of specific Church interests.

Bringing labour movements into the institutionalized game of politics was difficult, insofar as employers, faced with strikes and unions, were distinctly slower than politicians to abandon the policy of the strong fist for that of the velvet glove, even in pacific Scandinavia. The growing power of big business was particularly recalcitrant. In most countries, notably in the USA and Germany, employers as a class were never reconciled to unions before 1914, and even in Britain, where they had long been accepted in principle, and often in practice, the 1890s saw a counter-offensive of employers against unions, even as government administrators pursued policies of conciliation and the Liberal Party leaders did what they could to reassure and captivate the labour vote. It was also difficult politically, where the new parties of labour refused all compromise with the bourgeois state and system nationally – they were rarely as intransigent in the field of local government – as those adhering to the Marxist-dominated International of 1889 tended to do. (Non-revolutionary or non-Marxist labour politics raised no such problem.) But by 1900 it had become clear that a moderate or reformist wing had emerged in all the socialist mass movements; indeed, even among the Marxists it had found its ideologue in Eduard Bernstein, who argued that ‘the movement was everything, the final aim nothing’, and whose tactless demand for a revision of Marxist theory caused

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scandal, outrage and impassioned debate in the socialist world after 1897. Meanwhile, the politics of mass electoralism, of which even the most Marxist parties were enthusiastic champions, since it allowed their armies to grow with maximum visibility, could not but quietly integrate these parties into the system.

Socialists could certainly not yet be brought into governments. They could not even be expected to tolerate ‘reactionary’ politicians and governments. Yet a policy of bringing at least the moderate rep-resentatives of labour into broader alignments in favour of reform, the union of all democrats, republicans, anti-clericals or ‘men of the people’, especially against mobilized enemies of these good causes, had good chances of success. It was systematically pursued in France from 1899 under Waldeck Rousseau (1846-1904), architect of a government of republican union against the enemies who were so clearly challenging it in the Dreyfus affair; in Italy by Zanardelli, whose 1903 government relied on support from the extreme left, and later by Giolitti, the great fudger and conciliator. In Britain – after some difficulties in the 1890s – the Liberals in 1903 made an electoral pact with the young Labour Representation Committee which enabled it to enter Parliament in some force in 1906 as the Labour Party. Elsewhere a common interest in widening the suffrage drew together socialists and other democrats, as in Denmark, where in 1901 – for the first time anywhere in Europe – a government counted and could rely on the support of a socialist party.

The reason for these overtures from the parliamentary centre to the extreme left was usually not the need for socialist support, for even large socialist parties were minority groups which in most cases could easily have been frozen out of the parliamentary game, as communist parties of comparable size were in Europe after the Second World War. German governments kept the most formidable of all such parties in the cold by a so-called Sammlungspolitik (politics of broad union), i.e. by assembling majorities from the guaranteed anti-socialist conservatives, Catholics, and liberals. It was rather the desire to exploit the possibilities of domesticating these wild beasts of the” political forest, which sensible men in the ruling classes soon discerned. The strategy of the soft embrace had varying results, and the intransigence of employers given to coercion and provoking mass industrial confrontations did not make it any easier, but on the whole it worked, at least inasmuch as it succeeded in splitting mass labour movements into a moderate and a radical wing of irreconcilables – generally a minority – and isolating the latter.

However, democracy would be the more easily tameable, the less acute its discontents. The new strategy thus implied a readiness to venture into programmes of social reform and welfare, which under-

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mined the classic mid-century liberal commitment to governments which kept out of the field reserved for private enterprise and self-help. The British jurist, A. V. Dicey (1835-1922), saw the steamroller of collec-tivism, which had been in motion since 1870, flattening the landscape of individual liberty into the centralized and levelling tyranny of school meals, health insurance and old age pensions. And in a sense he was right. Bismarck, logical as always, had already decided in the 1880s to cut the ground from under socialist agitation by an ambitious scheme of social insurance, and he was to be followed on this road by Austria and the British Liberal governments of 1906-14 (old age pensions, public labour exchanges, health and unemployment insurance), and even, after several hesitations, France (old age pensions, igi 1). Curi-ously enough, the Scandinavian countries, now the ‘welfare states’ par excellence, were slow off the mark and several countries made only nominal gestures in this direction, the USA of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan none at all. In that paradise of free enterprise even child labour remained uncontrolled by federal law, though by 1914 laws nominally prohibiting it (in theory) existed even in Italy, Greece and Bulgaria. Workmen’s compensation laws for accidents, generally avail-able by 1905, were of no interest to Congress and were condemned as unconstitutional by the courts. With the exception of Germany such social welfare schemes were modest until the last years before 1914, and even in Germany they visibly failed to halt the growth of the socialist party. Nevertheless, the trend, notably faster in the Protestant countries of Europe and in Australasia than elsewhere, was established.

Dicey was also right in stressing the inevitable growth in the role and weight of the state apparatus, once the ideal of state non-intervention was abandoned. By modern standards bureaucracy remained modest, though it grew at a rapid rate – nowhere more so than Great Britain, where government employment tripled between 1891 and 1911. In Europe, around 1914, it ranged from a low of about 3 per cent of the labour force in France – a somewhat surprising fact – to a high of 5.5-6 per cent in Germany and – an equally surprising fact – Switzerland.^H For comparison, in the EEC countries of the 1970s it formed between 10 and 13 per cent of the occupied population.

But could not the loyalties of the masses be acquired without expen-sive social policies which might cut into the profits of entrepreneurs on whom the economy depended? As we have seen, it was believed not only that imperialism could pay for social reform but that it was also popular. As it turned out, war, or at least the prospects of successful war, had an even greater built-in demagogic potential. The British Conservative government used the South African War (1899-1902) to sweep away its Liberal opponents in the ‘Khaki election’ of 1900, and

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American imperialism mobilized the popularity of guns successfully for war against Spain in 1898. Indeed the ruling elites of the USA, headed by Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919, President in 1901-9), had just discovered the gun-toting cowboy as symbol of true Americanism, freedom and native white tradition against the invading hordes of low-class immigrants and the uncontrollable big city. That symbol has been extensively exploited ever since.

However, the problem was wider than this. Could the regimes of states and ruling classes be given a new legitimacy in the minds of democratically mobilized masses? Much of the history of our period consists of attempts to answer this question. The task was urgent, because the ancient mechanisms of social subordination were often clearly breaking down. Thus the German Conservatives – essentially the party of electors loyal to the large landed proprietors and nobles – lost half of their share of the total vote between 1881 and 1912, for the simple reason that 71 per cent of their vote came from villages of less than 2000 inhabitants, which housed a declining share of the population, and only 5 per cent from big cities over 100,000, into which Germans were pouring. The old loyalties might still work on the estates of the Pomeranian junkers* where the Conservatives held on to almost half the vote, but even in Prussia as a whole they could only mobilize 11-12 per cent of electors.¹⁵ The situation of that other master-class, the liberal bourgeoisie, was even more dramatic. It had triumphed by shattering the social cohesion of ancient hierarchies and communities, by choosing the market against human relations, Gesellschaft against Gemeinschaft – and when the masses entered the political stage pursuing their own concerns, they were hostile to all that bourgeois liberalism stood for. Nowhere was this more obvious than in Austria, where the Liberals by the end of the century were reduced to a small isolated rump of city-dwelling comfortable middle-class Germans and German Jews. The municipality of Vienna, their fortress in the 1860s, was lost to radical democrats, anti-Semites, the new Christian Social party and eventually the Social Democrats. Even in Prague, where this bourgeois nucleus could claim to represent the interests of the small and dimin-ishing German-speaking minority of all classes (some 30,000, and by 1910 a mere 7 per cent of the population), they could hold the loyalties neither of the German-nationalist {volkisch) students and petty-bour-geoisie, nor of the Social Democratic or politically passive German workers, nor even of a proportion of the Jews.¹⁶

And what of the state itself, normally still represented by monarchs? It might be quite new, and lacking all relevant historical precedent as

* Pomerania, an area along the Baltic north-east of Berlin, is now part of Poland. 1 0 4

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in Italy and the new German Empire, not to mention Rumania and Bulgaria. Its regimes might be the product of recent defeat, revolution and civil war as in France, Spain and for that matter post-Civil War USA, not to mention the ever-changing regimes of Latin American republics. In old-established monarchies – even in the Britain of the 1870s – republican agitations were, or appeared to be, far from negli-gible. National agitations gathered strength. Could the state’s claim on the loyalty of all its subjects or citizens be taken for granted?

This was consequently the moment when governments, intellectuals and businessmen discovered the political significance of irrationality. Intellectuals wrote, but governments acted. ‘Whoever sets himself to base his political thinking on a re-examination of the working of human nature, must begin by trying to overcome his own tendency to exag-gerate the intellectuality of mankind’: thus wrote the British political scientist Graham Wallas in 1908, conscious that he was also writing the epitaph of nineteenth-century liberalism.¹⁷ Political life thus found itself increasingly ritualized and filled with symbols and publicity appeals, both overt and subliminal. As the ancient ways – mainly religious – of ensuring subordination, obedience and loyalty were eroded, the now patent need for something to replace them was met by the invention of tradition, using both old and tried evokers of emotion such as crown and military glory and, as we have seen (see previous chapter), new ones such as empire and colonial conquest.

Like horticulture, this development was a mixture of planting from above and growth – or at any rate readiness for planting – from below. Governments and ruling elites certainly knew what they were doing when they instituted new national festivals, like the Fourteenth of July in France (in 1880), or developed the ritualization of the British monarchy which has become increasingly hieratic and byzantine since it began in the 1880s.^I8 Indeed, the standard commentator of the British constitution, after the franchise extension of 1867, distinguished lucidly between the ‘efficient’ parts of it by which government was actually carried on and the ‘dignified’ parts whose function was to keep the masses happy while they were being governed.¹⁹ The masses of marble and towering masonry with which states anxious to confirm their legitimacy – notably the new German Empire – filled their open spaces had to be planned by authority, and were so planned, to the financial rather than artistic benefit of numerous architects and sculptors. British coronations were now, quite consciously, organized as politico-ideo-logical operations for the attention of the masses.

Yet they did not create the demand for emotionally satisfying ritual and symbolism. They rather discovered and filled a void left by the political rationalism of the liberal era, by the new need to address the

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masses and by the transformation of these masses themselves. In this respect the invention of traditions ran parallel to the commercial dis-covery of the mass market and of mass spectacle and entertainment, which belongs to the same decades. The advertising industry, though pioneered in the USA after the Civil War, for the first time came into its own. The modern poster was born in the 188os and 1890s. A common frame of social psychology (the psychology of’the crowd’ became a flourishing topic for both French professors and American advertising gurus) bound together the annual Royal Tournament (initiated in 1880), a public display of the glory and drama of the British armed forces, and the illuminations on the seafront of Blackpool, playground of the new proletarian holiday-makers; Queen Victoria and the Kodak girl (product of the 1900s), the Emperor William’s monuments to Hohenzollern rulers and Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters for famous variety artists.

Official initiatives naturally succeeded best where they exploited and manipulated spontaneous and undefined grassroots emotion, or integrated themes from unofficial mass politics. The Fourteenth of July in France established itself as a genuine national day because it mobilized both the people’s attachment to the Great Revolution and the demand for an institutionalized carnival.²⁰ The German government, countless tons of marble and masonry to the contrary, failed to establish the Emperor William I as father of the nation, but cashed in on the unofficial nationalist enthusiasm which erected ‘Bismark columns’ by the hundred after the death of the great statesman, whom the Emperor William 11 (reigned 1888-1918) had sacked. Conversely, unofficial nationalism was welded to the ‘Little Germany’ it had so long opposed, by military might and global ambition: as witness the triumph of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ over more modest national anthems, and of the new Prusso-German black-white-red flag over the old black-red-gold of 1848 – both of which triumphs occurred in the 1890s.²¹

Political regimes thus conducted a silent war for the control of the symbols and rites of belonging to the human race within their frontiers, not least through their control of the public school system (especially the primary schools, the essential basis in democracies for ‘educating our masters’* in the ‘right’ spirit) and, generally where the Churches were politically unreliable, through the attempt to control the great ceremonies of birth, marriage and death. Of all such symbols, perhaps the most powerful were music, in its political forms of the national anthem and the military march – both played for all they were worth

* The phrase is that of Robert Lowe in 1867.²²

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in this age of J . P. Sousa (1854-1932) and Edward Elgar (1857-1934)! – and above all the national flag. In the absence of monarchies, the flag itself could become the virtual embodiment of state, nation and society, as in the USA where the practice of worshipping the flag as a daily ritual in the country’s schools spread from the end of the 1880s until it became universal.²⁴

Lucky the regime which could rely on mobilizing universally accept-able symbols, such as the British monarch, who even began his annual appearance at that festival of the proletariat, the football Cup Final, thus underlining the convergence between mass public ritual and mass spectacle. In this period, both public and political ceremonial spaces, for instance around the new German national monuments, and the new sports halls and stadia, which could also double as political areas, began to multiply. Elderly readers may recall speeches by Hitler in Berlin’s Sportspalast (sport palace). Lucky the regime which could at least associate itself with some great cause for which there was mass grassroots support, like revolution and republic in France and the USA.

For states and governments competed for symbols of togetherness and emotional loyalty with the unofficial mass movements, which might devise their own counter-symbols such as the socialist ‘Internationale’, when the former anthem of revolution, the ‘Marseillaise’, had been taken over by the state.²⁵ Though the German and Austrian socialist parties are usually cited as the extreme examples of such separate communities, counter-societies and counter-culture (see next chapter), they were in fact only incompletely separatist since they remained linked to official culture by their faith in education (i.e. the public school system), in reason and science, and in the values of the (bourgeois) arts – the ‘classics’. They were, after all, the heirs of the Enlightenment. It was religious and nationalist movements which rivalled the state by setting up rival school systems on linguistic or confessional bases. Still, all mass movements tended, as we have seen in the Irish case, to form a complex of associations and counter-communities around centres of loyalty which rivalled the state.

IV

Did the political societies and ruling classes of western Europe succeed in managing these potentially or actually subversive mass mobi-lizations? On the whole, in the period up to 1914, they did, except in Austria, that conglomerate of nationalities all of whom looked elsewhere

t Between 1890 and 1910 there were more musical settings of the British national anthem than ever before or since.²³

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for their future prospects, and which was now held together only by the longevity of her ancient emperor Francis Joseph (reigned 1848-1916), by the administration of a sceptical and rationalist bureaucracy, and by being less undesirable than any alternative fate for a number of the national groups. By and large, they let themselves be integrated into the system. For most states of the bourgeois and capitalist west – the situation in other parts of the world was, as we shall see, very different (see chapter 12 below) – the period from 1875 and 1914, and certainly from 1900 to 1914, was, in spite of alarums and excursions, one of political stability.

Movements rejecting the system, like socialism, were caught in its web, or else – if sufficiently powerless – they could even be used as catalysts of a majority consensus. This was the function of ‘reaction’ in the French Republic perhaps, of anti-socialism in imperial Germany: nothing united as much as a common enemy. Even nationalism could sometimes be managed. Welsh nationalism served to strengthen Lib-eralism, its champion Lloyd George becoming government minister and chief demagogic container and conciliator of democratic radicalism and labour. Irish nationalism, after the dramas of 1879-91, appeared to have been tranquillized by agrarian reform and political dependence on British Liberalism. Pan-German extremism was reconciled to ‘Little Germany’ by the militarism and imperialism of William’s empire. Even the Flemings in Belgium still remained within the fold of the Catholic party, which did not challenge the existence of the unitary bi-national state. The irreconcilables of the ultra-right and the ultra-left could be isolated. The great socialist movements announced the inevitable revolution, but they had other things with which to occupy themselves at present. When war broke out in 1914 most of them joined their governments and ruling classes in patriotic union. The major west European exception actually proves the rule. For the British Inde-pendent Labour Party, which continued to oppose the war, did so because it shared the long pacific tradition of Britain nonconformity and bourgeois Liberalism – which actually made Britain the only country from whose cabinet in August 1914 Liberal ministers resigned from such motives.*

The socialist parties which accepted the war often did so without enthusiasm, and chiefly because they feared to be abandoned by their followers, who flocked to the colours with spontaneous zeal. In Britain, which had no conscription, 2 millions were to volunteer for military service between August 1914 and June 1915, melancholy proof of the success of the politics of integrating democracy. Only where the effort

*John Morley, biographer of Gladstone and John Burns, former labour leader.

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to make the poor citizen identify with nation and state had hardly begun to be seriously pursued, as in Italy, or where it could hardly succeed, as among the Czechs, did the masses in 1914 remain indifferent or hostile to the war. The mass anti-war movement did not seriously begin until much later.

Since political integration succeeded, regimes therefore faced only the immediate challenge of direct action. Such forms of unrest certainly spread, above all in the last years before the war. But they constituted a challenge to public order rather than to the social system, given the absence of revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situations in the central countries of bourgeois society. The riots of southern French wine-growers, the mutiny of the 17th Regiment sent against them (1907), violent quasi-general strikes in Belfast (1907), Liverpool (1911) and Dublin (1913), a general strike in Sweden (1908), even the ‘tragic week’ of Barcelona (1909), were insufficient by themselves to shake the foundations of political regimes. They were indeed serious, not least as symptoms of the vulnerability of complex economies. In 1912 the British Prime Minister Asquith, in spite of the British gentleman’s proverbial impassivity, wept as he announced the government’s retreat before a general strike of coal-miners.

Such phenomena are not to be underestimated. Even if con-temporaries did not know what was to come after, they often had the sense, in these last pre-war years, of society trembling as under seismic shocks before greater earthquakes. These were years when wisps of violence hung in the air over the Ritz hotels and country houses. They underlined the impermanence, the fragility, of the political order in the belle tpoque.

But let us not overestimate them either. So far as the core countries of bourgeois society were concerned, what destroyed the stability of the belle Spoque, including its peace, was the situation in Russia, the Habs-burg Empire and the Balkans, and not in western Europe or even Germany. What made the British political situation dangerous on the eve of the war was not the rebellion of the workers, but the division within the ranks of the rulers, a constitutional crisis as the ultra-conservative Lords resisted the Commons, the collective refusal of officers to obey the orders of a liberal government committed to Irish Home Rule. No doubt such crises were in part due to the mobilization of labour, for what the Lords resisted blindly and vainly was the intelligent demagogy of Lloyd George, designed to keep ‘the people’ within the framework of the system of their rulers. And yet the last and gravest of such crises was provoked by the political commitment of the Liberals to (Catholic) Irish autonomy and of Conservatives to the armed refusal of Ulster Protestant ultras to accept it. Parliamentary

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democracy, the stylized game of politics, was – as we still know in the 1980s – powerless to control such a situation.

All the same in the years between 1880 and 1914 ruling classes discovered that parliamentary democracy, in spite of their fears, proved itself to be quite compatible with the political and economic stability of capitalist regimes. The discovery, like the system itself, was new – at least in Europe. It proved disappointing to social revolutionaries. For Marx and Engels had always seen the democratic republic, though plainly ‘bourgeois’, as the ante-chamber ofsocialism, since it permitted, and even encouraged, the political mobilization of the proletariat as a class, and of the oppressed masses under the leadership of the prole-tariat. It would thus, whether it liked to or not, favour the eventual victory of the proletariat in its confrontation with the exploiters. And yet, after the end of our period, a very different note was to be heard among their disciples. ‘A democratic republic’, argued Lenin in 1917, ‘is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and therefore, once capitalism has gained control of this very best shell … it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change, either of persons, of institutions, or of parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic, can shake it.’²⁶ As always, Lenin was concerned not so much with political analysis in general, as with finding effective arguments for a specific political situation, in this instance against the provisional government of revolutionary Russia and for Soviet power. In any case, we are not concerned with the validity of his claim, which is highly debatable, not least because it fails to distinguish between the economic and social circumstances which have safeguarded states from social upheaval, and the institutions which have helped them to do so. We are concerned with its plausibility. Before 1880 such a claim would have seemed equally implausible to either supporters or opponents of capitalism insofar as they were committed to political activity. Even on the political ultra-left, so negative a judgment on ‘the democratic republic’ would have been almost inconceivable. Behind Lenin’s judgment of 1917 there stood the experience of a generation of western democratization, and especially of the last fifteen years before the war.

But was not the stability of this marriage between political democracy and a flourishing capitalism the illusion of a passing era? What strikes us, in retrospect, about the years from 1880 to 1914 is both the fragility and the restricted scope of such a combination. It was and remained confined to a minority of prosperous and flourishing economies in the west, generally in states with a lengthy history of constitutional government. Democratic optimism, a belief in historical inevitability, might make it look as though its universal progress could not be halted. But it was not, after all, to be the universal model of the future. In 1919

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the whole of Europe west of Russia and Turkey was systematically reorganized into states on the democratic model. Yet how many democ-racies remained in the Europe of 1939? As fascism and other dic-tatorships rose, the opposite case to Lenin’s was widely argued, not least by Lenin’s followers. Capitalism must inevitably abandon bourgeois democracy. This was equally wrong. Bourgeois democracy was reborn from its ashes in 1945, and has since remained the favourite system for capitalist societies sufficiently strong, economically flourishing and socially unpolarized or divided to afford so politically advantageous a system. But this system operates effectively in very few of the more than 150 states which form the United Nations of the late twentieth century. The progress of democratic politics between 1880 and 1914 fore-shadowed neither its permanence nor its universal triumph.

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CHAPTER₅

WORKERS OF THE WORLD

1 got to know a shoemaker called Schroder…. Later he went to America He gave me some newspapers to read and I read a bit because I was bored, and then I got more and more interested…. They described the misery of the workers and how they depended on the capitalists and landlords in a way that was so lively and true to nature that it really amazed me. It was as though my eyes had been closed before. Damn it, what they wrote in those papers was the truth. All my life up to that day was proof of it.

A German labourer, c. 1911′

They [the European workers] feel that great social changes must come soon; that the curtain has been rung down on the human comedy of government by, of andfor the classes; that the day of democracy is at hand and that the struggles of the toilers for their own shall take precedence over those wars between nations which mean battles without cause between working men.

Samuel Gompers, 1909²

A proletarian life, a proletarian death, and cremation in the spirit of cultural progress.

Motto of the Austrian Workers’ Funeral Association, ‘The Flame’³

I

Given the inevitable extension of the electorate, the majority of electors were bound to be poor, insecure, discontented, or all of those things. They could not but be dominated by their economic and social situation and the problems arising from it; in other words, by the situation of their class. And the class whose numbers were most visibly growing as the wave of industrialization engulfed the west, whose presence became ever more inescapable, and whose class consciousness seemed most directly to threaten the social, economic and political system of modern societies, was the proletariat. These were the people the young Winston

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Churchill (then a Liberal cabinet minister) had in mind when he warned Parliament that, if the system of Conservative-Liberal two-party politics broke down, it would be replaced by class politics.

The number of people who earned their living by manual labour for a wage was indeed increasing in all countries flooded or even lapped by the tidal wave of western capitalism, from the ranches of Patagonia and the nitrate mines of Chile to the frozen gold-mines of north-eastern Siberia, scene of a spectacular strike and massacre on the eve of the Great War. They were to be found wherever modern cities required building work or the municipal services and public utilities which had become indispensable in the nineteenth century – gas, water, sewage – and wherever the network of ports and railways and telegraphs stretched which bound the economic globe together. Mines were to be found in remote spots throughout the five continents. By 1914 even oilfields were exploited on a significant scale in North and Central America, in eastern Europe, South-east Asia and the Middle East. More significantly, even in predominantly agrarian countries urban markets were supplied with manufactured food, drink, stimulants and elementary textiles by cheap labour working in a sort of industrial establishment, and in some – India is a case in point – fairly significant textile and even iron and steel industries were developing. Yet the number of wage-workers multiplied most spectacularly, and formed recognized classes of such labour, chiefly in the countries of old-estab-lished industrialization, and in the growing number of countries which, as we have seen, entered their period of industrial revolution between the 1870s and 1914, that is to say mainly in Europe, North America, Japan and some of the areas of white mass settlement overseas.

They grew mainly by transfer from the two great reservoirs of pre-industrial labour, the handicrafts and the agricultural countryside, which still held the majority of human beings. By the end of the century urbanization had probably advanced more rapidly and massively than ever before, and important currents of migration – for instance from Britain and east European J e w r y – came from towns, though sometimes small ones. These could and did transfer from one kind of non-agricultural work to another. As for the men and women who fled from the land (to use the then current term, Landfluckt), relatively few of them had the chance to go into agriculture, even if they wanted to.

On the one hand, the modernizing and modernized farming of the west required relatively fewer permanent hands than before, though considerable use was made of seasonal migrant labour, often from far away, for whom farmers did not have to take responsibility when the working season ended: the Sachsenganger from Poland in Germany, the

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Italian ‘swallows’ in Argentina,* the train-jumping hobo transients and even, already, the Mexicans, in the USA. In any case agricultural progress means fewer people farming. In 1910 New Zealand, which had no industry worth mentioning and lived entirely by means of extremely efficient agriculture, specializing in livestock and dairy prod-ucts, had 54 per cent of her population living in towns, and 40 per cent (or twice the proportion of Europe without Russia) employed in tertiary occupations.⁵

Meanwhile the unmodernized agriculture of the backward regions could no longer provide enough land for the would-be peasants whose numbers multiplied in the villages. What most of them wanted, when they emigrated, was certainly not to end up their lives as labourers. They wanted to ‘make America’ (or wherever they went), hoping to earn enough after a few years to buy themselves a holding, a house and the respect of the neighbours as a man of means, in some Sicilian, Polish or Greek village. A minority returned, but most stayed, to fill the constructional gangs, the mines, the steel mills, and the other activities of the urban and industrial world which needed hard labour and little else. Their daughters and brides went into domestic service.

At the same time machine and factory production cut the ground from under the considerable masses who had, until the late nineteenth century, made most familiar urban consumer goods – clothing, footwear, furniture and the like – by handicraft methods, ranging from those of the proud master artisan to those of the sweated workshop or attic seamstress. If their numbers did not appear to fall dramatically, their share of the labour force did, in spite of the spectacular increase in the output of their products. Thus in Germany the number of people engaged in shoe-making sank only slightly between 1882 and 1907 from c. 400,000 to c. 370,000 – but the consumption of leather doubled between 1890 and 1910. Plainly most of this additional output was produced in the c. 1500 larger plants (whose numbers had tripled since 1882, and who now employed almost six times as many workers as then), rather than in the small workshops employing no workers/or less than ten workers, whose numbers had fallen by 20 per cent and which now employed only 63 per cent of people engaged in shoe-making as against 93 per cent in 1882.⁶ In rapidly industrializing countries, the pre-industrial manufacturing sector thus also provided a small, but by no means negligible, reserve for the recruitment of the new workers.

On the other hand, the number of proletarians in the industrializing economies also grew at so impressive a rate because of the apparently

* It is said that they refused to take harvesting jobs in Germany, since travel from Italy to South America was cheaper and easier, while wages were higher.⁴

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limitless appetite for labour in this period of economic expansion, and not least for the sort of pre-industrial labour that was now prepared to pour into their expanding sectors. Insofar as industry still grew by a sort of marriage between manual dexterity and steam technology, or – as in building – had not yet seriously changed its methods, the demand was for old craft skills, or skills adapted from old crafts like smiths and locksmiths to new machine-making industries. This was significant, since trained craft journeymen, an established pre-industrial body of wage-workers, often formed the most active, educated and self-con-fident element in the developing proletariat of early economies: the leader of the German Social Democratic Party was a wood-turner (August Bebel), of the Spanish Socialist Party a printer (Iglesias).

Insofar as industrial labour was unmechanized and required no particular skills, it was not only within reach of most raw recruits, but, being labour-intensive, multiplied the numbers of such workers as output rose. To take two obvious examples: both construction, which built the infrastructure of production, transport and the rapidly expanding giant cities, and coal-mining, which produced the basic form of energy for this period – steam – generated vast armies. The constructional industry in Germany grew from about half a million in 1875 to almost 1.7 million in 1907, or from about 10 per cent to almost 16 per cent of the labour force. In 1913 no less than a million and a quarter men in Britain (800,000 in Germany, 1907) hacked, shovelled, hauled and lifted the coal that kept the economies of the world going. (In 1985 the equivalent numbers were 197,000 and 137,500.) On the other hand, mechanization, seeking to replace manual skill and experience by sequences of specialized machines or processes, served by more or less unskilled labour, welcomed the cheapness and helplessness of green workers – and nowhere more so than in the USA, where the old pre-industrial skills were in any case in short supply and not much wanted on the shop-floor. (‘The will to be skilled is not general,’ said Henry Ford.)⁷

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, no industrial, indus-trializing or urbanizing country could fail to be aware of these his-torically unprecedented, apparently anonymous and rootless masses of labouring people who formed a growing and, it seemed, an inevitably rising proportion of its people: probably, one day soon, a majority. For the diversification of industrial economies, notably by the rise of tertiary occupations – offices, shops and services – was only just beginning, except in the USA where tertiary workers already outnumbered blue-collar workers. Elsewhere the contrary development seemed to pre-dominate. Cities, which in pre-industrial times had been primarily inhabited by people in the tertiary sector, for even their handicraftsmen

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were also generally shopkeepers, became centres of manufacture. By the end of the nineteenth century something like two-thirds of the occupied population in big cities (i.e. cities over 100,000 inhabitants) were in industrial occupations.⁸

As men looked back from the end of the century they would be struck chiefly by the advance of the armies of industry, and within each town or region, as like as not, by the advance of industrial specialization. The typical industrial city, which was usually a town of between 50,000 and 300,000 – of course at the beginning of the century any city over 100,000 would have been considered very large – tended to evoke a monochrome image, or at best two or three associated hues: textiles in Roubaix or Lodz, Dundee or Lowell, coal, iron and steel alone or in combination in Essen, or Middlesbrough, armaments and shipbuilding in Jarrow and Barrow, chemicals in Ludwigshafen or Widnes. In this respect it differed from the size and variety of the new multi-million megalopolis, whether or not this was a capital city. Though some of the great capitals were also important industrial centres (Berlin, St Petersburg, Budapest) usually capitals occupied no central position in the pattern of a country’s industry.

What is more, though these masses were heterogeneous and far from uniform, the tendency for more and more of them to work as parts of large and complex firms, in plants ranging from hundreds to many thousands, appeared to be universal, especially in the new centres of heavy industry. Krupp in Essen, Vickers in Barrow, Armstrong in Newcastle, measured the size of the labour force in their individual plants in tens of thousands. Those who worked in these giant factories and yards were a minority. Even in Germany the mean number of people employed in units with more than ten workers in 1913 was only 23-4^ but they were an increasingly visible and potentially formidable minority. And, whatever the historian can establish in retrospect, for contemporaries the mass of workers was large, was indisputably growing, and threw a dark shadow over the established ordering of society and politics. What indeed would happen if, as a class, they organized politically?

This is precisely what happened, on a European scale, suddenly and with extraordinary speed. Wherever democratic and electoral politics allowed it, mass parties based on the working class, for the most part inspired by an ideology of revolutionary socialism (for all socialism was by definition seen as revolutionary) and led by men – and even some-times by women – who believed in such an ideology, appeared on the scene and grew with startling rapidity. In 1880 they barely existed, with the major exception of the German Social Democratic Party, recently (1875) unified and already an electoral force to be reckoned

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with. By 1906 they were so much taken for granted that a German scholar could publish a book on the topic ‘Why is there no socialism in the USA?’¹⁰ The existence of mass labour and socialist parties was already the norm: it was their absence which seemed surprising.

In fact, by 1914 there were mass socialist parties even in the USA, where the party’s candidate in 1912 polled almost a million votes, and in Argentina, where the party had 10 per cent of the vote in 1914, while in Australia an admittedly quite non-socialist Labour Party already formed the federal government in 1912. As for Europe, socialist and labour parties were serious electoral forces almost everywhere where conditions permitted. They were indeed minorities, but in some states, notably Germany and Scandinavia, they were already the largest national parties, with up to 35-40 per cent of the total vote – and every extension of the right to vote revealed the industrial masses ready to choose socialism. And they not only voted, but organized in gigantic armies: the Belgian Labour Party in its small country had 276,000 members in 1911, the great German SPD had more than a million, and the less directly political workers’ organizations, linked with such parties and often founded by them, were even more massive – trade unions and co-operative societies.

Not all the armies of labour were as large, solid and disciplined as in northern and central Europe. But even where workers’ parties consisted rather of groups of activist irregulars, or local militants, ready to lead mobilizations when they occurred, the new labour and socialist parties had to be taken seriously. They were a significant factor in national politics. Thus the French party, whose membership in 1914 — 76,000 – was neither united nor large, nevertheless elected 103 deputies by virtue of its 1.4 million votes. The Italian party, with an even more modest membership – 50,000 in 1914 — had almost a million who voted for it.” In short, labour and socialist parties were almost everywhere growing at a rate which, depending on one’s point of view, was extremely alarming or marvellous. Their leaders cheered themselves with tri-umphant extrapolations of the curve of past growth. The proletariat was destined – one had only to look at industrial Britain and the record of national censuses over the years – to become the great majority of the people. The proletariat was joining its parties. It was only a question of time, according to systematic and statistically minded German social-ists, before these parties would pass the magic figure of 51 per cent of votes, which, in democratic states, must surely be a decisive turning-point. Or, as the new anthem of world socialism put it: ‘The Inter-nationale will be the human race.’

We need not share this optimism, which proved to be misplaced. Nevertheless, in the years before 1914 it was patent that even the most

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miraculously successful parties still had vast reserves ofpotential support to mobilize, and that they were indeed mobilizing it. And it is natural that the extraordinary rise of socialist labour parties since the 188os should give their members and supporters, as well as their leaders, a sense of excitement, of marvellous hope, of the historic inevitability of their triumph. Never before had there been such an age of hope for those who laboured with their hands in factory, workshop and mine. In the words of a Russian socialist song: ‘Out of the dark past, the light of the future shines forth brightly.’

II

This remarkable upsurge of working-class parties was, at first sight, rather surprising. Their power lay essentially in the elementary sim-plicity of their political appeal. They were the parties of all manual workers who laboured for wages. They represented this class in its struggles against the capitalists and their states, and their object was to create a new society, which would begin with the emancipation of the workers by their own action, and which would emancipate the entire human race, except for an increasingly tiny minority of the exploiters. The doctrine of Marxism, formulated as such between Marx’s death and the end of the century, increasingly dominated the majority of the new parties, because the clarity with which it enunciated these propositions gave it an enormous power of political penetration. It was enough to know that all workers must join or support such parties, for history itself guaranteed their future victory.

This assumed that a class of workers existed sufficiently numerous and homogeneous to recognize itself in the Marxist image of’the pro-letariat’, and sufficiently convinced of the validity of the socialist analy-sis of its situation and its tasks, of which the first was to form proletarian parties and, whatever else they did, engage in political action. (Not all revolutionaries agreed with this primacy of politics, but for the moment we can leave aside this anti-political minority, which was mainly inspired by ideas then associated with anarchism.)

But practically all observers of the working-class scene were agreed that ‘the proletariat’ was very far from being a homogeneous mass, even within single nations. Indeed, before the rise of the new parties people had habitually talked of’the working classes’ in the plural rather than the singular.

The divisions within the masses whom socialists classified under the heading of’the proletariat’ were indeed so great that one might have

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expected them to stand in the way of any practical assertion of a single unified class consciousness.

The classic proletariat of the modern industrial factory or plant, often still a smallish though rapidly growing minority, was far from identical with the bulk of manual workers who laboured in small workshops, in rural cottages or city back-rooms or in the open air, with the labyrinthine jungle of wage-work which filled the cities and – even leaving aside farming – the countryside. Industries, crafts or other occupations, often extremely localized and with the most geographically restricted horizons, did not see their problems and situation as the same. How much was there in common between, say, the exclusively male boilermakers and the, in Britain, mainly female cotton weavers, or, within the same port cities, between skilled workers in shipyards, dockers, the garment workers and the builders? These divisions were not only vertical but horizontal: between craftsmen and labourers, between ‘respectable’ people and occupations (who respected them-selves and were respected) and the rest, between labour aristocracy, lumpenproletariat and those in between, or indeed between different strata of skilled crafts, where the typographical compositor looked down on the bricklayer, and the bricklayer on the house-painter. There were, moreover, not only divisions but rivalries between equivalent groups each seeking to monopolize a particular kind of work: rivalries exas-perated by technological developments which transformed old processes, created new ones, made old skills irrelevant and dissolved the clear traditional definitions of what ‘rightly’ belonged to the func-tions of, say, the locksmith or the farrier. Where employers were strong and workers weak, management, through machines and command, imposed its own division of labour, but elsewhere skilled workers might engage in those embittered ‘demarcation disputes’ which flickered through the British shipyards, notably in the 1890s, often throwing workers uninvolved in these inter-occupational strikes into uncon-trollable and undeserved idleness.

And in addition to all these there were the even more obvious differences of social and geographical origin, of nationality, language, culture and religion, which could not but emerge as industry recruited its rapidly growing armies from all corners of its own country, and indeed, in this era of massive international and trans-oceanic migration, from abroad. For what, from one point of view, looked like a con-centration of men and women in a single ‘working class’, could be seen from another as a gigantic scattering of the fragments of societies, a diaspora of old and new communities. Insofar as these divisions kept workers apart, they were obviously useful to, and indeed encouraged by, employers – notably in the USA, where the proletariat consisted

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largely of a variety of immigrant foreigners. Even so militant a body as the Western Federation of Miners in the Rocky Mountains risked being torn apart by the fights between the skilled and Methodist Cornishmen, specialists of the hard rocks, who were to be found wherever on the globe metal was commercially mined, and the less skilled Catholic Irish, who were to be found wherever strength and hard labour was needed on the frontiers of the English-speaking world.

Whatever the other differences within the working class, there was no doubt at all that differences of nationality, religion and language divided it. The classic case of Ireland is tragically familiar. But even in Germany Catholic workers resisted the appeal of social democracy far more than Protestant ones, and in Bohemia Czech workers resisted integration in a pan-Austrian movement dominated by workers of German speech. The passionate internationalism of the socialists – the workers, Marx told them, had no country, only a class – appealed to labour movements, not only because of its ideal, but also because it was often the essential precondition of their operation. How otherwise could workers be mobilized as such in a city like Vienna, where a third of them were Czech immigrants, or in Budapest, where the skilled oper-atives were Germans, the rest Slovaks or Magyars? The great industrial centre of Belfast showed, and still shows, what could happen when workers identified primarily as Catholics and Protestants, and not as workers, or even as Irishmen.

Fortunately the appeal to internationalism or, what was almost the same in large countries, to inter-regionalism, was not entirely ineffect-ive. Differences of language, nationality and religion did not by them-selves make the formation of a unified class consciousness impossible, especially when national groups of workers did not compete, for each had their niche in the labour market. They created major difficulties only where such differences expressed, or symbolized, severe group conflicts which cut across class lines, or differences within the working class which seemed to be incompatible with the unity of all workers. Czech workers were suspicious of German workers not as workers but as members of a nation which treated Czechs as inferior. Catholic Irish workers in Ulster were not likely to be impressed by appeals to class unity, when they saw Catholics increasingly excluded between 1870 and 1914 from the skilled jobs in industry which therefore became a virtual monopoly of Protestant workers, with the approval of their unions. Even so, the force of class experience was such that the worker’s alternative identification with some other group in plural working classes – as Pole, as Catholic or whatever – narrowed rather than replaced class identification. A person felt himself to be a worker, but a specifically Czech, Polish or Catholic worker. The Catholic Church,

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in spite of its deep hostility to class division and conflict, was obliged to form, or at least to tolerate, labour unions, even Catholic trade unions – at this period generally not very large – though it would have preferred joint organizations of employers and employed. What alternative identifications really excluded was not class consciousness as such but political class consciousness. Thus there was a trade union movement, and the usual tendencies to form a party of labour, even on the sectarian battlefield of Ulster. But the unity of the workers was possible only insofar as the two issues which dominated existence and political debate were excluded from discussion: religion and Home Rule for Ireland, on which Catholic and Protestant, Orange and Green workers could not agree. Some kind of trade union movement and industrial struggle was possible under these circumstances, but not – except within each community, and then only feebly or intermittently – a party based on class identification.

Add to these factors which stood in the way of labour class con-sciousness and organization, the heterogeneous structure of the indus-trial economy itself, as it developed. Here Britain was quite exceptional, since a strong non-political class feeling and labour organization already existed. The sheer antiquity – and archaism – of this country’s pioneer industrialization had allowed a rather primitive, largely decentralized trade unionism, mainly of craft unions, to sink roots into the basic industries of the countries, which – for a number of reasons – developed less through machinery replacing labour than through a marriage of manual operations and steam power. In all the great industries of the former ‘workshop of the world’ – in cotton, mining and metallurgy, the construction of machines and ships (the last industry dominated by Britain) – a nucleus of labour organization, mainly along craft or occupational lines, existed, capable of transformation into mass union-ism. Between 1867 and 1875 trade unions had actually acquired a legal status and privileges so far-reaching that militant employers, conservative governments and judges did not succeed in reducing or abolishing them until the 1980s. Labour organization was not merely present and accepted, but powerful, expecially in the workplace. This exceptional, indeed unique, power of labour was to create growing problems for the British industrial economy in the future, and indeed even during our period major difficulties for industrialists who wished to mechanize or administer it out of existence. Before 1914 they failed in the most crucial cases, but for our purposes it is sufficient simply to note the anomaly of Britain in this respect. Political pressure might help in reinforcing workshop strength, but it did not, in effect, have to take its place.

Elsewhere    the  situation      was  rather      different.     Broadly    speaking

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effective trade unions only functioned on the margins of modern and especially large-scale industry: in workshops, on work-sites or in small and medium enterprises. Organization might in theory be national, but in practice it was extremely localized and decentralized. In coun-tries like France and Italy its effective groupings were alliances of small local unions grouped round local labour halls. The French national trade union federation (CGT) required only a minimum of three local unions to constitute a national union.¹² In the large plants of modern industry unions were negligible. In Germany the strength of social democracy and its ‘Free Trade Unions’ was not to be found in the heavy industries of Rhineland and Ruhr. In the USA unionism in the great industries was virtually eliminated during the 1890s – it would not return until the 1930s – but it survived in small-scale industry and among the craft unions of the building trade, protected by the localism of the market in the large cities, where rapid urbanization, not to mention the politics of graft and municipal contracting, gave it greater scope. The only real alternative to the local union of small knots of organized labour, to the (mainly skilled) craft union, was the occasional and rarely permanent mobilization of masses of workers in intermittent strikes, but this also was mainly local.

There were only some striking exceptions, among which the miners stand out by their very difference from the carpenters and cigar-makers, the locksmith-mechanics, the printers and the rest of the journeymen artisans who formed the normal working-class cadre of the new pro-letarian movements. In one way or another these masses of muscular men, labouring in darkness, often living with their families in separate communities as forbidding and harsh as their pits, bound together by the solidarity of work and community and by the hardness and danger of their toil, showed a marked tendency to engage in collective struggle: even in France and the USA coal-miners formed at least intermittently powerful unions.* Given the size of the mining proletariat, and its marked regional concentrations, its potential – and in Britain its actual – role in labour movements could be formidable.

Two other, partly overlapping, sectors of non-craft unionism also deserve attention: transport and public employment. Employees of the state were still – even in France, the later stronghold of public service unions – excluded from labour organization, and this notably retarded the unionization of railways, which were frequently state-owned.

* As is indicated m the German miners’ doggerel, roughly translatable as

Bakers can bake their bread alone

Joiners can do their work at home

But wherever miners stand,

Mates brave and true must be at hand ‘³

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However, even private railways proved difficult to organize, outside large and thinly populated land-spaces, where their indispensability gave some of those employed on them considerable strategic leverage: especially the engine drivers and train crews. Railway companies were by far the largest enterprises in the capitalist economy, and were virtually impossible to organize except over the whole of what might be an almost nationwide network: in the 1890s the London and North-western Railway Company, for instance, controlled 65,000 workers over a system of 7000 kilometres of line and 800 stations.

By contrast, the other key sector of transport, the maritime, was extraordinarily localized in and around the sea-ports, where, in turn, the entire economy tended to pivot on it. Here, therefore, any strike in the docks tended to turn into a general transport strike which might grow into a general strike. The economic general strikes which mul-tiplied in the first years of the new century* – and were to lead to impassioned ideological debates within the socialist movement – were thus mainly strikes in port cities: Trieste, Genoa, Marseilles, Barcelona, Amsterdam. These were giant battles, but unlikely to lead as yet to permanent mass union organization, given the heterogeneity of an often unskilled labour force. But while rail and sea transport were so different, they had in common their crucial strategic importance for national economies, which could be paralysed by their cessation. As labour movements grew, governments were increasingly conscious of this potential strangulation, and considered possible counter-measures: the decision by the French government to break a general rail strike in 1910 by conscripting 150,000 railwaymen, i.e. putting them under military discipline, is the most drastic example.¹⁴

However, private employers also recognized the strategic role of the transport sector. The counter-offensive against the wave of British unionization in 1889-90 (which had itself been launched by seamen’s and dockers’ strikes) began with a battle against the Scottish rail-waymen and a series of battles against the massive but unstable union-ization of great sea-ports. Conversely, the labour offensive on the eve of the world war planned its own strategic striking force, the Triple Alliance of coal-miners, railwaymen and the transport workers’ fed-eration (i.e. the port employees). Transport was now clearly seen as a crucial element in the class struggle.

It was more clearly seen than another zone of confrontation which was, shortly, to prove even more crucial: the great and growing metal industries. For here the traditional force of labour organization, the skilled workers of craft background and with stubborn craft unions met

* Brief general strikes in favour of the democratization of voting rights were a different matter

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the great modern factory, which set out to reduce them (or most of them) to semi-skilled operators of increasingly specialized and soph-isticated machine-tools and machines. Here, on the rapidly moving frontier of technological advance, the conflict of interest was clear. While peace lasted, by and large, the situation favoured management, but after 1914 it is not surprising that the cutting edge of labour radicalization would be found everywhere in the great armament plants. Behind the metalworkers’ turn to revolution during and after the world war we discern the preparatory tensions of the 1890s and

1900s.

The working classes were thus neither homogeneous nor easy to unite into a single coherent social group – even if we leave aside the agricultural proletariat, which labour movements also sought to organize and mobilize, in general with indifferent success.* Yet they were being unified. But how?

I ll

One powerful way was through ideology carried by organization. Socialists and anarchists carried their new gospel to masses hitherto neglected by almost all agencies except their exploiters and ‘hose who told them to be quiet and obedient: and even primary schools (where they reached them) were mainly content to inculcate the civic duties of religion, while organized Churches themselves, apart from a few plebeian sects, were slow to move into proletarian territory, or ill-suited to deal with populations so different from the structured communities of ancient rural or city parishes. Workers were unknown and forgotten people in proportion as they were a new social group. How unknown, scores of writings by middle-class social explorers and observers testify; how forgotten, any reader of the letters of the painter Van Gogh, who went into the Belgian coalfield as an evangelist, can judge. The socialists were often the first to come to them. Where conditions were right, they impressed on the most varied groups of workers – from craft journeymen or vanguards of militants to entire working communities of outworkers or miners – a single identity: that of ‘the proletarian’. In 1886 the cottagers in the Belgian valleys round Liege, traditionally manu-facturing guns, had no politics. They lived ill-paid lives varied for the

* Except in Italy, where the Federation of Land Workers was by far the largest union, and the one which laid the base for the later communist influence in central and parts of southern Italy. Possibly in Spain anarchism may have had comparable influence among landless labourers from time to time.

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males among them only by pigeon-fancying, fishing and cock-fighting. From the moment the ‘Workers’ Party’ arrived on the scene, they converted to it en masse: 80-90 per cent of the VaI de Vesdre henceforth voted socialist, and even the last ramparts of local Catholicism were breached. The people of the Liegois found themselves sharing an identi-fication and a faith with the weavers of Ghent, whose very language (Flemish) they could not understand, and thereby with all who shared the ideal of a single, universal working class. This message of the unity of all who worked and were poor was brought into the remotest corners of their countries by the agitators and propagandists. But they also brought organization, the structured collective action without which the working class could not exist as a class, and through organization they acquired that cadre of spokesmen who could articulate the feelings and hopes of men and women who were unable to do so themselves. These possessed or found the words for the truths they felt. Without this organized collectivity, they were only poor labouring folk. For the ancient corpus of wisdom – proverbs, sayings, songs – which formulated the Weltanschauung of the labouring poor of the pre-industrial world was no longer enough. They were a new social reality, requiring new reflection. This began at the moment when they understood their new spokesmen’s message: You are a class, you must show that you are. Hence, in extreme cases, it was enough for the new parties merely to enunciate their name: ‘the workers’ party’. Nobody except the militants of the new movement brought this message of class consciousness to the workers. It unified all those who were prepared to recognize this great truth across all differences among them.

But people were prepared to recognize it, because the gap which separated those who were, or were becoming, workers from the rest, including other branches of the socially modest ‘little people’, was widening, because the working-class world was increasingly separate, and, not least, because the conflict between those who paid wages and those who lived by them was an increasingly dominant existential reality. This was plainly the case in places virtually created by and for industry like Bochum (4200 inhabitants in 1842, 120,000 in 1907, of whom 78 per cent were workers, 0.3 per cent ‘capitalists’) or Middles-brough (6000 in 1841, 105,000 in 1911). In these centres, mainly of mining and heavy industry, which mushroomed in the second half of the century, perhaps even more than in the textile mill-towns which had been the typical centres of industry earlier, men and women might live without regularly even seeing any member of the non-wage-earning classes who did not in some way command them (owner, manager, official, teacher, priest), except for the small artisans and shopkeepers and publicans who served the modest needs of the poor, and who,

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dependent on their clientele, adjusted to the proletarian environment.* Bochum’s consumer production contained, apart from the usual bakers, butchers and brewers, a few hundred seamstresses, and forty-eight milliners, but only eleven laundresses, six hat- and cap-makers, eight furriers – and, significantly, no single person making that characteristic status symbol of the middle and upper classes, gloves.¹⁵

Yet even in the great city, with its miscellaneous and increasingly diversified services and social variety, functional specialization, sup-plemented in this period by town-planning and property-development, separated the classes, except on such neutral territories as parks, railway stations and the structures of entertainment. The old ‘popular quarter’ declined with the new social segregation: in Lyon, La Croix-Rousse, ancient stronghold of the riotous silk-weavers descending into the city centre, was in 1913 described as a quarter of’small employees’ – ‘the bee-swarm of workers has left the plateau and its slopes of access’.¹⁶ Workers moved from the old city to the other bank of the Rhone and its factories. Increasingly the grey uniformity of new working-class quarters, extruded from the central city areas, took over: Wedding and Neukolln in Berlin, Favoriten and Ottakring in Vienna, Poplar and West Ham in London – counterparts to the rapidly developing seg-regated middle- and lower-middle-class quarters and suburbs. And if the much discussed crisis of the traditional craft sector drove some groups among the master artisans to the anti-capitalist and anti-pro-letarian radical right, as in Germany, it could also, as in France, intensify their anti-capitalist jacobinism or republican radicalism. As for their journeymen and apprentices, it could hardly fail to convince them that they were now no more than proletarians. And was it was not natural for the hard-pressed proto-industrial cottage-industries, often, like the handloom weavers, symbiotic with the early stages of the factory system, to identify with the proletarian situation? Localized communities of this kind, in various hilly regions of central Germany, Bohemia or elsewhere, became natural strongholds of the movement.

All workers were, for good reasons, apt to be convinced of the injustice of the social order, but the crux of their experience was their relation with employers. The new socialist labour movement was inseparable from the discontents of the workplace, whether or not expressed in strikes and (more rarely) organized trade unions. Time and again the rise of a local socialist party is inseparable from a particular group of locally central workers, whose mobilization it released or reflected. In Roanne (France) the weavers formed the core of the Parti Ouvrier;

* The role of taverns as meeting-places for unions and socialist party branches, and of tavern-keepers as socialist militants, is familiar in several countries.

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when weaving in the region organized in 1889-91 the rural cantons suddenly switched their politics from ‘reaction’ to ‘socialism’ and indus-trial conflict passed over into political organization and electoral activity. Yet, as the example of British labour in the middle decades of the century shows, there was no necessary connection between the willingness to strike and organize, and the identification of the class of employers (the ‘capitalists’) as the major political adversary. Indeed, traditionally a common front had united those who laboured and produced, workers, artisans, shopkeepers, bourgeois against the idle and against ‘privilege’ – the believers in progress (a coalition which also crossed class boundaries) against ‘reaction’. Yet this alliance, largely responsible for the earlier historic and political force of liberalism (see The Age of Capital, chapter 6, 1) crumbled, not only because electoral democracy revealed the divergent interests of its various components (see pp. 88-90 above), but because the class of employers, increas-ingly typified by size and concentration – as we have seen, the key word ‘big’, as in big business, grande Industrie, grand patronat, Grossindustrie, appears more frequently¹⁷ – became more visibly integrated into the undifferentiated zone of wealth, state power and privilege. It joined the ‘plutocracy’ which Edwardian demagogues in Britain liked to excoriate – a ‘plutocracy’ which, as the era of depression gave way to the intoxicating surge of economic expansion, increasingly flaunted itself, visibly and through the new mass media. The British government’s chief labour expert claimed that newspapers and the motor car, in Europe a monopoly of the rich, made the contrast between rich and poor inescapable.¹⁸

But as the political fight against ‘privilege’ merged with the hitherto separate fight at and around the place of employment, the world of the manual worker was increasingly separated from those above it by the growth, rapid and striking in some countries, of the tertiary sector of the economy which generated a stratum of men and women who worked without getting their hands dirty. Unlike the ancient petty-bourgeoisie of small craftsmen and shopkeepers which could be seen as a transitional zone or no-man’s land between labour and bourgeoisie, these new lower-middle classes separated the two, if only because the

very modesty of their economic situation, often little better than those

of well-paid workers, made them stress precisely what separated them

from manual labour and what they hoped they had or thought they ought to have, in common with their social superiors (see chapter 7). They formed a layer isolating the workers below them.

If economic and social developments thus favoured	the formation of
a class consciousness of all manual workers, a third	factor  virtually

forced unification on them: the national economy and the nation-state,

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both increasingly intertwined. The nation-state not only formed the framework of the citizen’s life, established its parameters, and deter-mined the concrete conditions and the geographical limits of the wor-kers’ struggle, but its political, legal and administrative interventions were more and more central to working-class existence. The economy increasingly operated as an integrated system, or rather one in which a trade union could no longer function as an aggregage of loosely linked local units, concerned in the first instance only with local conditions, but was compelled to adopt a national perspective, at least for its own industry. In Britain the novel phenomenon of organized national labour conflicts appears for the first time in the 1890s, while the spectre of national transport and coal strikes became a reality in the 1900s. Correspondingly industries began to negotiate nationwide collective agreements, which had been practically unknown before 1889. By 1910 they were quite usual.

The growing tendency among trade unions, especially socialist ones, to organize workers in comprehensive bodies each covering a single national industry (‘industrial unionism’) reflected this sense of the economy as an integrated whole. ‘Industrial unionism’ as an aspiration recognized that ‘the industry’ had ceased to be a theoretical classi-fication for statisticians and economists and was now becoming a nationwide operational or strategic concept, the economic framework of trade union struggle, however localized. Fiercely attached though British coal-miners were to the autonomy of their coalfield or even their pit, conscious of the specificity of their problems and customs, South Wales and Northumberland, Fife and Staffordshire, they found them-selves for this reason inevitably drawn together between 1888 and 1908 into national organization.

As for the state, its electoral democratization imposed the class unity its rulers hoped to avoid. The fight for the extension of citizen rights itself inevitably took on a class tinge for workers, since the central question at issue (at least for men) was the right to vote of the propertyless citizen. A property qualification, however modest, had to exclude primarily a large part of workers. Conversely, where general voting rights had not yet been achieved, at least in theory, the new socialist movements inevitably made themselves the major champions of uni-versal suffrage, launching or threatening gigantic demonstration general strikes in its favour – in Belgium 1893 and twice thereafter, in Sweden in 1902, in Finland in 1905 – which both demonstrated and reinforced their power to mobilize the newly converted masses. Even deliberately anti-democratic electoral reforms might reinforce national class consciousness if, as in Russia after 1905, they formed working-class electors into a separate (and underrepresented) electoral com-

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partment or curia. But electoral activities, into which socialist parties characteristically plunged, to the horror of anarchists who saw them as diverting the movement from revolution, could not but give the working class a single national dimension, however divided it was in other respects.

But more than this: the state unified the class, since increasingly any social group had to pursue its political aims by exerting pressure on the national government, in favour of or against the legislation and admin-istration oinational laws. No class had a more consistent and continuous need for positive state action on economic and social matters, to com-pensate for the inadequacies of their unaided collective action; and the more numerous the national proletariat, the more (reluctantly) sensitive politicians were to the demands of so large and dangerous a body of voters. In Britain the old mid-Victorian trade unions and the new labour movement divided, in the 1880s, essentially on the issue of the demand for an Eight-Hour Day to be established by law and not by collective bargaining. That is to say a law universally applicable to all workers, by definition a national law, and even, as the Second International thought, fully conscious of the significance of the demand, an international law. The agitation did indeed generate what is prob-ably the most visceral and moving institution asserting working-class internationalism, the annual May Day demonstrations, inaugurated in 1890. (In 1917 the Russian workers, at last free to celebrate it, even jumped their own calendar in order to demonstrate on precisely the same day as the rest of the world.)*¹⁹ And yet the force of working-class unification within each nation inevitably replaced the hopes and theoretical assertions of working-class internationalism, except for a noble minority of militants and activists. As the behaviour of most national working classes in August 1914 demonstrated, the effective framework of their class consciousness was, except at brief moments of revolution, the state and the politically defined nation.

I V

It is neither possible nor necessary here to survey the full range of geographical, ideological, national, sectional or other variations, actual or potential, on the general theme of the formation of the working classes of 1870-1914 as conscious and organized social groups. It was quite plainly not yet taking place, to any significant extent, among that

*As we know, in 1917 the Russian (Julian) calendar was still thirteen days behind our (Gregorian) calendar: hence the familiar puzzle of the October Revolution, which occurred on 7 November.

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part of humanity whose skins were a different shade of colour, even when (as in India and, of course, Japan) industrial development was already undeniable. This advance of class organization was chron-ologically uneven. 11 accelerated rapidly in the course oftwo short periods. The first major leap forward occurred between the end of the 188os and in the early years of the 1890s, years marked both by the re-establishment of a labour International (the ‘Second’, to distinguish it from Marx’s International of 1864-72) and by that symbol of working-class hope and confidence, May Day. These were the years when socialists first appeared in significant numbers in the parliaments of several countries, while even in Germany, where their party was already strong, the force of the SPD more than doubled between 1887 and 1893 (from 10.i to 23.3 per cent). The second period of major advance falls some time between the Russian Revolution of 1905, which greatly influenced it, especially in central Europe, and 1914. The massive electoral advance of labour and socialist parties was now assisted by the spread of a democratized suffrage which allowed it to be effectively registered. At the same time waves of labour agitation produced a major advance in the strength of organized trade unionism. While the details varied enormously with national circumstances, these two waves of rapid labour advance are to be found, in one way or another, almost everywhere.

Yet the formation of a working-class consciousness cannot be simply identified with the growth of organized labour movements, though there are examples, particularly in central Europe and in some indus-trially specialized zones, where the identification of the workers with their party and movement was almost total. Thus in 1913 an analyst of elections in a central German constituency (Naumburg-Merseburg) expressed surprise that only 88 per cent of workers had voted for the SPD: plainly here the equation ‘worker= Social Democrat’ was assumed to be the norm.²⁰ But this case was as yet neither typical nor even usual. What was increasingly usual, whether or not workers identified with ‘their’ party, was a non-political class identification, a conscious mem-bership of a separate workers’ world “which included but went far beyond the ‘class party’. For it was based on a separate life experience, a separate manner and style of living which emerged, across the regional variations of speech and custom, in shared forms of social activity (for instance, versions of sport specifically identified with proletarians as a class, as association football came to be in Britain from the 1880s), or even class-specific and novel kinds of clothing, such as the proverbial worker’s peaked cap.

Still, without the simultaneous appearance of’the movement’, even the non-political expressions of class consciousness would have been

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neither complete nor even fully conceivable: for it was through the movement that the plural ‘working classes’ were fused into the singular ‘working class’. But, in turn, the movements themselves, insofar as they became mass movements, were imbued with the workers’ non-political but instinctive distrust of all who did not get their hands dirty in labour. This pervasive ouvrierisme (as the French called it) reflected reality in mass parties, for these, as distinct from small or illegal organizations, were overwhelmingly composed of manual workers. The 61,000 members of the Social Democratic Party in Hamburg in 1911-12 contained only thirty-six ‘authors and journalists’ and two members of the higher professions. Indeed only 5 per cent of its members were non-proletarian, and half of these consisted of innkeepers.²¹ But distrust of non-workers did not exclude the admiration for great teachers from a different class such as Karl Marx himself, nor for a handful of socialists of bourgeois origin, founding fathers, national leaders and orators (two functions which were often hard to distinguish) or ‘theorists’. And indeed in their first generation the socialist parties attracted admirable middle-class figures of great gifts who deserved such admiration: Victor Adler in Austria (1852-1918), Jaures in France (1859-1914), Turati in Italy (1857-1932), Branting in Sweden (1860-1925).

What then was ‘the movement’ which, in extreme cases, could be virtually coextensive with the class? Everywhere it included the most basic and universal organization of workers, the trade union, though in different forms and varying strength. It also frequently included co-operatives, mainly in the form of shops for workers, occasionally (as in Belgium) as the central institution of the movement.* In countries of mass socialist parties it might include virtually every association in which workers participated, from cradle to grave – or rather, given their anti-clericalism, to the crematorium, which ‘the advanced’ strongly favoured as being better suited to the age of sciences and progress.²² These might range from the 200,000 members of the German Fed-eration of Worker Choirs in 1914 and the 130,000 members of the Workers’ Cycling Club ‘Solidarity’ (1910) to the Worker Stamp Col-lectors and Worker Rabbit Breeders, whose traces are still occasionally found in the suburban inns of Vienna. But in essence all these were subordinate to, or part of, or at least closely linked with, the political party which was its essential expression, almost always called either Socialist (Social Democratic), and/or even more simply ‘Workers’ or ‘Labour’ party. Labour movements which were without organized class

* While workers’ co-operation was closely linked with labour movements, and in fact often formed a bridge between the ‘Utopian¹ ideals of pre-1848 socialism and the new socialism, this was not the case with the most nourishing part of co-operation, that of peasants and farmers, except in parts of Italy.

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parties or which were opposed to politics, though they represented an old strain of Utopian or anarchist ideology on the left, were almost invariably weak. They represented shifting cadres of individual mili-tants, evangelists, agitators and potential strike-leaders rather than mass structures. Except in the Iberian world, always out of phase with other European developments, anarchism nowhere in Europe became the majority ideology of even weak labour movements. Except in Latin countries, and – as the revolution of 1917 revealed – in Russia, anarchism was politically negligible.

The great majority of these working-class parties, Australasia being the major exception, envisaged a fundamental change in society, and consequently called themselves ‘socialist’, or were judged to be on the way to doing so, like the British Labour Party. Before 1914 they wanted to have as little as possible to do with the politics of the ruling class, and still less with government, until the day when labour itself formed its own government, and presumably would set about the great trans-formation. Labour leaders tempted into compromises with middle-class parties and governments were execrated unless they kept very quiet, as J. R. MacDonald did about the electoral arrangement with the Liberals, which first gave the British Labour Party significant parliamentary representation in 1906. (For understandable reasons the parties’ atti-tude to local government was rather more positive.) Perhaps the chief reason why so many of such parties ran up the red flag of Karl Marx was that he, more than any other theorist of the left, told them three things which seemed equally plausible and encouraging: that no fore-seeable improvement within the present system would change the basic situation of workers as workers (their ‘exploitation’); that the nature of capitalist development, which he analysed at length, made the over-throw of the present society and its replacement by a new and better society quite uncertain; and that the working class, organized in class-parties, would be the creator and inheritor of this glorious future. Marx thus provided workers with the certainty, akin to that once given by religion, that science demonstrated the historical inevitability of their eventual triumph. In these respects Marxism was so effective that even Marx’s opponents within the movement largely adopted his analysis of capitalism.

Thus both the orators and the ideologists of these parties and their adversaries generally took it for granted that they wanted a social revolution, or that their activities implied one. Yet what exactly did this phrase mean, except that the change from capitalism to socialism, from a society based on private property and enterprise to one based on ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’,²³ would indeed revolutionize life, though the exact

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nature and content of the socialist future was surprisingly little discussed, and remained unclear – except that what was bad now would be good then. The nature of revolution was the issue which dominated the debates on proletarian politics throughout this period.

What was at issue was not faith in a total transformation of society, even though there were many leaders and militants who were much too busy with immediate struggles to take much interest in the remoter future. It was rather that, by a left-wing tradition which reached back

beyond Marx and Bakunin to	1789 or even 1776, revolutions hoped
to achieve fundamental  social	change by means of sudden,  violent,

insurrectionary transfers of power. Or, in a more general and millennial sense, that the great change whose inevitability was established ought to be more imminent than it actually appeared to be in the industrial world, or indeed than it had seemed in the depressed and discontented 1880s, or in the hopeful surges of the early 1890s. Even then the veteran Engels, who looked back to the Age of Revolution when barricades could be expected to go up every twenty years or so, and who had indeed taken part in revolutionary campaigns, gun in hand, warned that the days of 1848 were gone for good. And, as we have seen, from the middle 1890s on the idea of an imminent collapse of capitalism seemed quite implausible. What then was there to do for the armies of the proletariat, mobilized in their millions under the red flag?

On the right of the movement there were some who recommended concentrating on the immediate improvements and reforms which the working class might win from governments and employers, leaving the remoter future to take care of itself. Revolt and insurrection were in any case not on the agenda. Even so, few labour leaders born after, say, i860 abandoned the idea of the New Jerusalem. Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), a self-made socialist intellectual who suggested incau-tiously, not only that Karl Marx’s theories should be revised in the light of a flourishing capitalism (‘revisionism’), but also that the puta-tive socialist end was less important than the reforms to be won on the way, was massively condemned by labour politicians whose interest in actually overthrowing capitalism was sometimes extremely faint. The belief that the present society was intolerable made sense to working-class people, even when, as an observer of a German socialist congress in the 1900s noted, their militants ‘kept a loaf or two ahead of capi-talism’.²⁴ The ideal of a new society was what gave the working class hope.

All the same, how was the new society to be brought about in times when the collapse of the old system looked far from imminent? Kautsky’s embarrassed description of the great German Social Democratic Party as ‘a party which, while revolutionary, does not make a revolution’²⁵

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sums up the problem. Was it enough to maintain, as the SPD did, a commitment to nothing less than social revolution in theory, a stance of undeviating opposition, periodically to measure the growing strength of the movement in elections and rely on the objective forces of historical development to bring about its inevitable triumph? Not if it meant, as to often it did in practice, that the movement adjusted itself to operating within the framework of the system it could not overthrow. The intran-sigent front, or so many a radical or militant felt, concealed compro-mise, passivity, the refusal to order the mobilized armies of labour into action, and the suppression of the struggles which spontaneously welled up among the masses, in the miserable name of organizational disci-pline.

What the ill-assorted, but after 1905 growing, radical left of rebels, grassroots trade union militants, intellectual dissidents and revolu-tionaries rejected was thus the mass proletarian parties, which they saw as inevitably reformist and bureaucratized by virtue of engaging in certain kinds of political action. The arguments against them were much the same whether the prevailing orthodoxy was Marxist, as it usually was on the continent, or anti-Marxist in the Fabian manner as in Britain. Instead, the radical left preferred to rely on direct proletarian action which bypassed the dangerous bog of politics, ideally cul-minating in something like a revolutionary general strike. ‘Rev-olutionary syndicalism’, which flourished in the last ten years before 1914, suggests by its very name this marriage between all-out social revolutionaries and decentralized trade union militancy, which was, in varying degrees, associated with anarchist ideas. It flourished, outside Spain, mainly as an ideology of a few hundred or thousand proletarian union militants and a few intellectuals, during the second phase of the movement’s growth and radicalization which coincided with con-siderable and internationally widespread labour unrest, and consid-erable uncertainty in the socialist parties about what exactly they could or ought to be doing.

Between 1905 and 1914 the typical revolutionary in the west was likely to be some kind of revolutionary syndicalist who, paradoxically, rejected Marxism as the ideology of parties which used it as an excuse for not trying to make revolution. This was a little unfair to the shades of Marx, for the striking thing about the western mass proletarian parties which ran up his banner on their flagpoles was how modest the role of Marx actually was in them. The basic beliefs of their leaders and militants were often indistinguishable from those of the non-Marxist working-class radical or jacobin left. They all believed equally in the struggle of reason against ignorance and superstition (that is to say clericalism); in the struggle of progress against the dark past; in science,

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in education, in democracy and in the secular trinity of Liberty, Equal-ity and Fraternity. Even in Germany, where almost one in three citizens voted for a Social Democratic Party which had declared itself formally Marxist in 1891, the Communist Manifesto before 1905 was published in editions of a mere 2000-3000 copies and the most popular ideological work in workers’ libraries was one whose title is self-explanatory: Darwin versus Moses.’²⁶ Actually, even native Marxist intellectuals were scarce. The leading ‘theorists’ of Germany were imported from the Habsburg Empire, like Kautsky and Hilferding, or from the tsar’s empire, like Parvus and Rosa Luxemburg. For from Vienna and Prague eastwards, Marxism and Marxist intellectuals were in abundant supply. And in these regions Marxism had retained its revolutionary impulse un-diluted, and the link between Marxism and revolution was obvious, if only because the prospects of revolution were immediate and real.

And here, indeed, lay the key to the pattern of labour and socialist movements, as of so much else in the history of the fifty years before 1914. They emerged in the countries of the dual revolution, and indeed in the zone of western and central Europe in which every politically minded person looked back on the greatest of revolutions, that of France in 1789, and any city-dweller born in the year of Waterloo was quite likely in the course of a lifetime of sixty years to have lived through at least two or even three revolutions at first or second hand. The labour and socialist movement saw itself as the lineal continuation of this tradition. The Austrian Social Democrats celebrated March Day (anni-versary of the victims of the Vienna revolution of 1848) before they celebrated the new May Day. Yet social revolution was rapidly retreat-ing from its original zone of incubation. And in some ways the very emergence of massive, organized and above all disciplined class-parties accelerated its retreat. The organized mass meeting, the carefully planned mass demonstration or procession, the election campaign, replaced rather than prepared riot and insurrection. The sudden upsurge of ‘red’ parties in the advanced countries of bourgeois society was indeed a worrying phenomenon for its rulers: but few of them actually expected to see the guillotine erected in their capitals. They could recognize such parties as bodies of radical opposition within a system which, nevertheless, provided room for improvement and conciliation. These were not, or not yet, or no longer, societies in which, in spite of rhetoric to the contrary, much blood flowed.

What kept the new parties committed to the complete revolution of society, at least in theory, and the masses of ordinary workers committed to them, was certainly not the inability of capitalism to bring them some improvement. It was that, so far as most workers who hoped for improvement could judge, all significant amelioration came primarily

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through their action and organization as a class. Indeed, in some respects the decision to choose the road of collective improvement foreclosed other options. In the regions of Italy where poor landless farm labourers chose to organize in unions and co-operatives, they did not choose the alternative of mass emigration. The stronger the sense of a working-class community and solidarity, the stronger the social pressures to keep within it, though they did not exclude – especially for groups like the miners – the ambition to give one’s children the schooling that would keep them out of the pit. What lay behind the socialist convictions of working-class militants and the approval of their masses was, more than anything, the segregated world imposed on the new proletariat. If they had hope – and their organized members were indeed proud and hopeful – it was because they had hope in the movement. If ‘the American dream’ was individualist, the European worker’s was overwhelmingly collective.

Was this revolutionary? Almost certainly not in the insurrectionary sense, to judge by the behaviour of the majority of the strongest of all revolutionary socialist parties, the German s P D. But there was in Europe a vast semi-circular belt of poverty and unrest in which revolution actually was on the agenda, and – at least in one part of it – actually broke out. It stretched from Spain through large parts of Italy, via the Balkan peninsula into the Russian Empire. Revolution migrated from western to eastern Europe in our period. We shall consider the fortunes of the revolutionary zone of the continent and the globe below. Here we can only note that in the east Marxism retained its original explosive connotations. After the Russian Revolution it returned to the west as well as expanding into the east as the quintessential ideology of social revolution, which it was to remain for so much of the twentieth century. Meanwhile the gap in communication between socialists speaking the same theoretical language widened almost without their being aware of it, until its width was suddenly revealed by the outbreak of war in 1914, when Lenin, long the admirer of German social democratic orthodoxy, discovered that its chief theorist was a traitor.

V

Even though socialist parties in most countries, in spite of national and confessional divisions, plainly seemed to be on the way to mobilize the majority of their working classes, it was undeniable that, except for Great Britain, the proletariat was not – socialists confidently claimed ‘not yet’ – anything like a majority of the population. As soon as socialist parties acquired a mass basis, ceasing to be propagandist and agitational

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sects, bodies of cadres or scattered local strongholds of converts, it thus became evident that they could not confine their attention exclusively to the working class. The intensive debate on ‘the agrarian question’ which began among Marxists in the middle 1890s reflects precisely this discovery. While ‘the peasantry’ was no doubt destined to fade away (as Marxists argued, correctly, since this has virtually happened in the later twentieth century), what could or ought socialism to offer meanwhile to the 36 per cent in Germany, the 43 per cent in France who lived by agriculture (1900), not to mention the European countries which were, as yet, overwhelmingly agrarian? The need to widen the appeal of socialist parties from the purely proletarian could be formulated and defended in various ways, from simple electoral cal-culations or revolutionary considerations to general theory (‘Social Democracy is the party of the proletariat… b u t . . . it is simultaneously a party of social development, envisaging the development of the entire social body from the present capitalist stage to a higher form’).²⁷ It could not be denied, since the proletariat could almost everywhere be outvoted, isolated, or even repressed by the united force of other classes.

But the very identification between party and proletariat made the appeal to other social strata more difficult. It stood in the way of the political pragmatists, the reformists, the Marxist ‘revisionists’, who would have preferred to broaden socialism from a class-party into a ‘people’s party’, for even practical politicians ready to leave doctrine to a few comrades classified as ‘theorists’ appreciated that the almost existential appeal to the workers as workers was what gave the parties their real force. What is more, the political demands and slogans specifically tailored to proletarian measurements – such as the Eight-Hour Day and socialization – left other strata indifferent, or even risked antagonizing them by the implied threat of expropriation. Socialist labour parties rarely had much success in breaking out of the large but separate working-class universe within which their militants, and quite often their masses, actually felt quite comfortable.

And yet the appeal of such parties sometimes went far beyond the working classes; and even those mass parties most uncompromisingly identifying themselves with one class patently mobilized support from other social strata. There were, for instance, countries in which social-ism, in spite of its ideological lack of rapport with the rural world, captured large areas of the countryside – and not only the support of those who might be classified as ‘rural proletarians’: as in parts of southern France, of central Italy and of the USA, where the most solid stronghold of the Socialist Party was, surprisingly, to be found among the Bible-punching poor white farmers of Oklahoma – with a vote of more than 25 per cent for its 1912 presidential candidate in the twenty-

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three most rural counties of that state. Equally remarkable, small artisans and shopkeepers were notably overrepresented in the mem-bership of the Italian Socialist Party, compared to their numbers in the total population.

There were, no doubt, historical reasons for this. Where the political tradition of the (secular) left – republican, democratic, jacobin or the like – was old and strong, socialism might seem a logical extension of it – today’s version, as it were, of that declaration of faith in the eternal great causes of the left. In France, where it was clearly a major force, those grassroots intellectuals of the countryside and champions of repub-lican values, the primary school teachers, were much attracted to socialism, and the major political grouping of the Third Republic paid its respects to the ideals of its electorate by naming itself Republican Radical and Radical Socialist Party in 1901. (It was patently neither radical nor socialist.) Yet socialist parties drew strength, as well as political ambiguity, from such traditions only because, as we have seen, they shared them, even when they were no longer felt to be sufficient. Thus in states where the franchise was still restricted, their militant and effective combat for democratic voting rights won support from other democrats. As the parties of the least privileged, it was natural that they should now be seen as standard-bearers of that fight against inequality and ‘privilege’ which had been central to political radicalism since the American and French revolutions; all the more so since so many of its former standard-bearers had, like the liberal middle class, joined the forces of privilege themselves.

Socialist parties benefited even more clearly by their status as the unqualified opposition to the rich. They stood for a class which was, without exception, poor, though not necessarily very poor by con-temporary standards. They denounced exploitation, wealth and its growing concentration with unceasing passion. Others who were poor and felt exploited, though not proletarian, might well find such a party congenial.

Thirdly, socialist parties were, almost by definition, parties devoted to that key concept of the nineteenth century, ‘progress’. They stood, especially in their Marxist form, for the inevitable forward march of history towards a better future, whose precise content might be unclear, but which would certainly see the continued and accelerated triumph ofreason and education, science and technology. When Spanish anarch-ists speculated about their Utopia, it was in terms of electricity and automatic waste-disposal machines. Progress, if only as a synonym of hope, was the aspiration of those who had little or nothing, and the new rumblings of doubt about its reality or desirability in the world of bourgeois and patrician culture (see below) augmented its plebeian

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and politically radical associations, at least in Europe. There can be no doubt that socialists benefited from the prestige of progress among all who believed in it, especially among those brought up in and imbued with the tradition of liberalism and the Enlightenment.

Finally, and paradoxically, being both outsiders and in permanent opposition (at least until the revolution) gave them an advantage. In their first capacity they clearly attracted much more than the stat-istically expectable support from minorities whose position in society was in some degree anomalous, such as, in most European countries, the Jews even when they were comfortably bourgeois, and in France the Protestant minority. In their second capacity, unsullied by the contamination of ruling classes, they might in multinational empires attract oppressed nations, which might for this reason rally to red banners, to which they gave a distinct national tinge. This was notably so, as we shall see in the next chapter, in the Tsarist Empire, the most dramatic case being that of the Finns. For this reason the Finnish Socialist Party, which polled 37 per cent of the vote as soon as the law allowed it to, rising to 47 per cent in 1916, became defacto the national party of its country.

The support of nominally proletarian parties could therefore extend considerably beyond the proletariat. Where this was so, it could easily turn such parties into parties of government in suitable circumstances; and indeed after 1918 it did so. However, to join the system of’bour-geois’ governments meant to abandon the status of revolutionaries or even radical oppositionists. Before 1914 this was not quite unthinkable, but certainly it was publicly inadmissible. The first socialist who joined a ‘bourgeois’ government, even with the excuse of unity in defence of the republic against the imminent threat of reaction, Alexandre Millerand (1899) – he subsequently became President of France – was solemnly drummed out of the national and international movement. Before 1914 no serious socialist politician was fool enough to make his mistake. (In fact, in France the Socialist Party did not join a government until 1936.) On the face of it the parties remained pure and uncom-promising until the war.

One last question must, however, be asked. Can one write the story of the working classes in our period simply in terms of their class organizations (not necessarily socialist ones) or of that generic class consciousness expressed in the lifestyles and behaviour patterns in the ghetto-world of the proletariat? Only to the extent that they felt and behaved in some way as members of such a class. Such consciousness could extend very far, into entirely unexpected quarters, such as the ultra-pious Chassidic weavers of ritual Jewish prayer-shawls in a lost corner of Galicia (Kolomea) who went on strike against their employers

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with the help of the local Jewish socialists. And yet a great many of the poor, and especially the very poor, did not think of themselves or behave as ‘proletarians’, or find the organizations and modes of action of the movement applicable or relevant to them. They saw themselves as belonging to the eternal category of the poor, the outcast, the unlucky or the marginal. If they were immigrants into the big city from the countryside or some foreign region, they might live in a ghetto which could overlap with the working-class slum, but was more likely to be dominated by the street, the market, the innumerable petty ways, legal or non-legal, in which poor families kept body and soul together, only some of which were in any real sense wage-work. What counted for them was not union or class-party, but neighbours, family, patrons who could do favours or provide jobs, otherwise avoiding rather than pressuring public authorities, priests, people from the same place in the old country, anybody and anything that made life in a new and unknown environment possible. If they belonged to the old urban inner-city plebs, the admiration of anarchists for their underworlds and half-worlds would not make them more proletarian or political. The world of Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago (1896) or of Aristide Bruant’s song Belleville-Mtnilmontant is not that of class consciousness, except insofar as the sense of resentment against the rich is shared by both. The ironic, shoulder-shrugging, accepting, utterly a-political world of English music-hall song,* which had its golden age in these years, is closer to that of the conscious working class, but its themes – mothers-in-law, wives, no money for the rent – belonged to any com-munity of nineteenth-century urban underdogs.

We should not forget these worlds. In fact, they are not forgotten because, paradoxically, they attracted the artists of the time more than the respectable and monochrome and especially the provincial world of the classical proletariat. But neither should we counterpose it to the proletarian world. The culture of the plebeian poor, even the world of the traditional outcasts, shaded over into that of class consciousness where both coexisted. Both recognized one another, and where class consciousness and its movement were strong, as in, say, Berlin or the great sea-port of Hamburg, the pre-industrial miscellaneous world of poverty fitted into it, and even the pimps, thieves and fences would pay their respects to it. They had nothing independent to contribute to it, though anarchists thought differently. They certainly lacked the

* As Gus Elen sang:

With a ladder and some glasses

You could see the Hackney Marshes

If it wasn’t for the houses in between.

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permanent militancy, let alone the commitment, of the activist – but so, as every activist knew, did the great bulk of ordinary working-class people anywhere. There is no end to the complaints of the militants about this dead weight of passivity and scepticism. Insofar as a conscious working class, which found expression in its movement and party, was emerging in this period, the pre-industrial plebs were drawn into its sphere of influence. And insofar as they were not, they must be left out of history, because they were not its makers but its victims.

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CHAPTER 6

WAVING FLAGS: NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

‘Scappa, che arriva la patria’ (Run away, the fatherland is coming).

Italian peasant woman to her son¹

Their language has become complex, because now they read. They read book or at any rate they learn to read out of books. … The word and the idiom of the literary language tend and the pronunciation suggested by its spelling tends t prevail over the local usage.

H.G.Wells, 1901²

Nationalism … attacks democracy, demolishes anti-clericalism,fightssocialism and undermines pacifism, humanitarianism and internationalism. … It declare the programme of liberalism finished.

Alfredo Rocco, 1914³

I

If the rise of working-class parties was one major by-product of the politics of democratization, the rise of nationalism in politics was another. In itself it was plainly not new (see The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital). Yet in the period from 1880 to 1914 nationalism took a dramatic leap forward, and its ideological and political content was transformed. Its very vocabulary indicates the significance of these years. For the word ‘nationalism’ itself first appeared at the end of the nineteenth century to describe groups of right-wing ideologists in France and Italy, keen to brandish the national flag against foreigners, liberals and socialists and in favour of that aggressive expansion of their own state which was to become so characteristic of such movements. This was also the period when the song ‘Deutschland l)ber Alles’ (Germany above all others) replaced rival compositions to become the actual national anthem of Germany. Though it originally described

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only a right-wing version of the phenomenon, the word ‘nationalism’ proved to be more convenient than the clumsy ‘principle of nationality’ which had been part of the vocabulary of European politics since about 1830, and so it came to be used also for all movements to whom the ‘national cause’ was paramount in politics: that is to say for all demand-ing the right to self-determination, i.e. in the last analysis to form an independent state, for some nationally defined group. For the number of such movements, or at least of leaders claiming to speak for such movements, and their political significance, increased strikingly in our period.

The basis of’nationalism’ of all kinds was the same: the readiness of people to identify themselves emotionally with ‘their’ nation’ and to be politically mobilized as Czechs, Germans, Italians or whatever, a readiness which could be politically exploited. The democratization of politics, and especially elections, provided ample opportunities for mobilizing them. When states did so they called it ‘patriotism’, and the essence of the original ‘right-wing’ nationalism, which emerged in already established nation-states, was to claim a monopoly of patriotism for the extreme political right, and thereby brand everyone else as some sort of traitor. This was a new phenomenon, for during most of the nineteenth century nationalism had been rather identified with liberal and radical movements and with the tradition of the French Revolution. But elsewhere nationalism had no necessary identification with any colour in the political spectrum. Among the national movements still lacking their own states we shall encounter those identifying with the right or the left, or indifferent to either. And indeed, as we have suggested, there were movements, and not the least powerful, which mobilized men and women on a national basis, but, as it were, by accident, since their primary appeal was for social liberation. For while in this period national identification clearly was or became a major factor in the politics of states, it is quite mistaken to see the national appeal as incompatible with any other. Nationalist politicians and their opponents naturally liked to suggest that one kind of appeal excluded the other, as wearing one hat excludes wearing another at the same time. But, as a matter of history, and observation, this is not so. In our period it was perfectly possible to become simultaneously a class-conscious Marxian revolutionary and an Irish patriot, like James Con-nolly, who was to be executed in 1916 for leading the Easter Rising in Dublin.

But of course, insofar as parties in the countries of mass politics competed for the same body of supporters, these had to make mutually exclusive choices.

The new working-class movements, appealing to their potential constituency on grounds of class identification, soon realized this, insofar

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as they found themselves competing, as was usually the case in multi-national regions, against parties which asked proletarians and poten-tial socialists to support them as Czechs, Poles or Slovenes. Hence their preoccupation as soon as they actually became mass movements, with ‘the national question’. That virtually every Marxist theorist of import-ance, from Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, via the Austro-Marxists, to Lenin and the young Stalin, took part in the impassioned debates on this subject during this period, suggests the urgency and centrality of this problem.⁴

Where national identification became a political force, it therefore formed a sort of general substratum of politics. This makes its multi-farious expressions extremely difficult to define, even when they claimed to be specifically nationalist or patriotic. As we shall see, national identification almost certainly became more widespread in our period, and the significance of the national appeal in politics grew. However, what was almost certainly more important was a major set of mutations within political nationalism, which was to have profound consequences for the twentieth century.

Four aspects of this mutation must be mentioned. The first, as we have already seen, is the emergence of nationalism and patriotism as an ideology taken over by the political right. This was to find its extreme expression between the wars in fascism, whose ideological ancestors are to be found here. The second is the assumption, quite foreign to the liberal phase of national movements, that national self-determination up to and including the formation of independent sovereign states applied not just to some nations which could demonstrate economic, political and cultural viability, but to any and all groups which claimed to be a ‘nation’. The difference between the old and the new assumption is illustrated by the difference between the twelve rather large entities envisaged as constituting ‘the Europe of nations’ by Giuseppe Mazzini, the great prophet of nineteenth-century nationalism, in 1857 (see The Age of Capital, chapter 5, 1), and the twenty-six states – twenty-seven ifwe include Ireland – which emerged from President Wilson’s principle of national self-determination at the end of the First World War. The third was the growing tendency to assume that ‘national self-determination’ could not be satisfied by any form of autonomy less than full state independence. For most of the nineteenth century, the majority of demands for autonomy had not envisaged this. Finally, there was the novel tendency to define a nation in terms of ethnicity and especially in terms of language.

Before the middle 1870s there had been states, mainly in the western half of Europe, which saw themselves as representing ‘nations’ (e.g. France, Britain or the new Germany and Italy), and states which,

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though based on some other political principle, were regarded as repre-senting the main body of their inhabitants on grounds which could be thought of as something like national (this was true of the tsars, who certainly enjoyed the loyalty of the Great Russian people as both Russian and Orthodox rulers). Outside the Habsburg Empire and perhaps the Ottoman Empire, the numerous nationalities within the established states did not constitute much of a political problem, especially once a German and an Italian state had been established. There were, of course, the Poles, divided between Russia, Germany and Austria but never losing sight of the restoration of an independent Poland. There were, within the United Kingdom, the Irish. There were various chunks of nationalities which, for one reason or another, found themselves outside the frontiers of the relevant nation-state to which they would much have preferred to belong, though only some created political problems, e.g. the inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany in 1871. (Nice and Savoy, handed over by what was to become Italy to France in i860, showed no marked signs of discontent.)

There is no doubt that the number of nationalist movements increased considerably in Europe from the 1870s, though in fact much fewer new national states were established in Europe in the last forty years before the First World War than in the forty years preceding the formation of the German Empire, and those established were not very significant: Bulgaria (1878), Norway (1907), Albania (1913).* There were now ‘national movements’ not only among peoples hitherto con-sidered ‘unhistorical’ (i.e. who had never previously possessed an inde-pendent state, ruling class or cultural elite), such as Finns and Slovaks, but among peoples about whom hardly anybody except folklore enthusiasts had previously thought at all, such as Estonians and Mace-donians. And within long-established nation-states regional populations now began to mobilize politically as ‘nations’; this happened in Wales, where a Young Wales movement was organized in the 1890s under the leadership of a local lawyer of whom much more was to be heard in future, David Lloyd George, and in Spain, where a Basque National Party was formed in 1894. And about the same time Theodor Herzl launched Zionism among the Jews, to whom the sort of nationalism it represented had hitherto been unknown and meaningless.

Many of these movements did not yet have much support among the people for whom they claimed to speak, though mass emigration now gave many more members of backward communities the powerful incentive of nostalgia to identify with what they had left behind,

*The states established or internationally recognized in 1830-71 included Germany, Italy, Belgium, Greece, Serbia and Rumania. The so-called ‘Compromise’ of 1867 also amounted to the grant of very far-reaching autonomy by the Habsburg Empire to Hungary.

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and opened their minds to new political ideas. Nevertheless, mass identification with a ‘nation’ almost certainly grew, and the political problem of nationalism probably became more difficult to manage for both states and non-nationalist competitors. Probably most observers of the European scene in the early 1870s felt that, after the period of Italian and German unification and the Austro-Hungarian compro-mise, the ‘principle of nationality’ was likely to be less explosive than it had been. Even the Austrian authorities, asked to include a question on language in their censuses (a step recommended by the International Statistical Congress of 1873), though unenthusiastic, did not say no. However, they thought, one had to give time for the hot national tempers of the past ten years to cool down. They thought they could safely assume that this would have happened by the census of 1880. They could not have been more spectacularly mistaken.⁵

However, what proved to be significant in the long run was not so much the degree of support for the national cause achieved at the time among this or that people, as the transformation of the definition and programme of nationalism. We are now so used to an ethnic-linguistic definition of nations that we forget that this was, essentially, invented in the later nineteenth century. Without going at length into the matter, it is enough to recall that the ideologists of the Irish movement did not begin to tie the cause of the Irish nation to the defence of the Gaelic language until some time after the foundation of the Gaelic League in 1893; that the Basques did not base their national claims on their language (as distinct from their historic fueros or constitutional privi-leges) until the same period; that the impassioned debates about whether Macedonian is more like Bulgarian than it is like Serbo-Croat were among the last arguments used to decide which of those two people they should unite with. As for the Zionist Jews, they went one better by identifying the Jewish nation with Hebrew, a language which no Jews had used for ordinary purposes since the days of the Babylonian captivity, if then. It had just (1880) been invented as a language for everyday use – as distinct from a sacred and ritual tongue or a learned lingua franca – by a man who began the process of providing it with a suitable vocabulary by inventing a Hebrew term for ‘nationalism’, and it was learned as a badge of Zionist commitment rather than as a means for communication.

This does not mean that language had previously been unimportant as a national issue. It was one criterion of nationality among several others; and, in general, the less prominent it was, the stronger was the identification of the masses of a people with its collectivity. Language was not an ideological battleground for those who merely talked it, if only because the exercise of control over what language mothers talked

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with children, husbands with wives, and neighbours with each other, was virtually impossible. The language which most Jews actually spoke, namely Yiddish, had virtually no ideological dimension until the non-Zionist left took it up, nor did most Jews who spoke it mind that many authorities (including those of the Habsburg Empire) refused even to accept it as a separate language. Millions chose to become members of the American nation, which obviously had no single ethnic basis, and learned English as a matter of necessity or convenience, without reading any essential element of a national soul or a national continuity into their efforts to speak the language. Linguistic nationalism was the creation of people who wrote and read, not of people who spoke. And the ‘national languages’ in which they discovered the essential character of their nations were, more often than not, artefacts, since they had to be compiled, standardized, homogenized and modernized for con-temporary and literary use, out of the jigsaw puzzle of local or regional dialects which constituted non-literary languages as actually spoken. The major written national languages of old nation-states or literate cultures had gone through this phase of compilation and ‘correction’ long since: German and Russian in the eighteenth, French and English in the seventeenth century, Italian and Castilian even earlier. For most languages of smaller linguistic groups the nineteenth century was the period of the great ‘authorities’ who established the vocabulary and ‘correct’ usage of their idiom. For several – Catalan, Basque, the Baltic languages – it was the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Written languages are closely, though not necessarily, linked with territories and institutions. The nationalism which established itself as the standard version of the national ideology and programme was essentially territorial, since its basic model was the territorial state of the French Revolution, or at any rate the nearest thing to complete political control over a clearly defined territory and its inhabitants which was available in practice. Once again Zionism provides the extreme example, just because it was so clearly a borrowed programme which had no precedent in, or organic connection with, the actual tradition which had given the Jewish people permanence, cohesion and an indestructible identity for some millennia. It asked them to acquire a territory (inhabited by another people) – for Herzl it was not even necessary that that territory should have any historic connection with the Jews – as well as a language they had not spoken for millennia.

The identification of nations with an exclusive territory created such problems over large areas of the world of mass migration, and even of the non-migratory world, that an alternative definition of nationality was developed, notably in the Habsburg Empire and among the Jewish diaspora. It was here seen as inherent, not in a particular piece of the

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map to which a body’of inhabitants were attached, but in the members of such bodies of men and women as considered themselves to belong to a nationality, wherever they happened to live. As such members, they would enjoy ‘cultural autonomy’. Supporters of the geographical and human theories of’the nation’ were locked in embittered argument, notably in the international socialist movement and between Zionists and Bundists among the Jews. Neither theory was particularly sat-isfactory, though the human theory was more harmless. At all events it did not lead its supporters to create a territory first and squeeze its inhabitants into the right national shape afterwards: or, in the words of Pilsudski, the leader of the newly independent Poland after 1918: ‘It is the state which makes the nation and not the nation the state.’⁶

As a matter of sociology, the non-territorialists were almost certainly right. Not that men and women – give or take a few nomadic or diaspora peoples – were not deeply attached to some piece of land they called ‘home’, especially considering that for most of history the great majority of them belonged to that most rooted part of humanity, those who live by agriculture. But that ‘home territory’ was no more like the territory of the modern nation than the word ‘father’ in the modern term ‘fatherland’ was like a real parent. The ‘homeland’ was the locus of a real community of human beings with real social relations with each other, not the imaginary community which creates some sort of bond between members of a population of tens – today even of hun-dreds – of millions. Vocabulary itself proves this. In Spanish patria did not become coterminous with Spain until late in the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth it still meant simply the place or town where a person was born.⁷ Paese in Italian (‘country’) and pueblo in Spanish (‘people’) can and do still mean a village as well as the national territory or its inhabitants.* Nationalism and the state took over the associations of kin, neighbours and home ground, for territories and populations of a size and scale which turned them into metaphors.

But, of course, with the decline of the real communities to which people had been used – village and kin, parish and barrio, gild, con-fraternity or whatever – a decline which occurred because they clearly no longer encompassed, as they once had done, most contingencies of people’s lives, their members felt a need for something to take their place. The imaginary community of’the nation’ could fill this void.

It found itself attached, and inevitably so, to that characteristic phenomenon of the nineteenth century, the ‘nation-state’. For as a matter of politics, Pilsudski was right. The state not only made the

* The force of the German television serial Heimal lay precisely in marrying the characters’ experience of the ‘little fatherland’ {to use the Spanish term) – the Hunsriick mountain – to their experience of the ‘big fatherland’, Germany.

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WAVING  FLAGS: NATIONS AND  NATIONALISM

nation, but needed to make the nation. Governments now reached down directly to each citizen on their territory in everyday life, through modest but omnipresent agents, from postmen and policemen to teach-ers and (in many countries) railway employees. They might require his, and eventually even her, active personal commitment to the state: in fact their ‘patriotism’. Authorities in an increasingly democratic age, who could no longer rely on the social orders submitting spontaneously to their social superiors in the traditional manner, or on traditional religion as an effective guarantee of social obedience, needed a way of welding together the state’s subjects against subversion and dissidence. ‘The nation’ was the new civic religion of states. It provided a cement which bonded all citizens to their state, a way to bring the nation-state directly to each citizen, and a counterweight to those who appealed to other loyalties over state loyalty – to religion, to nationality or ethnicity not identified with the state, perhaps above all to class. In constitutional states, the more the masses were drawn into politics by elections, the more scope there was for such appeals to be heard.

Moreover, even non-constitutional states now learned to appreciate the political force of being able to appeal to their subjects on grounds of nationality (a sort of democratic appeal without the dangers of democracy), as well as on grounds of their duty to obey the authorities sanctioned by God. In the 1880s even the Russian tsar, faced with revolutionary agitations, began to apply the policy vainly suggested to his grandfather in the 1830s, namely to base his rule not only on the principles of autocracy and orthodoxy, but also on nationality: i.e. on appealing to Russians as Russians.⁸ Of course in one sense practically all nineteenth-century monarchs had to put on national fancy-dress, since hardly any of them were natives of the countries they ruled. The (mostly) German princes and princesses who became rulers or rulers’ consorts of Britain, Greece, Rumania, Russia, Bulgaria, or whatever other country needed crowned heads, paid their respect to the principle of nationality by turning themselves into Britons (like Queen Victoria) or Greeks (like Otto of Bavaria) or learning some other language which they spoke with an accent, even though they had far more in common with the other members of the international princes’ trade union – or rather family, since they were all related – than with their own subjects.

What made state nationalism even more essential was that both the economy of a technological era and the nature of its public and private administration required mass elementary education, or at least literacy. The nineteenth century was the era when oral communication broke down, as the distance between authorities and subjects increased, and mass migration put days or weeks of travel between even mothers and sons, bridegrooms and brides. From the state’s point of view, the school

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had a further and essential advantage: it could teach all children how to be good subjects and citizens. Until the triumph of television, there was no medium of secular propaganda to compare with the classroom.

Hence, in educational terms, the era from 1870 to 1914 was above all, in most European countries, the age of the primary school. Even in notoriously well-schooled countries the number of primary school teachers multiplied. It trebled in Sweden and rose almost as much in Norway. Relatively backward countries caught up. The number of primary school children in the Netherlands doubled; in the United Kingdom (which had had no public educational system before 1870) it trebled; in Finland it increased thirteenfold. Even in the illiterate Balkans the number of children in elementary schools quadrupled and the number of teachers almost trebled. But a national, i.e. an overwhelmingly state-organized and state-supervised, educational system required a national language of instruction. Education joined the law courts and bureaucracy (see The Age of Capital, chapter 5) as a force which made language into the primary condition of nationality.

States therefore created ‘nations’, i.e. national patriotism and, at least for certain purposes, linguistically and administratively homogenized citizens, with particular urgency and zeal. The French republic turned peasants into Frenchmen. The Italian kingdom, following D’Azeglio’s slogan (see The Age of Capital, chapter 5, 11), did its best, with mixed success, to ‘make Italians’ through school and military service, after having ‘made Italy’. The USA made a knowledge of English a condition for American citizenship and, from the end of the 1880s on, began to introduce actual worship under the new civic religion – the only one permitted under an agnostic constitution – in the form of a daily ritual of homage to the flag in every American school. The Hungarian state did its best to turn all its multinational inhabitants into Magyars; the Russian state pressed the russification of its lesser nationalities – i.e. it tried to give Russian the monopoly of education. And where multi-nationality was sufficiently recognized to permit elementary or even secondary education in some other vernacular (as in the Habsburg Empire), the state language inevitably enjoyed a decisive advantage at the highest levels of the system. Hence the significance, for non-state nationalities, of the struggle for a university of their own, as in Bohemia, Wales or Flanders.

For state nationalism, real or (as in the case of the monarchs) invented for convenience, was a double-edged strategy. As it mobilized some inhabitants, it alienated others – those who did not belong, or wish to belong, to the nation identified with the state. In short, it helped to define the nationalities excluded from the official nationality by separating out those communities which, for whatever reason, resisted

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the official public language and ideology.

II

But why should some have resisted, where so many others did not? After all, there were quite substantial advantages for peasants – and even more for their children – in becoming Frenchmen, or indeed for anyone who acquired a major language of culture and professional advancement in addition to their own dialect or vernacular. In 1910 70 per cent of German immigrants to the USA, who arrived there, on average after 1900, with $41 in their pockets,⁹ had become English-speaking American citizens, though they had plainly no intention of ceasing to speak and feel German.¹⁰ (To be fair, few states really tried to stop the private life of a minority language and culture, so long as it did not challenge the public supremacy of the official state-nation.) It might well be that the unofficial language could not effectively compete with the official one, except for purposes of religion, poetry and community or family sentiment. Hard though it may be to believe today, there were passionately national Welshmen who accepted a lesser place for their ancient Celtic tongue in the century of progress, and some who envisaged an eventual natural euthanasia* for it. There were, indeed, many who chose to migrate not from one territory but from one class to another; a voyage which was apt to mean a change of nation or at least a change of language. Central Europe became full of German nationalists with obviously Slav names, and Magyars whose names were literal translations of German or adaptations of Slovak ones. The American nation and English language were not the only ones which, in the era of liberalism and mobility, issued a more or less open invitation for membership. And there were plenty who were happy to accept such invitations, all the more so when they were not actually expected to deny their origins by doing so. ‘Assimilation’ for most of the nineteenth century was far from a bad word: it was what vast numbers of people hoped to achieve, especially among those who wanted to join the middle classes.

One obvious reason why members of some nationalities refused to ‘assimilate’ was because they were not allowed to become full members of the official nation. The extreme case is that of the native elites in European colonies, educated in the language and culture of their masters so that they could administer the colonials on the Europeans’ behalf, but patently not treated as their equals. Here a conflict was

* The term is actually used by a Welsh witness to the 1847 parliamentary committee on Welsh education.

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bound to erupt sooner or later, all the more so since western education actually provided a specific language for articulating their claims. Why, wrote an Indonesian intellectual in 1913 (in Dutch), should Indonesians be expected to celebrate the centenary of the liberation of the Nether-lands from Napoleon? If he were a Dutchman, ‘I would not organise an independence celebration in a country where the independence of the people has been stolen.'”

Colonial peoples were an extreme case, since it was clear from the outset that, given the pervasive racism of bourgeois society, no amount of assimilation would turn men with dark skins into ‘real’ Englishmen, Belgians or Dutchmen, even if they had as much money and noble blood and as much taste for sports as the European nobility – as was the case with many an Indian rajah educated in Britain. And yet, even within the zone of white skins, there was a striking contradiction between the offer of unlimited assimilation to anyone who proved his

or her willingness and ability to join the state-nation and the	rejection
of some groups in practice. This was particularly dramatic	for those

who had hitherto assumed, on highly plausible grounds, that there were no limits to what assimilation could achieve: the middle-class, westernized, cultivated Jews. That is why the Dreyfus case in France, the victimization of a single French staff officer for being Jewish, produced so disproportionate a reaction of horror – not only among Jews but among all liberals – and led directly to the establishment of Zionism, a territorial state nationalism for Jews.

The half-century before 1914 was a classic era of xenophobia, and therefore of nationalist reaction to it, because – even leaving aside global colonialism – it was an era of massive mobility and migration and, especially during the Depression decades, of open or concealed social tension. To take a single example: by 1914 something like 3.6 millions (or almost 15 per cent of the population) had permanently left the territory of inter-war Poland, not counting another half-million a year of seasonal migrants.¹² The consequent xenophobia did not only come from below. Its most unexpected manifestations, which reflected the crisis of bourgeois liberalism, came from the established middle classes, who were not likely actually ever to meet the sort of people who settled on New York’s Lower East Side or who lived in the harvest-labourers’ barracks in Saxony. Max Weber, glory of open-minded German bourgeois scholarship, developed so passionate an animus against the Poles (whom he, correctly, accused German landowners of importing en masse as cheap labour) that he actually joined the ultra-nationalist Pan-German League in the 1890s.¹³ The real systematization of race-prejudice against ‘Slavs, Mediterraneans and Semites’ in the USA is to be found among the native white, preferably

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Protestant anglophone-born middle and upper classes, which even, in this period, invented their own heroic nativist myth of the white Anglo-Saxon (and fortunately non-unionized) cowboy of the wide open spaces, so different from the dangerous antheaps of the swelling great cities. * In fact, for this bourgeoisie the influx of the alien poor dramatized and symbolized the problems raised by the expanding urban  proletariat, combining  as they did  the characteristics  of internal  and  external ‘barbarians’, which threatened  to swamp civilization  as respectable men knew it (see p. 35 above). They also dramatized, nowhere more than in the USA, the apparent inability of society to cope with the problems of headlong change, and the unpardonable failure of the new masses  to accept  the superior  position  of the old elites. It  was in Boston, the centre of the traditional white, Anglo-Saxon,  Protestant bourgeoisie, both educated and wealthy, that the Immigration Restric-tion League was founded  in 1893. Politically the xenophobia of the middle classes was almost certainly more effective than the xenophobia of the labouring classes, which  reflected  cultural  frictions  between neighbours and the fear of low-wage competition for jobs. Except in one respect.  It was sectional working-class pressure which  actually excluded foreigners from labour markets, since for employers the incen-tive to import cheap labour was almost irresistible. Where exclusion kept the stranger out entirely, as did the bans on non-white immigrants in California and Australia, which triumphed in the 1880s and 1890s, this produced  no national or communal  friction,  but where it dis-criminated against a group already on the spot, such as Africans in white South Africa or Catholics in Northern Ireland, it was naturally apt  to do so. However,  working-class xenophobia  was rarely  very effective before 1914. All things considered, the greatest international migration of people in history produced surprisingly little by way of anti-foreign labour agitations even in the USA, and sometimes virtually

none, as in Argentina and Brazil.

Nevertheless, bodies of immigrants into foreign countries were very likely to discover national sentiments, whether or not they were met by local xenophobia. Poles and Slovaks would become conscious of themselves as such, not only because once they left their home villages they could no longer take themselves for granted as people who did not require any definition, and not only because the states they moved to imposed some new definition on them, classifying people who had hitherto thought of themselves as Sicilians or Neapolitans, or even as

* The three members of the north-eastern elite who are chiefly responsible for this myth (which, incidentally, extruded the people chiefly responsible for the cowboy culture and vocabulary, the Mexicans) were Owen Wister (author of The Virginian, 1902), the painter Frederick Remington (1861-1909;) and the later President, Theodore Roosevelt.¹⁴

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natives of Lucca or Salerno, as ‘Italians’ on arrival in the USA. They needed their community for mutual aid. From whom could migrants into new, strange, unknown lives expect help except kin and friends, people from the old country? (Even regional migrants within the same country would usually stick together.) Who could even understand him or, more to the point, her – for women’s domestic sphere left them more monoglot than men? Who could give them shape as a community rather than a mere heap of foreigners, except, in the first instance, some body like their Church which, even though in theory universal, was in practice national, because its priests came from the same people as their congregations and Slovak priests had to talk Slovak to them, whatever the language in which they celebrated the mass? In this manner ‘nation-ality’ became a real network of personal relations rather than a merely imaginary community, simply because, far from home, every Slovene actually had a potential personal connection with every other Slovene when they met.

Moreover, if such populations were to be organized in any manner for the purpose of the new societies in which they found themselves, it had to be done in ways which allowed communication. Labour and socialist movements, as we have seen, were internationalist, and even dreamed, as liberals had done [The Age of Capital, chapter 3, i, iv), of a future in which all would talk a single world language – a dream still surviving in small groups of Esperantists. Eventually, as Kautsky still hoped in 1908, the entire body of educated humanity would be fused into a single language and nationality.¹⁵ Yet in the meantime they faced the problem of the Tower of Babel: unions in Hungarian factories might have to issue strike-calls in four different languages.¹⁶ They soon discovered that nationally mixed branches did not work well, unless members were already bilingual. International movements of labouring people had to be combinations of national or linguistic units. In the USA the party which in effect became the workers’ mass party, the Democrats, necessarily developed as an ‘ethnic’ coalition.

The greater the migration of peoples and the more rapid the develop-ment of cities and industry which threw-uprooted masses against each other, the greater the basis for national consciousness among the uprooted. Hence, in the case of new national movements, exile was often their main place of incubation. When the future President Masaryk signed the agreement which was to create a state uniting Czechs and Slovaks (Czechoslovakia) he did so in Pittsburgh, for the mass basis of an organized Slovak nationalism was to be found in Pennsylvania rather than in Slovakia. As for the backward mountain peoples of the Carpathians known in Austria as Ruthenes, who were also to be joined to Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1945, their nationalism

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had no organized expression whatever except among emigrants to the USA.

The mutual aid and protection of emigrants may have contributed to the growth of nationalism in their nations, but is not enough to explain it. However, insofar as it rested on an ambiguous and double-edged nostalgia for the old ways emigrants had left behind, it had something in common with a force which undoubtedly fostered nationalism at home, especially in the smaller nations. This was neo-traditionalism, a defensive or conservative reaction against the dis-ruption of the old social order by the advancing epidemic of modernity, capitalism, cities and industry, not forgetting the proletarian socialism which was their logical outcome.

The traditionalist element is obvious enough in the support of the Catholic Church for such movements as Basque and Flemish national-ism, or indeed many nationalisms of small peoples which were, almost by definition, rejected by liberal nationalism as incapable of forming viable nation-states. The right-wing ideologues who now multiplied also tended to develop a taste for traditionally rooted cultural region-alism such as the Yrovenqai filibrige. In fact, the ideological ancestors of most of the separatist-regionalist movements in late-twentieth-century western Europe (Breton, Welsh, Occitan, etc.) are to be found on the pre-1914 intellectual right. Conversely, among these small peoples neither the bourgeoisies nor the new proletariat usually found mini-nationalism to their taste. In Wales the rise of Labour undermined the Young Wales nationalism which had threatened to take over the Liberal Party. As for the new industrial bourgeoisie, it could be expected to prefer the market of a large nation or world to the provincial con-striction of a small country or region. Neither in Russian Poland nor in the Basque country, two disproportionately industrialized regions of larger states, did indigenous capitalists show enthusiasm for the national cause, and the demonstratively franco-centred bourgeoisie of Ghent was a permanent provocation to Flemish nationalists. Though this lack of interest was not quite universal, it was strong enough to mislead Rosa Luxemburg into supposing that there was no bourgeois base for Polish nationalism.

But, even more frustrating to traditionalist nationalists, the most traditionalist of all classes, the peasantry, also showed only a faint interest in nationalism. The Basque-speaking peasants showed little enthusiasm for the Basque National Party, founded in 1894 to defend all that was ancient against the incursion of Spaniards and godless workers. Like most other such movements, it was primarily an urban middle- and lower-middle-class body.¹⁷

In fact,  the advance of nationalism in our period  was largely  a

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phenomenon carried by these middle strata of society. Hence there is much point to the contemporary socialists who called it ‘petty-bour-geois’. And its connection with these strata helps to explain the three novel characteristics we have already observed: its shifts to linguistic militancy, to a demand for independent states rather than lesser kinds of autonomy, and to the political right and ultra-right.

For the lower-middle classes rising from a popular background, career and vernacular language were inseparably welded together. From the moment that society rested on mass literacy, a spoken lan-guage had to be in some sense official – a medium of bureaucracy and instruction – if it was not to sink into the half-world of purely oral communication ocasionally dignified with the status of an exhibit in a folklore museum. Mass, i.e. primary, education was the crucial develop-ment, since it was possible only in a language which the bulk of the population could be expected to understand.* Education in a totally foreign language, alive or dead, is possible only for a select and some-times exiguous minority which can afford the considerable time, expense and effort to acquire sufficient command of it. Bureaucracy, again, was a crucial element, both because it decided the official status of a language and because, in most countries, it provided the largest body of employment requiring literacy. Hence the endless petty strug-gles which disrupted the politics of the Habsburg Empire from the 1890s, about the language in which street signs were to be written in

areas of mixed nationality, and about such matters as the nationality

of particular assistant postmasters or railway station masters.

But only political power could transform the status of lesser languages or dialects (which, as everyone knows, are just languages without an army and police force). Hence the pressures and counter-pressures behind the elaborate linguistic censuses of the period (e.g., most notably, those of Belgium and Austria in 1910), on which the political claims of this or that idiom depended. And hence, at least in part, the political mobilization of nationalists for language at the very moment when, as in Belgium, the number of bilingual Flemings grew very strikingly or, as in the Basque country, the use of the Basque language was virtually dying out in the rapidly growing cities.¹⁸ For political pressure alone could win a place for what were in practice ‘uncompetitive’ languages as a medium of education or written public communication. This, and

* The prohibition of the use of Welsh, or some local language or patois in the classroom, which left such traumatic traces in the memories oflocal scholars and intellectuals, was due not to some kind of totalitarian claims by the dominant state-nation, but almost certainly to the sincere belief that no adequate education was possible except in the state language, and that the person who remained a monoglot would inevitably be handicapped as a citizen and in his or her professional prospects.

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this alone, made Belgium officially bilingual (1870) and Flemish a compulsory subject in the secondary schools of Flanders (as late as 1883). But once the unofficial language had thus won official standing, it automatically created a substantial political constituency of vernacular literates for itself. The 4.8 million pupils in the primary and secondary schools of Habsburg Austria in 1912 obviously contained a great many more potential and actual nationalists than the 2.2 millions of 1874, not to mention the 100,000 or so extra teachers who now instructed them in various rival languages.

And yet in multilingual societies those educated in the vernacular, and able to use this education for professional advancement, probably still felt themselves to be inferior and unprivileged. For while they were in practice at an advantage in competing for the lesser jobs, because they were much more likely to be bilingual than the snobs of the elite language, they might justifiably feel that they were at a disadvantage in the search for the top jobs. Hence the pressure to extend vernacular teaching from primary to secondary education, and eventually to the crown of a full educational system, the vernacular university. In both Wales and Flanders the demand for such a university was intensely, and exclusively, political for this reason. In fact in Wales the national university (1893) actually became for a while the first and only national institution of a people whose small country had no administrative or other existence distinct from England. Those whose first language was an unofficial vernacular would almost certainly still be excluded from the higher ranges of culture and private or public affairs, unless as speakers of the official and superior idiom in which they would certainly be conducted. In short, the very fact that new lower-middle and even middle classes had been educated in Slovene or Flemish emphasized that the major prizes and the top status still went to those who spoke French or German, even if they did not bother to learn the lesser language.

Yet more political pressure was needed to overcome this built-in handicap. In fact, what was needed was political power. To put it bluntly, people had to be compelled to use the vernacular for purposes for which they would normally have found it preferable to use another language. Hungary insisted on magyarized schooling, even though every educated Hungarian, then as now, knew perfectly well that a knowledge of at least one internationally current language was essential for all except the most subaltern functions in Hungarian society. Com-pulsion, or government pressure amounting to it, was the price paid for turning Magyar into a literary language which could serve all modern purposes in its own territory, even if nobody could understand a word of it outside. Political power alone – in the last analysis state

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power – could hope to achieve such results. Nationalists, especially those whose livelihood and career prospects were tied up with their language, were unlikely to ask whether there were other ways in which languages might develop and flourish.

To this extent linguistic nationalism had a built-in bias towards secession. And, conversely, the call for an independent state territory seemed increasingly inseparable from language, so that we find the official commitment to Gaelic entering Irish nationalism (in the 1890s) even though – perhaps actually because – most of the Irish were quite satisfied to speak only English, and Zionism invented Hebrew as an everyday language, because no other language of the Jews committed them to the construction of a territorial state. There is room for inter-esting reflections about the varied fate of such essentially political efforts at linguistic engineering, for some were to fail (like the reconversion of the Irish to Gaelic) or half-fail (like the construction of a more Norweg-ian Norwegian – Nynorsk), while others were to succeed. However, before 1914 they generally lacked the required state power. In 1916 the number of actual everyday speakers of Hebrew was no more than

16,000.

But nationalism was linked to the middle strata in another way, which gave both it and them a twist towards the political right. Xenophobia appealed readily to traders, independent craftsmen and some farmers threatened by the progress of the industrial economy, especially, once again, during the hard-pressed years of the Depression. The foreigner came to symbolize the disruption of old ways and the capitalist system which disrupted them. Thus the virulent political anti-Semitism which we have observed spreading across the western world from the 1880s had little to do with the actual number of Jews against whom it was directed: it was as effective in France, where there were 60,000 among 40 millions, in Germany where there were half a million among 65 millions, as in Vienna where they formed 15 per cent of the population. (It was not a political factor in Budapest, where they formed a quarter of it). This anti-Semitism took aim rather against the bankers, entre-preneurs and others who were identified with the ravages of capitalism among the ‘little men’. The typical cartoon image of the capitalist in the belle ipoque was not just a fat man in a top hat smoking a cigar, but one with a Jewish nose – because the fields of enterprise in which Jews were prominent competed with small shopkeepers and gave or refused credit to farmers and small artisans.

Anti-Semitism, the German socialist leader Bebel therefore felt, was ‘the socialism of idiots’. Yet what strikes us about the rise of political anti-Semitism at the end of the century is not so much the equation ‘Jew = capitalist’, which was not implausible in large parts of east-

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central Europe, but its association with right-wing nationalism. This was not only due to the rise of socialist movements which systematically combated the latent or overt xenophobia of their supporters, so that a deeply rooted dislike of foreigners and Jews in those quarters tended to be rather more shamefaced than in the past. It marked a distinct shift of the nationalist ideology to the right in the major states, especially in the 1890s, when we can see, for instance, the old mass organizations of German nationalism, the Turner (gymnastic associations), veer from the liberalism inherited from the 1848 revolution to an aggressive, militarist and anti-Semitic posture. This is when the banners of patri-otism became so much a property of the political right that the left found trouble in grasping them, even where patriotism was as firmly identified with revolution and the cause of the people as was the French tricolour. To brandish the national name and flag, they felt, risked contamination from the ultra-right. Not until the days of Hitler did the French left recover the full use ofjacobin patriotism.

Patriotism shifted to the political right, not only because its former ideological stablemate, bourgeois liberalism, was in disarray, but because the international situation which had apparently made lib-eralism and nationalism compatible no longer held good. Up to the 1870s – perhaps even up to the Congress of Berlin of 1878 – it could be claimed that one nation-state’s gain was not necessarily another’s loss. Indeed, the map of Europe had been transformed by the creation of two major new nation-states (Germany and Italy) and the formation of several minor ones in the Balkans, without either war or intolerable disruption of the international state system. Until the Great Depression something very like global free trade, while perhaps benefiting Britain rather more than others, had been in the interest of all. Yet from the 1870s on such claims ceased to ring true, and as a global conflict came, once more, to be considered as a serious, if not an impending possibility, the sort of nationalism which saw other nations frankly as menace or victims gained ground.

It both bred and was encouraged by the movements of the political right which emerged out of the crisis of liberalism. Indeed the men who first called themselves by the novel name of ‘nationalists’ were frequently stimulated into political action by the experience of their state’s defeat in war, like Maurice Barres (1862-1923) and Paul Derou-lede (1846-1914.) after the German victory over France in 1870-1, and Enrico Corradini (1865—1931) after Italy’s even more galling defeat at the hands of Ethiopia in 1896. And the movements they founded, which brought the word ‘nationalism’ into the general dictionaries, were quite deliberately set up ‘in reaction against the democracy then in government’, i.e. against parliamentary politics.¹⁹ The French move-

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merits of this kind remained marginal, like the Action Francaise (est. 1898) which lost itself in a politically irrelevant monarchism and in vituperative prose. The Italian ones eventually merged with fascism after the First World War. They were characteristic of a new breed of political movements built on chauvinism, xenophobia and, increas-ingly, the idealization of national expansion, conquest and the very act of war.

Such nationalism lent itself exceptionally well to expressing the col-lective resentments of people who could not explain their discontents precisely. It was the foreigners’ fault. The Dreyfus case gave French anti-Semitism a special edge, not only because the accused was a Jew (what business had an alien in the French general staff?) but because his alleged crime was espionage on behalf of Germany. Conversely, the blood of’good’ Germans curdled at the thought that their country was being systematically ‘encircled’ by the alliance of its enemies, as their leaders frequently reminded them. Meanwhile the English were getting ready to celebrate the outbreak of the world war (like other belligerent peoples) by an outburst of anti-alien hysteria which made it advisable to change the German family name of the royal dynasty to the Anglo-Saxon ‘Windsor’. No doubt every native citizen, apart from a minority of internationalist socialists, a few intellectuals, cosmopolitan busi-nessmen and the members of the international club of aristocrats and royals, felt the appeal of chauvinism to some extent. No doubt almost all, including even many socialists and intellectuals, were so deeply imbued with the fundamental racism of nineteenth-century civilization (see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, n, and pp. 253-4 below) that they were also indirectly vulnerable to the temptations which come from believing one’s own class or people to have a built-in natural superiority over others. Imperialism could not but reinforce these temptations among members of imperial states. Yet there is little doubt that those who responded most eagerly to the nationalist bugles were to be found somewhere between the established upper classes of society and the peasants and proletarians at the bottom.

For this widening body of middle strata, nationalism also had a wider and less instrumental appeal. It provided them with a collective identity as the ‘true defenders’ of the nation which eluded them as a class, or as aspirants to the full bourgeois status they so much coveted. Patriotism compensated for social inferiority. Thus in Britain, where there was no compulsory military service, the curve of volunteer recruitment of working-class soldiers in the imperialist South African War (1899-1902) simply reflects the economic situation. It rose and fell with unemployment. But the curve of recruitment for lower-middle-class and white-collar youths clearly reflected the appeals of patriotic propa-

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ganda. And, in a sense, patriotism in uniform could bring its social rewards. In Germany it provided the potential status as reserve officer for boys who had undergone secondary education to the age of sixteen, even if they went no further. In Britain, as the war was to show, even clerks and salesmen in the service of the nation could become officers and – in the brutally frank terminology of the British upper class – ‘temporary gentlemen’.

I l l

Yet, nationalism between the 1870s and 1914 cannot be confined to the kind of ideology which appealed to the frustrated middle classes or the anti-liberal (and anti-socialist) ancestors of fascism. For it is beyond question that in this period governments and parties or movements which could make, or imply, a national appeal were likely to enjoy an extra advantage; and conversely those which could not or would not were to some extent handicapped. It is quite undeniable that the outbreak of war in 1914 produced genuine, if sometimes shortlived, outbursts of mass patriotism in the main belligerent countries. And in multinational states working-class movements organized on an all-state basis fought and lost a rearguard action against disintegration into separate movements based on the workers of each nationality. The labour and socialist movement of the Habsburg Empire thus fell apart before the empire itself did.

Nevertheless, there is a major difference between nationalism as an ideology of nationalist movements and flag-waving governments, and the broader appeal of nationality. The first did not look beyond the establishment or aggrandizement of ‘the nation’. Its programme was to resist, expel, defeat, conquer, subject or eliminate ‘the foreigner’. Anything else was unimportant. It was enough to assert the Irishness, Germanness or Croatianness of the Irish, German or Croatian people in an independent state of their own, belonging exclusively to them, to announce its glorious future and to make every sacrifice to achieve it.

It was this which, in practice, limited its appeal to a cadre of impassioned ideologists and militants, to shapeless middle classes searching for cohesion and self-justification, to such groups (again, mainly among the struggling ‘little men’) as could ascribe all their discontents to the damned foreigners – and, of course, to governments which welcomed an ideology which told citizens that patriotism was. enough.

But for most people nationalism alone was not enough. This is, paradoxically, most evident in the actual movements of nationalities

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which had not yet achieved self-determination. The national move-ments which gained genuine mass support in our period – and by no means all which wanted it had achieved it – were almost invariably those which combined the appeal of nationality and language with some more powerful interest or mobilizing force, ancient or modern. Religion was one. Without the Catholic Church the Flemish and Basque movements would have been politically negligible, and nobody doubts that Catholicism gave consistency and mass strength to the nationalism of Irish and Poles ruled by rulers of a different faith. In fact, during this period the nationalism of the Irish Fenians, originally a secular, indeed anti-clerical, movement appealing to Irishmen across con-fessional frontiers, became a major political force precisely by letting Irish nationalism identify itself essentially with the Catholic Irish.

More surprisingly, as we have already suggested, parties whose orig-inal and primary object was international class and social liberation found themselves becoming the vehicles of national liberation also. The re-establishment of an independent Poland was achieved, not under the leadership of any of the numerous nineteenth-century parties devoted exclusively to independence, but under leadership coming from the Second International’s Polish Socialist Party. Armenian nationalism shows the same pattern, as indeed does Jewish territorial nationalism. What made Israel was not Herzl or Weizmann, but (Russian-inspired) labour Zionism. And while some such parties were, justifiably, criticized within international socialism because they put nationalism a long way before social liberation, this cannot be said of other socialist, or even Marxist, parties which found themselves to their surprise to be the representative of particular nations: the Finnish Socialist Party, the Mensheviks in Georgia, the Jewish Bund in large areas of eastern Europe – in fact, even the rigidly non-nationalist Bolsheviks in Latvia. Conversely, nationalist movements became aware of the desirability of spelling out, if not a specific social programme, then at least a concern with economic and social questions. Characteristically it was in indus-trialized Bohemia, torn between Czechs and Germans both drawn to labour movements,* that movements specifically describing themselves as ‘national socialist’ emerged. The Czech national socialists eventually became the characteristic party of independent Czechoslovakia, and provided its last President (Benes). The German national socialists inspired a young Austrian who took their name and their combination of anti-Semitic ultra-nationalism with a vague populist social demagogy into post-war Germany: Adolf Hitler.

* The Social Democrats polled	38 per cent of Czech votes in the first democratic election  –
1907 – and emerged as the largest	party.

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WAVING  FLAGS: NATIONS AND  NATIONALISM

Nationalism therefore became genuinely popular essentially when it was drunk as a cocktail. Its attraction was not just its own flavour, but its combination with some other component or components which, it was hoped, would slake the consumers’ spiritual and material thirst. But such nationalism, though genuine enough, was neither as militant nor as single-minded, and certainly not as reactionary, as the flag-waving right would have wanted it to be.

The Habsburg Empire, about to disintegrate under the various national pressures, paradoxically illustrates the limitations of national-ism. For though most of its people were, by the early 1900s, unques-tionably conscious of belonging to some nationality or other, few of them thought that this was incompatible with support for the Habsburg monarchy. Even after the outbreak of war national independence was not a major issue, and a decided hostility to the state was to be found only in four of the Habsburg nations, three of which could identify with national states beyond their borders (the Italians, the Rumanians, the Serbs and the Czechs). Most of the nationalities did not visibly wish to break out of what middle- and lower-middle-class zealots liked to call ‘the prison of peoples’. And when, in the course of the war, discontent and revolutionary feelings really mounted, it took the form, in the first instance, not of movements for national independence but for social revolution.²⁰

As for the western belligerents, in the course of the war anti-war feeling and social discontent increasingly overlaid, but without destroy-ing, the patriotism of the mass armies. The extraordinary international impact of the Russian revolutions of 1917 is comprehensible only if we bear in mind that those who had gone to war willingly, even enthusiastically, in 1914 were moved by the idea of patriotism which could not be confined within nationalist slogans: for it included a sense of what was due to citizens. These armies had not gone to war out of a taste for fighting, for violence and heroism, or to pursue the uncon-ditional national egoism and expansionism of the nationalism of the right. And still less out of hostility to liberalism and democracy.

On the contrary. The domestic propaganda of all belligerents with mass politics demonstrates, in 1914, that the point to stress was not glory and conquest, but that ‘we’ were the victims of aggression, or of a policy of aggression, that ‘they’ represented a mortal threat to the values of freedom and civilization which ‘we’ embodied. What is more, men and women would not be successfully mobilized for the war unless they felt that the war was more than a plain armed combat: that in some sense the world would be better for ‘our’ victory and ‘our’ country

would be –  to use Lloyd	George’s phrase –	‘a land fit for heroes to
live in’. The British and	French governments	thus claimed to defend

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democracy and freedom against monarchical power, militarism and barbarism (‘the Huns’), while the German government claimed to defend the values of order, law and culture against Russian autocracy and barbarism. The prospects of conquest and imperial aggrandizement could be advertised in colonial wars, but not in the major conflicts – even if they occupied foreign ministries behind the scenes.

The German, French and British masses who marched to war in 1914 did so, not as warriors or adventurers, but as citizens and civilians. Yet this very fact demonstrates both the necessity of patriotism for governments operating in democratic societies and its force. For only the sense that the cause of the state was genuinely their own could mobilize the masses effectively: and in 1914 the British, French and Germans had it. They were so mobilized, until three years of unpar-alleled massacre and the example of revolution in Russia taught them that they had been mistaken.

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CHAPTER      7

W H O ‘ S W H O O R T H E  U N C E R T A I N T I E S  O F        T H E

B O U R G E O I S I E

In its widest possible sense … a man’s Self is the sum-total of what he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors andfriends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses andyacht and bank-account.

William James¹

With an immense zest … they begin shopping. … They plunge into it as one plunges into a career; as a class they talk, think and dream possessions.

H.G.Wells, 1909²

The College is founded by the advice and counsel of the Founder’s dear wife       …

to afford the best education for women of the Upper and Upper Middle Classes.

From the Foundation Deed of Holloway College, 1883

I

Let us now turn to those whom democratization appeared to threaten. In the century of the conquering bourgeoisie, members of the successful middle classes were sure of their civilization, generally confident and not usually in financial difficulties, but only very late in the century were they physically comfortable. Until then they had lived well enough, surrounded by a profusion of decorated solid objects, encased in large quantities of textiles, able to afford what they regarded as suitable to persons of their standing and unsuitable to those below them, and consuming food and drink in substantial, and probably in excessive, quantities. The food and drink, in some countries at least, were excel-lent: cuisine bourgeoise, in France at least, was a term of gastronomic praise. Elsewhere, at least, they were copious. An ample supply of servants compensated for the discomfort and impracticability of their

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houses. But it could not conceal them. It was only quite late in the century that bourgeois society developed a style of life and the suitable material equipment actually designed to fit the requirements of the class which was supposed to form its backbone: men in business, the free professions or the higher ranks of public service and their families, who did not necessarily aspire to or expect the status of aristocracy or the material rewards of the very rich, but who were well above the zone where buying one thing meant forgoing others.

The paradox of the most bourgeois of centuries was that its life-styles became ‘bourgeois’ only late, that this transformation was pioneered on its fringes rather than at its centre, and that, as a specifically bourgeois way and style of living, it triumphed only momentarily. That is perhaps why the survivors looked back to the era before 1914 so often and so nostalgically as the belle (poque. Let us begin the survey of what happened to the middle classes in our period by considering this paradox.

That new lifestyle was the suburban house and garden, which has long ceased to be specifically ‘bourgeois’ except as an index of aspiration. Like so much else in bourgeois society it came from the classic country of capitalism, Great Britain. We may first detect it in the garden suburbs constructed by architects like Norman Shaw in the 1870s for comfortable, though not particularly wealthy, middle-class households (Bedford Park). Such colonies, generally intended for rather richer strata than their British equivalents, developed on the outskirts of central European cities – the Cottage-Viertel in Vienna, Dahlem and the Grunewald-Viertel in Berlin – and eventually moved socially down-wards into the lesser or lower-middle-class suburbs or the unplanned labyrinth of’pavilions’ on the fringes of great cities, and eventually, via speculative builders and socially idealistic town-planners into the semi-detached streets and colonies intended to recapture the village and small-town spirit (Siedlungen or ‘settlements’ was to be the significant German term for them) of some municipal housing for the more comfortable workers later in the twentieth century. The ideal middle-class house was no longer seen as part of a city street, a ‘town house’ or its substitute, an apartment in a large building fronting a city street and pretending to be a palace, but an urbanized or rather suburbanized country house (‘villa’ or even ‘cottage’) in a miniature park or garden, surrounded by greenery. It was to prove an enormously powerful ideal of living, though not applicable as yet within most non-Anglo-Saxon cities.

The ‘villa’ differed from its original model, the country house of nobility and gentry, in one major respect, apart from its more modest (and reducible) scale and cost. It was designed for the convenience of

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private living rather than social status-striving and role-playing. Indeed, the fact that such colonies were largely single-class communi-ties, topographically isolated from the rest of society, made it easier to concentrate on the comforts of life. This isolation developed even when it was not intended: the ‘garden cities’ and ‘garden suburbs’ designed by socially idealistic (Anglo-Saxon) planners went the same way as the suburbs specifically built to remove the middle classes from their inferiors. And this exodus in itself indicated a certain abdication of the bourgeoisie from its role as a ruling class. ‘Boston’, the local rich told their sons around 1900, ‘holds nothing for you except heavy taxes and political misrule. When you marry, pick out a suburb to build a house in, join the Country Club, and make your life center about your club, your home, and your children.’³

But this was the very opposite of the function of the traditional country house or chateau, or even of its bourgeois rival or imitator, the great capitalist’s mansion – the Krupps’ Villa Hugel, or the Bankfield House and Belle Vue of the Akroyds and Crossleys, who dominated the smoky lives of the woollen town of Halifax. Such establishments were the engine-casings of power. They were designed to demonstrate the resources and prestige of a member of a ruling elite to other members and to the inferior classes, and to organize the business of influence and ruling. If cabinets were made in the country house of the Duke of Omnium, John Crossley of Crossleys Carpets at least invited forty-nine of his colleagues on the Halifax Borough Council for three days to his house in the Lake District on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, and entertained the Prince of Wales on the occasion of the inauguration of Halifax town hall. In such houses private life was inseparable from public life with recognized and, as it were, diplomatic and political public functions. The requirements of these took precedence over home comforts. One does not imagine that the Akroyds would have built themselves a grand stairway painted with scenes from classical myth-ology, a painted banqueting hall, a dining room, library and suite of nine reception rooms, or for that matter a servants’ wing designed for twenty-five domestics, primarily for their family use.⁴ The country gentleman could no more avoid exercising his power and influence in his county than the local business magnate could avoid doing so in Bury or Zwickau. Indeed, so long as he lived in the city, by definition an image of the urban social hierarchy, even the average member of the bourgeoisie could hardly avoid indicating – nay, underlining – his place in it by the choice of his address, or at least of the size of his apartment and the storey it occupied in the building, the degree of servitude he could command, the formalities of his costume and social intercourse. The Edwardian stockbroker’s family which a dissident son

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recalled later in life was inferior to the Forsytes, because their house did not quite overlook Kensington Gardens, but it was not so far away as to lose status. The London Season was beyond it, but the mother was formally ‘At Home’ on regular afternoons, and organized evening receptions with a ‘Hungarian band’ hired from Whiteleys Universal Store, as well as giving or attending almost daily dinner parties at the required time, during the months of May and June.⁵ Private life and the public presentation of status and social claims could not be distinct.

The modestly rising middle classes of the pre-industrial period were mostly excluded from such temptations by their inferior, if respectable, social status or their puritan and pietist convictions, not to mention by the imperatives of capital accumulation. It was the bonanza of mid-nineteenth-century economic growth which put them within the reach of the successful, but which at the same time imposed a public lifestyle patterned on that of the older elites. Yet at this moment of triumph four developments encouraged the formation of a less formal, a more genuinely private and privatized lifestyle.

The first, as we have seen, was the democratization of politics which undermined the public and political influence of all but the very grandest and most formidable of bourgeois. In some cases the (mainly liberal) bourgeoisie was forced de facto to withdraw altogether from a politics dominated by mass movements or a mass of voters which refused to recognize their ‘influence’ when it was not actually directed against them. The culture of fin de sikle Vienna, it has been argued, was largely that of a class and a people – the middle-class Jews – who were no longer allowed to be what they wanted, namely German liberals, and who would not have found many followers even as a non-Jewish liberal bourgeoisie.⁶ The culture of the Buddenbrooks and of their author Thomas Mann, himself the son of a patrician in an ancient and proud city of Hanseatic traders, is that of a bourgeoisie which has withdrawn from politics. The Cabots and the Lowells in Boston were far from extruded from national politics, but they were to lose control of Boston politics to the Irish. From the 1890s the paternalist ‘factory culture’ of northern England broke down, a culture in which workers might be trade unionists, but would celebrate the anniversaries of their employers, whose political colours they followed. One of the reasqns why a Labour Party emerged after 1900 is that the men of influence in the working-class constituencies, the local bourgeoisie, had refused to give up the right to nominate local ‘notables’, i.e. people like themselves for Parliament and council in the 1890s. Insofar as the bourgeoisie retained its political power, it was henceforth by mobilizing influence rather than followers.

The second was a certain loosening of the links between  the tri-

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umphant bourgeoisie and the puritan values which had been so useful for capital accumulation in the past and by means of which the class had so often identified itself and marked its distance from the idle and dissolute aristocrat and the lazy and drunken labourers. In the established bourgeoisie the money had already been made. It might come, not directly from its source, but as a regular payment produced by pieces of paper which represented ‘investments’ whose nature might be obscure, even when they did not originate in some remote region of the globe, far from the Home Counties round London. Frequently it was inherited, or distributed to non-working sons and female relatives. A good deal of the late-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie consisted of a ‘leisure class’ whose name was invented at this time by a maverick American sociologist of considerable originality, Thorstein Veblen, who wrote a ‘Theory’ about it.⁷ And even some of those who actually made money did not have to spend too much time at it, at all events if they did so in (European) banking, finance and speculation. In Britain, at any rate, these left plenty of time for other pursuits. In short, spending became at least as important as earning. The spending did not have to be as lavish as that of the ultra-rich, of whom there was indeed plenty in the belle Spoque. Even the relatively less affluent learned how to spend for comfort and enjoyment.

The third was the loosening of the structures of the bourgeois family, which was reflected in a certain emancipation of the women in it (which will be considered in the next chapter), and the emergence of the age-groups between adolescence and marriage as a separate and more independent category of’youth’, which in turn had a powerful impact on the arts and literature (see chapter 9 below). The words ‘youth’ and ‘modernity’ sometimes became almost interchangeable; and if ‘modernity’ meant anything, it meant a change of taste, decor and style. Both these developments became noticeable among the estab-lished middle classes in the second half of the century, and obvious in its last two decades. They not only affected that form of leisure which took the form of tourism and holidays – as Visconti’s Death in Venice rightly shows, the grand hotel by beach or mountain, which now entered its period of glory, was dominated by the image of its women guests – but they greatly increased the role of the bourgeois home as a setting for its women.

The fourth was the substantial growth of those who belonged, or claimed to belong, or aspired passionately to belong, to the bourgeoisie: in short, of the ‘middle class’ as a whole. A certain idea of an essentially domestic lifestyle was one of the things that bound all its members together.

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I I

At the same time democratization, the rise of a self-conscious working class and social mobility created a novel problem of social identity for those who belonged or wished to belong to some layer or other of these ‘middle classes’. The definition of’the bourgeoisie’ is notoriously difficult (see The Age of Capital, chapter 13, ra, iv), and it became no easier as democracy and the rise of labour movements led those who belonged to the bourgeoisie (whose name became an increasingly dirty word) to deny their existence as a class in public, if not to deny the existence ofclasses altogether. In France it was held that the Revolution had abolished classes, in Britain that classes, not being closed castes, did not exist, in the increasingly vocal field of sociology that social structure and stratification were too complex for such simplifications. In America the danger seemed to be not so much that the masses might mobilize themselves as one class and identify their exploiters as another, as that, in pursuit of their constitutional right to equality, they might declare themselves to belong to the middle class, thus diminishing the advantages (other than the unanswerable facts of wealth) of belonging to an elite. Sociology, as an academic discipline a product of the period 1870-1914, still suffers from endless and inconclusive debates about social class and status, due to the fondness of its practitioners for reclassifying the population in a manner most suitable to their ideo-logical convictions.

Moreover, with social mobility and the decline of traditional hier-archies establishing who belonged and did not belong to a ‘middle rank’ or ‘estate’ of society, the boundaries of this intermediate social zone (and the area within it), became hazy. In countries used to the older classification, like Germany, elaborate distinctions were now drawn between a Biirgertum of bourgeoisie, in turn divided into a Besitzburgertum based on the ownership of property and a Bildungs-biirgertum based on the access to bourgeois status by means of higher education, and a Mittelstand (‘middle estate’) below it, which in turn looked down on the Kleinbiirgertum or petty-bourgeoisie. Other lan-guages of western Europe merely manipulated the shifting and impre-cise categories of a ‘big’ or ‘upper’, a ‘petty’ or ‘lower’ middle class/bourgeoisie, with an even more imprecise space between them. But how to determine who could claim to belong to any of these?

The basic difficulty lay in the growing number of those who claimed bourgeois status in a society in which, after all, the bourgeoisie formed the top social stratum. Even where the old landed nobility had not been eliminated (as in America) or deprived of its dejure privileges (as in republican France), its profile in developed capitalist countries was

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W H O ‘S WHO OR THE UNCERTAINTIES OF THE                 BOURGEOISIE

now distinctly lower than before. Even in Britain, where it had main-tained both a very prominent political presence and much the greatest wealth in the middle decades of the century, it was relatively falling back. In 1858-79, of the British millionaires who died, four-fifths (117) had still been landowners; in 1880-99 only a little more than a third were, and in 1900-14 the percentage was even lower.⁸ Aristocrats were a majority in almost all British cabinets before 1895. After 1895 they never were. Titles of nobility were far from despised, even in countries which officially had no place for them: rich Americans, who could not acquire them for themselves, were quick to buy them in Europe by subsidized marriage for their daughters. Singer sewing-machines became the Princess de Polignac. Nevertheless, even ancient and deep-rooted monarchies conceded that money was now as useful a criterion of nobility as blue blood. The Emperor William 11 ‘considered it as one of his duties as a ruler to meet the wishes of millionaires for decorations and patents of nobility, but made their grant conditional on the making of charitable gifts in the public interest. Perhaps he was influenced by English models.’⁹ Well might the observer think so. Of the 159 peerages created in Britain between 1901 and 1920 (omitting those given to the armed services), sixty-six were given to businessmen – about half of these to industrialists – thirty-four to the professions, overwhelmingly the lawyers, and only twenty to men of landed background.¹⁰

But if the line between bourgeoisie and aristocracy was hazy, the boundaries between the bourgeoisie and its inferiors were also far from clear. This did not so much affect the ‘old’ lower-middle class or petty-bourgeoisie of independent artisans, small shopkeepers and their like. Their scale ofoperations placed them firmly on a lower level, and indeed opposed them to the bourgeoisie. The French Radicals’ programme was a series of variations on the theme ‘small is beautiful’: ‘the word “petit*’ constantly recurs in the congresses of the Radical party’.” Its enemy were Us gros – big capital, big industry, big finance, big merchants. The same attitude, with a nationalist, right-wing and anti-Semitic twist rather than a republican and left-wing one, was to be found among their German equivalents, more hard-pressed by an irresistible and rapid industrialization from the 1870s onward. Seen from above, not only their littleness but their occupations debarred them from higher status, unless, exceptionally, the size of their wealth wiped out the memory of its origin. Still, the dramatic transformation of the dis-tributive system, especially from the 1880s on, made some revisions necessary. The word ‘grocer’ still carries a note of contempt among the upper-middle classes, but in Britain of our period a Sir Thomas Lipton (who made his money from packets of tea), a Lord Leverhulme (who made it from soap) and a Lord Vestey (who made it from frozen meat)

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acquired titles and steam yachts. However, the real difficulty arose with the enormous expansion of the tertiary sector – of employment in public and private offices – that is to say of work which was both clearly subaltern and remunerated by wages (even if they were called ‘sala-ries’), but which was also clearly non-manual, based on formal edu-cational qualifications, if relatively modest ones, and above all carried out by men – and even some women – most of whom specifically refused to consider themselves as part of the working-class and aspired, often at great material sacrifice, to the style of life of middle-class respect-ability. The line between this new ‘lower-middle class’ of ‘clerks’ (Angestellte, employes) and the higher ranges of the professions, or even of large business increasingly employing salaried executives and man-agers, raised novel problems.

Leaving aside these new lower-middle classes themselves, it was clear that the new entrants to the middle class or claimants to middle-class status were now rapidly increasing in numbers, which posed practical problems of demarcation and definition, made more difficult by the uncertainty of the theoretical criteria for such definition. What con-stituted ‘the bourgeoisie’ was always more difficult to determine than what, in theory, defined a nobility (e.g. birth, hereditary title, land-ownership) or a working class (e.g. the wage-relationship and manual labour). Still (see The Age of Capital, chapter 13), the mid-nineteenth-century criteria were fairly explicit. Except for senior salaried state

servants, members of this class would be expected to	possess capital
or an investment income  and/or  act  as independent	profit-making

entrepreneurs employing labour or as members of a ‘free’ profession which was a form of private enterprise. Significantly ‘profits’ and ‘fees’ were included under the same heading for purposes of the British income tax. Yet with the changes mentioned above, these criteria became far less useful for distinguishing the members of the ‘real’ bourgeoisie – both economically and above all socially – in the very considerable mass of’the middle classes’, not to mention the even larger body of those aspiring to this status. They did not all possess capital; but neither, at least initially, did many men of undoubted bourgeois status who substituted higher education for it as an initial resource [Bildungsbiirgertum): and their number was increasing substantially. The

number	of doctors	in France,		more or less stable at around  12,000
between	1866 and	1886, had		risen to 20,000 by 1911; in Britain the
number of doctors rose from			15,000 to 22,000, of architects from 7000
to 11,000 between		1881 and	1901: in both countries the rise was much

faster than the growth of the adult population. They were not all entrepreneurs and employers (except of servants).¹² But who could deny bourgeois status to those senior salaried managers who were an

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increasingly essential part of large business enterprise at a time when, as a German expert pointed out in 1892, ‘the intimate, purely private character of the old small businesses’ simply could no longer apply to such large undertakings?¹³

The great majority of all these middle classes, at least insofar as most of them were the product of the era since the dual revolution (see The Age of Revolution, Introduction), had one thing in common: social mobility, past or present. Sociologically, as a French observer noted in Britain, the ‘middle classes’ consisted ‘essentially of families in the process of rising socially’, and the bourgeoisie of those who ‘had arri-ved’ – whether at the top or at some conventionally defined plateau.¹⁴ But such snapshots could hardly give an adequate image of a process of movement which could only be seized, as it were, by a sociological equivalent of that recent invention, the moving picture or film. The ‘new social strata’ whose advent Gambetta saw as the essential content of the regime of the French Third Republic – he was no doubt thinking of men like himself, making their way without business and property to influence and income through democratic politics – did not stop moving even when recognized as ‘arrived’.¹⁵ Conversely, did not ‘arrival’ change the character of the bourgeoisie? Could membership of this class be denied to the members of their second and third generations who lived leisured lives on the family wealth; who sometimes reacted against the values and activities which still constituted the essence of their class?

Such problems do not at our period concern the economist. An economy based on profit-making private enterprise, such as unques-tionably dominated the developed countries of the west, does not require its analysts to speculate about what individuals exactly con-stitute a ‘bourgeoisie’. From the economist’s point of view Prince Henckel von Donnersmarck, the second-richest man in imperial Germany (after Krupp), was functionally a capitalist, since nine-tenths of his income came from the ownership of coal-mines, industrial and banking shares, partnerships in real-estate developments, not to mention 12-15 million Marks earning interest. On the other hand for the sociologist and the historian his status as a hereditary aristocrat is far from irrelevant. The problem of defining the bourgeoisie as a group of men and women, and the line between these and the ‘lower-middle classes’, therefore has no direct bearing on the analysis of capitalist development at this stage (except for those who believe that the system depends on the personal motivations of individuals as private entre-preneurs,* though of course it reflects structural changes in the capitalist

* There were indeed thinkers who argued that growing bureaucratization, the increasing unpopularity of entrepreneurial values and other such factors would undermine the role of the

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economy, and may throw light on its forms of organization.

I l l

Establishing recognizable criteria was thus urgent for the contemporary members or would-be members of the bourgeoisie or middle class, and in particular for those whose money alone was insufficient to buy a status of assured respect and privilege for themselves and their offspring. Three major ways of establishing such membership became increasingly important in our period – at any rate in countries in which uncertainty about ‘who was who’ already arose.* All required to fulfil two con-ditions: they had clearly to distinguish members of the middle classes from the working classes, peasants and others engaged in manual labour, and they had to provide a hierarchy of exclusiveness, without closing the possibility of climbing the steps of this social stairway. A middle-class lifestyle and culture was one such criterion, leisure activity, and especially the new invention of sport, was another; but the chief indicator of social membership increasingly became, and has remained, formal education.

Its major function was not utilitarian, in spite of the potential financ-ial returns from trained intelligence and specialized knowledge in an age increasingly based on scientific technology, and in spite of its opening careers a little more widely for meritocratic talent, especially in the expanding industry of education itself. What counted was the demonstration that adolescents were able to postpone earning a living. The content of education was secondary, and indeed the vocational value of the Greek and Latin on which British ‘public school’ boys spent so much of their time, of the philosophy, letters, history and geography which filled 77 per cent of the hours in French lycees (1890), was negligible. Even in practical-minded Prussia the classical Gymnasien in 1885 contained almost three times as many pupils as the more ‘modern’ and technically minded Realgymnasien and Ober-Realschulen. Moreover, the cost of providing such an education for a child was itself a social marker. One Prussian official, who calculated it with German thoroughness, spent 31 per cent of his income on his three sons’ edu-cation over a period of thirty-one years.¹⁶

Formal education, preferably crowned by some certificate, had hith-

private entrepreneur, and thereby of capitalism. Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter held such opinions among contemporaries.

*The publication of reference works about persons of status in the nation – as distinct from guides to membership of royal and noble families such as the Almanack de Gotha – began in this period. The British Who’s Who (1897) was perhaps the first.

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erto been irrelevant to the rise of a bourgeoisie, except for those learned professions inside and outside public service which it was the main function of universities to train, in addition to providing an agreeable environment for the drinking, whoring and sporting activities of young gentlemen, to whom actual examinations were quite unimportant. Few nineteenth-century businessmen were graduates of anything. The Frenchpolytechnique at this period did not especially attract the bourgeois elite. A German banker, giving advice to a budding industrialist in 1884, dismissed theory and university education, which he considered merely ‘a means of enjoyment for times of rest, like the cigar after lunch’. His advice was to get into practical business as soon as possible, look for a financial backer, observe the USA, and gain experience, leaving higher education to the ‘scientifically trained technician’, whom the entrepreneur would find useful. From a business point of view this was plain common sense, though it left the technical cadres dissatisfied. German engineers bitterly demanded ‘a social position corresponding to the engineer’s significance in life’.¹⁷

Schooling provided above all a ticket of admission to the recognized middle and upper zones of society and a means of socializing the entrants into the ways which would distinguish them from the lower orders. Even the minimum school-leaving age for this type of entry – around sixteen years – guaranteed boys in some countries with military conscription classification as potential officer-material. Increasingly, secondary education to the age of eighteen or nineteen became usual among the middle classes, normally followed by university or higher professional training. The numbers involved remained small, though they increased somewhat in secondary education and much more dra-matically in higher education. Between 1875 and 1912 the number of German students more than tripled, of French students (1875-1910) more than quadrupled. However, in 1910 still less than 3 per cent of the French age-groups between twelve and nineteen attended secondary schools (77,500 in all), and only 2 per cent stayed for the final exam-ination, which half of them passed.¹⁸ Germany, with a population of 65 millions, entered the First World War with a corps of something like 120,000 reserve officers, or about 1 per cent of the men between the ages of twenty and forty-five.¹⁹

Modest though these numbers were, they were much larger than the usual size of older ruling classes – e.g. the 7000 persons who in the 1870s owned 80 per cent of all privately held land in Britain, let alone the 700 or so families which constituted the British peerage. They were certainly too large for the formation of those informal, personal net-works by means of which the bourgeoisie earlier in the nineteenth century had been able to structure itself, partly because the economy

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was highly localized, partly because religious and ethnic minority groups which developed a particular affinity for capitalism (French Protestants, Quakers, Unitarians, Greeks, Jews, Armenians) generated webs of mutual trust, kinship and business transactions which stretched over entire countries, continents and oceans.* At the very peak of the national and international economy such informal networks could still operate, since the number of people involved was tiny, and some parts of business, especially banking and finance, were increasingly concentrated in a handful of financial centres (generally also the actual capital cities of major nation-states). Around 1900 the British banking community, which de facto controlled the world’s financial business, consisted of a few score families with houses in a small area of London, who knew each other, frequented the same clubs and social circles, and intermarried.²⁰ The Rhine-Westphalian steel syndicate, which con-stituted most of the German steel industry, consisted of twenty-eight firms. The largest of all trusts, United States Steel, was formed in informal talks between a handful of men and finally took shape during after-dinner conversations and at golf.

The genuine big bourgeoisie, old or new, therefore had no great difficulty in organizing itself as an elite, since it could use methods very similar to those used by aristocracies, or even – as in Great Britain – the actual mechanisms of aristocracy. Indeed, where possible their aim increasingly was to crown business success by joining the class of the nobility, at least via their sons and daughters, and, if not, at least by an aristocratic lifestyle. It is a mistake to see this simply as an abdication of bourgeois before old aristocratic values. For one thing, socialization through elite (or any) schools had been no more important for tra-ditional aristocracies than for bourgeoisies. Insofar as it became so, as in British ‘public schools’, it assimilated aristocratic values to a moral system designed for a bourgeois society and for its public service. For another, the test of aristocratic values now increasingly became a profligate and expensive style of life which required above all money, never mind where it came from. Money therefore became its criterion. The genuinely traditional landed nobleman, insofar as he could not maintain such a lifestyle and the activities associated with it, found himself exiled into a fading provincial world, loyal, proud but socially marginal, like the characters in Theodore Fontane’s Der Stechlin (1895) that powerful elegy on ancient Brandenburg junker values. The big

* The reasons for this affinity have been much discussed, notably in our period by German scholars (e.g. Max Weber and Werner Sombart). Whatever the explanation – and all that such groups have in common is self-conscious minority status – the fact remains that small groups of this kind, such as the British Quakers, had turned themselves almost completely into bodies of bankers, merchants and manufacturers.

176

W H O ‘S WHO OR THE UNCERTAINTIES OF T H E  BOURGEOISIE

bourgeoisie used the mechanism of aristocracy, as of any elite selection, for its own purposes.

The real test of schools and universities as socializers was for those who were climbing up the social ladder, not for those who had already arrived at the top. It transformed the son of a nonconformist Salisbury gardener into a Cambridge don, and his son, via Eton and King’s College, into the economist John Maynard Keynes, so obviously a member of a confident and polished elite that we are still amazed to think of his mother’s childhood milieu among provincial Baptist tabernacles – and yet, to the end, a proud member of his class, of what he later called the ‘educated bourgeoisie’.²¹

No wonder that the kind of schooling which offered the probability, perhaps even the certainty, of bourgeois status expanded to meet the rising number who had acquired wealth but not status (like grandfather Keynes), those whose own bourgeois status traditionally depended on education, such as the sons of impecunious Protestant clergymen and the more liberally rewarded professions, and the masses of lesser ‘respec-table’ parents ambitious for their children. Secondary education, the essential gate of entry, grew. The number of its pupils multiplied by anything between two (Belgium, France, Norway, Netherlands) and five (Italy). The number of students in universities, which offered a guarantee of middle-class membership, approximately tripled in most European countries between the late 1870s and 1913. (In the previous decades it had remained more or less stable.) In fact, by the 1880s, German observers were becoming worried about admitting more uni-versity students than the middle class sectors of the economy could accommodate.

The problem of the genuine ‘upper-middle class’ – say, the sixty-eight ‘large industrialists’ who from 1895 to 1907 joined the five who were already in the top class of taxpayers in Bochum (Germany)²² – was that such general educational expansion did not provide sufficiently exclusive badges of status. Yet at the same time the big bourgeoisie could not formally separate itself from its inferiors, because its structure had to be kept open to new entrants – that was the nature of its being – and because it needed to mobilize, or at least conciliate, the middle and lower-middle classes against the increasingly mobilized working classes. Hence the insistence of non-socialist observers that the ‘middle class’ was not merely growing but was of enormous size. The redoubt-able Gustav von Schmoller, chieftain of German economists, thought they formed a quarter of the population,²³ but he included among it not only the new ‘officials, managers and technicians on good, but moderate, salaries’ but also foremen and skilled workers. Sombart similarly estimated it at 12.5 million against 35 million workers.²⁴

177

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

These were essentially calculations of potentially antisocialist voters. A generous estimate could hardly go very far beyond the 300,000 who are reckoned to have constituted the ‘investing public’ in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.²⁵ In any case the actual members of the estab-lished middle classes were far from opening their arms to the lower orders even when these wore collars and ties. An English observer, more characteristically, dismissed the lower-middle classes as belonging with the workers to ‘the world of the board schools’.²⁶

Within systems of open entry, circles of informal but definite exclu-siveness thus had to be established. This was easiest in a country like England, which lacked public primary education until 1870 (school attendance was not compulsory for another twenty years), public sec-ondary education until 1902, and any significant university education outside the two ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge.* Numer-ous strikingly misnamed ‘public schools’ were founded for the middle classes from the 1840s on, on the model of the nine ancient foundations recognized as such in 1870, and already (especially Eton) nurseries of the nobility and gentry. By the early 1900s they had expanded to a list of – depending on the degree of exclusiveness or snobbery – anything between 64 and some 160 more or less expensive schools claiming such status, and deliberately training their pupils as members of a ruling class.²⁷ A body of similar private secondary schools, mainly in the north-eastern USA, also prepared the sons of good, or at any rate rich, families for the final polish of private elite universities.

Within these, as within the large body of German university students, even more exclusive groups were recruited by private associations such as the student Korps or the more prestigious Greek Letter fraternities – whose place in the old English universities was taken by the residential ‘colleges’. The late-nineteenth-century bourgeoisies were thus a curious combination of educationally open and closed societies: open, since entry was available by virtue of money, or even (through scholarships or other provisions for poor students) merit, but closed insofar as it was clearly understood that some circles were considerably more equal than others. The exclusiveness was purely social. German Korps students, beery and scarred, duelled because this proved that they were (unlike the lower orders) satisfaktionsfdhig, i.e. gentlemen and not plebeians. The subtle gradations of status among British private schools were established by what schools were prepared to engage in sporting contests against each other – i.e. whose sisters were suitable marriage partners. The body of American elite universities, at least in the east, was actually

* The Scottish system was somewhat more comprehensive, but Scots graduates who wanted to make their way in the world found it advisable to take a further degree or examination at Oxbridge, as Keynes’ father did after a London degree.

I ₇ S

W H O ‘S WHO OR THE UNCERTAINTIES  OF THE  BOURGEOISIE

defined by the social exclusiveness of sports: they played each other in the ‘Ivy League’.

For those who were on the way up into the big bourgeoisie, these mechanisms of socialization guaranteed unquestioned membership for their sons. Academic education for daughters was optional, and outside liberal and progressive circles still not guaranteed. But it also had some distinct practical advantages. The institution of’old boys’ (AUe Herren, alumni), which developed rapidly from the 1870s on, demonstrated that the products of an educational establishment formed a network which might be national or even international but it also bonded younger generations to the older. In short, it gave social cohesion to a heterogeneous body of recruits. Here also sport provided much of the formal cement. By these means a school, a college, a Korps or fraternity – revisited and often financed by their alumni – formed a sort of potential mafia (‘friends of friends’) for mutual aid, not least in business, and in turn the network of such ‘extended families’ of people whose equivalent economic and social status could be assumed, provided a grid of poten-tial contacts beyond the range of local or regional kin and business. As the guide to American college fraternities put it, observing the vast growth of alumni associations – Beta Theta Phi had alumni chapters in 16 cities in 1889 but 110 in 1912 – they formed ‘circles of cultivated men who would not otherwise know each other’.²⁸

The practical potential of such networks in a world of national and international business may be indicated by the fact that one such American fraternity (Delta Kappa Epsilon) boasted six senators, forty congressmen, a Cabot Lodge and the Theodore Roosevelt in 1889, while in 1912 it also included eighteen New York bankers (including J. P. Morgan), nine figures of substance from Boston, three directors of Standard Oil and persons of comparable weight in the Middle West. It would certainly not be to the disadvantage of the future entrepreneur from, say, Peoria to undergo the rigours of initiation into Delta Kappa Epsilon at a suitable Ivy League college.

All this was of economic as well as social importance, as capitalist concentration developed, and purely local or even regional industry lacking a tie to wider networks atrophied, like the rapidly dying ‘country banks’ in Great Britain. Yet while the formal and informal schooling system was convenient for the established economic and social elite, it was essential chiefly for those who wanted to join it, or to have their ‘arrival’ certified by the assimilation of their children. School was the ladder by which children of the more modest members of the middle strata climbed higher; for even in the most meritocratic educational systems few sons of actual peasants and even fewer of workers got further than the bottom rungs.

179

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

IV

The relative ease with which the ‘upper ten thousand’ (as they came to be called) could establish exclusiveness did not solve the problem of the upper hundred thousands who filled the ill-defined space between the top people and the populace, and even less, the problem of the much larger ‘lower-middle class’, often barely a financial hair’s breadth above the better-paid skilled workers. They certainly belonged to what British social observers called the ‘servant-keeping class’ – 29 per cent of the population in a provincial city like York. In spite of the fact that the number of domestic servants stagnated or even declined from the 1880s on, and therefore did not keep pace with the growth of the middle strata, middle- or even lower-middle-class aspiration without domestic service was still hardly conceivable, except in the USA. To this extent the middle class was still a class of masters (cf. The Age of Capital), or rather of mistresses over some labouring girl. They certainly gave their sons, and even increasingly their daughters, a secondary education. Insofar as this qualified men for reserve-officer status (or ‘temporary gentlemen’ officers in the British mass armies of 1914) it also stamped them as potential masters over other men. Yet a large and growing number of them were no longer ‘independent’ in the formal sense, but were themselves receivers of wages from employers, even if these were euphemistically called by some other name. Side by side with the old bourgeoisie of entrepreneurs or independent professionals, and those recognizing only the orders of God or the state, there now grew up the new middle class of salaried managers, executives and technical experts in the capitalism of state corporations and high technology: the public and private bureaucracy whose rise Max Weber monitored. Side by side with and overshadowing the old petty-bourgeoisie of independent artisans and small shopkeepers, there now grew up the new petty-bourgeoisie of office; shop and subaltern administration. These were indeed numerically very large strata, and the gradual shift from primary and secondary to tertiary economic activities promised to increase their size. In the USA they were, by 1900, already larger than the actual working class, though this was exceptional.

These new middle and lower-middle classes were too numerous and often, as individuals, too insignificant, their social environments too unstructured and anonymous (especially in the big city), and the scale on which economics and politics operated was too vast for them to count as persons or families, in the way in which the ‘upper-middle class’ or ‘haute-bourgeoisie’ could. No doubt this had always been so in the big city, but in 1871 less than 5 per cent of Germans lived in cities of 100,000 or more, whereas in 1910 over 21 per cent did so.

180

S O C I E T Y

1. Rulers. Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, and George V of Britain, King-Emperor, members of the international clan of monarchs.

2. Aristocracy. The Wyndham Sisters, painted by J. S. Sargent.

3. Plutocracy (only for males). At the Bourse, by Edgar Degas (1834-1917).

4. Lords of Industry (only for males). John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), master of Standard Oil, in the 1880s.

5. The Middle Classes at tea on the Isle of Wight, Britain.

W

7. The petty bourgeoisie. The Day ofFirst Communion by H. de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901).

6. And one who served them.

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, . .                                                        _     _               ‘               • : ;              . „ „ .             ; * ‘

8. Peasants in the West: eating at work in the Bcauce (France).

9. Peasants in the East: a Russian village council.

12. Below: The Uprooted: immigrants in steerage on their way to America.

i o, i i . Above and top: The proletariat. Workers in Britain and the USA. Note the international badge of their class, the peaked cap.

T E C H N O L O G Y

AND       S O C I E T Y

13. Experimental Science. Professor Rontgen, discoverer of X-Rays(i8₉ 5).

14. The bicycle, engine oflibcration.

15- The telephone, transformer of communications. A French telephone exchange, character-istically staffed by women.

16. Making pictures in every home: the mass-produced camera using film.

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17-  The triumph of film: the image moves. Poster for one of the first films, Lumiere’s

L’arroseur arrose (1896).

r8.   The mechanical reproduction of sound, for middle-class homes.

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20. The aeroplane. Bleriot lands on the cliffs of Dover after the first crossing of the Channel, 1909.

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21. ‘The Formula of British Conquest’: guns and trade. Advertisement for soap and British penetration of the Sudan, 1887.

Two views of the conquerors.

22. Above: Group photograph of the British mission about to take over what became Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe.

23. Below: A critical view of’The Expedition of the European Powers against the Boxers’ in China, igoo. (By H. Paul in L’Assietle au beurre.) A priest urges on Russia, Germany, and France amid carnage.

25. Right: White and black abroad. A French settler on the Ivory Coast, surrounded by his personal bodyguard.

26. Below: White and black abroad. White tea-party in India with native retinue.

24- Left: White and black at home. Visitors to the Paris Exposition of 1900 observe a denizen of a ‘colonial village’ in her human zoo. And vice versa.

‘WOMEN OF NEW GUINEA

HEATHEN                           CHRISTIAN.

27. Above: Women and Empire. The prospect of female civilization as seen on a missionary postcard.

28. Left: Women and Empire. Indian ladies consider education and social intercourse with Europeans.

2g. Men and Empire. The proconsul. (Sir Frederick, later Lord, Lugard, 1858-1945, chiefly active in West Africa. The inventor of’indirect rule’ through indigenous chiefs.)

30. Men and Empire. The rebel. (Emiliano Zapata, 1877-1919, leader of peasant revolution in Mexico. Described on the monument in his native village as ‘cock of the South.’)

SOME

PERSONALITIES

31. Above: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), 1870-1924, Russian revolutionary. Probably the individual with the greatest single impact on twentieth-century history.

34. Above: Rosa Luxemburg, 1871-1919. Socialist leader in German and the Tsarist Empire (Poland).

32. Below: Friedrich (Wilhelm) Nietzsche, 1844-1900. German philosopher and prophet of the era of war, barbarism, and fascism.

35. Below: George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950. Irishman, dramatist, socialist.

33. Above: Albert Einstein, 1879-1955. German Jewish, theoretical physicist. The greatest scientist since Newton.

36. Above: Pablo Ruiz

Picasso, 1881-1973.

Spaniard. Artist.

C O N F R O N T A T I O N S –             TRANSFORMATIONS

37. Bourgeois interior. Drawing room designed by Liberty, 1906, for a new middle-class style of light, culture, and comfort.

38. Working-class exterior. Slum courtyards in Hamburg c. 1900.

B-LIMANS UNIVERSAL

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39- Leisure. Golf, with tennis, the sport that united the middle-class

40. Labour. Making

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PERSONAL  ATTENTION.

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42. Style: female. Paris haute couture, 1913. Note the informality of both, compared to Victorian costume: uncorseted loose lines for women, sportiness for men.

41. Style: male. What the well-dressed Edwardian labour activist should wear.

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43. Two styles of architecture: (i) The new Reichstag (parliament) of the new German Empire (built 1884-1894). Classic nineteenth-century grand style with historical and allegorical decoration, at the service of imperial nationalism.

44. Two styles of architecture: (ii) Main railway station, Helsinki, Finland (built 1905-1916). Avant-garde art—art nouveau transformed into modernism—as the

idiom of reform and nation for the Finnish middle class.

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45-   Above: Three stages of the image:

(i) Typical Victorian salon painting adapted to commercial publicity. Note the combination of sexism, soft porn, and white supremacy (1880s).

46. Aboveright:Three stages of the image: (ii) The New Art; (with echoes of Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘decadence’) addresses itself to the New Woman working in the new offices (1890s).

47. Right: Three stages of the image:

    • The image revolutionized. Portrait ofAmbroise Vollard in the Cubist style by Pablo Picasso (1900s).

C O N F I D E N C E

AND      HOPE

48. The springtime of socialism.

The hopes ofWilliam Morris in the _{• A- GARLA}–_{ND • TOR- MM-CAY •1895•} design ofWalter Crane (1895).

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49. For enlightenment. The female figure in this German social-democratic prim noias ‘The Sword of Intellect,’ round its hilt the inscription ‘Knowledge is Power.’ She rests on the works of the great emancipators, Marx, Darwin and Lasalle, leader of the first German workers’ party (1897).

.a Lam

JOURNAL REPUBLICAN

Anti-clerical

VOSLA L E N N EMi I

51. Right: The hope of revolution. A German worker shakes the hand of a Russian worker after the Russian revolution of 1905 (German social-democratic May Day cartoon, 1906).

50. Left: Against obscurantism. Anticlerical title page of a French leftwingjournal. Caption: ‘Here is the enemy’ (1

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52. For bigger and better technical progress. The Olympic and Titanic under construction in a Belfast shipyard (Northern Ireland, 1910).

53. For the emancipation of women. Doulton statuette of a suffrage militant i g u .

T HE   MARCH     INTO     THE      FUTURE

54. British soldiers on their way to the Great War.

W H O ‘S WHO OR THE  UNCERTAINTIES  OF THE                BOURGEOISIE

Increasingly, then, the middle classes were identifiable not so much as individuals who ‘counted’ as such, but by collective recognition signs: by the education they had received, the places they lived in, their lifestyles and practices which indicated their situation to others who were, as individuals, equally unidentifiable. For the recognized middle classes these normally implied a combination of income and education and a certain visible distance from popular origins, as indicated, for instance, by the habitual use of the standard national language of culture and the accent which indicated class, in social intercourse with other than inferiors. The lower-middle classes, old or new, were clearly separate and inferior because of ‘insufficient income, mediocrity of culture or closeness to popular origins’.²⁹ The main objective of the ‘new’ petty-bourgeoisies was to demarcate themselves as sharply as possible from the working classes – an aim which, generally, inclined them to the radical right in politics. Reaction was their form of snob-bery.

The main body of the ‘solid’, undoubted middle class was not large: in the early 1900s less than 4 per cent of people dying in the United Kingdom left behind them more than £300 worth of property (includ-ing houses, furniture, etc.). Yet even though a more than comfortable middle-class income – say £700-1000 a year – was perhaps ten times as high as a good working-class income, it could not compare with the really rich, let alone the super-rich. The gap was enormous, between the established, recognizable and prosperous upper-middle class and what now came to be called the ‘plutocracy’, which represented what a late Victorian observer called ‘the visible obliteration of the con-ventional distinction between the aristocracies of birth and money’.³⁰

Residential segregation – more likely than not in a suitable suburb – was one way of structuring such masses of the comfortable into a social grouping. Education, as we have seen, was another. Both were tied together by a practice which became essentially institutionalized in the last quarter of the old century: sport. Formalized about this time in Britain, which provided the model and vocabulary for it, it spread like wildfire to other countries. At its start its modern form was essentially associated with the middle class, and not necessarily even the upper class. Young aristocrats might, as in Britain, try their hand at any form of physical prowess, but their special field was exercise connected with riding and killing, or at least attacking, animals and people: hunting, shooting, fishing, horse-races, fencing and the like. Indeed in Britain the word ‘sports’ was originally confined to such pursuits, the games and physical contests now called ‘sports’ being classified as ‘pastimes’. The bourgeoisie, as usual, not only adopted but transformed noble ways of life. Aristocrats also, characteristically, took to notably expens-

181

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

ive forms of pursuit such as the newly invented motor car, which was correctly described in the Europe of 1905 as ‘the toy of millionaires and the conveyance of the moneyed class’.³‘

The new sports also made their way into the working classes, and even before 1914 some were enthusiastically practised by workers – there were perhaps half a million football players in Britain – and passionately watched and followed by vast multitudes. This fact pro-vided sport with a built-in class criterion, amateurism, or rather the prohibition or strict caste segregation of the ‘professionals’. No amateur could genuinely excel in sport unless able to devote far more time to it than members of the labouring classes could, unless they were paid. The sports which became most characteristic of the middle classes, such as lawn tennis, rugby football, American football, still a game of college students, in spite of some strain, or the as yet undeveloped winter sports, stubbornly rejected professionalism. The amateur ideal, which had the additional advantage of uniting middle class and nobility, was enshrined in the new institution of the Olympic Games (1896), brain-child of a French admirer of the British public school system, which was built round its playing-fields.

That sport was seen as an important element in the formation of a new governing class on the model of the public-school-trained British bourgeois ‘gentleman’ is evident from the role of schools in introducing it to the continent. (The future professional football clubs were more often works teams of expatriate British firms and their staff.) That it had a patriotic, even militarist aspect is also clear. But it also served to create new patterns of middle-class life and cohesion. Lawn tennis, invented in 1873, rapidly became the quintessential game of middle-class suburbs, largely because it was bisexual, and therefore provided a means for ‘the sons and daughters of the great middle class’ to meet partners not introduced via the family but certain to be of comparable social position. In short, they widened the narrow circle of middle-class family and acquaintance, and, through the network of interacting ‘lawn tennis subscription clubs’, created a social universe out of self-contained household cells. ‘The parlour of home soon dwindled into an insig-nificant spot.’³² The triumph of tennis is inconceivable without both suburbanization and the growing emancipation of the middle-class woman. Alpinism, the new sport of cycling (which became the first mass working-class spectator sport on the continent) and the later winter sports, preceded by skating, also benefited substantially from the attraction between the sexes, and incidentally played a significant role in women’s emancipation for this reason (see below, pp. 205, 207).

Golf clubs were to play an equally important role in the (Anglo-Saxon) masculine world of middle-class professional men and busi-

182

W H O ‘S WHO  OR THE UNCERTAINTIES  OF THE               BOURGEOISIE

nessmen. We have already encountered an early business deal con-cluded on a golf course. The social potential of this game, played on large, expensively constructed and maintained pieces of real estate by members of clubs designed to exclude socially and financially unac-ceptable outsiders, struck the new middle classes like a sudden revel-ation. Before 1889 there had only been two ‘golf links’ in all of Yorkshire (West Riding): between 1890 and 1895 twenty-nine of them were opened.³³ In fact, the extraordinary speed with which all forms of organized sport conquered bourgeois society between 1870 and the early 1900s suggests that it filled a social need for considerably more than open-air exercise. Paradoxically, in Britain at least, an industrial proletariat and a new bourgeoisie or middle class emerged as self-conscious groups at about the same time, defining themselves, against each other, by ways and styles of collective living and action. Sport, a middle-class creation transformed into two obviously class-identified wings, was one of the major ways of doing so.

V

So three major developments marked the middle classes of the pre-1914 decades socially. At the lower end, the number of those with some claim to membership of this middle group grew. These were the non-manual employees who, at the margin, were distinguished from workers who might earn as much as they only by the would-be formality of their working dress (the ‘black-coated’ or, as the Germans said, ‘stiff-collared’ proletariat), and by a would-be middle-class style of living. At the upper end the line between employers, upper professionals and higher managers, salaried executives and senior officials, grew hazy. All of them were (realistically) grouped together as ‘Class 1’ when the British Census in 1911 first attempted to record the population by class. At the same time the bourgeois leisure class of men and women who lived off profits at second hand – the puritan tradition echoes through the British Inland Revenue’s classification of ‘unearned income’ – grew much larger. Relatively fewer bourgeois were now engaged in actually ‘earning’, and the available accumulations of profit to be distributed among their relatives were now much greater. Above all there were the super-rich, the plutocrats. There were, after all, already more than 4000 (dollar) millionaires in the USA of the early 1890s.

To most of these the pre-war decades were kind; to the more favoured they were extraordinarily generous. The new lower-middle class got little enough in material terms, for their incomes might not be higher than the skilled artisan’s, though measured by the year rather than by

183

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

the week or the day, and workers did not have to spend so much ‘to keep up appearances’. However, their status placed them unques-tionably above the labouring masses. In Britain the males among them could even think of themselves as ‘gentlemen’, a term originally devised for the landed gentry, but, in the era of the bourgeoisie, drained of its specific social content and opened to anyone who did not actually perform manual labour. (It was never applied to workers.) Most of them thought of themselves as having done better than their parents, and hoped for even better prospects for their own children. This prob-ably did little to diminish the sense of helpless resentment against those above and below them, which seemed so characteristic of this class.

Those who belonged to the unquestioned world of the bourgeoisie had very little indeed to complain about, for an exceptionally agreeable life, now conducted in an exceptionally agreeable lifestyle, was at the disposal of anyone with a few hundred pounds sterling a year, which was far below the threshold of the big money. The great economist Marshall thought (in Principles of Economics) that a professor could live a suitable life on £500 a year,³⁴ an opinion confirmed by his colleague, the father ofJohn Maynard Keynes, who managed to save £400 a year out of an income (salary plus inherited capital) of £ 1000, which enabled him to run a Morris-wallpapered home with three regular servants and a governess, to take two holidays a year – a month in Switzerland cost the couple £68 in 1891 – and to indulge his passions for stamp collecting,

butterfly hunting,		logic and, of course, golf.35 There	was no difficulty
in finding	ways to spend a hundred times as much		per year, and the
ultra-rich	of the	belle epoque –  American multi-millionaires,  Russian

grand dukes, South African gold magnates and assorted international financiers – rushed to compete in spending as lavishly as they could. But one did not have to be a tycoon to enjoy some very palatable sweets of life, for in 1896, for example, a 101-piece dinner service decorated with one’s own monogram could be bought retail in London for less than £5. The international grand hotel, born of the railway in mid-century, reached its apogee in the last twenty years before 1914. Many of them still bear the name of the most famous of contemporary chefs, Cesar Ritz. These palaces might be frequented by the super-rich, but they were not primarily built for them, since the super-rich still constructed or rented their own palatial establishments. They aimed at the middling-rich and the comfortably off. Lord Rosebery dined at the new Hotel Cecil, but not on the standard dinner of 6 shillings a head. The activities aimed at the really wealthy were priced on a different scale. In 1909 a set of golf clubs and bag would cost one and a half pounds sterling in London, while the basic price for the new Mercedes car was £900. (Lady Wimborne and her son owned two of

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them, plus two Daimlers, three Darracqs and two Napiers.)³⁶

Small wonder that the pre-1914 years live on in the folklore of the bourgeoisie as an era of golden days. Or that the sort of leisure class which attracted most public attention was the one which engaged in (Veblen again) ‘conspicuous consumption’ to establish the person’s status and wealth, not so much against the lower orders, too far in the depths to be even noticed, but in competition with other tycoons. J. P. Morgan’s answer to the question how much it cost to run a yacht (‘If you have to ask, you can’t afford it’), and John D. Rockefeller’s, equally apocryphal, remark when told that J. P. Morgan had left $80 million at his death (‘And we all thought he was rich’), indicate the nature of the phenomenon. There was plenty of it in those gold-plated decades when art-dealers like Joseph Duveen convinced billionaires that only a collection of old masters could put the seal on their status, when

no successful grocer was complete without a huge yacht, no mining
speculator without a string of race-horses and a (preferably British)
country palace and grouse-moor, and when the sheer quantity  and
variety of food wasted –	and indeed even the quantities consumed – in
an Edwardian weekend	beggar the imagination.

In fact, however, as already suggested the largest body of leisure subsidized by private incomes probably took the form of non-profit-making activities by the wives, sons and daughters, and sometimes other relatives, of well-heeled families. This, as we shall see, was an important element in the emancipation of women (see chapter 8 below): Virginia Woolf regarded ‘a room of one’s own’, i.e. £500 a year, as essential for this purpose, and the great Fabian partnership of Beatrice and Sidney Webb rested on £1000 a year settled on her at her marriage. Good causes, ranging from campaigns for peace and sobriety through social service for the poor – this was the era of slum ‘settlements’ by middle-class activists – to the support of the uncommercial arts, bene-fited from unpaid help and financial subsidy. The history of the early-twentieth-century arts is full of such subsidies: Rilke’s poetry was made possible by the generosity of an uncle and a succession of noble ladies, Stefan George’s poetry and Karl Kraus’ social criticism, like Georg Lukacs’ philosophy, by the family business, which also allowed Thomas Mann to concentrate on the literary life before it became lucrative. In

the words of E. M. Forster, another	beneficiary of a private income :
Tn came the dividends, up went	the lofty  thoughts.’ They rose in
and  out of villas and  apartments	furnished  by the  ‘arts-and-crafts’

movement which adapted the methods of the medieval artisan for those who could pay, and among ‘cultivated’ families for whom, given the right accent and income, even hitherto unrespectable occupations became what the Germans called salonfahig (acceptable in family

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drawing rooms). Not the least curious development of the ex-puritan middle class is its readiness, at the end of the century, to let its sons and daughters go on the professional stage, which acquired all the symbols of public recognition. After all, Sir Thomas Beecham, the heir to Beecham’s Pills, chose to spend his time as a professional conductor of Delius (son of the Bradford woollen trade) and of Mozart (who had had no such advantages).

V I

And yet, could the age of the conquering bourgeoisie flourish, when large tracts of the bourgeoisie itself found themselves so little engaged in the generation of wealth, and drifting so rapidly and so far away from the puritan ethic, the values of work and effort, accumulation through abstention, duty and moral earnestness, which had given them their identity, pride and ferocious energy? As we have seen in chapter 3, the fear – nay, the shame – of a future as parasites haunted them. Leisure, culture, comfort were all very well. (The gross public flaunting of wealth by luxurious waste was still greeted with considerable reserve by a Bible-reading generation which recalled the worship of the golden calf.) But was not the class that had made the nineteenth century its own, withdrawing from its historic destiny? How, if at all, could it combine the values of its past and its present?

The problem was hardly yet visible in the USA, where the dynamic entrepreneur felt no discernible twinges of uncertainty, though some were worried about their public relations. It was among the old New England families dedicated to university-educated public and pro-fessional services, such as the Jameses and the Adamses, that men and women distinctly ill at ease in their society were to be found. The most that can be said of American capitalists is that some of them earned money so fast and in such astronomic quantities that they were forcibly brought up against the fact that mere capital accumulation in itself is not an adequate aim in life for human beings, even bourgeois ones.* However, most American businessmen were not in the class of the admittedly unusual Carnegie, who gave away $350 million to a variety of excellent causes and people all over the world, without visibly affecting his style of life in Skibo Castle, or Rockefeller, who imitated Carnegie’s new device of the philanthropic foundation, and was to give

* “the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry – no idol more debasing than the worship of money To continue much longer overwhelmed by business care and with most of my thoughts wholly on the way to make money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond the hope of permanent recovery’ – Andrew Carnegie ^v

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away even more before his death in 1937. Philanthropy on this scale, like art collecting, had the incidental advantage that it retrospectively softened the public outlines of men whose workers and business rivals remembered them as merciless predators. For most of the American middle class getting rich, or at least well-off, was still a sufficient aim in life and an adequate justification of their class and of civilization.

Nor can we detect much of a crisis of bourgeois confidence in the smaller western countries entering upon their era of economic trans-formation – such as the ‘pillars of society’ in the provincial Norwegian shipbuilding town about whom Henrik Ibsen wrote a celebrated and eponymous play (1877). Unlike capitalists in Russia, they had no reason to feel that the entire weight and morality of a traditionalist society, from grand dukes to muzhiks, was dead against them; not to mention their exploited workers. On the contrary. Still, even in Russia, where we find surprising phenomena in literature and life like the successful businessman who is ashamed of his triumphs (Lopakhin in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard), and the great textile magnate and art-patron who finances Lenin’s Bolsheviks (Savva Morozov), rapid industrial progress brought self-assurance. Paradoxically what was to turn the February Revolution of 1917 into the October Revolution, or so it has been persuasively argued, was the conviction, acquired by Russian employers in the previous twenty years, that ‘there can be no other economic order in Russia besides capitalism’, and that Russian capitalists were strong enough to force their workers back into line.*

There were no doubt plenty of businessmen and successful pro-fessional men in the developed parts of Europe who still felt the wind of history in their sails, even though it was increasingly difficult to overlook what was happening to two of the masts which had tra-ditionally carried these sails: the owner-managed firm, and the male-centred family of its proprietor. The conduct of big business by salaried functionaries or the loss of independence of formerly sovereign entre-preneurs in cartels were indeed, as a German economic historian noted with relief at the time, ‘still a long way from socialism’.³⁹ But the mere fact that private business and socialism could be so linked shows how far from the accepted idea of private enterprise the new economic structures of our period seemed. As for the erosion of the bourgeois family, not least by the emancipation of its female members, how could it fail to undermine the self-definition of a class which rested so largely on its maintenance (see The Age of Capital, chapter 13,11) – a class for

* As a moderate industrialist leader put it on 3 August 1917 ‘We must insist that the present revolution is a bourgeois revolution [voice ‘Correct’], that a bourgeois order at the current time is inevitable, and since inevitable, should lead to a completely logical conclusion those persons who rule the country ought to think and act m a bourgeois manner ^,38

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which respectability equated with ‘morality’ and which depended so crucially on the perceived conduct of its women?

What made the problem particularly acute, at all events in Europe, and dissolved the firm contours of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, was a crisis in what, except for some self-consciously pietist Catholic groups, had long been its identifying ideology and allegiance. For the bourgeoisie had believed, not only in individualism, respectability and property, but also in progress, reform and a moderate liberalism. In the eternal political battle among the upper strata of nineteenth-century societies, between the ‘parties of movement’ or ‘progress’ and the ‘parties of order’, the middle classes had unquestionably stood, in their great majority, for movement, though by no means insensitive to order. Yet, as we shall see below, progress, reform and liberalism were all in crisis. Scientific and technical progress, of course, remained unques-tioned. Economic progress still seemed a safe bet, at any rate after the doubts and hesitations of the Depression, even though it generated organized labour movements usually led by dangerous subversives. Political progress, as we have seen, was a far more problematic concept in the light of democracy. As for the situation in the field of culture and morality, it seemed increasingly puzzling. What was one to make of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) or Maurice Barres (1862-192 3), who in the 1900s were the gurus of the children of those who had navigated their intellectual seas by the beacons of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) or Ernest Renan (1820-92)?

The situation became even more puzzling intellectually with the rise to power and prominence in the bourgeois world of Germany, a country in which middle-class culture had never taken kindly to the lucid simplicities of the rationalist eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which penetrated the liberalism of the original countries of the dual revolution, France and Great Britain. Germany was unquestionably a giant in science and learning, in technology and economic development, in civility, culture and the arts and not least in power. Probably, taken all in all, it was the most impressive national success story of the nineteenth century. Its history exemplified progress. But was it really liberal? And even insofar as it was, where did what Jin de sikle Germans called liberalism fit in with the accepted verities of the mid-nineteenth century? German universities even refused to teach economics as that subject was now universally understood elsewhere (see below, pp. 270, 271). The great German sociologist Max Weber came from an impecc-ably Liberal background, considered himself a lifelong bourgeois Liberal, and indeed was very much a Liberal of the left by German standards. Yet he was also an impassioned believer in militarism, imperialism and – at least for a time – sufficiently tempted by right-

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wing nationalism to join the Pan-German League. Or consider the domestic literary wars of the brothers Mann: Heinrich,* a classical rationalist, francophile man of the left, Thomas, a passionate critic of western ‘civilization’ and liberalism, to which (in a familiar Teutonic manner) he counterposed an essentially German ‘culture’. Yet Thomas Mann’s entire career, and certainly his reactions to the rise and triumph of Hitler, demonstrate that his roots and his heart were in the nine-teenth-century liberal tradition. Which of the two brothers was the real ‘Liberal’? Where did the Burger or German bourgeois stand?

Moreover, as we have seen, bourgeois politics themselves became more complex and divided, as the supremacy of Liberal parties crum-bled during the Great Depression. Former Liberals shifted to Con-servatism, as in Britain, Liberalism divided and declined, as in Germany, or lost support to left and right as in Belgium and Austria. What exactly did it mean to be a Liberal or even a liberal under these circumstances? Need one be an ideological or political liberal at all? After all, by the 1900s there were enough countries in which the typical member of the entrepreneurial and professional classes would be frankly on the right of the political centre. And, below them, there were the swelling ranks of the new middle and lower-middle classes, with their resentful and built-in affinity for a frankly anti-liberal right.

Two issues of increasing urgency underlined this erosion of old col-lective identities: nationalism/imperialism (see chapters 3 and 6 above) and war. The liberal bourgeoisie had certainly not been enthusiasts for imperial conquest, although (paradoxically) its intellectuals were responsible for the way the largest imperial possession of all – India – was administered (see The Age of Revolution, chapter 8, iv). Imperial expansion could be reconciled with bourgeois liberalism, but not, as a rule, comfortably. The most vocal bards of conquest were usually found further to the right. On the other hand the liberal bourgeoisie had been opposed in principle to neither nationalism nor war. However, they had seen ‘the nation’ (including their own) as a temporary phase in the evolution towards a truly global society and civilization, and were sceptical of the claims to national independence of what they regarded as obviously unviable or small peoples. As for war, though sometimes necessary, it was something to be avoided, which aroused enthusiasm only among the militarist nobility or the uncivilized. Bismarck’s (realistic) observation that the problems of Germany would only be solved by ‘blood and iron’ was deliberately meant to shock a mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal public, and in the 1860s it had done so.

* Probably, and unfairly, known outside Germany chiefly for having written the book on which Marlcne Dietrich’s film Blue Angel was based.

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It is evident that in the era of empires, extending nationalism and approaching war, these sentiments were no longer in tune with the political realities of the world. A man who in the 1900s repeated what in the 1860s or even the 1880s would have been regarded as the merest common sense of bourgeois experience, would in 1910 find himself out of sympathy with much of his times. (Bernard Shaw’s plays after 1900 get some of their comic effects by such confrontations.)⁴⁰ Under the circumstances one might have expected realistic middle-class Liberals to evolve the usual circuitous rationalizations of positions half-changed, or to remain silent. Indeed that is what British Liberal government ministers did as they committed the country to war while pretending, perhaps even to themselves, that they were not. But we also find something more.

As bourgeois Europe moved in growing material comfort towards its catastrophe, we observe the curious phenomenon of a bourgeoisie, or at least a significant part of its youth and its intellectuals, which plunged willingly, even enthusiastically, into the abyss. Everyone knows of the young men – there is much less evidence before 1914 of prospective bellicosity among young women – who hailed the outbreak of the First World War like people who have fallen in love. ‘Now God be thanked who has matched us with this hour,’ wrote the normally rational Fabian socialist and Cambridge Apostle, the poet Rupert Brooke. ‘Only war’, wrote the Italian futurist Marinetti, ‘knows how to rejuvenate, accel-erate and sharpen the human intelligence, to make more joyful and air the nerves, to liberate us from the weight of daily burdens, to give savour to life and talent to imbeciles.’ ‘In the life of camps and under fire’, wrote a French student, ‘ … we shall experience the supreme expansion of the French force that lies within us.’⁴¹ But plenty of older intellectuals were also to greet the war with manifestos of delight and pride which some lived long enough to regret. The fashion, in the years before 1914, for rejecting an ideal of peace, reason and progress for an ideal of violence, instinct and explosion has often been observed. An influential book on British history during those years has called it ‘The Strange Death of Liberal England’.

One might extend the title to western Europe. Amid the physical comforts of their newly civilized existence, the middle classes of Europe were uneasy (though this was not yet true of the businessmen of the New World). They had lost their historic mission. The most heartfelt and unqualified songs in praise of the benefits of reason, science, education, enlightenment, freedom, democracy and the progress of humanity which the bourgeoisie had once been proud to exemplify, now came (as we shall see below) from those whose intellectual formation belonged to an earlier era and had not kept up with the times. It was

1 9 0

W H O ‘S WHO OR THE UNCERTAINTIES OF THE  BOURGEOISIE

the working classes and not the bourgeoisie whom Georges Sorel, a brilliant and rebellious intellectual eccentric, warned against ‘The Illusions of Progress’ in a book published under that title in igo8. Looking backwards and forwards, the intellectuals, the young, the politicians of the bourgeois classes, were by no means convinced that all was or would be for the best. However, one important part of the upper and middle classes of Europe retained a firm confidence in future progress, for it was based on the recent and spectacular improvement in their situation. It consisted of the women, and especially the women born since about i860.

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CHAPTER      8

T H E  N E W    W O M A N

In Freud’s opinion it is true that woman gains nothing by studying, and that on the whole woman’s lot will not improve thereby. Moreover, women cannot equal man’s achievement in the sublimation of sexuality.

Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, 1907¹

My mother left school at 14. She had to go into service rightaway, on some farm…. Later she went to Hamburg as a servant girl. But her brother was allowed to learn something, he became a locksmith. When he lost hisjob they even let him start a second apprenticeship with a painter.

Grete Appen on her mother, born 1888²

The restoration of woman’s self-respect is the gist of thefeminist movement. The most substantial of its political victories can have no higher value than this – that they teach women not to depreciate their own sex.

!Catherine Anthony, 1915³

I

It may seem absurd, at first sight, to consider the history of half the human race in our period in the context of that of the western middle classes, a relatively small group even within the countries of’developed’ and developing capitalism. Yet it is legitimate, insofar as historians concentrate their attention on changes and transformations in the condition of women, for the most striking of these, ‘women’s eman-cipation’, was at this period pioneered and still almost entirely confined to the middle and – in a different form – the statistically less significant upper strata of society. It was modest enough at this time, even though the period produced a small but unprecedented number of women who were active, and indeed extraordinarily distinguished, in fields previously confined entirely to men: figures like Rosa Luxemburg, Madame Curie, Beatrice Webb. Still, it was large enough to produce

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not simply a handful of pioneers, but – within the bourgeois milieu – a novel species, the ‘new woman’ about whom male observers specu-lated and argued from the 1880s onwards, and who was the protagonist of ‘progressive’ writers: Henrik Ibsen’s Nora and Rebecca West, Bernard Shaw’s heroines, or rather anti-heroines.

In the condition of the great majority of the world’s women, those who lived in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the peasant societies of southern and eastern Europe, or indeed in most agrarian societies, there was as yet no change whatever. There was little enough change in the condition of most women of the labouring classes anywhere, except, of course, in one crucial respect. From 1875 ^{o n} women in the ‘developed’ world began to have notably fewer children.

In short, this part of the world was now visibly experiencing the so-called ‘demographic transition’ from some variant of the old pattern – speaking very roughly high birth-rates balanced by high death-rates – to the familiar modern pattern of low birth-rates offset by low mortality. Just how and why this transition came about is one of the major puzzles which confront historians of population. Historically speaking, the sharp decline in fertility in the ‘developed’ countries is quite novel. Incidentally, the failure of fertility and mortality to decline together in most of the world accounts for the spectacular explosion in the global population since the two world wars, for while mortality has fallen dramatically, partly through improvements in the standard of living, partly through a revolution in medicine, the birth-rate in most of the Third World remains high, or is only beginning to decline after the lag of a generation.

In the west the declines in birth- and death-rates were better co-ordinated. Both obviously affected the lives and feelings of women – for the most striking development affecting death was the sharp fall in the mortality of babies below one year, which also became unmistakable in the last decades before 1914. In Denmark, for instance, infant mortality had averaged about 140 per 1000 live births in the 1870s, but it stood at 96 in the last five years before 1914; in the Netherlands the equivalent figures were almost 200 and a little over 100. (For comparison: in Russia infant mortality remained at about 250 per 1000 in the early 1900s, compared to about 260 in the 1870s.) Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that having fewer children in a lifetime was a more notable change in women’s lives than having more of their children survive.

A lower birth-rate can be ensured either by women marrying later, by more of them staying unmarried (always assuming no rise in illegit-imacy) or by some form of birth-control which, in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly meant abstention from sex or coitus interruptus.

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(In Europe we can leave aside mass infanticide.) In fact, the rather peculiar west European pattern of marriage, which had prevailed over several centuries, had used all these, but especially the first two. For, unlike the usual marriage pattern in non-western countries, where girls married young and hardly any of them remained unmarried, pre-industrial western women tended to marry late – sometimes in their late twenties – and the proportion of bachelors and spinsters was high. Hence, even during the period of rapid population increase in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the European birth-rate in the ‘developed’ or developing countries of the west was lower than in the twentieth century Third World, and the rate of demographic growth, however amazing by past standards, was more modest. Nevertheless, and in spite of a general, but not universal, tendency for a higher proportion of women to marry, and to do so at a younger age, the birth-rate dropped: i.e. deliberate birth-control must have spread. The passionate debates on this emotionally explosive issue, which was more freely discussed in some countries than in others, are less significant than the massive and (outside the relevant bedrooms) silent decisions of armies of couples to limit the size of their families.

In the past such decisions had been overwhelmingly part of the strategy of maintaining and extending family resources which, given that most Europeans were country people, meant safeguarding the transmission of land from one generation to the next. The two most startling examples of nineteenth-century control of progeny, post-rev-olutionary France and post-famine Ireland, were primarily due to the decision of peasants or farmers to prevent the dissipation of family holdings by cutting down the number of heirs with possible claims to share in them: in the French case by reducing the number of children; in the case of the much more pious Irish by reducing the number of men and women in a position to have children with such claims by raising the average age at marriage to an all-time European peak, by multiplying bachelors and spinsters, preferably in the prestigious form of the religiously celibate, and, of course, by exporting spare offspring en masse across the seas as emigrants. Hence the rare examples, in a century of population growth, of a country (France) whose population remained barely more than stable, and another (Ireland) whose popu-lation actually fell.

The new forms of controlling family size were almost certainly not due to the same motives. In the cities they were undoubtedly stimulated by the desire for a higher standard of living, particularly among the multiplying lower-middle classes, whose members could not afford both the expense of a large brood of small children and the wider range of consumer goods and services which now became available; for in the

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nineteenth century nobody, other than the indigent old, was poorer than a couple with a low income and a houseful of small children. But it was probably also due to the changes which at this time made children an increasing burden on parents, as they went to school or training for a lengthening period during which they remained economically dependent. Prohibitions on child labour and the urbanization of work reduced or eliminated the modest economic value which children had for parents, e.g. on farms where they could make themselves useful.

At the same time birth-control indicated significant cultural changes, both towards children and in respect of what men and women expected from life. If children were to do better than their parents – and for most people in the pre-industrial era this had been neither possible nor desirable – then they had to be given a better chance in life, and smaller families made it possible to devote more time, care and resources to each. And, just as one aspect of a world of change and progress was to open the chance of social and professional improvement from one generation to the next, so it might also teach men and women that their own lives did notjust have to replicate their parents’. The moralists shook their heads over the French, with their single-child or double-child families; but there can be no doubt that in the privacy of pillow-talk it suggested new possibilities to husbands and wives.*

The rise of birth-control thus indicates a certain penetration of new structures, values and expectations into the sphere of western labouring women. Nevertheless, most of them were only marginally affected. Indeed they were largely outside ‘the economy’, conventionally defined to consist of those who declared themselves as having an employment or ‘occupation’ (other than domestic labour in the family). In the 1890s something like two-thirds of all males were thus classified as ‘occupied’ in the ‘developed’ countries of Europe and the USA, while something like three-quarters of females – in the USA 87 per cent of them – were not.f More precisely, 95 per cent of all married men between the ages of eighteen and sixty were ‘occupied’ in this sense (e.g. in Germany), whereas only 12 per cent of all married women were in the 1890s, though half the unmarried and about 40 per cent of the widowed were.

Pre-industrial societies are not entirely repetitive, even in the country-side. Conditions of life change, and even the pattern of women’s exist-ence does not remain the same through the generations, though one

* The French example was still cited by Sicilians who decided to enter on family limitation in

the 1950s	and 1960s, or so I am informed by two anthropologists who are enquiring into				the
subject, P	and J  Schneider
t A different classification		might have produced very different	figures	Thus the Austrian	half
of the Habsburg monarchy		counted 47 3 per cent of occupied	women,	compared to the econ-

omically not dissimilar Hungarian half which counted just under 25 per cent These percentages are based on total population, including children and the old ⁴

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T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

would hardly expect to see any dramatic transformations over a period of fifty years except as the result of climatic or political catastrophe or the impact of the industrial world. For most rural women outside the ‘developed’ zone of the world, that impact was still quite small. What characterized their lives was the inseparability of family functions and labour. They were conducted in a single setting in which most men and women carried out all their sexually differentiated tasks – whether in what we today consider the ‘household’ or in ‘production’. Farmers needed wives for farming as well as cooking and bearing children, handicraft masters and small shopkeepers needed them to conduct their trades. If there were some occupations which collected together men without women for lengthy periods – say as soldiers or sailors – there were no purely female occupations (except perhaps prostitution and the public entertainments assimilated to it) which were not normally carried out for most of the time in the setting of some household: for even unmarried men and women who were hired out as servants or agricultural labourers ‘lived in’. Insofar as the bulk of the world’s women continued to live in this manner, shackled by double labour and inferiority to men, there is little to be said about them that could not have been said in the days of Confucius, Mohammed or the Old Testament. They were not outside history, but they were outside the history of nineteenth-century society.

There was indeed a large and growing number of labouring women whose patterns of life had been or were being transformed – not necessarily for the better – by economic revolution. The first aspect of this revolution which transformed them had been what is now called ‘proto-industrialization’, the striking growth of cottage and putting-out industries for sale in wider markets. Insofar as this continued to be carried out in a setting which combined household and outside production, it did not change the position of women, though certain kinds of cottage manufacture were specifically feminine (e.g. lace-making or straw-plaiting) and therefore provided rural women with the comparatively rare advantage of a means of earning a little cash independent of men. However, what cottage industries achieved more generally was a certain erosion of the conventional differences between men’s and women’s work and above all a transformation in family structure and strategy. Households could be set up as soon as two people reached working age; children, a valuable addition to the family labour force, could be engendered without considering what would happen next to the plot of land on which their future as peasants depended. The complex and traditional mechanisms for maintaining a balance over the next generation between people and the means of production on which they depended, by controlling the age and choice

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of marriage partners, family size and inheritance, broke down. The consequences for demographic growth have been much discussed, but what is relevant here are the more immediate consequences for the life-histories and life-patterns of women.

As it happens, by the late nineteenth century proto-industries, whether male, female or combined, were falling victim to more large-scale manufacture, as indeed was handicraft production in the indus-trialized countries (see pp. 114-15 above). Globally speaking ‘domestic industry’, whose problems therefore increasingly preoccupied social investigators and governments, was still substantial. It included perhaps 7 per cent of all industrial employment in Germany, perhaps 19 per cent in Switzerland, as much as 34 per cent in Austria in the 1890s.⁵ Such industries, known as ‘sweated industries’, even expanded under certain circumstances, with the aid of small-scale mechanization which was new (notably the sewing-machine), and notoriously underpaid and exploited labour. However, they increasingly lost their character as ‘family manufacture’ as their labour force became more and more

feminized	and,	incidentally,	compulsory	schooling  deprived		them
of child	labour,	which  was	usually  an  integral  part  of		them.  As
the traditional ‘proto-industrial’ occupations were swept away –						hand-
loom  weaving,		framework  knitting  etc. –		most  domestic	industry

ceased to be a family enterprise and became merely a kind of underpaid work which women could do in cottages, garrets and back-yards.

Domestic industry at least enabled them to combine paid work with some supervision of household and children. That is why so many married women who needed to earn money, but remained chained to kitchens and small children, found themselves doing such work. For the second and major effect of industrialization on the position of women was much more drastic: it separated the household from the place of work. And in doing so it largely excluded them from the publicly recognized economy – the one in which people were paid wages – and compounded their traditional inferiority to men by a new economic dependence. Peasants, for instance, could hardly exist as peasants without wives. Farm work required the woman as well as the man. It was absurd to regard the household income as earned by one sex rather than both, even though one sex was considered as dominant. But in the new economy the household income was typically and increasingly earned by specifiable people who went out to work and came back from factory or office at regular intervals with money, which was distributed to other family members who, equally clearly, did not earn it directly even if their contribution to the household was essential in other ways. Those who brought back money were not necessarily

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only men, even though the main ‘bread-winner’ was typically a male; but those who found it difficult to bring back money from outside were typically the married women.

Such a separation of household and place of work logically entailed a pattern of sexual-economic division. For the woman it meant that her role as a household manager became her primary function, especially where family earnings were irregular or tight. This may explain the constant complaints from middle-class sources about the inadequacies of working-class women in this respect: such complaints do not appear to have been common in the pre-industrial era. Of course, except among the rich, this produced a new kind of complementarity between husbands and wives. Nevertheless, she no longer brought home income.

The main bread-winner had to aim at earning an income sufficient to maintain all his dependants. His earnings (for he was typically a male) ought therefore ideally to be fixed at a level which did not require any other contribution to produce a family wage sufficient to keep all. Conversely, the income of other family members was conceived of as at best complementary, and this reinforced the traditional belief that women’s (and of course children’s) work was inferior and low-paid. After all, the woman needed to be paid less since she did not have to earn the family income. Since better-paid men would have their wages reduced by the competition of low-paid women, the logical strategy for them was to exclude such competition if possible, thus pressing women further into economic dependence or permanent low-wage occupations. At the same time, from the woman’s point of view, dependence became the optimum economic strategy. By far her best chance of getting a good income lay in attaching herself to a man who was capable of bringing it home, since her own chance of earning such a living was usually minimal. Apart from the higher reaches of prostitution, which were no easier to reach than Hollywood stardom in later days, her most promising career was marriage. But marriage made it exceedingly difficult for her to go out to earn a living even had she wanted to, partly because domestic work and looking after children and husband tied her to the household, partly because the very assumption that a good husband was by definition a good bread-winner intensified the con-ventional resistance, by both men and women, to the wife’s work. The fact that she could be seen not to need to work was the visible proof, before society, that the family was not pauperized. Everything conspired to keep the married woman a dependant. Women habitually went to work until they married. They were very often obliged to go to work when widowed or abandoned by their husbands. But they did not usually do so when married. In the 1890s only 12.8 per cent of German

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married women had a recognized occupation. In Britain (1911) only about 10 per cent had one.⁶

Since a great many adult male bread-winners could plainly not bring home an adequate family income by themselves, the paid labour of women and children was, in fact, only too often essential to the family budget. Moreover, since women and children were notoriously cheap labour and easy to brow-beat, especially since most female labour consisted of young girls, the economy of capitalism encouraged their employment wherever possible – i.e. where not prevented by the resistance of the men, by law, by convention, or by the nature of certain physically taxing jobs. There was thus a great deal of women’s work even according to the narrow criteria of the censuses, which in any case almost certainly substantially understated the amount of ‘occupied’ married women, since much of their paid work would not be reported as such or would not be distinguished from the domestic tasks with which it overlapped: the taking in of lodgers, part-time work as domestic cleaners, laundresses and the like. In Britain 34 per cent of women over the age often were ‘occupied’ in the 1880s and 1890s – compared with 83 per cent of the men, and in ‘industry’ the proportion of women ranged from 18 per cent in Germany to 31 per cent in France.⁷ Women’s work in industry was at the beginning of our period still overwhelmingly concentrated in a few typically ‘female’ branches, notably textiles and clothing but increasingly also food manufacture. However, the majority of women earning an income as individuals did so in the service sector. The number and proportion of domestic servants, curiously enough, varied very greatly. It was probably larger in Britain than anywhere else – probably nearly twice as high as in France or Germany – but from the end of the century it began to fall quite notably. In the extreme case of Britain, where the number had doubled between 1851 and 1891 (from 1.1 to 2 millions) it remained stable for the rest of the period.

Taking it all in all, we can see nineteenth-century industrialization – using the word in its widest sense – as a process which tended to extrude women, and particularly married women, from the economy officially defined as such, namely that in which only those who received an individual cash income counted as ‘occupied’: the sort of economics which included the earnings of prostitutes in the ‘national income’, at least in theory, but not the equivalent but unpaid conjugal or extra-conjugal activities of other women, or which counted paid servants as ‘occupied’ but unpaid domestic work as ‘unoccupied’. It produced a certain masculinization of what economics recognized as ‘labour’, just as in the bourgeois world where the prejudice against women working was far greater and more easily applied (see The Age of Capital, chapter 13, 11) it produced a masculinization of business. In pre-industrial

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times women who themselves looked after estate or enterprise were recognized, though not common. In the nineteenth century they were increasingly considered as freaks of nature, except at the inferior social levels where poverty and the general lowness of the lower orders made it impossible to regard the large numbers of female shopkeepers and market-women, inn- and lodging-house-keepers, small traders and moneylenders as quite so ‘unnatural’.

If the economy was thus masculinized, so was politics. For as demo-cratization advanced, and as the right to vote — both locally and nationally – was extended after 1870 (see pp. 85-6 above) women were systematically excluded. Thus politics became essentially a man’s affair, to be discussed in the inns and cafes where men gathered or at meetings attended by them, while the women were confined to that part of life which was private and personal, for which alone nature fitted them (or so it was argued). This also was a relative innovation. In the popular politics of pre-industrial society, which ranged from the pressure of village opinion through riots in favour of the old ‘moral economy’ to revolutions and barricades, poor women at least had not only a part but a recognized role. It had been the women of Paris who marched on Versailles to express the people’s demand for controlled food-prices to the king in the French Revolution. In the era of parties and general elections they were pushed into the background. If they exerted any influence at all, it was only through their men.

In the nature of things these processes affected, more than any others, the women of the new classes most typical of the nineteenth century: the middle and working classes. Peasant women, the daughters and wives of small craftsmen, shopkeepers and the like went on much as before, except insofar as they or their menfolk themselves were drawn into the new economy. In the nature of things the differences between women in the new situation of economic dependency and in the old situation of inferiority were in practice not very large. In both men were the dominant sex, women second-class human beings: since they had no citizen rights at all one cannot even call them second-class citizens. In both most of them worked; whether they were paid for it or not.

Both working- and middle-class women saw their position begin to change quite substantially for economic reasons in these decades. In the first place both structural transformations and technology now altered and greatly increased the scope for women’s employment as wage-earners. The most striking change, apart from the decline of domestic service, was the rise of occupations which are now primarily feminine: employment in shops and offices. Female shop-assistants in Germany rose from 32,000 in 1882 (under one-fifth of the total) to

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174,000 in 1907 (or about 40 per cent of the total) in 1907. In Britain central and local government employed 7000 women in 1881 but 76,000 in 1911; the number of’commercial and business clerks’ had risen from 6000 to 146,000 – a tribute to the typewriter.⁸ The growth of elementary education expanded teaching, a (subaltern) profession which in a number of countries – the USA and increasingly Britain – became strikingly feminized. Even in France in 1891 for the first time more women than men were recruited into that ill-paid and devoted army of the ‘black hussars of the Republic’;⁹ for women could teach boys, but it was unthinkable that men should undergo the temptations of teaching the growing number of schoolgirls. Some of these new openings benefited the daughters of workers or even peasants; more of them benefited the daughters of the middle classes and the old or new lower-middle classes, attracted in particular to posts which had a certain social respectability or could (at the cost of depressing their wage-levels) be considered as working ‘for pocket-money’.*

A change in the social position and expectations of women became obvious in the last decades of the nineteenth century, though the more visible aspects of women’s emancipation were still largely confined to women of the middle classes. Among these we need not pay too much attention to the most spectacular aspect, the active, and in countries like Britain dramatic, campaign of the organized female ‘suffragists’ and ‘suffragettes’ for the women’s right to vote. As an independent women’s movement it was not of major significance except in a few countries (notably the USA and Britain), and even there it did not begin to achieve its objects until after the First World War. In countries like Britain, where suffragism became a significant phenomenon, it measured the public strength of organized feminism, but in doing so it also revealed its major limitation, an appeal primarily confined to the middle class. Votes for women were, like other aspects of female emancipation, strongly supported on principle by the new labour and socialist parties, which actually provided by far the most favourable environment in which emancipated women could take part in public life, at least in Europe. However, while this new socialist left (unlike parts of the old, and strongly masculine, radical-democratic and anti-clerical left) overlapped with suffragist feminism and was sometimes attracted to it, it could not but observe that most working-class women laboured under disabilities which were more urgent than political disenfranchisement, which were not likely to be automatically removed

* ‘Ware-house girls and clerks come from better-class families and are therefore more frequently subsidised by their parents…. In a few trades, such as typewriting, clerical trades and shop-assistants … we find the modern phenomenon of a girl working for pocket money.’¹⁰

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by the right to vote, and which were not in the forefront of the minds of most middle-class suffragists.

I I

In retrospect the movement for emancipation seems natural enough, and even its acceleration in the 188os is not very surprising at first sight. Like the democratization of politics, a greater degree of equal rights and opportunities for women was implicit in the ideology of the liberal bourgeoisie, however inconvenient and inopportune it might appear to patriarchs in their private lives. The transformations within the bourgeoisie after the 1870s inevitably provided more scope for its women, and especially its daughters, for, as we have seen, it created a substantial leisure class of females of independent means, irrespective of marriage, and a consequent demand for non-domestic activities. Moreover, when a growing number of bourgeois males were no longer required to do productive work, and many of them engaged in cultural activities, which tough businessmen had been inclined to leave to the females of the family, the gender differences could not but seem attenuated.

Moreover, some degree of women’s emancipation was probably necessary for middle-class fathers, because by no means all middle-class families, and practically no lower-middle-class families, were sufficiently well-off to keep their daughters in comfort if they did not marry and did not work either. This may explain the enthusiasm of many middle-class men, who would not have admitted women to their clubs or professional associations, for educating their daughters to envisage a certain independence. All the same, there is no reason at all to doubt the genuine convictions of liberal fathers in these matters.

The rise of labour	and socialist movements as major	movements
for the emancipation	of the unprivileged unquestionably	encouraged

women seeking their own freedom: it is no accident that they formed one-quarter of the membership of the (small and middle-class) Fabian Society – founded 1883. And, as we have seen, the rise of an economy of services and other tertiary occupations provided a wider range of jobs for women, while the rise of a consumer economy made them into the central target for the capitalist market.

We need not, therefore, spend much time in discovering reasons for the emergence of the ‘new woman’, although it is as well to remember that the reasons may not have been quite so simple as they appear at first sight. There is, for instance, no good evidence that in our period woman’s position was much changed by her increasingly central econ-

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omic significance as wielder of the shopping basket, which the adver-tising industry, now entering upon its first age of glory, recognized with its usual ruthless realism. It had to focus on women in an economy which discovered mass consumption even among the fairly poor, because money was to be made out of the person who decided most household purchases. She had to be treated with greater respect, at least by this mechanism of capitalist society. The transformation of the distributive system – multiple shops and department stores gaining on corner shop and market, mail-order catalogues on pedlars – insti-tutionalized this respect, through deference, flattery, display and adver-tisement.

However, bourgeois ladies had long been treated as valuable cus-tomers, while most of the expenditure of the relatively or absolutely poor still went on necessities or was fixed by custom. The range of what were now considered household necessities widened, but personal luxuries for women such as toiletries and changing fashions were still confined chiefly to the middle classes. Women’s market power did not yet contribute much to the change in their status, and especially not among the middle classes, where it was not new. One might even argue that the techniques which advertisers and journalists found to be most effective tended, if anything, to perpetuate traditional stereotypes of women’s behaviour. On the other hand the women’s market generated a substantial number of new jobs for women professionals, many of whom were also, and for obvious reasons, actively interested in feminism.

Whatever the complexities of the process, there is no doubt about the striking change in the position and aspiration of women, at all events in the middle classes, during the decades before 1914. The most obvious symptom of this was the remarkable expansion in the secondary education for girls. In France the number of boys’ lycees remained roughly stable at 330-340 during our entire period, but the number of girls’ establishments of the same kind grew from none in 1880 to 138 in 1913, and the number of girls in them (c. 33,000) had reached a third of that of the boys. In Britain, where there was no national secondary system before 1902, the number of boys’ schools climbed from 292 to 1904/5 to 397 in 1913/14, but the number of girls’ schools from 99 to a comparable figure (349)-* By 1907/8 in Yorkshire the number of girls in secondary schools was roughly equal to that of boys: but what is perhaps more interesting is that by 1913/14 the number of girls staying on in the nation’s state secondary schools past the age of sixteen was

* The number of co-educational schools, almost certainly of inferior status, grew more modestly from 184 to 281.

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very much larger than that of boys.¹¹

Not all countries showed a comparable zeal for the formal education of (middle- and lower-middle class) girls. It advanced far more slowly in Sweden than in the other Scandinavian countries, hardly at all in the Netherlands, little enough in Belgium and Switzerland, while in Italy, with 7500 pupils, it was quite negligible. Conversely by 1910 about a quarter of a million girls received secondary education in Germany (vastly more than in Austria) and, somewhat surprisingly, in Russia it had reached this figure by 1900. It grew much more modestly in Scotland than in England and Wales. University education for women showed less unevenness, except for the quite remarkable expan-sion in tsarist Russia, where it grew from less than 2000 in 1905 to 9300 in 1911 – and of course the USA where total numbers (56,000 in 1910) which had not quite doubled since 1890, were not really comparable to other university systems. In 1914 numbers in Germany, France and Italy were between 4500 and 5000, in Austria 2700. It is to be noted that women were admitted to university study in Russia, the USA and Switzerland from the 1860s, but in Austria not until 1897 and in Germany not until 1900-8 (Berlin). Outside medicine, only 103 women had graduated in German universities by 1908, the year in which the first woman was appointed as a university teacher in that country (at the Commercial Academy in Mannheim). National differ-ences in the progress of women’s education have not attracted any great interest among historians so far.¹²

Even if all these girls (with the exception of the handful who pen-etrated the male institutions of the university) did not receive the same education, or one as good, as boys of the same age, the mere fact that formal secondary education for middle-class women became familiar, and in some countries already almost normal in certain circles, was quite unprecedented.

The second, less¹ quantifiable symptom of a significant change in the position of (young) women is the greater freedom of movement in society they acquired, both in their own right as individuals and in their relations with men. This was of particular importance for girls of the ‘respectable’ families, subject to the strongest conventional restraints. The practice of casual social dancing in public places avail-able regularly for this purpose (i.e. neither in the home nor at formal balls organized for special occasions) reflects this loosening of conven-tions. By 1914 the more unshackled youth in the western big cities and resorts was already familiar with sexually provocative rhythmic dances of dubious but exotic origin (the Argentinian tango, the syncopated steps of American blacks), practised in night-clubs or, in a way even more shocking, in hotels at tea-time or between courses of dinner.

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This implied freedom of movement not only in the social but in the literal sense. For though women’s fashions did not dramatically express emancipation until after the First World War, the disappearance of the armours of textiles and whalebone which enclosed the female figure in public was already anticipated by the loose and flowing garments which the vogues of intellectual aestheticism in the 1880s, art nouveau and pre-1914 haute-couture at the end of the period popularized. And here the escape of middle-class women from the twilit or lamplit cocoon of the bourgeois interior into the open air is significant, for it also implied, at least on certain occasions, escape from the movement-inhibiting confinement of clothes and corsets (and also their substitution after 1910 by the novel, more flexible, brassiere). It is no accident that Ibsen symbolized the liberation of his heroine by a draught of fresh air into the Norwegian home. Sport not only made it possible for young men and women to meet as partners outside the confines of household and kinship. Women, if in small numbers, were members of the new touring clubs and mountaineering clubs, and that great engine of freedom, the bicycle, emancipated the female proportionately more than the male, since she had more need of free movement. It gave more freedom even than that enjoyed by the horsewomen of the aristocracy, who were still obliged by feminine modesty, at substantial physical risk to themselves, to ride sidesaddle. How much additional freedom did middle-class women acquire through the growing, and sexually skewed, practice of holidays in summer resorts – winter sports, except for bisexual skating, were in their infancy – where they were only occasion-ally joined by husbands who otherwise remained in their city offices?* At all events mixed bathing now, in spite of all efforts to the contrary, inevitably revealed more of the body than Victorian respectability would have regarded as tolerable.

How far this increased freedom of movement meant greater sexual liberty for middle-class women is difficult to establish. Sex without marriage was certainly still confined to a minority of consciously eman-cipated girls of this class, almost certainly also seeking other expressions of liberation, political or otherwise. As a Russian woman recalls, in the period after 1905, ‘It became very difficult for a “progressive” girl to refuse advances without long explanations. The provincial lads were not very demanding, simple kisses were enough, but the university students from the capital … could not easily be turned down. “Are you old-fashioned, Fraulein?” And who wanted to be old-fashioned?”³ How large these communities of emancipated young women were is

* Readers interested in psychoanalysis may have noted the role played by holidays in the progress of patients m Sigmund Freud’s case-book.

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unknown, though almost certainly they were largest in tsarist Russia, negligible in size in the Mediterranean countries,* and probably quite significant in north-western Europe (including Britain) and the cities of the Habsburg Empire. Adultery, which was pretty certainly the most widespread form of extra-marital sex for middle-class women, may or may not have increased with their self-confidence. There is all the difference between adultery as a form of Utopian dream of liberation from a confined life, as in the standard Madame Bovary version of nineteenth-century novels, and the relative freedom of French middle-class husbands and wives, so long as conventions were kept up, to have lovers, as presented in nineteenth-century French boulevard plays. (Both, incidentally, were primarily written by men.) However, nine-teenth-century adultery, like most nineteenth-century sex, resists quantification. All that can be said with any confidence is that this form of behaviour was commonest in aristocratic and fashionable circles, and in the large cities where (with the help of discreet and impersonal institutions such as hotels) appearances could be more easily kept up.f

However, if the quantitative historian is at a loss, the qualitative historian cannot fail to be struck by the growing recognition of female sensuality in the strident masculine statements about women during this period. Many of these are attempts to reassert, in literary and scientific terms, the superiority of men in active and intellectual achieve-ment and the passive and, as it were supplementary, function of women in the relation between the sexes. Whether or not these appear to express a fear of women’s ascendancy, as perhaps in the Swedish dramatist Strindberg and the unbalanced young Austrian Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), which went through twenty-five editions in twenty-two years, seems secondary. The philosopher Nietz-sche’s endlessly quoted injunction to men not to forget the whip when they went to woman (Thus Spake Zjirathustra, 1883)¹⁺ was actually no more ‘sexist’ than the praise of women of Weininger’s contemporary and admirer Karl Kraus. To insist, like Kraus, that ‘what is not given to woman is just what ensures that man makes use of his gifts”⁵ or, like the psychiatrist Mobius (1907), that ‘cultural man alienated from nature’ needed natural woman as his counterpart, could suggest (as for Mobius) that all higher educational establishments for women should be destroyed, or (as for Kraus) it could suggest no such thing. The basic attitude was similar. There was, however, an unmistakable and novel

* This may explain the disproportionate role of Russian emigre women in the progressive and labour movements of a country like Italy

t These observations apply exclusively to the middle and upper classes They do not apply to the pre- and post-marital sexual behaviour of women of the peasantry and urban labouring classes, who, of course, constituted the majority of all women

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insistence that women as such had powerful erotic interests: for Kraus ‘the sensuality [my emphasis] of women is the source to which man’s intellectuality [Geistigkeit] goes for renewal’. Fm de siicle Vienna, that remarkable laboratory of modern psychology, provides the most soph-isticated and unconstrained recognition of female sexuality. Klimt’s portraits of Viennese ladies, not to mention of women in general, are images of persons with powerful erotic concerns of their own rather than merely images of the sexual dreams of men. It would be very improbable if they did not reflect something of the sexual reality of the Habsburg middle and upper classes.

The third symptom of change was the notably greater public atten-tion given to women as a group having special interests and aspirations as individuals. No doubt business nostrils were the first to catch the scent of a special women’s market – for instance, for the women’s pages of the new mass dailies addressed to the lower-middle class, and the girls’ and women’s periodicals for the newly literate – but even the market appreciated the publicity value of treating women not only as consumers but as achievers. The great Anglo-French International exhibition of 1908 caught the tone of the time not only by combining the sales efforts of exhibitors with celebrations of empire and the first custom-built Olympic stadium, but with a centrally placed Palace of Women’s Work including a historic exhibit on distinguished women who had died before the 1900s of’royal, noble and of simple origins’ (sketches of the young Victoria, the manuscript of Jane Eyre, Florence Nightingale’s Crimean carriage, etc.) and displays of needlework, arts-and-crafts, book illustration, photography and the like.* Nor should we overlook the emergence of women as individual achievers in competitive efforts of which sport, once again, provides a striking example. The institution of a women’s singles at Wimbledon within six years of that of the men’s singles and also, with about the same time-lag, in the French and US tennis championships, was a more revolutionary innovation in the 1880s than is easy to recognize today. For respectable, even married, women to appear in such public roles unattached to families and men, would have been virtually inconceivable even two decades earlier.

* It is, however, typical of the time that ‘the women artists preferred for the most part to show their work in the Fine Arts Palace’ And that the Women’s Industrial Council complained to The Times of the intolerable conditions under which the thousand or so women employed at the Exhibition worked ¹⁶

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I I I

For obvious reasons it is easier to document the conscious and cam-paigning movement for women’s emancipation, and the women who actually succeeded in penetrating the hitherto masculine preserves of life. Both consist of articulate and, by their very rarity, recorded min-orities of western middle- and upper-class women – all the better documented since their very efforts, or in some cases their very existence, aroused resistance and debate. The very visibility of these minorities detracts attention from the groundswell of historical change in the social position of women, which historians can only apprehend obliquely. Indeed, even the conscious development of the movement for emancipation is not entirely seized by concentrating on its militant spokespeople. For an important section of it, and almost certainly the majority of those who took part in it outside Britain, America and possibly Scandinavia and the Netherlands, did not do so by identifying with specifically feminine movements, but by identifying with woman’s liberation as part of wider movements of general emancipation, such as the labour and socialist movements. Nevertheless, these minorities must be briefly surveyed.

As already suggested, the specifically feminist movements were small: in many continental countries their organizations consisted of a few hundred or at best one or two thousand individuals. Their members were overwhelmingly drawn from the middle class, and their identi-fication with the bourgeoisie, and in particular with the bourgeois liberalism whose extension to the second sex they stood for, gave them such strength as they had and determined their limitations. Below the level of the prosperous and educated bourgeoisie, votes for women, access to higher education, the right to go out to work and to join the professions, and the fight for male legal status and rights (especially property rights) were unlikely to rouse as much crusading fervour as other issues. Nor should we forget that the relative freedom of middle-class women to campaign for such demands rested, in Europe at least, on passing the burdens of domestic work to a much larger group of women, their servants.

The limitations of middle-class western feminism were not only social and economic but also cultural. The form of emancipation to which their movements aspired, namely to be treated legally and politically like man and to take part as individuals, irrespective of sex, in the life of society, assumed a transformed pattern of social life which was already far removed from the traditional ‘woman’s place’. To take an extreme case: emancipated Bengali men, who wished to show their westernization by bringing their wives out of seclusion and ‘into the

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drawing room’, produced unexpected tensions with and among their women-folk, since it was quite unclear to these women what they gained in return for the certain loss of the subaltern, but very real autonomy in that section of the household which was unquestionably theirs.¹¹ A clearly defined ‘women’s sphere’ – whether of women singly in their household relations or of women collectively as part of a community – might strike progressives as a mere excuse for keeping women down, as indeed, among other things, it evidently was. And of course it increas-ingly became so with the weakening of traditional social structures.

Yet within its limits it had given women such individual and collective resources as they had, and these were not entirely negligible: for instance, they were the perpetuators and formers of language, culture and social values, the essential makers of’public opinion’, the acknow-ledged initiators of certain kinds of public action (e.g. the defence of the ‘moral economy’), and not least, the persons who had not only learned to manipulate their men, but to whom, in some subjects and in some situations, men were expected to defer. The rule of men over women, however absolute in theory, was no more unrestricted and arbitrary in collective practice than the rule of absolute monarchs by divine right was an unlimited despotism. This observation does not justify one form of rule rather than the other, but it may help to explain why many women who, for want of anything better, had learned over the generations to ‘work the system’ were relatively indifferent to liberal middle-class demands which appeared to offer no such practical advantages. After all, even within the bourgeois liberal society, middle-class and petty-bourgeois Frenchwomen, far from foolish and not often given to gentle passivity, did not bother to support the cause of women’s suffrage in large numbers.

Since times were changing and the subordination of women was universal, overt and proudly advertised by men, this still left plenty of room for movements of feminine emancipation. Yet insofar as these were likely to gain support among the mass of women in this period, it was paradoxically not as specifically feminist movements, but as women’s components within movements of universal human eman-cipation. Hence the appeal of the new social revolutionary and socialist movements. They were specifically committed to women’s eman-cipation – the most popular exposition of socialism by the leader of the German Social Democratic Party was, significantly, August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism. Indeed, socialist movements provided much the most favourable public environment for women, other than entertainers and a few very favoured daughters of the elite, to develop their per-sonalities and talents. But more than this, they promised a total trans-formation of society which, as realistic women well knew, would be

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required to change the ancient pattern of the relation between the sexes.*

To this extent the real political choice for the mass of European women lay not between feminism and mixed political movements, but between the Churches (notably the Catholic Church) and socialism. The Churches, fighting a powerful rearguard action against nineteenth-century ‘progress’ (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter 6, i), defended such rights as women possessed in the traditional order of society, and with all the more zeal inasmuch as both the body of their faithful and, in many respects, their actual personnel were being dramatically fem-inized: by the end of the century there were almost certainly far more female religious professionals than at any time since the Middle Ages. It is hardly an accident that the best-known Catholic saints of the period since the mid-nineteenth century were women: St Bernadette of Lourdes and St Teresa of Lisieux – both canonized in the early twentieth century – and that the Church gave notable encouragement to the cult of the Virgin Mary. In Catholic countries the Church provided wives with powerful, and resented, weapons against husbands. Much of anti-clericalism therefore had a marked tinge of anti-feminine hostility, as in France and Italy. On the other hand the Churches championed women at the cost of also committing their pious supporters to accept their traditional subordination, and to condemn the female eman-cipation which the socialists offered.

Statistically the women who opted for the defence of their sex through piety enormously outnumbered those who opted for liberation. Indeed, while the socialist movement attracted an avant garde of exceptionally able women from the start – mainly, as might be expected, from the middle and upper classes – there is not much sign before 1905 of any significant female membership in labour and socialist parties. In the 1890s not more than fifty women at any time, or 2-3 per cent, were members of the admittedly not very large Parti Ouvrier Francais.¹⁸ When they were recruited in larger numbers, as in Germany after 1905, it was largely as wives, daughters or (as in Gorki’s famous novel) mothers of socialist men. Before 1914 there is no equivalent to, say, the Austrian Social Democratic Party of the mid-1920s, almost 30 per cent of whose members were women, or the British Labour Party in the 1930s, about 40 per cent of whose individual membership was female, though in Germany the percentage was already substantial.¹⁹ The percentage of women organized in labour unions remained consistently small: negligible in the 1890s (except for Britain), normally not more

* It does not follow that this transformation would take the form only of the social revolution anticipated by the socialist and anarchist movements.

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than io per cent in the 1900s.* However, as women did not have the vote in the vast majority of countries, the most convenient index of their political sympathies is not available to us, and further speculation is idle.

Most women thus remained outside any form of the movement for emancipation. Moreover, even many of those whose lives, careers and opinions showed that they cared intensely about breaking the tra-ditional cage of ‘the woman’s sphere’ showed little enthusiasm for the more orthodox campaigns of the feminists. The early period of women’s emancipation produced a remarkable crop of eminent women, but some of the most distinguished among them (e.g. Rosa Luxemburg or Beatrice Webb) saw no reason to confine their talents to the cause of any one sex. It is true that public recognition was now somewhat easier:

from 1891 the British reference book Men of the Time changed	its title
to Men and Women of the Time, and public activity for women’s	causes
or for those commonly regarded as of special interest to women (e.g.
children’s welfare) was itself now apt to bring some public prominence.

Nevertheless, the road of the woman in a man’s world remained hard, success implied quite exceptional efforts and endowments, and the numbers of those who succeeded was modest.

By far the largest proportion of them practised activities recognized as being compatible with traditional femininity, such as in the per-forming arts and (for middle-class women, especially married ones) writing. Much the largest number of British ‘women of the time’ recorded in 1895 were authors (forty-eight) and stage figures (forty-two).²¹ In France Colette (1873-1954) was both. Before 1914 one woman had already won a Nobel prize for literature (Selma Lagerlof of Sweden, 1909). Professional careers now also opened, for instance in education with the great growth of secondary and higher education for girls, or – certainly in Britain – in the new journalism. In our period politics and public campaigning on the left became another promising option. The largest percentage of prominent British women in 1895 – one-third – came under the heading ‘Reformers, Philanthropists etc’ In fact, socialist and revolutionary politics offered opportunities

* Percentage of women among organized trade unionists 1913:²⁰

Country	Percentage
UK	10.5
Germany	9
Belgium (1923)	8.4
Sweden	5
Switzerland	11
Finland	12.3

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unequalled elsewhere, as a number of women from tsarist Russia, operating in a variety of countries (Rosa Luxemburg, Vera Zasulich, Alexandra Kollontai, Anna Kuliscioff, Angelica Balabanoff, Emma Goldman), and a few in other countries (Beatrice Webb in Britain, Henrietta Roland-Hoist in the Netherlands) showed.

In this it differed from conservative politics which in Britain – though hardly anywhere else – held the loyalty of many an aristocratic lady feminist,* but offered no such possibilities; and it differed from liberal party politics, in which politicians were also at this time essentially male. Nevertheless, the relative ease with which women could make their mark in public life is symbolized by the award of the Nobel peace prize to one (Bertha von Suttner, 1905). The hardest task was undoubtedly that of the woman who braved the entrenched resistance, institutional and informal, of men in the organized professions, in spite of the small but rapidly expanding bridgehead they had established in medicine: 20 doctors in the England and Wales of 1881, 212 in 1901, 447 in 1911. This is some measure of the extraordinary achievement of Marie Sklodkowska-Curie (another product of the Tsarist Empire), who won two Nobel prizes for science in this period (1903, 1911)’ These luminaries do not measure the participation of women in a male world, which could be very impressive, allowing for the tiny numbers involved: one thinks of the role of a handful of emancipated British women in the revival of the labour movement after 1888: of Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx, and the itinerant propagandists who did so much to form the young Independent Labour Party (Enid Stacy, Katherine Conway, Caroline Martyn). Nevertheless, while almost all such women were supporters of women’s rights and, particularly in Britain and the USA, most were strong supporters of the political feminist movement, they devoted only marginal attention to it.

Those who did concentrate on it were normally committed to pol-itical agitation, since they demanded rights which, like the vote, required political and legal changes. They could hardly expect much from conservative and confessional parties, and their relation with liberal and radical ones, with whom the ideological affinities of middle-class feminism lay, were sometimes difficult, especially in Britain where it was Liberal governments which stood in the way of the strong suffragist movement in 1906-14. Occasionally (as among the Czechs and Finns) they were associated with opposition movements of national liberation. Within the socialist and labour movements females were encouraged to concentrate on their own sex, and many socialist fem-

*The Directory of the feminist Englishwoman’s Tear-Book (1905) included 158 titled ladies, including thirty duchesses, marchionesses, viscountesses and countesses. This comprised a quarter of the British duchesses.²²

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inists did so, not only because the exploitation of working women so obviously called for action, but also because they discovered the need to fight for the rights and interests of women within their own movement, in spite of its ideological commitment to equality. For the difference between a small avant garde of progressive or revolutionary militants and a mass labour movement was that the latter consisted primarily not just of men (if only because the bulk of the wage-earning and even more of the organized working class was masculine), but of men whose attitude to women was traditional, and whose interests as trade unionists were to exclude low-paid competitors from men’s work. And women were the quintessential form of cheap labour. However, within the labour movements these issues were muted and to some extent defused by the multiplication of women’s organizations and committees within them, particularly after 1905.

Of the political issues of feminism, the right to vote in parliamentary elections was much the most prominent. Before 1914 it had not been won anywhere nationally except in Australasia, Finland and Norway, though it existed in a number of states of the USA and to a limited extent in local government. Women’s suffrage was not an issue which mobilized important movements of women or played a major role in national politics except in the USA and Britain, where it had very substantial support among women of the upper and middle class, and among the political leaders and activists of the socialist movement. The agitations were dramatized by the tactics of direct action of the Women’s Social and Political Union (the ‘suffragettes’), in the period 1906-14. However, suffragism should not tempt us to overlook the extensive political organization of women as pressure-groups for other causes either of special interest to their sex – such as the campaigns against the ‘white slave traffic’ (which led to the Mann Act of 1910 in the USA) – or concerning such issues as peace and anti-alcoholism. If they were, alas, unsuccessful in the first endeavour, their contribution to the triumph of the second, the eighteenth amendment to the US constitution (Prohibition), was crucial. Nevertheless, outside the USA, Britain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, the independent political activities of women (except as part of labour) remained of minor importance.

IV

Yet there was another strand of feminism twining its way through political and non-political debates about women: sexual liberation. This was a touchy subject, as witness the persecution of women who

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publicly propagated so respectably backed a cause as birth-control – Annie Besant, deprived of her children for this reason in 1877, Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes later. But, above all, it did not fit readily into the texture of any movement. The upper-class world of Proust’s great novel or the Paris of independent and often well-heeled lesbians like Natalie Barney accepted sexual freedom, orthodox or heterodox, with ease, so long as appearances were kept up where necessary. But – as witness Proust – it did not associate sexual liberation with social or private happiness, or social transformation; nor (except for a much lower bohime of artists and writers attracted to anarchism) did it welcome the prospect of such transformation. Conversely social rev-olutionaries were certainly committed to sexual freedom of choice for women – the sexual Utopia of Fourier, admired by Engels and Bebel, had not been entirely forgotten – and such movements attracted the anti-conventional, Utopians, bohemians and counter-cultural propa-gandists of all kinds, including those who wished to assert the right to sleep with anyone in any way they pleased. Homosexuals like Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde, champions of sexual toleration like Have-lock Ellis, liberated women of varying tastes like Annie Besant and Olive Schreiner, gravitated in the orbit of the small British socialist movement of the 1880s. Free unions without marriage certificates were not only accepted, but, where anti-clericalism was particularly impassioned, virtually mandatory. Yet, as Lenin’s later brushes with female comrades too preoccupied with the sexual question show, opinions were divided about what ‘free love’ should mean and how central a concern of the socialist movement it should be. An advocate of the unlimited liberation of instincts like the psychiatrist Otto Grosz (1877-1920), criminal, drug-addict and early disciple of Freud, who made his way through the intellectual and artistic milieux of Heidelberg (not least through his lovers the Richthofen sisters, lovers or wives of Max Weber, D. H. Lawrence and others), through Munich, Ascona, Berlin and Prague, was a Nietzschean with scant sympathy for Marx. Though he was hailed by some of the pre-1914 bohemian anarchists – but opposed as an enemy of morals by others – and favoured anything that would destroy the existing order, he was an elitist who can hardly be fitted into any political framework. In short, as a programme sexual liberation raised more problems than it offered solutions. Outside the avant garde boheme its programmatic appeal was small.

One major problem it raised, or drew attention to, was the precise nature of woman’s future in society given equal rights, opportunities and treatment. The crux here was the future of the family, which hinged on woman as mother. It was easy to conceive of women eman-cipated from the burdens of the household, which the middle and upper

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classes (especially in Britain) had largely shed by means of servants and by sending their male offspring to boarding-schools from an early age. American women, in a country already short of servants, had long advocated – and now began to achieve – the labour-saving tech-nological transformation of the home. Christine Frederick, in the Ladies Home Journal of 1912, even brought ‘scientific management’ into the home (see above, pp. 44-5). Gas cookers began to spread, not very fast, from 1880, electric cookers, more rapidly, from the last pre-war years. The term ‘vacuum cleaner’ appears in 1903 and electric irons were pushed on a sceptical public from 1909, but their triumph lay in the inter-war future. Laundries – not as yet in the home – were mechanized: the value of washing-machine production in the US quintupled between 1880 and 1910.²³ Socialists and anarchists, equally enthusiastic about technological Utopia, favoured more collective arrangements, and also concentrated on infant schools, creches and public provision of cooked food (of which school meals were an early example), which would enable women to combine motherhood with work and other activities. Yet this did not entirely solve the problem.

Would not women’s emancipation imply the replacement of the existing nuclear family by some other human grouping? Ethnography, which flourished as never before, demonstrated that this was far from the only type of family known to history – the Finnish anthropologist Westermarck’s History of Human Marriage (1891) ran through five editions by 1921 and was translated into French, German, Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Japanese – and Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) drew the required revolutionary conclusions. Yet though the Utopian-revolutionary left experimented with new forms of communal units, whose most lasting product was to be the kibbutz ofJewish settlers in Palestine, it is safe to say that most socialist leaders and an even more overwhelming majority of their supporters, not to mention less ‘advanced’ persons, conceived of the future in terms of a transformed but still essentially nuclear family. However, opinions differed about the woman who made marriage, housekeeping and motherhood her primary career. As Bernard Shaw pointed out to an emancipated female correspondent, woman’s emancipation was chiefly about Ae?-.²⁴ In spite of some defence of home and hearth by the moderates of socialism (e.g. the German ‘revisionists’), left-wing theorists generally felt that woman’s emancipation would come through outside employment or interests, which they therefore encouraged strongly. And yet the problem of combining emancipation and mother-hood was not to be easily solved.

A large number, and probably the majority, of the emancipated middle-class women who opted for a career in a man’s world at this

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time solved it by childlessness, refusal to marry, often (as in Britain) virtual celibacy. This was not only a reflex of hostility to men, sometimes disguised as a sense of female superiority to the other sex, such as could be found on the fringes of the Anglo-Saxon suffrage movement. Nor was it simply a by-product of the demographic fact that the excess of women – 13 million in Britain in 1911 – precluded marriage for many. Marriage was indeed still a career to which even many non-manual working women looked forward, abandoning their school-teaching or office-employment on their wedding day, even when they did not have to. It reflected the very real difficulty ofcombining two demanding occu-pations, at a time when only exceptional resources and help made this practicable. In their absence a worker-feminist like Amalie Ryba-Seidl (1876-1952) had to abandon herlifelong militancy in the Austrian Social-ist party for five years (1895-1900) in order to bear her husband three children,²⁵ and, by our standards more inexcusably, Bertha Philpotts Newall (1877-1932), a distinguished and neglected historian, felt she had to resign as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, as late as 1925, because ‘her father needs her and she feels she must go’.²⁶ But the cost of self-abnegation was high and women who opted for a career, like Rosa Luxemburg, knew that it had to be paid and that they were paying it.²⁷

How far, then, had the condition of women been transformed in the half-century before 1914? The problem is not how to measure but how to judge changes which, by any standards, were substantial for a vast number, perhaps for most women in the urban and industrial west, and dramatic for a minority of middle-class women. (But it is worth repeating that all these together formed only a small percentage of the female half of the human race.) By the simple and elementary standards of Mary Wollstonecraft, who asked for the same rights for both sexes, there had been a major breakthrough in women’s access to occupations and professions hitherto maintained as male monopolies, and often bitterly defended in the teeth of common sense and even bourgeois convention, as when male gynaecologists argued the special tmsuit-ability of women to treat specifically female diseases. By 1914 few women had advanced through the gap, but in principle the way was now open. In spite of appearances to the contrary, women were on the verge of a massive victory in the long struggle for equal citizen rights, symbolized by the vote. However bitterly contested before 1914, less than ten years later women could vote in national elections for the first time in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the USA.* It is evident that this remarkable change was the

* In fact in Europe women were excluded from the vote only in the Latin countries, including France, in Hungary, the more backward parts of east and south-east Europe – and in Switzerland.

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culmination of pre-1914 struggles. As for equal rights before the (civil) law, the balance-sheet was rather less positive, in spite of the removal of some of the more flagrant inequalities. In the matter of equality of earnings, there had been no significant advance. With negligible exceptions women could still expect to earn much less than men for the same work, or to occupy jobs which, being seen as ‘women’s jobs’, were for that reason low-paid.

One might say that, a century after Napoleon, the Rights of Man of the French Revolution had been extended to women. Women were on the verge of equal citizen rights, and, however grudgingly and narrowly, careers were now open to their talent as well as to men’s. In retrospect it is easy to recognize the limitations of these advances, as it is easy to recognize those of the original Rights of Man. They were welcome, but they were not enough, especially not for the vast majority of women whom poverty and marriage kept dependent.

But even for those for whom the progress of emancipation was unquestionable – women of the established middle classes (though probably not of the new and old petty-bourgeoisie or lower-middle classes) and young women of working age before marriage – it posed a major problem. If emancipation meant emergence from the private and often separate sphere of family, household and personal relations to which women had so long been confined, could they, how could they, retain those parts of their femininity which were not simply roles imposed on them by males in a world designed for males? In other words, how could women compete as women in a public sphere formed by and in terms suited to a differently designed sex?

Probably there is no permanent answer to this question, faced in different ways by every generation which takes the position of women in society seriously. Each answer, or set of answers, may be satisfactory only for its own historical conjuncture. What was the answer of the first generations of western urban women which plunged into the era of emancipation? We know a good deal about the vanguard of politically active or culturally articulate prominent pioneers, but little about the inactive and inarticulate. All we know is that the women’s fashions which swept the emancipated sectors of the west after the First World War, and which took up themes anticipated in the milieux of ‘the advanced’ before 1914, notably the artistic bohemias of great cities, combined two very different elements. On the one hand the post-war ‘jazz generation’ demonstratively took over the public use of cosmetics, which had previously been the characteristic of women whose exclusive function was to please men: prostitutes and other entertainers. They now displayed parts of the body, starting with the legs, which nine-teenth-century conventions of female sexual modesty had kept shielded

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from the concupiscent eyes of males. On the other hand post-war fashions were to do their best to minimize the secondary sexual charac-teristics which distinguished women from men most visibly, by cutting and eventually cropping traditionally long hair, and making their chests look as flat as was physically possible. Like the short skirts, the abandoned corsets, the new-found ease of movement, all these were signs of, and calls for, freedom. They could not have been tolerated by an older generation of fathers, husbands or other holders of traditional patriarchal authority. What else did they indicate? Perhaps, as in the triumph of the ‘little black dress’, invented by Coco Chanel (1883— 1971), pioneer of the professional businesswoman, they also reflected the requirements of women who needed to combine work and public informality with elegance. But we can only speculate. Yet it is hard to deny that the signs of emancipated fashion pointed in opposite and not always compatible directions.

Like so much else in the world between the wars, the post-1918 fashions of women’s liberation were first pioneered in the pre-war avant gardes. More precisely, they flourished in the bohemian quarters of the great cities: Greenwich Village, Montmartre and Montparnasse, Chelsea, Schwabing. For the ideas of bourgeois society, including its ideological crises and contradictions, found characteristic, if often puzzling and puzzled expressions, in its arts.

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They [French politicians of the left] were very ignorant about art … but they all pretended more or less to some knowledge of it, and often they really loved it…. One of them would be a playwright; another would scrape on the violin; another would be a besotted Wagnerian. And they all collected Impressionist pictures, read decadent books, and prided themselves on a taste for some ultra-aristocratic art.

Romain Rolland, 1915¹

It is among such men, with cultivated intellects, sensitive nerves, and bad digestion, that we find the prophets and disciples of the gospel of Pessimism Accordingly Pessimism is not a creed which is likely to exert much influence on the strong, practical, Anglo-Saxon race, and we can only discern somefaint traces of it in the tendency of certain very limited cliques of so-called Aestheticism to admire morbid and self conscious ideals, both in poetry and painting.

1. Laing, 1885²

The past is necessarily inferior to thefuture. That is how we wish it to be. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy?… This is how we deny the obsessing splendour of the dead centuries, and how we cooperate with the victorious Mechanics that hold the world firm in its web ofspeed.

1. T. Marinetti, the futurist, 1913³

I

Perhaps nothing illustrates the identity crisis through which bourgeois society passed in this period better than the history of the arts from the 1870s to 1914. It was the era when both the creative arts and the public for them lost their bearings. The former reacted to this situation by a flight forward into innovation and experiment, increasingly linked to utopianism or pseudo-theory. The latter, unless converted by fashion

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and snob-appeal, murmured defensively that they ‘didn’t know about art, but they knew what they liked’, or retreated into the sphere of ‘classic’ works whose excellence was guaranteed by the consensus of generations. Yet the very concept of such a consensus was itself under fire. From the sixteenth until the end of the nineteenth century, about a hundred ancient sculptures embodied what all agreed to be the highest achievements of plastic art, their names and reproductions familiar to every educated western person: the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere, the Dying Gladiator, the Boy Removing a Thorn, the Weeping Niobe and various others. Virtually all were forgotten in the two generations after 1900, except perhaps the Venus de MiIo, singled out after discovery early in the nineteenth century by the conservatism of the authorities of the Louvre museum in Paris, which has retained its popularity to this day.

Moreover, from the end of the nineteenth century the traditional kingdom of high culture was undermined by an even more formidable enemy: the arts appealing to the common people and (with the partial exception of literature) revolutionized by the combination of technology and the discovery of the mass market. The cinema, the most extra-ordinary innovation in this field, together with jazz and its various offspring, had not yet triumphed: but by 1914 it was very much present and ready to conquer the globe.

It is, of course, unwise to exaggerate the divergence between public and creative artists in high or bourgeois culture at this period. In many respects the consensus between them remained in being, and the works of people who considered themselves innovators, and met with resist-ance as such, were absorbed into the corpus of what was both ‘good’ and ‘popular’ among the cultured public, but also, in diluted or selected form, among much wider strata of the population. The accepted rep-ertoire of the late-twentieth-century concert-hall includes the work of composers of this period as well as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘classics’ which form its main stock: Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and various figures of mainly national eminence (Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Reger, Sibelius). The international operatic rep-ertoire was still being extended (Puccini, Strauss, Mascagni, Leon-cavallo, Janacek, not to mention Wagner, whose triumph dates from the thirty years before 1914). In fact, grand opera flourished enormously, and even absorbed the avant garde for the benefit of the fashionable public, in the form of the Russian ballet. The great names of that period are still legendary: Caruso, Chaliapin, Melba, Nijinsky. The ‘light classics’ or the popular operettas, songs and short com-positions essentially in their idiom, flourished greatly, as in the Habs-burg operetta (Lehar, 1870-1948) and ‘musical comedy’. The

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repertoire of Palm Court orchestras, bandstands and even of present-day Muzak bear witness to its appeal.

The ‘serious’ prose literature of the time has found and kept its place, though not always its contemporary popularity. If the reputation of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust has (rightly) risen – most of their work was published after 1914, though Hardy’s novels appeared mostly between 1871 and 1897 – the fortunes of Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland and Roger Martin du Gard, Theodore Dreiser and Selma Lagerlof, have been more chequered. Ibsen and Shaw, Chekhov and (in his own country) Hauptmann have survived initial scandal to become part of classic theatre. For that matter, the revolutionaries of the late-nineteenth-century visual arts, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, came to be accepted in the twentieth century as ‘great masters’ rather than as indicators of their admirers’ modernity.

The real dividing-line runs through the period itself. It is the exper-imental avant garde of the last pre-war years which, outside a small community of the ‘advanced’ – intellectuals, artists and critics and the fashion-conscious – was never to find a genuine, spontaneous welcome among the broad public. They might console themselves with the thought that the future was theirs, but for Schonberg the future was not to come as it did for Wagner (though it may be argued that it did come for Stravinsky); for the Cubists it was not to come as it did for Van Gogh. To state this fact is not to judge the works, still less to undervalue the talents of their creators, which could be enormously impressive. Yet it is hard to deny that Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), a man of extraordinary genius and vast productivity, is mainly admired as a phenomenon rather than (except for a handful of paintings, mainly from his pre-Cubist period) for the depth of impact, or even our simple enjoyment, of his works. He may well be the first artist of equivalent gifts since the Renaissance of whom this can be said.

It is therefore pointless to survey the arts of this period, as the historian is tempted to do so for the earlier nineteenth century, in terms of their achievement. Yet it must be emphasized that they flourished notably. The sheer increase in the size and wealth of an urban middle class able to devote more of its attention to culture, as well as the great extension of literate and culture-hungry lower-middle classes and sections of the working classes, would have been enough to ensure this. The number of theatres in Germany tripled between 1870 and 1896, from two hundred to six hundred.⁴ This was the period when in Britain the Promenade Concerts began (1895), when the new Medici Society (1908) mass-produced cheap reproductions of the great masters of painting for the culturally aspiring, when Havelock Ellis, better known

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as a sexologist, edited an inexpensive Mermaid Series of Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, when such series as the World’s Classics and the Everyman Library brought international literature to readers of small means. At the top of the scale of wealth, prices of old masters and other symbols of big money, dominated by the competitive buying of American multi-millionaires advised by dealers and their associated experts like Bernard Berenson, both of whom did extremely well out of this traffic, reached an all-time peak in real terms. The cultured sectors of the rich, and occasionally the very rich, in suitable regions, and the well-financed museums, chiefly of Germany, brought not only the best of the old, but also the best of the new, including the extreme avant gardes which survived economically largely on the patronage of a handful of such collectors, such as the Muscovite businessmen Morozov and Shchukin. The less cultured had themselves, or more frequently their wives, painted by John Singer Sargent or Boldini and their houses designed by fashionable architects.

There is thus no doubt that the public for the arts, richer, more cultured and more democratized, was enthusiastic and receptive. This was, after all, a period when cultural activities, long an indicator of status among the wealthier middle classes, found concrete symbols to express the aspirations and modest material achievements of wider strata, as in the upright piano, which, financially accessible through instalment paying, now penetrated the front parlours of clerks, the better-paid workers (at least in Anglo-Saxon countries) and comfort-able peasants anxious to demonstrate their modernity. Moreover, culture represented not only individual but collective aspirations, nowhere more so than in the new mass labour movements. The arts also symbolized political aims and achievements in an age of democracy, to the material benefit of architects who designed the gigantic monu-ments to national self-congratulation and imperial propaganda, which filled the new German Empire and Edwardian Britain and India with masses of masonry, and of sculptors who supplied this golden age of what has been called ‘statuomania’⁵ with objects ranging from the titanic (as in Germany and the USA) to the modest busts of Marianne and the memorials of local worthies in French rural communes.

The arts are not to be measured by sheer quantity, nor is their achievement a simple function of expenditure and market demand. Yet there is no denying that there were in this period more people trying to earn their living as creative artists (or a higher proportion of such people in the labour force). It has even been suggested that the various breakaways from the official art establishments which controlled the official public exhibitions (the New English Arts Club, the frankly entitled ‘Secessions’ of Vienna and Berlin, etc., successors to the French

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Impressionist Exhibition of the early 1870s) were largely due to the overcrowding of the profession and its official institutes, which naturally tended to be dominated by the older and established artists.⁶ It might even be argued that it now became easier than ever before to earn a living as a professional creator, because of the striking growth of the daily and periodical press (including the illustrated press) and the appearance of the advertising industry, as well as of consumer goods designed by artist-craftsmen or other experts with professional stand-ing. Advertising created at least one new form of the visual arts which enjoyed a small golden age in the 1890s: the poster. No doubt this proliferation of professional creators produced a great deal of hack-work, or was resented as such by its literary and musical practitioners, who dreamed of symphonies as they wrote operettas or song-hits, or like George Gissing, of great novels and poems as they churned out reviews and ‘essays’ orfeuilletons. But it was paid work, and it could be reasonably paid: aspiring women journalists, probably the largest body of new female professionals, were assured that £150 a year could be earned by supplying the Australian press alone.⁷

Moreover, there is no denying that during this period artistic creation itself flourished remarkably, and over a wider area of western civi-lization than ever before. Indeed it now became internationalized as never before, if we omit music, which already enjoyed a basically international repertoire, mainly of Austro-German origin. The fer-tilization of western arts by exotic influences – from Japan since the 1860s, from Africa in the early 1900s – has already been mentioned in connection with imperialism (see above, pp. 80-1). In the popular arts influences from Spain, Russia, Argentina, Brazil and above all North America spread across the western world. But culture in the accepted elite sense was also notably internationalized by the sheer ease of personal movement within a broad cultural zone. One thinks not so much of the actual ‘naturalization’ of foreigners attracted by the prestige of certain national cultures, which made Greeks (Moreas), Americans (Stuart Merill, Francis Viele-Griffln) and Englishmen (Oscar Wilde) write symbolist compositions in French; prompted Poles (Joseph Conrad) and Americans (Henryjames, Ezra Pound) to establish themselves in England; and ensured that the Ecole de Paris for painters consisted less of Frenchmen than of Spaniards (Picasso, Gris), Italians (Modigliani), Russians (Chagall, Lipchitz, Soutine) Rumanians (Brancusi), Bulgarians (Pascin) and Dutchmen (Van Dongen). In a sense this was merely one aspect of that spray of intellectuals which in this period distributed itself across the cities of the globe, as emigrants, leisured visitors, settlers and political refugees or through universities and laboratories, to fertilize international politics and

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culture.* One thinks rather of the western readers who discovered Russian and Scandinavian literature (in translation) in the 1880s, the central Europeans who found inspiration in the British arts-and-crafts movement, the Russian ballet which conquered fashionable Europe before 1914. High culture, from the 1880s, rested on a combination of native manufactures and imports.

However, national cultures, at least in their less conservative and conventional manifestations, were clearly in a healthy state – if this is the right word for some arts and creative talents who took pride in the 1880s and 1890s in being considered ‘decadent’. Value judgments in this vague territory are notoriously difficult, for national sentiment is apt to exaggerate the merits of cultural achievements in its own language. Moreover, as we have seen, there were now flourishing written litera-tures in languages understood by few foreigners. For the overwhelming majority of us the greatness of prose and especially poetry in Gaelic, Hungarian or Finnish must remain a matter of faith, as does the greatness of the poetry of Goethe or Pushkin for those who know no German or Russian. Music is luckier in this respect. In any case there were no valid criteria of judgment, except perhaps inclusion in a recognized avant garde, for singling out some national figure from his or her contemporaries for international recognition. Was Ruben Dario (1867-1916) a better poet than any of his Latin American con-temporaries? He may well have been, but all we can be sure of is that this son of Nicaragua gained international recognition in the Hispanic

world as an influential	poetic innovator. This difficulty in				establishing
international  criteria	of  literary	judgment	has	made	the  choice
of the Nobel  prize for  literature		(instituted	in	1897)	permanently
unsatisfactory.

Cultural efflorescence was perhaps less noticeable in countries of recognized prestige and unbroken achievement in the high arts, though even there one notes the liveliness of the cultural scene in the French Third Republic and in the German Empire after the 1880s (compared to the mid-century decades), and the growth of new foliage on branches of the creative arts hitherto fairly bare: drama and musical composition in Britain, literature and painting in Austria. But what is particularly impressive is the unquestionable flowering of the arts in small or mar-ginal countries or regions not hitherto much noted, or long dormant: in Spain, Scandinavia or Bohemia. This is very obvious in an international fashion such as the variously named art nouveau (Jugendstil, stile liberty) of the late century. Its epicentres were found not only in some major

* The role of such emigres from Russia in the politics of other countries is familiar Luxemburg, Helphand-Parvus and Radek in Germany, KulisciofT and Balabanoff in Italy, Rappoport in France, Dobrogeanu-Gherea in Rumania, Emma Goldman in the USA

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cultural capitals (Paris, Vienna), but also, and indeed above all, in more or less peripheral ones: Brussels and Barcelona, Glasgow and Helsingfors (Helsinki). Belgium, Catalonia and Ireland are striking examples.

Probably at no time since the seventeenth century did the rest of the world need to take as much cultural notice of the southern Low Coun-tries as in the final decades of the nineteenth century. For that is when Maeterlinck and Verhaeren briefly became major names in European literature (one of them is still familiar as the writer of Debussy’s Pelleas et Mehsande), James Ensor became a familiar name in painting, while the architect Horta launched art nouveau, Van de Velde brought a British-derived ‘modernism’ into German architecture, and Constantin Meunier invented the international stereotype of the sculptured pro-letarian. As for Catalonia, or rather the Barcelona ofmodernisme, among whose architects and painters Gaudi and Picasso are only the most world-famous, it can safely be said that only the most self-confident Catalans would have envisaged such cultural glory in, say, i860. Nor would an observer of the Irish scene in that year have predicted the extraordinary efflorescence of (mainly Protestant) writers who emerged from that island in the generation after 1880: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, the great poet W. B. Yeats, John M. Synge, the young James Joyce, and others of more localized celebrity.

Yet it plainly will not do to write the history of the arts in our period simply as a success story, which it certainly was in terms of economics and the democratization of culture, and, at a level somewhat more modest than the Shakespearean or Beethovenian, in widely distributed creative achievement. For even if we remain in the sphere of ‘high culture’ (which was already being made technologically obsolescent), neither the creators in the arts nor the public for what was classified as ‘good’ literature, music, painting, etc., saw it in such terms. There were still, notably in the border-zone where artistic creation and technology overlapped, expressions of confidence and triumph. Those public palaces of the nineteenth century, the great railway stations, were still being built as massive monuments to the fine arts: in New York, St Louis, Antwerp, Moscow (the extraordinary Kazan station), Bombay and Helsinki. The sheer achievement of technology, as demonstrated in the Eiffel Tower and the novel American skyscrapers, dazzled even those who denied it aesthetic appeal. For the aspiring and increasingly literate masses, the mere accessibility of high culture still seen as a continuum of past and present, ‘classic’ and ‘modern’, was itself a triumph. The (British) Everyman’s Library published its achievements in volumes whose design echoed William Morris, ranging from Homer to Ibsen, from Plato to Darwin.⁸ And, of course, public statuary and

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the celebration of history and culture on the walls of public buildings – as in the Paris Sorbonne and the Vienna Burgtheater, University and Art History Museum – flourished as never before. The incipient struggle between Italian and German nationalism in the Tyrol crystallized round the erection of monuments to Dante and Walther von der Vogelweide (a medieval lyricist) respectively.

I I

Nevertheless, the late nineteenth century does not suggest widespread triumphalism and cultural self-confidence, and the familiar impli-cations of the term fin de siecle are rather misleadingly those of the ‘decadence’ in which so many established and aspiring artists – the young Thomas Mann comes to mind – took pride in the 1880s and 1890s. More generally, the ‘high’ arts were ill at ease in society. Somehow, in the field of culture as elsewhere, the results of bourgeois society and historical progress, long conceived as a co-ordinated forward march of the human mind, were different from what had been expected. The first great liberal historian of German literature, Gervinus, had argued before 1848 that the (liberal and national) ordering of German political affairs was the indispensable precondition for another flower-ing of German literature.⁹ After the new Germany had actually come into being, the textbooks of literary history confidently forecast the imminence of this golden age, but by the end of the century such optimistic prognoses turned into glorification of the classical heritage against contemporary writing seen as disappointing or (in the case of the ‘modernists’) undesirable. For greater minds than the run-of-the-mill pedagogues it seemed already clear that ‘the German spirit of 1888 marks a regression from the German spirit of 1788’ (Nietzsche). Culture seemed a struggle of mediocrity consolidating itself against ‘the domi-nance of the mob and the eccentrics (both mainly in alliance)’.¹⁰ In the European battle between ancients and moderns, engaged at the end of the seventeenth century and so evidently won by the moderns in the Age of Revolution, the ancients – now no longer situated in classical antiquity – were once again winning.

The democratization of culture through mass education – even through the numerical growth of culture-hungry middle and lower-middle classes – was itself sufficient to make elites look for more exclusive cultural status-symbols. But the crux of the crisis of the arts lay in the growing divergence between what was contemporary and what was ‘modern’.

At first this divergence was not obvious. Indeed, after  1880, when

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‘modernity’ became a slogan and the term ‘avant garde”, in its modern sense, first crept into the conversation of French painters and writers, the gap between the public and the more adventurous arts seemed actually to be narrowing. This was partly because, especially in the decades of economic depression and social tension, ‘advanced’ views on society and culture appeared to combine naturally, and partly because-perhaps through the public recognition of emancipated (middle-class) women and youth as a group and through the more unbuttoned and leisure-oriented phase of bourgeois society (see chapter 7 above) – important sectors of middle-class taste become distinctly more flexible. The fortress of the established bourgeois public, grand opera, which had been shocked by the populism of Bizet’s Carmen in 1875, had by the early 1900s accepted not only Wagner, but the curious combination of arias and social realism (verismo) about the lower orders (Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, 1890; Charpentier’s Louise, 1900). It was prepared to make the fortunes of a composer like Richard Strauss, whose Salome (1905) combined everything designed to shock the bourgeoisie of 1880: a symbolist libretto based on a work by a militant and scandalous aesthete (Oscar Wilde) and an uncompromisingly post-Wagnerian musical idiom. At another, and commercially more significant level, anti-conventional minority taste now become marketable, as witness the fortunes of the London firms of Heals (furniture makers) and Liberty (fabrics). In Britain, the epicentre of this stylistic earthquake, as early as 1881 a spokesman of blinkered convention, the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience, satirized an Oscar Wilde figure and attacked the novel preference of young ladies (favouring ‘aesthetic’ robes inspired by art galleries) for symbolist poets with lilies rather than sturdy dragoon officers. Shortly thereafter William Morris and arts-and-crafts provided the model for the villas, rural cottages and interiors of the comfortable and educated bourgeoisie (‘my class’, as the economist J. M. Keynes was later to call it).

Indeed, the fact that the same words were used to describe social, cultural and aesthetic innovation underlines the convergence. The New English Arts Club (1886), art nouveau and the Neue £eit, the major journal of international Marxism, used the same adjective as was supplied to the ‘new woman’. Youth and springtime growth were the metaphors which described the German version of art nouveau {Jugendstil), the artistic rebels ofJung-Wien (1890) and the devisers of images of spring and growth for the May Day demonstrations of labour. The future belonged to socialism – but the ‘music of the future’ [Zukunftsmusik) of Wagner had a conscious socio-political dimension, in which even political revolutionaries of the left (Bernard Shaw; Victor Adler, the Austrian socialist leader; Plekhanov, the pioneer Russian

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Marxist) thought they discerned socialist elements which escape most of us today. Indeed the anarchist (though perhaps less the socialist) left even discovered ideological merits in the great, but far from politically ‘progressive’ genius of Nietzsche who, whatever his other charac-teristics, was undoubtedly ‘modern’.”

It was no doubt natural that ‘advanced’ ideas should develop an affinity for artistic styles inspired by ‘the people’ or which, pushing realism (cf. The Age of Capital) forward into ‘naturalism’, took the oppressed and exploited and even the struggle of labour as their subject-matter. And the other way round. In the socially conscious Depression era there was a considerable amount of such work, a good deal of it – e.g. in painting – by people who did not subscribe to any manifesto of artistic rebellion. It was natural that the ‘advanced’ should admire writers who shattered bourgeois conventions about what it was ‘proper’ to write about. They favoured the great Russian novelists, largely discovered and popularized in the west by ‘progressives’, Ibsen (and in Germany other Scandinavians like the young Hamsun and – a more unexpected choice – Strindberg), and above all ‘naturalist’ writers accused by the respectable of concentrating on the filthy underside of society, and often, sometimes temporarily, attracted to the democratic left of various kinds, like Emile Zola and the German dramatist Hauptmann.

Nor did it seem strange that artists should express their passionate commitment to suffering humanity in ways which went beyond the ‘realism’ whose model was a dispassionate scientific recording: Van Gogh, then still quite unknown; the Norwegian Munch, a socialist; the Belgian James Ensor, whose ‘Entry ofJesus Christ into Brussels in 1889’ included a banner for the Social Revolution; or the German proto-expressionist Kathe Kollwitz, commemorating the revolt of the hand-loom weavers. Yet militant aesthetes and believers in art for art’s sake, champions of ‘decadence’ and schools designed to be difficult of mass access such as ‘symbolism’, also declared a sympathy for socialism, like Oscar Wilde and Maeterlinck, or at least an interest in anarchism. Huysmans, Leconte de Lisle and Mallarme were among the subscribers to La RSvolte (1894).¹² In short, until the new century there was no general rift between political and artistic ‘modernity’.

The British-based revolution in architecture and the applied arts illustrates the connection between both, as well as their eventual incom-patibility. The British roots of the ‘modernism’ which led to the Bauhaus were, paradoxically, Gothic. In the smoky workshop of the world, a society of egoism and aesthetic vandals, where the small craftsmen so visible elsewhere in Europe could no longer be seen in the fog generated by the factories, the Middle Ages of peasants and artisans had long

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seemed a model of a society both socially and artistically more satis-factory. Given the irreversible industrial revolution, it inevitably tended to become a model inspiring a future vision rather than something that could be preserved, let alone restored. William Morris (1834-96) demonstrates the entire trajectory from late-romantic medievalist to a sort of Marxian social revolutionary. What made Morris and the associated arts-and-craft movement so remarkably influential was ideol-ogy, rather than his astonishing and manifold gifts as a designer, decorator and craftsman. For this movement of artistic renovation specifically sought to restore the broken links between art and the worker in production, and to transform the environment ofdaily living – from interior furnishings to house, and indeed village, city and land-scape – rather than the self-contained sphere of the ‘fine arts’ for the rich and leisured. The arts-and-crafts movement was disproportionately influential, because its impact automatically stretched beyond small circles of artists and critics, and because it inspired those who wished to change human life, not to mention practical men interested in producing structures and objects of use and in the relevant branches of education. Not least, it attracted a clutch of progressively minded architects, drawn to the new and urgent tasks of’town-planning’ (the term became familiar after 1900) by the vision of Utopia so readily associated with their profession and its associated propagandists: the ‘garden city’ of Ebenezer Howard (1898), or at least the ‘garden suburb’.

With the arts-and-crafts movement an artistic ideology thus became more than a fashion among creators and connoisseurs, because its commitment to social change linked it to the world of public institutions and reforming public authorities which could translate it into the public reality of art schools and redesigned or expanded cities and communities. And it linked the men and – to a notably increased extent – the women active in it to productions, because its object was essentially to produce ‘applied arts’, or arts used in real life. The most lasting memorial to William Morris is a set of marvellous wallpaper and textile designs which were still commercially available in the 1980s.

The culmination of this socio-aesthetic marriage between crafts, architecture and reform was the style which – largely, though not entirely, propelled by British example and its propagandists – swept Europe in the later 1890s under various names of which art nouveau is the most familiar. It was deliberately revolutionary, anti-historicist, anti-academic and, as its champions never ceased to repeat, ‘con-temporary’. It combined the indispensable modern technology – its most prominent monuments were the stations of the Paris and Vienna municipal transport systems – with the artisan’s union of adornment

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and fitness for purpose; so much so that today it suggests above all a profusion of interlaced curvilinear decoration based on stylized mainly biological motifs, botanical or female. They were the metaphors of nature, youth, growth and movement so characteristic of the time. And indeed, even outside Britain, artists and architects in this idiom were associated with socialism and labour – like Berlage, who built a trade union headquarters in Amsterdam, and Horta, who built the ‘Maison du Peuple’ in Brussels. Essentially art nouveau triumphed through furniture, motifs of interior decoration, and innumerable smallish dom-estic objects ranging from the expensive luxuries of Tiffany, Lalique and the Wiener Werkstatte to the table-lamps and cutlery which mechanical imitation spread through modest suburban homes. It was the first all-conquering ‘modern’ style.*

Yet there were flaws at the heart of art nouveau, which may be partly responsible for its rapid disappearance, at least from the high cultural scene. They were the contradictions which drove the avant garde into isolation. In any case the tensions between the elitism and the populist aspirations of ‘advanced’ culture, i.e. between the hope of general renewal and the pessimism of educated middle classes faced with ‘mass society’, had only been temporarily obscured. From the middle 1890s, when it was clear that the great forward surge of socialism led not to revolution but to organized mass movements engaged in hopeful but routine activities, the artists and aesthetes found them less inspiring. In Vienna Karl Kraus, originally attracted to social democracy, moved away from it in the new century. Electoral cam-paigns did not excite him, and the cultural policy of the movement had to take account of the conventional tastes of its proletarian militants, and had indeed trouble enough fighting off the influence of pulp thrillers, romances and other forms of Schundliteratur against which socialists (notably in Scandinavia) waged embittered campaigns.¹³ The dream of an art for the people confronted the reality of an essentially upper- and middle-class public for the ‘advanced’ arts, give or take a few figures whose subject-matter showed them to be politically acceptable to worker militants. Unlike the avant gardes of 1880-95, those of the new century, apart from the survivors of the older generation, were not attracted by radical politics. They were a-political or even, in some schools, like the Italian futurists, moving towards the right. Only war, the October Revolution and the apocalyptic mood which both brought with them were to fuse revolution in the arts and in society once again, thus casting a retrospective red glow over Cubism and ‘constructivism’,

* As this is written, the writer stirs his tea with a spoon made in Korea, whose decorative motifs visibly derive from art nouveau.

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which had no such associations before 1914. ‘The majority of artists today’, complained the old Marxist Plekhanov in 1912-13, ‘follow bourgeois points of view and are entirely resistant to the great ideals of liberty in our time.”⁴ And in France it was noted that the avant garde of painters were entirely caught up in their technical debates and kept out of the way of other intellectual and social movements.¹⁵ Who would have expected this in 1890?

I ll

Yet there were more fundamental contradictions within the avant garde arts. They concerned the nature of the two things for which the motto of the Vienna Secession called (‘Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit’ – ‘To our era its art, to art its freedom’), or ‘Modernity’ and ‘reality’. ‘Nature’ remained the subject-matter of the creative arts. Even in 1911 the painter later regarded as the herald of pure abstraction, Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), refused to sever all connection with it, since this would simply produce patterns ‘like a necktie or a carpet (to put it bluntly)’.’⁶ But, as we shall see, the arts merely echoed a new

and  fundamental  uncertainty  about	what  nature	was	(see  chapter
io below). They faced  a triple problem. Granted		its	objective  and
describable reality – a tree, a face, an	event – how	could description

catch the reality? The difficulties of making reality ‘real’ in a ‘scientific’ or objective sense had already led e.g. Impressionist painters far beyond the visual language of representational convention (see The Age of Capital, chapter 15, iv), though, as the event proved, not beyond the comprehension of laymen. It took their followers considerably further, into the pointillism of Seurat (1859-91) and the search for the basic structure as against the appearance of visual reality, which the Cubists, claiming the authority of Cezanne (1839-1906), thought they could discern in some three-dimensional shapes of geometry.

Second, there was the duality between ‘nature’ and ‘imagination’, or art as the communication of descriptions and of ideas, emotions and values. The difficulty lay not in choosing between them, since few, even among the ultra-positivist ‘realists’ or ‘naturalists’, saw themselves entirely as dispassionate human cameras. It lay in the crisis of nine-teenth-century values diagnosed by the powerful vision of Nietzsche, and consequently of the conventional language, representational or symbolic, for translating ideas and values into the creative arts. The flood of official statuary and building in the traditional idiom which inundated the western world between 1880 and 1914, from the Statue of Liberty (1886) to the Victor Emmanuel Monument (1912), rep-

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resented a dying, and after 1918 clearly a dead, past. Yet the search for other idioms, often exotic, which was pursued from the ancient Egyptians and Japanese to the islands of Oceania and the sculptures of Africa, reflected not only dissatisfaction with the old, but uncertainty about the new. In a sense art nouveau was, for this reason, the invention of a new tradition which happened not to work out.

Third, there was the problem of combining reality and subjectivity. For part of the crisis of ‘positivism’, which will be more fully discussed in the next chapter, was the insistence that ‘reality’ was not just there, to be discovered, but was something perceived, shaped, even constructed

through and  by the mind of the observer. In the ‘weak’	version of
this view, reality was objectively there, but apprehended	exclusively

through the states of mind of the individual who apprehended and reconstructed it, as in Proust’s vision of French society as the by-product of one man’s long expedition to explore his own memory. In the ‘strong’ version, nothing remained of it but the creator’s ego and its emanations in words, sound or paint. Inevitably such art had enormous difficulties of communication. Inevitably it lent itself to, and unsympathetic critics dismissed it as, pure subjectivism verging on solipsism.

But avant garde art did of course want to communicate something other than the artist’s state of mind or his technical exercises. However, the ‘modernity’ it sought to express held a contradiction which proved fatal to Morris and art nouveau. The social renewal of the arts along Ruskin-Morris lines had no real place for the machine, the core of that capitalism which was, to adapt a phrase from Walter Benjamin, the era when technology learned to reproduce works of art. Indeed, the avant gardes of the late nineteenth century attempted to create the art of the new era by prolonging the methods of the old, whose forms of discourse they still shared. ‘Naturalism’ extended the field of literature as representation of ‘reality’, by enlarging its subject-matter, notably to include the lives of the poor and sexuality. The established language of symbolism and allegory was modified or adapted to express new ideas and aspirations, as in the new Morrisian iconography of the socialist movements, and indeed in the other major avant garde school of’symbolism’. Art nouveau was the culmination of this attempt to say the new in a version of the language of the old.

But how could it express precisely what the arts-and-crafts tradition disliked, namely the society of the machine and modern science? Was not the very mass production of the branches, flowers and female forms, the motifs of artisanal decoration and idealism which the commercial vogue for art nouveau entailed, a reductio ad absurdum of the Morris dream of craft revival? As Van de Velde felt – he had initially been a champion of Morris and the art-nouveau trends – must not sen-

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timentalism, lyricism, romanticism be incompatible with modern man who lived in the new rationality of the machine age? Must not art express a new human rationality reflecting that of the technological economy? Was there not a contradiction between the simple, utilitarian functionalism inspired by the old crafts and the craftsman’s joy in decoration, out of which art nouveau developed its ornamental jungle? ‘Ornament is crime’ declared the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933), equally inspired by Morris and the crafts. Significantly the architects, including persons originally associated with Morris or even art nouveau, like Berlage in Holland, Sullivan in the USA, Wagner in Austria, Mackintosh in Scotland, Auguste Perret in France, Behrens in Germany, even Horta in Belgium, now moved towards the new Utopia of func-tionalism, the return to the purity of line, form and material undisguised by ornament, and adapted to a technology no longer identifiable with masons and carpenters. For, as one of them (Muthesius) – also, typically, an enthusiast for the British ‘vernacular style’ – argued in 1902: ‘The result of the machine can only be the unadorned, factual form.”⁷ We are already in the world of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier.

For the architects, now engaged on buildings to whose structure craft tradition was irrelevant and where decoration was an applied embellishment, the appeal of such rational purity was understandable; even though it sacrificed the splendid aspiration of a total union of structure and decoration, of sculpture, painting and the applied arts, which Morris derived from his admiration of the Gothic cathedrals, a sort of visual equivalent of Wagner’s ‘total work of art’ or Gesamt-kunstwerk. This unity, the arts culminating in art nouveau had still tried to achieve. But if one can understand the appeal of the new architects’ austerity, one should also observe that there is absolutely no convincing reason why the use of a revolutionary technology in building must entail a decoratively stripped ‘functionalism’ (especially when, as so often, it became an anti-functional aesthetic), or why anything except machines should aspire to look like machines.

Thus it would have been quite as possible, and indeed more logical, to hail the triumph of revolutionary technology with the full twenty-one-gun salute of conventional architecture, in the manner of the great nineteenth-century railway stations. There was no compelling logic to the movement of architectural ‘modernism’. What it expressed was primarily the emotional conviction that the conventional language of the visual arts, based on historical tradition, was somehow inap-propriate or inadequate for the modern world. To be more precise, they felt that such a language could not possibly express but could only obscure the new world which the nineteenth century had brought into being. The machine, as it were, grown to giant size, cracked the fine-

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arts facade behind which it had been hidden. Nor could the old idiom, they felt, express the crisis of human understanding and values which this century of revolution had produced and was now forced to confront.

In a sense the avantgarde blamed the traditionalists and theywz de siecle modernists equally for what Marx had accused the revolutionaries of 1789-1848 of doing, namely ‘conjurfing] up the spirits of the past to their service, and borrow [ing] from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and in this borrowed language’.¹⁸ Only they did not have a new language, or they did not know what it would be. For what was the language in which to express the new world, especially as (technology apart) its only recognizable aspect was the disintegration of the old? Such was the dilemma of ‘modernism’ at the outset of the new century.

What led the avant garde artists forward	was therefore not a vision of
the future,  but  a reversed  vision  of the	past.  Often  indeed,  as in

architecture and music, they were eminent practitioners of the styles derived from tradition which they abandoned only because, like the ultra-Wagnerian Schonberg, they felt them incapable of further modi-fication. Architects abandoned ornament, as art nouveau pushed it to its extremes, composers tonality, as music drowned in post-Wagnerian chromaticism. Painters had long been troubled by the inadequacy of the older conventions for representing external reality and their own feelings, but – except for a very few who pioneered complete ‘abstrac-tion’ on the eve of the war (notably among the Russian avant garde) – they found it difficult to abandon painting something. The avant garde fanned out in various directions, but, broadly speaking, opted either for what seemed to observers like Max Raphael the supremacy of colour and form over content, or for the single-minded pursuit of a non-representational content in the form of emotion (‘expressionism’), or for various ways of dismantling the conventional elements of repre-sentational reality and reassembling them in different kinds of order or disorder (Cubism).¹⁹ Only the writers, shackled by their dependency on words with known meanings and sounds, found it difficult as yet to make an equivalent formal revolution, though a few began to try. Experiments in abandoning conventional forms of literary composition (e.g. rhymed verse and metre) were neither new nor ambitious. Writers stretched, twisted and manipulated content, i.e. what could be said in ordinary words. Fortunately the poetry of the early twentieth century was a lineal development of, rather than a revolt against, the symbolism of the late nineteenth century: it therefore produced Rilke (1875-1926), Apollinaire (1880-1918), George (1868-1933), Yeats (1865-1939), Blok (1880-1921) and the great Spaniards.

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Contemporaries, ever since Nietzsche, had no doubt that the crisis of the arts reflected the crisis of a society – the liberal bourgeois society of the nineteenth century – which, in one way or another, was in the process of destroying the bases of its existence, the systems of value, convention and intellectual understanding which structured and ordered it. Later historians have traced this crisis in the arts in general and in particular cases, such as fin de siecle Vienna’. Here we need only note two things about it. First, the visible break between the fin de siecle and the twentieth-century avant gardes occurred some time between 1900 and 1910. Amateurs of dates may choose between several, but the birth of Cubism in 1907 is as convenient as any. In the last few years before 1914 virtually everything that is characteristic of the various kinds of post-1918 ‘modernism’ is already present. Second, the avant garde henceforth found itself marching in directions the main army of the public was neither willing nor able to follow. Richard Strauss, who had travelled the road away from tonality as an artist, decided after Elektra failed (1909), as a supplier of commercial grand opera, that the public would follow him no further, and returned (with enormous success) to the more accessible idiom of Rosenkavalier (igi 1).

A wide gap therefore opened between the main body of ‘cultured’ taste and the various small minorities who asserted their status as dissident anti-bourgeois rebels by demonstrating admiration for styles of artistic creation inaccessible and scandalous to the majority. Only three major bridges crossed it. The first was the patronage of a handful of those who were both enlightened and well heeled, like the German industrialist Walter Rathenau, or of dealers like Kahnweiler who appreciated the commercial potential of this small but financially rewarding market. The second was a sector of fashionable high society, more than ever enthusiastic for ever-changing but guaranteed unbour-geois styles, preferably exotic and shocking. The third, paradoxically, was business. Lacking aesthetic preconceptions, industry could recog-nize the revolutionary technology of building and the economy of a functional style – it had always done so – and business could see that avant garde techniques were effective in advertising. ‘Modernist’ criteria had practical value for industrial design and mechanized mass production. After 1918 business patronage and industrial design were to be the main agencies for assimilating the styles originally associated with the high-cultural avant garde. However, before 1914 it remained confined within isolated enclaves.

It is therefore misleading to pay too much attention to the ‘modernist’ avant garde before 1914, except as ancestors. Most people, even among the highly cultured, had probably never heard of, say, Picasso or Schonberg, whereas the innovators of the last quarter of the nineteenth

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century had already become part of the cultural luggage of the educated middle classes. The new revolutionaries belonged to each other, to argumentative groups of the dissident young in the cafes of suitable city quarters, to the critics and drafters of manifestos for new ‘isms’ (cubism, futurism, vorticism), to little magazines and to a few impresarios and collectors with flair and a taste for new works and their creators: a Diaghilev, an Alma Schindler who, even before 1914, had progressed from Gustav Mahler to Kokoschka, Gropius and (a less successful cultural investment) the expressionist Franz Werfel. They were taken up by a section of high fashion. That was all.

All the same, the avant gardes of the last pre-1914 years marks a fundamental break in the history of the high arts since the Renaissance. But what they did not achieve was the actual cultural revolution of the twentieth century they aimed at, which was simultaneously taking place as a by-product of the democratization of society, mediated by the entrepreneurs whose eyes were on an entirely non-bourgeois market. The plebeian arts were about to conquer the world, both in their own version of arts-and-crafts and by means of high technology. This conquest constitutes the most important development in twentieth-century culture.

IV

Its early stages are not always easy to trace. At some point in the later nineteenth century the mass migration into the rapidly growing big cities produced both a lucrative market for popular spectacle and entertainment and those specialized city quarters devoted to it, which bohemians and artists also found attractive: Montmartre, Schwabing. Consequently traditional forms of popular entertainment were modi-fied, transformed and professionalized, producing original versions of popular artistic creation.

The world of high culture, or rather its bohemian fringe, was, of course, well aware of the world of popular theatrical entertainment which developed in such entertainment quarters of the great cities. The adventurous young, the avant garde or artistic boheme, the sexually unconventional, the raffish elements in the upper class who had always patronized the likes of boxers, jockeys and dancers, found themselves at ease in these unrespectable milieux. In fact, in Paris these demotic elements were shaped into the cabaret and show-culture of Montmartre chiefly for the benefit of a public of socialites, tourists and intellectuals, and immortalized in the posters and lithographs of its greatest denizen, the aristocratic painter Toulouse-Lautrec. A culture of avant garde bour-

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geois low-life also showed signs of developing in central Europe, but in Britain the music hall, which appealed to intellectual aesthetes from the 1880s on, was more genuinely aimed at a popular audience. The admiration was justified. The cinema was shortly to turn one figure from the entertainment world of the British poor into the most universally admired artist of the first half of the twentieth century: Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977).

At a considerably more modest level of popular entertainment, or entertainment provided by the poor – the tavern, dance hall, singing cafe and brothel – an international range of musical innovations appeared towards the end of the century, which spread across frontiers and oceans partly through tourism and the medium of the musical stage, mainly through the new practice of social dancing in public. Some, like the Neapolitan canzone, then in its golden age, remained localized. Others showed greater powers of expansion, like the Anda-lusian flamenco, enthusiastically taken up from the 1880s by populist Spanish intellectuals, or the tango, a product of the brothel quarter of Buenos Aires, which had reached the European beau monde before 1914. None of these exotic and plebeian creations was to have a more triumphant and global future than the musical idiom of North Amer-ican Negroes which – once again via the stage, commercialized popular music and social dancing – had already crossed the ocean by 1914. These fused with the arts of the plebeian demi-monde of great cities, occasionally reinforced by declassed bohemians and hailed by high-class aficionados. They were an urban equivalent of folk-art, which now formed the base of a commercialized entertainment industry, though their mode of creation owed nothing to their mode of exploitation. But, above all, they were essentially arts which owed nothing of substance to bourgeois culture, either in the form of ‘high’ art or in the form of middle-class light entertainment. On the contrary, they were about to transform bourgeois culture from below.

The real art of technological revolution, based on the mass market, was meanwhile developing with a rapidity for which there was no parallel in past history. Two of these technological-economic media were as yet of minor significance: the mechanical broadcasting of sound and the press. The impact of the phonograph was limited by the cost of the devices it required, which still confined their ownership largely to the relatively well off. The impact of the press was limited by its reliance on the old-fashioned printed word. Its content was broken up into small and self-contained chunks for the benefit of a class of readers with less education and willingness to concentrate than the solid middle-class elites who read The Times, the Journal des Debats and the Neue Freie Presse, but that was all. Its purely visual innovations – fat headlines,

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page lay-out, the mixture of text and picture, and especially display advertisements – were plainly revolutionary, as the Cubists recognized by including newspaper fragments in their pictures, but perhaps the only genuinely innovatory forms of communication the press revived were cartoons, and even the early versions of the modern strip-cartoons which they took over from popular pamphlets and broadsheets in forms simplified for technical reasons.²⁰ The mass press, which began to reach circulations of a million or more in the 1890s, transformed the environment of print, but not its content or associations – perhaps because men who founded newspapers were probably educated and certainly rich, and therefore sensitive to the values of bourgeois culture. Besides, there was nothing in principle new about newspapers and periodicals.

On the other hand, the cinema, which (eventually also via television and video) was to dominate and transform all the twentieth-century arts, was utterly novel, in its technology, its mode of production and its manner of presenting reality. Here, indeed, was the first art which could not have existed except in the industrial society of the twentieth century, and which had no parallel or precedent in the earlier arts – not even in the still photography which could be considered as no more than an alternative to sketching or painting (see The Age ofCapital, chapter 15, iv). For the first time in history the visual presentation of movement was emancipated from immediate, living performance. And for the first time in history story, drama or spectacle were freed from the constraints imposed by time, space and the physical nature of the observer, not to mention the previous limits on stage illusion. The movement of the camera, the variability of its focus, the unlimited scope of trick photo-graphy and, above all, the ability to cut the strip of film which recorded it all into suitable pieces and to assemble or reassemble them at will, were immediately obvious and immediately exploited by film-makers who rarely had any interest in or sympathies for the avant garde arts. Yet no art represents the requirements, the unintended triumph, of an utterly untraditional artistic modernism more dramatically than the cinema.

And the triumph of the cinema was quite extraordinary and unpar-alleled in its speed and scale. The moving photograph did not become technically feasible until about 1890. Though the French were the main pioneers of showing these moving pictures, short films were first shown as fairground or vaudeville novelties in 1895-6, almost simultaneously in Paris, Berlin, London, Brussels and New York.²¹ Barely a dozen years later there were 26 million Americans who went to see motion pictures every week, most probably in the 8000-10,000 small ‘nickelodeons’; that is to say roughly a figure as large as 20 per cent of the entire population

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of the USA.²² As for Europe, even in backward Italy there were by then almost five hundred cinemas in the major cities, forty of them in Milan alone.²³ By 1914 the American film audience had risen to almost 50 millions.²⁴ Films were now big business. The film-star system had been invented (in 1912 by Carl Laemmle for Mary Pickford). And the film industry had begun to settle in what was already on the way to being its global capital, on a hillside in Los Angeles.

This extraordinary achievement was due, in the first place, to the total lack of interest of the film pioneers in anything except profitable entertainment for a mass public. They entered the industry as showmen, sometimes small-time fairground showmen like the first movie mogul, Charles Pathe (1863-1957) of France – though he was not typical of the European entrepreneurs. More often they were, as in the USA, poor but energetic Jewish immigrant hucksters who would as willingly have gone on selling clothes, gloves, furs, hardware or meat, if they had looked equally lucrative. They moved into production in order to fill their shows. They aimed unhesitatingly at the least educated, the least intellectual, the least sophisticated, the least self-improving who filled the nickelodeons in which Carl Laemmle (Universal Films), Louis B. Mayer (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), the Warner Brothers and William Fox (Fox Films) got their start around 1905. In The Nation (1913), American populist democracy welcomed this triumph of the lower orders by means of 5-cent admissions, while European social democracy, concerned to bring workers the higher things in life, dismissed films as the diversion of the lumpenproletariat in search of escapism.²⁵ The film therefore developed according to the formulas for sure-fire applause tried and tested since the ancient Romans.

What is more, the film enjoyed one unanticipated but absolutely crucial advantage. Since it could, until the late 1920s, reproduce only images, not words, it was forced into silence, broken only by the sounds of the musical accompaniment, which multiplied the possibilities of employment for second-rate instrumentalists. Freed from the con-straints of the Tower of Babel, the movies therefore developed a uni-versal language which, in effect, enabled them to exploit the global market irrespective of language.

There is no doubt that the revolutionary innovations of films as an art, practically all of which had been developed in the USA by 1914, were due to its need to address a potentially universal public exclusively through the – technically manipulable – eye, but also that innovations which left the high-cultural avant garde far behind in their daring were readily accepted by the masses, because this was an art which transformed everything except its content. What the public saw and loved in the movies was precisely what had astonished, excited, amused

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and moved audiences as long as there had been professional enter-tainment. Paradoxically, this is where high culture made its only sig-nificant impact on the American film industry, which by 1914 was on the way to conquer and utterly dominate the global market.

For while American storefront showmen were about to make them-selves millionaires out of the nickels of immigrants and workers, other theatrical and vaudeville entrepreneurs (not to mention some of the nickelodeon hucksters) dreamed of tapping the greater purchasing-power and ‘class’ of the respectable family public, and especially the cash-flow of America’s ‘new woman’ and her children. (For 75 per cent of the public in the nickelodeon era were adult males.) They required expensive stories and prestige (‘screen classics’), which the anarchy of cut-price American movie production was disinclined to risk. But these could be imported from the pioneer French industry, which still domi-nated a third of the world’s output, or from other Europeans. For in Europe orthodox theatre, with its established middle-class market, had been the natural source for more ambitious film entertainment, and if dramatic adaptations of biblical stories and secular classics (Zola, Dumas, Daudet, Hugo) were successful, why not film adaptations? Imports of elaborate costume productions with famous actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, or elaborate epic equipment, in which the Italians specialized, proved commercially successful in the last pre-war years. Stimulated by the dramatic turn from documentary films to stories and comedies, which seems to have made itself felt in 1905-9, they encouraged American producers to make their own cinematic novels and epics. These in turn gave otherwise uninteresting minor literary talents of sound American white-collar stock like D. W. Griffith the chance to transform the motion picture into a major and original art-form.

Hollywood was based on the junction between nickelodeon populism and the culturally and morally rewarding drama and sentiment expected by the equally large mass of middle Americans. Its strength and its weakness lay precisely in its single-minded concentration on the mass-market box-office. The strength was in the first instance economic. The European cinema opted, not without some resistance from populist showmen,* for the educated public at the expense of the uneducated. Who would otherwise have made the famous German UFA films of the 1920s? Meanwhile the American industry could exploit to the full a mass market on the basis of a population which, on paper, was not

* ‘Our industry, which has progressed by means of its popular appeal, needs the support of all social classes. It must not become the favourite of the better-off classes only, who can afford to

pay almost as much for cinema tickets as they do to go to the theatre’ – Vita Cinematografica (19H)-²⁶

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more than a third larger than that provided by the population of Germany. This allowed it to cover costs and earn ample profits at home, and therefore to conquer the rest of the world by undercutting it. The First World War was to reinforce this decisive advantage and make the American position unchallengeable. Boundless resources would also enable Hollywood to buy up talent from all over the world, notably after the war from central Europe. It did not always make adequate use of it.

The weaknesses of Hollywood were equally obvious. It created an extraordinary medium with extraordinary potential, but one with an artistically negligible message, at least until the 1930s. The number of American silent films which are in the living repertoire, or which even the educated can recall, is tiny – except for comedies. Given the enormous rate at which motion pictures were produced, they form an entirely insignificant percentage of the output. Ideologically, indeed, the message was far from ineffective or negligible. If hardly anyone recalls the great mass of B-movies, their values were to be decanted into American high policy in the late twentieth century.

Nevertheless, industrialized mass entertainment revolutionized the twentieth-century arts, and it did so separately and independently from the avant garde. For before 1914 the arts avant garde had no part in films, and it appears to have taken no interest in them, apart from one Russian-born Cubist in Paris who is said to have thought about an abstract film sequence in 1913.²⁷ It only took the medium up seriously in the middle of the war, when it was already virtually mature. The typical pre-1914 form of avant garde show-business was the Russian ballet, for which the great impresario Serge Diaghilev mobilized the most revolutionary and exotic composers and painters. But the Russian ballet was aimed at an elite of well-heeled or well-born cultural snobs as unhesitatingly as American film producers aimed at the lowest permissible common denominator of humanity.

So the ‘modern’, the truly ‘contemporary’ art of this century developed unexpectedly, overlooked by the guardians ofcultural values, and with the speed to be expected of a genuine cultural revolution. But it was no longer, and could no longer be, the art of the bourgeois world and the bourgeois century, except in one crucial respect: it was profoundly capitalist. Was it ‘culture’ in the bourgeois sense at all? Almost certainly most educated persons in 1914 would have thought it was not. And yet this new and revolutionary medium of the masses was stronger by far than the elite culture, whose search for a new way of expressing the world fills most histories of twentieth-century arts.

Few figures represent the old tradition, in its conventional and revolutionary versions, more obviously than two composers of pre-

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1914 Vienna: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, an infant prodigy of the middlebrow musical scene already launching himself into symphonies, operas and the rest; and Arnold Schonberg. The first ended his life as a highly successful composer of sound tracks for Hollywood motion pictures and musical director of Warner Brothers. The second, after revolutionizing nineteenth-century classical music, ended his life in the same city, still without a public, but admired and subsidized by more adaptable and vastly more prosperous musicians who earned money in the motion picture industry by not applying the lessons they had learned from him.

The arts of the twentieth century were therefore revolutionized, but not by those who set themselves the task of doing so. In this respect they differed dramatically from the sciences.

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What is the material universe composed of? Ether, Matter and Energy.

1. Laing, 1885¹

// is generally agreed that during the past fifteen years there has been a great advance in our knowledge of the fundamental laws of heredity. Indeed, it may fairly be said that more has been gained in this regard within this period than in the entire previous history of thefieldof knowledge.

Raymond Pearl, 1913²

Space and time have ceased to be, for relativity physics, part of the bare bones of the world, and are now admitted to be constructions.

Bertrand Russell, 1914³

There are times when man’s entire way of apprehending and structuring the universe is transformed in a fairly brief period of time, and the decades which preceded the First World War were one of these. This transformation was as yet understood, or even observed, by relatively exiguous numbers of men and women in a handful of countries, and sometimes only by minorities even within the fields of intellectual and creative activity which were being transformed. And by no means all such fields saw a transformation, or were transformed in the same way. A fuller study would have to distinguish between fields in which men were conscious of linear progress rather than transformation (such as the medical sciences) and those which were revolutionized (such as physics); between old sciences revolutionized and sciences which them-selves constituted innovations, since they were born in our period (such as genetics); between scientific theories destined to be the base of a new consensus or orthodoxy, and others which were to remain on the margins of their disciplines, such as psychoanalysis. It would also have to distinguish between accepted theories challenged but successfully re-established in a more or less modified form, such as Darwinism, and

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other parts of the mid-nineteenth century intellectual heritage which disappeared except from the less advanced textbooks, such as the physics of Lord Kelvin. And it would certainly have to distinguish between the natural sciences and social sciences which, like the traditional fields of scholarship in the humanities, increasingly diverged from them – cre-ating a widening gap into which the large body of what the nineteenth century had regarded as ‘philosophy’ looked like disappearing. Still, however we qualify the global statement, it remains true. The intel-lectual landscape in which peaks named Planck, Einstein and Freud could now be seen to emerge, not to mention Schonberg and Picasso, was clearly and fundamentally different from that which intelligent observers believed themselves to perceive in, say, 1870.

The transformation was of two kinds. Intellectually it implied the end of an understanding of the universe in the image of the architect or engineer: a building as yet unfinished, but whose completion would not be very long delayed; a building based on ‘the facts’, held together by the firm framework of causes determining effects and ‘the laws of nature’ and constructed with the reliable tools of reason and scientific method,; a construction of the intellect, but one which also expressed, in an ever more accurate approximation, the objective realities of the cosmos. In the minds of the triumphant bourgeois world the giant static mechanism of the universe inherited from the seventeenth century, but since amplified by extension into new fields, produced not only permanence and predictability but also transformation. It produced evolution (which could be easily identified with secular ‘progress’, at least in human affairs). It was this model of the universe and the human mind’s way of understanding it which now broke down.

But this breakdown had a crucial psychological aspect. The intel-lectual structuring of the bourgeois world eliminated the ancient forces of religion from the analysis of a universe in which the supernatural and the miraculous could have no part, and left little analytical place for the emotions, except as products of the laws of nature. Nevertheless, with marginal exceptions, the intellectual universe appeared to fit in both with the intuitive human grasp of the material world (with ‘sense experience’) and with the intuitive, or at least age-old, concepts of the operation of human reasoning. Thus it was still possible to think of physics and chemistry in mechanical models (the ‘billiard-ball atom’).* But the new structuring of the universe increasingly found itself obliged to jettison intuition and ‘common sense’. In a sense ‘nature’ became less ‘natural’ and more incomprehensible. Indeed, though all of us

* As it happened, the atom, soon to be	broken up into lesser particles, returned in this period
as the basic building-block of the physical	sciences, after a period of relative neglect.

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today live by’and with a technology which rests on the new scientific revolution, in a world whose visual appearance has been transformed by it, and one in which educated lay discourse may echo its concepts and vocabulary, it is far from clear to what extent this revolution has been absorbed into the common processes of thought of the lay public even today. One might say that it has been existentially rather than intellectually absorbed.

The process of divorcing science and intuition may perhaps be illus-trated by the extreme example of mathematics. Some time in the middle of the nineteenth century the progress of mathematical thought began to generate not only (as it had already done earlier – see The Age of Revolution) results which conflicted with the real world as apprehended by the senses, such as non-Euclidean geometry, but results which appeared shocking even to mathematicians, who found, like the great Georg Cantor, that ‘je vois mais ne Ie crois pas’.⁴ What Bourbaki calls ‘the pathology of mathematics’ began.⁵ In geometry, one of the two dynamic frontiers of nineteenth-century mathematics, all manner of as it were unthinkable phenomena appear, such as curves without tangents. But the most dramatic and ‘impossible’ development was perhaps the exploration of infinite magnitudes by Cantor, which produced a world in which the intuitive concepts of ‘greater’ and ‘smaller’ no longer applied and the rules of arithmetic no longer gave their expected results. It was an exciting advance, a new mathematical ‘paradise’, to use Hilbert’s phrase, from which the avant garde of math-ematicians refused to be expelled.

One solution – subsequently followed by the majority of math-ematicians -was to emancipate mathematics from any correspondence with the real world, and to turn it into the elaboration of postulates, any postulates, which required only to be precisely defined and linked by the need not to be contradictory. Mathematics was henceforth based on a rigorous suspension of belief in anything except the rules of a game. In the words of Bertrand Russell – a major contributor to the rethinking of the foundations of mathematics which now moved to the centre of the stage, perhaps for the first time in its history – mathematics was the subject in which no one knew what he was talking about or whether what he said was true.⁶ Its foundations were reformulated by rigorously excluding any appeal to intuition.

This imposed enormous psychological difficulties, as well as some intellectual ones. The relation of mathematics to the real world was undeniable, even though, from the point of view of mathematical formalists, it was irrelevant. In the twentieth century the ‘purest’ mathematics has, time and again, found some correspondence in the real world, and indeed served to explain this world or to dominate it

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by means of technology. Even G. H. Hardy, a pure mathematician specializing in number theory – and incidentally the author of a brilliant piece of autobiographical introspection – a man who claimed with pride that nothing he had done was of any practical use, contributed a theorem, which is at the base of modern population genetics (the so-called Hardy-Weinberg law). What was the nature of the relationship between the mathematical game and the structure of the real world which corresponded with it? Perhaps this did not matter to math-ematicians in their mathematical capacity, but in fact even many of the formalists, such as the great Hilbert (1862-1943), seem to have believed in an objective mathematical truth, i.e. that it was not irrel-evant what mathematicians thought about the ‘nature’ of the math-ematical entities they manipulated or the ‘truth’ of their theorems. An entire school of’intuitionists’, anticipated by Henri Poincare (1854-1912) and led, from 1907, by the Dutchman L . E . J . Brouwer (1882-1966), bitterly rejected formalism, if necessary at the cost of abandoning even those triumphs of mathematical reasoning whose literally incred-ible results had led to the reconsideration of the bases of mathematics, and notably Cantor’s own work in set theory, propounded, against impassioned opposition by some, in the 1870s. The passions evoked by this battle in the stratosphere of pure thought indicate the profundity of the intellectual and psychological crisis which the collapse of the old links between mathematics and the apprehension of the world produced.

Moreover, the rethinking of the foundations of mathematics itself was far from unproblematic, for the attempt to base it on rigorous definitions and non-contradiction itself (which also stimulated the development of mathematical logic) ran into difficulties which were to turn the period between 1900 and 1930 into the ‘great crisis of the foundations’ (Bourbaki).⁷ The ruthless exclusion of intuition itself was possible only by a certain narrowing of the mathematician’s horizon. Beyond that horizon lay the paradoxes which mathematicians and mathematical logicians now discovered – Bertrand Russell formulated several in the early 1900s – and which raised the most profound difficulties.* Eventually (in 1931) the Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel proved that for certain fundamental purposes contradiction could not be eliminated at all: we cannot prove that the axioms of

* A simple example (Berry and Russell) is the statement that ‘the class of integers whose definition can be expressed in less than sixteen words is finite’. 11 is impossible without contradiction to define an integer as ‘the smallest integer not definable in less than sixteen words’, since the second definition contains only ten words. The most fundamental of these paradoxes is ‘Russell’s Paradox’, which asks whether the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is a member of itself. This is analagous to the ancient paradox of’the Greek philosopher Zeno about whether we can believe the Cretan who says ‘AH Cretans are liars’.

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arithmetic are consistent by a finite number of steps which do not lead to contradictions. However, by that time mathematicians had accustomed themselves to live with the uncertainties of their subject. The generations of the 1890s and 1900s were far from reconciled to them as yet.

Except for a handful of people the crisis in mathematics could be overlooked. A much larger body of scientists as well as eventually most educated human beings found themselves involved in the crisis of the Galilean or Newtonian universe of physics, whose beginning can be fairly precisely dated in 1895, and which was to be replaced by the Einsteinian universe of relativity. It met with less resistance in the world of physicists than the mathematical revolution, probably because it had not yet revealed itself as implying a challenge to the traditional beliefs in certainty and the laws of nature. That was to come only in the 1920s. On the other hand it met with enormous resistance from the laity. Indeed, even as late as 1913 a learned and plainly by no means foolish German author of a four-volume history and survey of science (who admittedly mentioned neither Planck – except as an epistemologist – nor Einstein, J . J . Thomson nor a number of others who would now hardly be omitted) denied that anything exceptionally revolutionary was happening in the sciences: ‘It is a sign of bias when science is presented as though its foundations had now become unstable, and our era must set about their reconstruction’.⁸ As we know, modern physics is still as remote to most laymen, even those who attempt to follow the often brilliant attempts to explain it to them which have multiplied since the First World War, as the higher reaches of scholastic theology were to most believers in Christianity in fourteenth-century Europe. Ideologists on the left were to reject relativity as incompatible with their idea of science, and those on the right condemned it as Jewish. In short science henceforth became not only something which few people could understand, but something of which many disapproved while increasingly recognizing that they depended on it.

The shock to experience, common sense and accepted conceptions of the universe can perhaps best be illustrated by the problem of the ‘luminiferous ether’, now almost as forgotten as that of the phlogiston by which combustion had been explained in the eighteenth century before the chemical revolution. There was no evidence for the ether, an elastic, rigid, incompressible and frictionless something believed to fill the universe, but it had to exist, in a world picture which was essentially mechanical and excluded any so-called ‘action at a distance’, chiefly because nineteenth-century physics was full of waves, starting with those of light (whose actual velocity was established for the first time) and multiplied by the progress of researches into electro-magnet-

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ism, which, since Maxwell, appeared to include lightwaves. But in a mechanically conceived physical universe waves had to be waves in something, just as seawaves were waves in water. As wave motion became ever more central to the physical world picture (to quote a by no means naive contemporary), ‘ether was discovered in this century, in the sense that all known evidence of its existence was gathered in this epoch’.⁹ In short, it was invented because, as all the ‘authoritative physicists’ held (with only the rarest dissenters like Heinrich Hertz (1857-94), the discoverer of radio waves, and Ernst Mach (1836-1916), best known as a philosopher of science), ‘we should know nothing of light, of radiant heat, of electricity or magnetism; without it there would probably be no such thing as gravitation’,¹⁰ since a mechanical world picture also required it to exert its force through some material medium.

Yet, if it existed, it must have mechanical properties, whether or not they were elaborated by means of the new electromagnetic concepts. These raised considerable difficulties, as physics (since Faraday and Maxwell) operated with two conceptual schemes which were not readily combined and in fact tended to move apart: the physics of discrete particles (of ‘matter’) and those of continuous media of ‘fields’. It seemed easiest to assume – the theory was elaborated by H. A. Lorentz (1853-1928), one of the eminent Dutch scientists who made our period into a golden age of Dutch science comparable to the seventeenth century – that the ether was stationary with respect to matter in motion. But this could now be tested, and two Americans, A. A. Michelson (1852-1931) and E. W. Morley (1838-1923), attempted to do so in a celebrated and imaginative experiment in 1887, which produced a result that seemed profoundly inexplicable. So inexplicable, and so incompatible with deep-rooted beliefs, that it was periodically repeated with all possible precautions until the 1920s: always with the same result.

What was the velocity of the movement of the earth through the stationary ether? A beam of light was divided into two parts, which travelled to and fro along two equal paths at right angles to one another, and were then reunited again. If the eajth travelled through the ether in the direction of one of the beams, the motion of the apparatus during the passage of light ought to make the paths of the beams unequal. This could be detected. But it could not. It seemed that the ether, whatever it was, moved with the earth, or presumably with anything else that was measured. The ether appeared to have no physical charac-teristics at all or to be beyond any form of material apprehension. The alternative was to abandon the established scientific image of the universe.

It will not surprise readers familiar with the history of science that

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Lorentz preferred theory to fact, and therefore attempted to explain away the Michelson-Morley experiment, and thus to save that ether which was considered ‘the fulcrum of modern physics’,” by an extra-ordinary piece of theoretical acrobatics which was to turn him into ‘the John the Baptist of relativity’.¹² Suppose that time and space could be pulled slightly apart, so that a body might turn out to be shorter when facing in the direction of its motion than it would be if it were at rest, or facing crosswise. Then the contraction of Michelson-Morley’s apparatus might have concealed the stationariness of the ether. This supposition, it is argued, was very close indeed to Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905), but the point about Lorentz and his con-temporaries was that they broke the egg of traditional physics in a desperate attempt to maintain it intact, whereas Einstein, who had been a child when Michelson and Morley came to their surprising conclusion, was prepared simply to abandon the ancient beliefs. There was no absolute motion. There was no ether, or if there was it was of no interest to physicists. One way or another the old order in physics was doomed.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this instructive episode. The first, which fits in with the rationalist ideal which science and its historians have inherited from the nineteenth century, is that facts are stronger than theories. Given the developments in electromagnetism, the discovery of new kinds of radiation – radio waves (Hertz 1883), X-rays (Rontgen 1895), radioactivity (Becquerel 1896), given the need increasingly to stretch orthodox theory into curious shapes, given the Michelson-Morley experiment, sooner or later theory would have to be fundamentally altered to fit in with fact. It is not surprising that this did not happen immediately, but it happened soon enough: the transformation can be dated with soine precision in the decade 1895-

I 9 _° 5 _–

The other conclusion is the exact opposite. The view of the physical

universe which fell apart in 1895-1905 had been based not on ‘the facts’ but on a priori assumptions about the universe, based partly on a seventeenth-century mechanical model, partly on even more ancient intuitions of sense experience and logic. There had never been any greater intrinsic difficulty about applying relativity to electrodynamics or anything else than to classical mechanics, where it had been taken for granted since Galileo. All that physics can say about two systems within each of which Newtonian laws hold (e.g. two railway trains) is that they move in relation to each other, but not that one is in any absolute sense ‘at rest’. The ether had been invented because the accepted mechanical model of the universe required something like it, and because it seemed intuitively inconceivable that in some sense there

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was no distinction between absolute motion and absolute rest somewhere. Having been invented, it precluded the extension of relativity to elec-trodynamics or to the laws of physics in general. In short, what made the revolution in physics so revolutionary was not the discovery of new facts, though this certainly look place, but the reluctance of physicists to reconsider their paradigms. As always, it was not the sophisticated intelligences which were prepared to recognize that the emperor wore no clothes: they spent their time inventing theories to explain why these clothes were both splendid and invisible.

Now both conclusions are correct, but the second is much more useful to the historian than the first. For the first does not really explain adequately how the revolution in physics came about. Old paradigms do not usually, and did not then, inhibit the progress of research, or the formation of theories which appeared to be both consistent with the facts and intellectually fertile. They merely produce what can be seen in retrospect (as in the case of the ether) to have been unnecessary and unduly complicated theories. Conversely, the revolutionaries in physics – mainly belonging to that ‘theoretical physics’ which was hardly yet recognized as a field in its own right situated somewhere between mathematics and the laboratory apparatus – were plainly not fundamentally motivated by any desire to clear up inconsistencies between observation and theory. They went their own way, sometimes moved by purely philosophical or even metaphysical preoccupations like Max Planck’s search for ‘the Absolute’, which took them into physics against the advice of teachers who were convinced that only minor corners still remained to be tidied up in that science, and into parts of physics which others regarded as uninteresting.¹³ Nothing is more surprising in the brief autobiographical sketch written in old age by Max Planck, whose quantum theory (announced in 1900) marked the first public breakthrough of the new physics, than the sense of isolation, of being misunderstood, almost of failure, which evidently never left him. After all, few physicists have been more honoured, in their own country and internationally, than he was in his lifetime. Much of it was clearly the result of the twenty-five years, starting with his dissertation in 1875, during which the young Planck vainly tried to get his admired seniors – including men whom he would eventually convert – to understand, to respond to, even to read, the work he submitted to them: work about whose conclusiveness in his opinion, no doubt was possible. We look back and see scientists recognizing crucial unsolved problems in their field and setting about solving them, some pursuing the right path, the majority the wrong one. But in fact, as historians of science have reminded us, at least since Thomas Kuhn (1962), this is not the way scientific revolutions operate.

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What, then, explains the transformation of mathematics and physics at this period? For the historian this is the crucial question. Moreover, for the historian who does not focus exclusively on the specialized debates among the theorists, the question is not simply about the change in the scientific image of the universe, but about the relation of this change to the rest of what was happening in the period. The processes of the intellect are not autonomous. Whatever the nature of the relations between science and the society in which it is embedded, and the peculiar historical conjuncture in which it takes place, there is such a relation. The problems which scientists recognize, the methods they use, the types of theories they regard as satisfactory in general or adequate in particular, the ideas and models they use in solving them, are those of men and women whose life, even in the present, is only partly confined within laboratory or study.

Some of these relations are simple to the point of crudity. A sub-stantial part of the impetus for the development of bacteriology and immunology was a function of imperialism, given that empires provided a strong incentive for the conquest of tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever which inhibited the activities of white men in colonial areas.¹⁴ A direct line thus links Joseph Chamberlain and (Sir) Ronald Ross, Nobel laureate in medicine in 1902. Nationalism played a part which is far from negligible. Wassermann, whose syphilis test provided the incentive to the development of serology, was urged on in 1906 by the German authorities, who were anxious to catch up with what they regarded as the undue advance of French research into syphilis.¹⁵ While it would be unwise to neglect such direct links between science and society, whether in the form of government or business patronage and pressure, or in the less trivial form of scientific work stimulated by or arising out of the practical progress of industry or its technical requirements, these relations cannot be satisfactorily analysed in such terms, least of all in the period 1873-1914. On the one hand the relations between science and its practical uses were far from close, if we except chemistry and medicine. Thus in the Germany of the 1880s and 1890s – a few countries took the practical implications ofscience more seriously-the technical academies (Technische Hochschulen) complained that their mathematicians did not confine themselves purely to the teaching of the mathematics required by engineers, and the professors of engin-eering confronted those of mathematics in open battle in 1897. Indeed the bulk of German engineers, though inspired by American progress to install technological laboratories in the 1890s, were not in close touch with current science. Industry, conversely, complained that the universities were not interested in its problems and did their own research – though slow to do even this. Krupp (who did not allow his

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son to attend a technical academy until 1882) did not take an interest in physics, as distinct from chemistry, until the mid-i8o.os.¹⁶ In short, universities, technical academies, industry and the government were far from co-ordinating their interests and efforts. Government-sponsored research institutions were indeed coming into being, but they were hardly yet advanced: the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (today the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft), which funded and co-ordinated basic research, was not founded until 1911, though it had privately financed pre-decessors. Moreover, while governments were undoubtedly beginning to commission and even press forward researches they considered of significance, we can hardly as yet speak of government as a major force commissioning fundamental research, any more than we can of industry, with the possible exception of the Bell laboratories. Moreover, the one science other than medicine in which pure research and its practical applications were adequately integrated at this time was chemistry, which was certainly undergoing no fundamental or rev-olutionary transformations during our period.

These scientific transformations would not have been possible but for technical developments in the industrial economy, such as those which made electricity freely available, provided adequate vacuum pumps and accurate measuring instruments. But a necessary element in any explanation is not in itself a sufficient explanation. We must look further. Can we understand the crisis of traditional science by analysing the social and political preoccupations of scientists?

These were obviously dominant in the social sciences; and, even in those natural sciences which appeared to be directly relevant to society and its concerns, the social and political element was often crucial. In our period this was plainly the case in those fields of biology which touched directly on social man, and all those which could be linked with the concept of ‘evolution’ and the increasingly politicized name of Charles Darwin. Both carried a high ideological charge. In the form of racism, whose central role in the nineteenth century cannot be overemphasized, biology was essential to a theoretically egalitarian bourgeois ideology, since it passed “the blame for visible human inequalities from society to ‘nature’ (see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, 11). The poor were poor because born inferior. Hence biology was not only potentially the science of the political right, but the science of those who suspected science, reason and progress. Few thinkers were more sceptical of the mid-nineteenth-century verities, including science, than the philosopher Nietzsche. Yet his own writings, and notably his most ambitious work, The Will to Power,” can be read as a variant of Social Darwinism, a discourse conducted in the language of ‘natural selection’, in this instance selection destined to’ produce a new race

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of ‘superman’ who will dominate human inferiors as man in nature dominates and exploits brute creation. And the links between biology and ideology are indeed particularly evident in the interplay between ‘eugenics’ and the new science of ‘genetics’, which virtually came into existence around 1900, receiving its name from William Bateson shortly thereafter (1905).

Eugenics, which was a programme for applying the selective breeding techniques familiar in agriculture and livestock-raising to people, long preceded genetics. The name dates from 1883. It was essentially a political movement, overwhelmingly confined to members of the bour-geoisie or middle classes, urging upon governments a programme of positive or negative actions to improve the genetic condition of the human race. Extreme eugenists believed that the condition of man and society could be ameliorated only by the genetic improvement of the human race – by concentrating on encouraging valuable human strains (usually identified with the bourgeoisie or with suitably tinted races such as the ‘Nordic’), and eliminating undesirable strains (usually identified with the poor, the colonized or unpopular strangers). Less extreme eugenists left some scope for social reforms, education and environmental change in general. While eugenics could become a fascist and racist pseudo-science which turned to deliberate genocide under Hitler, before 1914 it was by no means exclusively identified with any one branch of middle-class politics any more than the widely popular theories of race in which it was implicit. Eugenic themes occur in the ideological music of liberals, social reformers, Fabian socialists and some other sections of the left, in those countries in which the movement was fashionable,* though in the battle between heredity and environ-ment, or, in Karl Pearson’s phrase ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, the left could hardly opt exclusively for heredity. Hence, incidentally, the marked lack of enthusiasm for genetics among the medical profession at this period. For the great triumphs of medicine at this time were environmental, both by means of the new treatment for microbial diseases (which, since Pasteur and Koch, had given rise to the new science of bacteriology) and through public hygiene. Doctors were as reluctant as social reformers to believe with Pearson that ‘£1,500,000 spent in encouraging healthy parentage would do more than the establishment of a sanatorium in every township’ to eliminate tuberculosis.¹⁸ They were right.

What made eugenics ‘scientific’ was precisely the rise of the science of genetics after 1900, which appeared to suggest that environmental influences on heredity could be absolutely excluded, and that most or all traits were determined by a single gene, i.e. that the selective

* The movement for birth control was closely linked with eugenic arguments.

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breeding of human beings along Mendelian lines was possible. It would be impermissible to argue that genetics grew out of eugenical pre-occupations, even though there are cases of scientists who were drawn into research on heredity ‘as a consequence of a prior commitment to race-culture’, notably Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.¹⁹ On the other hand the links between genetics and eugenics between 1900 and 1914 were demonstrably close, and in both Britain and the USA leading figures in the science were associated with the movement, though even before 1914, at least in both Germany and the USA, the line between science and racist pseudo-science was far from clear.²⁰ Between the wars this led serious geneticists to move out of the organizations of committed eugenists. At all events the ‘political’ element in genetics is evident. The future Nobel laureate H.J. Muller was to declare in 1918: ‘I’ve never been interested in genetics purely as an abstraction, but always because of its fundamental relation to man – his characteristics and means of self-betterment.’²¹

If the development of genetics must be seen in the context of the urgent preoccupation with social problems for which eugenics claimed to provide biological solutions (sometimes as alternatives to socialist ones), the development of evolutionary theory, into which it fitted, also had a political dimension. The development of’sociobiology’ in recent years has once again drawn attention to this. This had been evident from the inception of the theory of’natural selection’, whose key model, the ‘struggle for existence’, had been primarily derived from the social sciences (Malthus). Observers at the turn of the century noted a ‘crisis in Darwinism’ which produced various alternative speculations – the so-called ‘vitalism’, ‘neo-Lamarckism’ (as it was called in 1901), and others. It was due not only to scientific doubts about the formulations of Darwinism, which had become something like a biological orthodoxy by the 1880s, but also to doubts about its wider implications. The marked enthusiasm of social democrats for Darwinism was enough to ensure that it would not be discussed in exclusively scientific terms. On the other hand, while the dominant politico-Darwinist trend in Europe saw it as reinforcing Marx’s view that evolutionary processes in nature and society take place regardless of men’s will and consciousness – and every socialist knew where they would inevitably lead – in America ‘Social Darwinism’ stressed free competition as nature’s fundamental law, and the triumph of the fittest (i.e. successful businessmen) over the unfit (i.e. the poor). The survival of the fittest could also be indicated, and indeed ensured, by the conquest of inferior races and people or war against rival states (as the German general Bernhardi suggested in 1913 in his book on Germany and the Next War).^

Such social themes entered the debates of scientists themselves. Thus

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the early years of genetics were bedevilled by a persistent and embittered quarrel between the Mendelians (most influential in the USA and among experimentalists) and the so-called biometricians (relatively stronger in Britain and among mathematically advanced statisticians). In 1900 Mendel’s long-neglected researches into the laws of heredity were simultaneously and separately rediscovered in three countries, and were – against biometrical opposition – to provide the foundation of modern genetics, though it has been suggested that the biologists of 1900 read into the old reports on growing sweet-peas a theory of genetic determinants which was not in Mendel’s mind in his monastery garden in 1865. A number of reasons for this debate have been suggested by historians of science, and one set of such reasons has a clear political dimension.

The major innovation which, together with Mendelian genetics, restored a markedly modified ‘Darwinism’ to its position as the scien-tifically orthodox theory of biological evolution was the introduction into it of unpredictable and discontinuous genetic ‘leaps’, sports or freaks, mostly unviable but occasionally of potential evolutionary advantage, upon which natural selection would operate. They were called ‘mutations’ by Hugo De Vries, one of the several con-temporaneous rediscoverers of Mendel’s forgotten researches. De Vries himself had been influenced by the chief British Mendelian, and inven-tor of the word ‘genetics’, William Bateson, whose studies in variation (1894) had been conducted ‘with special regard to discontinuity in the origin of species’. Yet continuity and discontinuity were not a matter of plant-breeding alone. The chief of the biometricians, Karl Pearson, rejected discontinuity even before he became interested in biology, because ‘no great social reconstruction, which will permanently benefit

any class of the community, is ever brought about by a revolution human progress, like Nature, never leaps’.²³

Bateson, his great antagonist, was far from a revolutionary. Yet if one thing is clear about the views of this curious figure, it is his distaste for existing society (outside the University of Cambridge, which he wished to preserve from all reform except the admission of women), his hatred of industrial capitalism and ‘sordid shopkeeper utility’ and his nostalgia for an organic feudal past. In short, for both Pearson and Bateson the variability of species was a question of ideology as well as of science. It is pointless, and indeed usually impossible, to equate specific scientific theories and specific political attitudes, least of all in such fields as ‘evolution’ which lend themselves to a variety of different ideological metaphors. It is almost as pointless to analyse them in terms of the social class of their practitioners virtually all of whom, in this period, belonged almost by definition to the professional middle classes.

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Nevertheless, in such fields as biology, politics, ideology and science cannot be kept apart, for their links are too obvious.

In spite of the fact that theoretical physicists and even math-ematicians are also human beings, these links are not obvious in their case. Conscious or unconscious political influences may be read into their debates, but not with much profit. Imperialism and the rise of mass labour movements may help to elucidate developments in biology, but hardly in symbolic logic or quantum theory. Events in the world outside their studies in the years from 1875 and 1914 were not so cataclysmic as to intervene directly in their labours – as they were to do after 1914, and as they may have done in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Revolutions in the world of the intellect in this period can hardly be derived by analogy from revolutions in the outside world. And yet every historian is struck by the fact that the revolutionary transformation of the scientific world view in these years forms part of a more general, and dramatic, abandonment of established and often long-accepted values, truths and ways of looking at the world and structuring it conceptually. It may be pure accident or arbitrary selection that Planck’s quantum theory, the rediscovery of Mendel, Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Cezanne’s Still Life with Onions can all be dated 1900 – it would be equally possible to open the new century with Ostwald’s Inorganic Chemistry, Puccini’s Tosca, Colette’s first ‘Claudine’ novel and Rostand’s L’Aiglon – but the coincidence of dramatic innovation in several fields remains striking.

One clue to the transformation has already been suggested. It was negative rather than positive, insofar as it replaced what had been regarded, rightly or wrongly, as a coherent, potentially comprehensive scientific view of the world in which reason was not at odds with intuition, with no equivalent alternative. As we have seen, the theorists themselves were puzzled and disoriented. Neither Planck nor Einstein was prepared to give up the rational, causal, determinist universe which their work did so much to destroy. Planck was as hostile as Lenin to Ernst Mach’s neo-positivism. Mach, in turn, though one of the rare early sceptics about the physical universe of late-nineteenth-century scientists, was to be equally sceptical of the theory of relativity.²⁴ The small world of mathematics, as we have seen, was split by battles about whether mathematical truth could be more than formal. At least the natural numbers and time were ‘real’, thought Brouwer. The truth is that theorists found themselves faced with contradictions which they could not resolve, for even the ‘paradoxes’ (a euphemism for con-tradictions) which the symbolic logicians tried so hard to overcome were not satisfactorily eliminated – not even, as Russell was to admit,

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by the monumental labours of his and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910-13). The least troublesome solution was a retreat into that neo-positivism which was to become the nearest thing to an accepted philosophy of science in the twentieth century. The neo-positivist current which emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, with writers like Duhem, Mach, Pearson and the chemist Ostwald, is not to be confused with the positivism which dominated the natural and social sciences before the new scientific revolution. That positivism believed that it could found the coherent view of the world which was about to be challenged on true theories based on the tested and systematized experience of the (ideally experimental) sciences, i.e. on ‘the facts’ of nature as discovered by scientific.method. In turn these ‘positive’ sciences, as distinct from the undisciplined speculation of theology and metaphysics, would provide the firm foundation for law, politics, morality and religion – in short, for the ways in which human beings lived together in society and articulated their hopes for the future.

Non-scientific critics like Husserl pointed out that ‘the exclusiveness with which the total world view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the “prosperity” which they produced, meant an indifferent turning away from the questions which were decisive for a genuine humanity.’²⁵ Neo-positivists concentrated on the conceptual defects of the positive sciences themselves. Faced with scientific theories which, now seen to be inadequate, could also be seen to be ‘a forcing of language and a straining of definitions’,²⁶ and with pictorial models (like the ‘billiard-ball atom’) which were unsatisfactory, they chose two linked ways out of the difficulty. On the one hand they proposed a reconstruction of science on a ruthlessly empiricist and even phenom-enalist basis, on the other a rigorous formalization and axiomatization of the bases of science. This eliminated speculations about the relations between the ‘real world’ and our interpretations of it, i.e. about the ‘truth’ as distinct from the internal consistency and usefulness of prop-ositions, without interfering with the actual practice of science. Scien-tific theories, as Henri Poincare said flatly, were ‘neither true nor false’ but merely useful.

It has been suggested that the rise of neo-positivism at the end of the century made possible the scientific revolution by allowing physical ideas to be transformed without bothering about prior preconceptions about the universe, causality and natural laws. This, in spite of Ein-stein’s admiration for Mach, is both to give too much credit to phil-osophers of science – even those who tell scientists not to bother about philosophy – and to underestimate the very general crisis of accepted nineteenth-century ideas in this period, of which neo-positivist agnos-

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ticism and the rethinking of mathematics and physics were only some aspects. For if we are to see this transformation in its historical context at all, it must be as part of this general crisis. And if we are to find a common denominator for the multiple aspects of this crisis, which affected virtually all branches of intellectual activity in varying degrees, it must be that all were confronted after the 1870s with the unexpected, unpredicted and often incomprehensible results of Progress. Or, to be more precise, with the contradictions it generated.

To use a metaphor suited to the confident Age of Capital, the railway lines constructed by humanity were expected to lead to destinations which the travellers might not know, having not yet arrived there, but about whose existence and general nature they had no real doubt. Just so Jules Verne’s travellers to the moon had no doubt about the existence of that satellite, or about what, having got there, they would already know and what remained to be discovered by closer inspection on the ground. The twentieth century could be predicted, by extrapolation, as an improved and more splendid version of the mid-nineteenth.* And yet, as the travellers looked out of the window of humanity’s train while it moved steadily forward into the future, could the landscape they saw, unanticipated, enigmatic and troubling, really be on the way to the destination indicated on their tickets? Had they entered the wrong train? Worse: had they entered the right train which was somehow taking them in a direction they neither wanted nor liked? If so, how

had	this nightmare situation arisen?
The intellectual		history of the decades after 1875 is full	of the sense
of expectations not		only disappointed –  ‘how beautiful  the Republic
was	when we still	had the Emperor’, as a disenchanted	Frenchman

joked – but somehow turning into their opposite. We have seen this sense of reversal troubling both the ideologists and the practitioners of politics at this time (see chapter 4 above). We have already observed

it in the field of culture, where it produced a small but flourishing	genre
of bourgeois writing on the decline and fall of modern civilization	from

the 1880s. Degeneration by the future Zionist Max Nordau (1893) ‘ ^{s a} good, and suitably hysterical, example”. Nietzsche, the eloquent and menacing prophet of an impending catastrophe whose exact nature he did not quite define, expressed this crisis of expectations better than anyone else. His very mode of literary exposition, by means of a succession of poetic and prophetic aphorisms containing visionary intuitions or unargued truths, seemed a contradiction of the rationalist system-building discourse of philosophy which he claimed to practise.

* Except insofar as the Second Law of Thermodynamics predicted an eventual frozen death of the universe, thus providing a properly Victorian basis for pessimism.

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His enthusiastic admirers multiplied among middle-class (male) youth from 1890.

For Nietzsche, the avant garde decadence, pessimism and nihilism of the 1880s was more than a fashion. They were ‘the logical end-product of our great values and ideals’.²⁷ Natural science, he argued, produced its own internal disintegration, its own enemies, an anti-science. The consequences of the modes of thought accepted by nineteenth-century politics and economics were nihilist.²⁸ The culture of the age was threatened by its own cultural products. Democracy produced social-ism, the fatal swamping of genius by mediocrity, strength by weakness – a note also struck, in a more pedestrian and positivistic key, by the eugenists. In that case was it not essential to reconsider all these values and ideals and the system of ideas of which they formed a part, for in any case the ‘revaluation of all values’ was taking place? Such reflections multiplied as the old century drew to its end. The only ideology of serious calibre which remained firmly committed to the nineteenth-century belief in science, reason and progress was Marxism, which was unaffected by disillusion about the present because it looked forward to the future triumph of precisely those ‘masses’ whose rise created so much uneasiness among middle-class thinkers.

The developments in science which broke the mould of established explanation were themselves part of this general process of expectations transformed and reversed which is found at this time wherever men and women, in public or private capacities, confronted the present and compared it with their own or their parents’ expectations. Could one suppose that in such an atmosphere thinkers might be readier than at other times to question the established ways of the intellect, to think, or at least to consider, the hitherto unthinkable? Unlike the early nineteenth century, the revolutions echoed, in some sense, in the prod-ucts of the mind were not actually taking place, but were rather to be expected. They were implicit in the crisis of a bourgeois world which simply could no longer be understood in its own old terms. To look at the world anew, to change one’s perspective, was not merely easier. It was what, in one way or another, most people actually had to do in their lives.

However, this sense of intellectual crisis was strictly a minority phenomenon. Among the scientifically educated, one would guess, it was confined to the few people directly involved in the collapse of the nineteenth-century way of looking at the world, and by no means all of these felt it acutely. The numbers concerned were tiny, for even where scientific education had expanded dramatically – as in Germany, where the number of science students multiplied eightfold between 1880 and 1910 – they could still be counted in thousands rather than

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tens of thousands.²⁹ And most of them went into industry or fairly routine teaching where they were unlikely to worry much about the collapse of the established image of the universe. (One-third of Britain’s science graduates in 1907-10 were primary school teachers.)³⁰ The chemists, by far the largest body of professional scientists of the time, were still only on the fringes of the new scientific revolution. Those who felt the intellectual earthquake directly were the mathematicians and physicists, whose numbers were not even growing very fast as yet. In 1910 the German and British Physical Societies together had only about 700 members, compared to more than ten times that number in the combined British and German learned societies for chemistry.³¹

Moreover, even in its most extended definition, modern science remained a geographically concentrated community. The distribution of the new Nobel prizes shows that its major achievements still clustered in the traditional area of scientific advance, central and north-western Europe. Out of the first seventy-six Nobel laureates³² all but ten came from Germany, Britain, France, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Austria-Hungary and Switzerland. Only three came from the Medi-terranean, two from Russia and three from the rapidly rising, but still secondary, scientific community of the USA. The rest of non-European science and mathematics were making their mark – sometimes an extremely distinguished mark, as with the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford – chiefly through their work in Britain. In fact, the scientific community was more concentrated than even these figures imply. More than 60 per cent of all Nobel laureates came from the German, British and French scientific centres.

Again, the western intellectuals who tried to elaborate alternatives to nineteenth-century liberalism, the educated bourgeois youth which welcomed Nietzsche and irrationalism, were small minorities. Their spokesmen numbered a few dozens, their public essentially belonged to new generations of the university-trained, who were, outside the USA, an exiguous educational elite. There were in 1913 14,000 students in Belgium and the Netherlands out of a total population of 13-14 millions, 11,400 in Scandinavia (minus Finland) out of almost 11 millions, and even in studious Germany only 77,000 out of 65 millions.³³ When journalists talked about ‘the generation of 1914’, what they meant was usually a cafe-table full of young men speaking for the network of friends they had made when they entered the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris or some self-selected leaders of intellectual fashion in the universities of Cambridge or Heidelberg.

This should not lead us to underestimate the impact of the new ideas, for numbers are no guide to intellectual influence. The total number of men elected to the small Cambridge discussion society usually known

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as the ‘Apostles’ between 1890 and the war was only thirty-seven; but they included the philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the future economist J. M. Keynes, the math-ematician G. H. Hardy and a number of persons reasonably famous in English literature.³⁴ In Russian intellectual circles the impact of the revolution in physics and philosophy was already such in 1908 that Lenin felt impelled to write a large book against Ernst Mach, whose political impact on the Bolsheviks he regarded as both serious and deleterious: Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Whatever we think of Lenin’s judgments on science, his assessment of political realities was highly realistic. Moreover, it would not take long, in a world which was already formed (as Karl Kraus, satirist and enemy of the press, argued) by the modern media, for distorted and vulgarized notions of major intellectual changes to penetrate a wider public. In 1914 the name of Einstein was hardly a household word outside the great phy-sicist’s own household, but by the end of the world war ‘relativity’ was already the subject of uneasy jokes in central European cabarets. Within a few years of the First World War Einstein, in spite of the total impenetrability of his theory for most laymen, had become perhaps the only scientist since Darwin whose name and image were generally recognized among the educated lay public all over the world.

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CHAPTER       Ii

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They believed in Reason as the Catholics believed in the Blessed Virgin.

Romain Rolland, 1915′

In the neurotic, we see the instinct of aggression inhibited, while class consciousness liberates it; Marx shows how it can be gratified in keeping with the meaning of civilization; by grasping the true causes of oppression, and by suitable organization.

Alfred Adler, 1909²

We do not share the obsolete belief that the totality of cultural phenomena can be deduced as the product or function of constellations of ‘material’ interests. Nevertheless we do believe that it was scientifically creative andfertile to analyse social phenomena and cultural events in the special light of the extent to which they are economically conditioned. It will remain so for the foreseeable future, so long as this principle is applied with care and not shackled by dogmatic partiality.

Max Weber, 1904³

Perhaps another form of confronting the intellectual crisis should be mentioned here. For one way of thinking the then unthinkable was to reject reason and science altogether. It is difficult to measure the strength of this reaction against the intellect in the last years of the old century, or even, in retrospect, to appreciate its strength. Many of its more vocal champions belonged to the underworld or demi-monde of the intelligence, and are today forgotten. We are apt to overlook the vogue for occultism, necromancy, magic, parapsychology (which preoccupied some leading British intellectuals) and various versions of eastern mysti-cism and religiosity, which swept along the fringes of western culture. The unknown and incomprehensible became more popular than they had been since the early romantic era (see The Age of Revolution, chapter 14,11). We may note in passing that the fashion for such matters, which had once been located largely on the self-educated left, now tended to move sharply to the political right. For the heterodox disciplines were

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no longer, as they had once been, would-be sciences like phrenology, homeopathy, spiritualism and other forms of parapsychology, favoured by those who were sceptical of the conventional learning of the estab-lishment, but rejections of science and all its methods. However, while these forms of obscurantism made some contributions of substance to the avant garde arts (as, for instance, via the painter Kandinsky and the poet W. B. Yeats), their impact on the natural sciences was negligible.

Nor, indeed, did they make much impact among the general public. For the great mass of the educated, and especially the newly educated, the old intellectual verities were not in question. On the contrary, they were triumphantly reaffirmed by men and women for whom ‘progress’ had far from exhausted its promise. The major intellectual development of the years from 1875 to 1914 was the massive advance of popular education and self-education and of a popular reading public. In fact, self-education and self-improvement was one of the major functions of the new working-class movements and one of the major attractions for its militants. And what the masses of newly educated lay persons absorbed, and welcomed if they were politically on the democratic or socialist left, was the rational certainties of nineteenth-century science, enemy of superstition and privilege, presiding spirit of education and enlightenment, proof and guarantee of progress and the emancipation of the lowly. One of the crucial attractions of Marxism over other brands of socialism was precisely that it was ‘scientific socialism’. Darwin and Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, were as honoured among radicals and social democrats as Tom Paine and Marx. Galileo’s ‘And still it moves’ was persistently quoted in socialist rhetoric to indicate the inevitable triumph of the workers’ cause.

The masses were both on the move and being educated. Between the mid-1870s and the war the number of primary school teachers grew by anything between about one-third in well-schooled countries like France, to seven or even thirteen times its 1875 figure in formerly ill-schooled ones like England and Finland; the number of secondary school teachers might multiply up to four or five times (Norway, Italy). The very fact that they were both on the move and educated, pushed the front of the old science forward even as its supply base in the rear was getting ready for reorganization. For school teachers, at least in Latin countries, lessons in science meant inculcating the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of progress and rationalism, of what a French manual (1898) called ‘the freeing of the spirit’,⁴ easily identified with ‘free thought’ or liberation from Church and God. If there was any crisis for such men and women, it was not that of science or philosophy, but of the world of those who lived by privilege, exploitation and superstition. And in the world beyond western democracy and socialism, science

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meant power and progress in an even less metaphorical sense. It meant the ideology of modernization, forced upon backward and superstitious rural masses by the cienUficos, enlightened political elites of oligarchs inspired by positivism – as in the Brazil of the Old Republic and the Mexico of Porfirio Diaz. It meant the secret of western technology. It meant the Social Darwinism that legitimated American multi-million-aires.

The most striking proof of this advance of the simple gospel of science and reason was the dramatic retreat of traditional religion, at least in the European heartlands of bourgeois society. This is not to say that a majority of the human race were about to become ‘free thinkers’ (to use the contemporary phrase). The great majority of human beings, including the virtual totality of its female members, remained com-mitted to a belief in the divinities or spirits of whatever was the religion or their locality and community, and to its rites. As we have seen (see p. 210 above), Christian Churches were markedly feminized in consequence. Considering that all major religions distrusted women and insisted firmly on their inferiority, and some, like the Jews, virtually excluded them from formal religious worship, the female loyalty to the gods seemed incomprehensible, and surprising to rationalist men, and was often considered yet another proof of the inferiority of their gender. Thus gods and anti-gods conspired against them, though the supporters of free thought, theoretically committed to the equality of the sexes, did so shamefacedly.

Again, over most of the non-white world, religion still remained the only language for talking about the cosmos, nature, society and politics, and both formulated and sanctioned what people thought and did. Religion was what mobilized men and women for purposes which westerners expressed in secular terms, but which in fact could not be entirely translated into the secular idiom. British politicians might wish to reduce Mahatma Gandhi to a mere anti-imperialist agitator using religion to rouse superstitious masses, but for the Mahatma a saintly and spiritual life was more than a political instrument for winning independence. Whatever its meaning, religion was ideologically omni-present. The young Bengali terrorists of the 1900s, the nursery of what later came to be Indian Marxism, were initially inspired by a Bengali ascetic and his successor Swami Vivekananda (whose Vedanta doctrine is probably best known through a more anodyne Californian version), which they interpreted, not implausibly, as calling for a rising of the country now subject to a foreign power, but destined to give a universal faith to mankind.* It has been said that ‘not through secular politics

* ‘Oh India … wouldst thou attain, by means of thy graceful cowardice, that freedom deserved only by the brave and the heroic? … Oh Thou Mother of strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanliness, and make me a man’ – Vivekananda.⁵

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but through quasi-religious societies educated Indians first fell into the habit of thinking and organising on a national scale’.⁶ Both the absorption of the west (through groups like the Brahmo Samaj – see The Age of Revolution, chapter IQ, II) and the rejection of the west by nativist middle classes (through the Arya Samaj, founded 1875) took this form; not to mention the Theosophical Society, whose connections with the Indian national movement will be noted below.

And if in countries like India the emancipated, the educated strata which welcomed modernity, thus found their ideologies inseparable from religion (or, if they did find them separable, had to be careful to conceal the fact), then it is obvious that the appeal of purely secular ideological language to the masses was negligible, and a purely secular ideology incomprehensible. Where they rebelled, it was quite likely to be under the banners of their gods, as they still did after the First World War against the British because of the fall of the Turkish sultan, who had been ex officio khalif, or head of all the Muslim faithful, or against the Mexican revolution for Christ the King. In short, on a global scale, it would be absurd to think of religion as significantly weaker in 1914 than in 1870, or in 1780.

Yet in the bourgeois heartlands, though perhaps not in the USA, traditional religion was receding with unprecedented rapidity, both as an intellectual force and among the masses. This was to some extent an almost automatic consequence of urbanization, since it was practically certain that, other things being equal, city was likely to discourage piety more than country, big city more than small town. But even the cities became less religious as the immigrants from the pious countryside assimilated to the a-religious or sceptical native townees. In Marseilles half the population had still attended Sunday worship in 1840, but by 1901 only 16 per cent did so.⁷ Moreover, in the Roman Catholic countries, which comprised 45 per cent of the European population, faith retreated particularly fast in our period, before the joint offensive of (to quote a French clerical complaint) middle-class rationalism and the socialism of school teachers,⁸ but especially of the combina-

tion	of emancipatory		ideals  and  political  calculation  which  made
the	fight  against	the	Church  the  key  issue  in  politics. The  word
‘anti-clerical’ first		occurs in France in the 1850s, and anti-clericalism
became central to		the politics of the French centre and left from the

middle of the century, when freemasonry passed under anti-clerical control.⁹

Anti-clericalism became central to politics in the Catholic countries for two main reasons: because the Roman Church had opted for a total rejection of the ideology of reason and progress, and thus could not but be identified with the political right, and because the struggle against

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T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

superstition and obscurantism united liberal bourgeoisie and working class, rather than dividing capitalist from proletarian. Shrewd poli-ticians did not fail to bear this in mind in appeals for the unity of all good men: France surmounted the Dreyfus affair by such a united front and immediately disestablished the Catholic Church.

One of the by-products of this struggle, which thus lead to the separation of Church and state in France in 1905, was a sharp accel-

eration of militant de-Christianization.	In	1899 onty  2-5 P e r	c e n t  °f
children in the diocese of Limoges had	not	been baptized; in	1904 –

the peak of the movement – the percentage was 34 per cent. But even where the struggle of Church and state was not at the centre of politics, the organization of mass labour movements, or the entry of the common man (for women were much more loyal to the faith) into political life, had the same effect. In the pious Po valley of north Italy the complaints about the decline of religion multiply at the end of the century. (In the city of Mantua two-thirds already abstained from Easter communion in 1885.) The Italian labourers who migrated into the Lorraine steelworks before 1914 were already godless. In the Spanish (or rather Catalan) diocese of Barcelona and Vich the proportion of children baptized in their first week of life halved between 1900 and 1910.¹¹ In short, for most of Europe progress and secularization went together. And both advanced all the more rapidly inasmuch as Churches were increasingly deprived of that official status which gave them the advantages of the monopolist. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which excluded or discriminated against non-Anglicans until 1871, rapidly ceased to be refuges for Anglican clergymen. If in Oxford (1891) most heads of colleges were still in holy orders, none of the professors were so any longer.¹²

There were indeed little eddies in the contrary direction: upper-class Anglicans who converted to the more full-blooded faith of Roman Catholicism, Jin de sikle aesthetes attracted by colourful ritual, and perhaps especially irrationalists for whom the very intellectual absurd-ity of traditional faith proved its superiority to mere reason, and reac-tionaries who backed the great bulwark of ancient tradition and hierarchy even when they did not believe in it, as was the case of Charles Maurras, in France the intellectual leader of the royalist and ultra-Catholic Action Frangaise. There were indeed many who practised their religion, and even some fervent believers among scholars, scientists and philosophers, but the religious faith of few of them could have been inferred from their writings.

In short, intellectually western religion was never more hard-pressed than in the early 1900s, and politically it was in full retreat, at least into confessional enclosures barricaded against assault from outside.

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The natural beneficiary of this combination of democratization and secularization was the political and ideological left, and it was in these quarters that the old bourgeois belief in science, reason and progress bloomed.

The most impressive heir to the (politically and ideologically trans-formed) old certainties was Marxism, the corpus of theory and doctrine elaborated after the death of Karl Marx out of his and Friedrich Engels’ writings, mainly within the German Social Democratic Party. In many ways Marxism, in the version of Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), definer of its orthodoxy, was the last triumph of nineteenth-century positivist scientific confidence. It was materialist, determinist, inevitabilist, evol-utionist, and firmly identified the ‘laws of history’ with the ‘laws of science’. Kautsky himself began by seeing Marx’s theory of history as ‘nothing but the application of Darwinism to social development’, and held in 1880 that Darwinism in social science taught that ‘the transition from an old to a new conception of the world occurs irresistibly’.¹³ Paradoxically, for a theory so firmly attached to science, Marxism was generally rather suspicious of the dramatic contemporary innovations in science and philosophy, perhaps because they appeared to be attached to a weakening of the materialist (i.e. free-thinking and deter-ministic) certainties which were so attractive. Only in the Austro-Marxist circles of intellectual Vienna, where so many innovations met, did Marxism keep in touch with these developments, though it might have done so more among the revolutionary Russian intellectuals but for the even more militant attachment to materialism of its Marxist gurus.* Natural scientists of the period therefore had little professional reason to take an interest in Marx and Engels, and, though some were on the political left, as in the France of the Dreyfus affair, few took an interest in them. Kautsky did not even publish Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, on the advice of the only professional physicist in the party, for whose sake the German Empire passed the so-called Lex Arons (1898) which banned Social Democratic scholars from university appoint-ments.¹⁵

However, Karl Marx, whatever his personal interest in the progress of mid-nineteenth-century natural sciences, had devoted his time and intellectual energy overwhelmingly to the social sciences. And on these, as well as on history, the impact of Marxian ideas was substantial.

Their influence was both direct and indirect.¹⁶ In Italy, east-central Europe and above all in the Tsarist Empire, regions which seemed on

* For instance, Sigmund Freud took over the apartment of the Austrian Social Democratic leader Victor Adler in the Berggasse, where Alfred Adler (no relation), a committed Social Democrat among the psychoanalysts, read a paper in 1909 on ‘The Psychology of Marxism’ Victor Adler’s son Friedrich, meanwhile, was a scientist and admirer or Ernst Mach ^I4

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the verge of social revolution or disintegration, Marx immediately attracted a large, extremely brilliant, but sometimes temporary, body of intellectual support. In such countries or regions there were times, for instance during the 1890s, when virtually all younger academic intellectuals were some kind of revolutionary or socialist, and most thought of themselves as Marxist, as has often happened in the history of Third World countries since. In western Europe few intellectuals were strongly Marxist, in spite of the size of the mass labour movements dedicated to a Marxian social democracy – except, oddly, in the Netherlands, then entering upon her early industrial revolution. The German Social Democratic Party imported its Marxist theorists from the Habsburg Empire (Kautsky, Hilferding), and from the Tsarist Empire (Rosa Luxemburg, Parvus). Here Marxism was chiefly influen-tial through people who were sufficiently impressed by its intellectual as well as its political challenge to criticize its theory or to seek alter-native non-socialist responses to the intellectual questions it raised. In the case both of its champions and of its critics, not to mention the ex-Marxists or post-Marxists who began to appear from the late 1890s, such as the eminent Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), the political element was clearly dominant; in countries like Britain, which did not have to worry about a strong Marxist labour movement, nobody bothered much about Marx. In countries which had strong movements of this kind, very eminent professors like Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk (1851-1914) in Austria took time off their duties as teachers and cabinet ministers to rebut Marxist theory.¹⁷ But of course Marxism would hardly have stimulated so substantial and heavyweight a litera-ture, for and against, if its ideas had not been of considerable intellectual interest.

The impact of Marx on the social sciences illustrates the difficulty of comparing their development with that of the natural sciences in this period. For they dealt essentially with the behaviour and problems of human beings, who are very far from neutral and dispassionate observers of their own affairs. As we have seen, even in the natural sciences ideology becomes more prominent as we move from the inani-mate world to life, and especially to problems of biology which directly involve and concern human beings. The social and human sciences operate entirely, and by definition, in the explosive zone where all theories have direct political implications, and where the impact of ideology, politics and the situation in which thinkers find themselves is paramount. It was quite possible in our (or any) period to be both a distinguished astronomer and a revolutionary Marxist, like A. Pan-nekoek (1873-1960), whose professional colleagues doubtless thought his politics as irrelevant to his astronomy as his comrades felt his

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astronomy to be to the class struggle. Had he been a sociologist nobody would have regarded his politics as irrelevant to his theories. The social sciences have zigzagged, crossed and recrossed the same territory or turned in a circle often enough for this reason. Unlike the natural sciences, they lacked a generally accepted central body of cumulative knowledge and theory, a structured field of research in which progress could be claimed to result from an adjustment of theory to new dis-coveries. And in the course of our period the divergence between the two branches of’science’ became accentuated.

In a way this was new. During the heyday of the liberal belief in progress, it looked as though most of the social sciences – ethno-graphy/anthropology, philology/linguistics, sociology and several important schools of economics – shared a basic framework of research and theory with the natural sciences in the form of evolutionism (see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, 11). The core of social science was the study of the ascent of man from a primitive state to the present, and the rational understanding of that present. This process was usually conceived of as a progress by humanity through various ‘stages’, though leaving behind on its margins survivals from earlier stages, rather similar to living fossils. The study of human society was a positive science like any other evolutionary discipline from geology to biology. It seemed perfectly natural for an author to write a study of the conditions of progress under the title Physics and Politics, Or thoughts on the application of the principles of’natural selection’ and ‘inheritance’ to political

society, and for such a book to be published in the	1880s in a	London
publisher’s International Scientific Series, cheek by jowl with		volumes
on The Conservation of Energy, Studies in Spectrum Analysis, The Study of
Sociology, General Physiology of Muscles and Nerves	and  Money	and the
Mechanism of Exchange.™

However, this evolutionism was congenial neither to the new fashions in philosophy and neo-positivism, nor to those who began to have their doubts about a progress which looked like leading in the wrong direction, and hence about ‘historical laws’ which made it apparently inevitable. History and science, so triumphantly combined in the theory of evolution, now found themselves being separated. The German academic historians rejected ‘historical laws’ as part of generalizing science, which had no place in human disciplines devoted specifically to the unique and unrepeatable, even to ‘the subjective-psychological way of looking at things’ which was separated by so ‘vast a chasm from the crude objectivism of the Marxists’.¹⁹ For the heavy artillery of theory mobilized in the senior European historical periodical in the 1890s, the Historische Zjiitschrift – though originally directed against other historians too inclined towards social or any other science – could

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I JtIJt  JWJEJ U r   J l M f IJttJi

soon be seen to be firing primarily against the Social Democrats.²⁰

On the other hand such social and human sciences as could aspire to rigorous or mathematical argument, or to the experimental methods of natural sciences, also abandoned historical evolution, sometimes with relief. Even some who could aspire to neither, did so, like psychoanalysis, which has been described by one perceptive historian as ‘an a-historical theory of man and society that could make bearable (to Freud’s fellow-liberals in Vienna) a political world spun out of orbit and beyond control’.²¹ Certainly in economics a bitterly fought ‘battle of methods’ in the 1880s turned on history. The winning side (led by Carl Menger, another Viennese liberal) represented not only a view of scientific method – deductive as against inductive argument – but a deliberate narrowing of the hitherto wide perspectives of the economists’ science. Historically minded economists were either, like Marx, expelled into the limbo of cranks and agitators, or like the ‘historical school’, which was then dominant in German economics, asked to reclassify themselves as something else, for instance, economic historians or sociologists, leaving real theory to the analysts of neo-classical equilibria. This meant that questions of historical dynamics, of economic development and indeed of economic fluctuations and crises were largely extruded from the fields of the new academic orthodoxy. Economics thus became the only social science in our period undisturbed by the problem of non-rational behaviour, since it was so defined as to exclude all transactions which could not be described as being in some sense rational.

Similarly linguistics, which had been (with economics) the first and most confident of the social sciences, now seemed to lose interest in the model of linguistic evolution which had been its greatest achievement. Fernand de Saussure (1857-1913), who posthumously inspired all the structuralist fashions after the Second World War, concentrated instead on the abstract and static structure of communication, of which words happened to be one possible medium. Where the practitioners of social or human sciences could, they assimilated themselves to experimental scientists, as notably in one part of psychology, which rushed into the laboratory to pursue its studies in perception, learning and the experimental modification of behaviour. This produced a Russo-Amer-ican theory of’behaviourism’ (I. Pavlov, 1849-1936Jj₁ B. Watson, 1878-1958), which is hardly an adequate guide to the human mind. For the complexities of human societies, or even ordinary human lives and relations, did not lend themselves to the reductionism of laboratory positivists, however eminent, nor could the study of transformations over time be conducted experimentally. The most far-reaching practical consequence of experimental psychology, intelligence testing (pio-neered by Binet in France from 1905), found it easier for this reason to

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determine the limits of a person’s intellectual development by means of an apparently permanent ‘IQ_’ than the nature of that development, or how it took place, or where it might lead.

Such positivist or ‘rigorous’ social sciences grew, generating uni-versity departments and professions, but without anything much that can be compared to the capacity to surprise and shock which we find in the revolutionary natural sciences of the period. Indeed, where they were being transformed, the pioneers of the transformation had already done their work in an earlier period. The new economics of marginal utility and equilibrium looked back to W. S. Jevons (1835-82), Leon Walras (1834-1910) and Carl Menger (1840-1921), whose original work was done in the 1860s and 1870s; the experimental psychologists, even though their first journal under that title was that of the Russian Bekhterev in 1904, looked back to the German school of Wilhelm Wundt, established in the 1860s. Among the linguists the revolutionary Saussure was still barely known, outside Lausanne, since his reputation rests on lecture notes published after his death.

The more dramatic and controversial developments in the social and human sciences were closely connected with the intellectual^ ie sihle crisis of the bourgeois world. As we have seen, this took two forms. Society and politics themselves appeared to require rethinking in the era of the masses, and in particular the problems of social structure and cohesion, or (in political terms) citizen loyalty and government legitimacy. It was, perhaps, the fact that the capitalist economy in the west appeared to face no equally grave problems – or at least only temporary ones – which preserved economics from greater intellectual convulsions. More generally there were the new doubts about nine-teenth-century assumptions with regard to human rationality and the natural order of things.

The crisis of reason is most obvious in psychology, at least insofar as it tried to come to terms not with experimental situations, but with the human mind as a whole. What remained of the solid citizen pursuing rational aims by maximizing personal utilities, if this pursuit was based on a bundle of’instincts’ like those of animals (MacDougall),²² if the rational mind was only a boat tossed on the waves and currents of the unconscious (Freud), or even if rational consciousness was only a special

kind of consciousness ‘whilst all about it, parted from it by the		flimsiest
of screens, there	lie potential forms of consciousness entirely	different’
(William James,	1902)?23 Such observations were of course familiar to

any reader of great literature, any lover of art, or to most introspective mature adults. Yet it was now and not before that they became part of what claimed to be the scientific study of the human psyche. They did not fit into the psychology of the laboratory or the test-score, and the

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two branches of the investigation into the human psyche coexisted uneasily. Indeed, the most dramatic innovator in this field, Sigmund Freud, created a discipline, psychoanalysis, which separated itself from the rest of psychology and whose claims to scientific status and thera-peutic value have been treated with suspicion ever since in conventional scientific circles. On the other hand its impact on a minority of eman-cipated intellectual laymen and laywomen was rapid and considerable, including some in the humanities and social sciences (Weber, Sombart). Vaguely Freudian terminology was to penetrate the common discourse of educated lay persons after 1918, at least in the zones of German and Anglo-Saxon culture. With Einstein, Freud is probably the only scientist of the period (for he saw himself as such) whose name is generally familiar to the man in the street. No doubt this was due to the con-venience of a theory which allowed men and women to throw the blame for their actions on something they could not help, such as their unconscious, but even more to the fact that Freud could be seen, correctly, as a breaker of sexual taboos and, incorrectly, as a champion of freedom from sexual repression. For sexuality, a subject which became opened to public discussion and investigation in our period and to a fairly undisguised treatment in literature (one has only to think of Proust in France, Arthur Schnitzler in Austria and Frank Wedekind in Germany)* was central to Freud’s theory. Of course Freud was not the only or even the first writer to investigate it in depth. He does not really belong to the growing body of sexologists, who appeared after the publication of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psy-chopathia Sexualis (1886), which invented the term ‘masochism’. Unlike Krafft-Ebing, most of them were reformers, seeking to win public toleration for various forms of unconventional (‘abnormal’) sexual inclinations, to provide information and to free from guilt those who belonged to such sexual minorities (Havelock Ellis 1859-1939, Magnus Hirschfeld 1868—iQ35t). Unlike the new sexologists, Freud appealed not so much to a public specifically concerned with sexual problems, as to all reading men and women sufficiently emancipated from traditional Judaeo-Christian taboos to accept what they had long suspected, namely the enormous power, ubiquity and multiformity of the sexual impulse.

Freudian  or non-Freudian,  individual  or social, what  concerned

* Proustforbothmaleandfemalehomosexuality.Schnitzler-amedicalman-forafranktreatment ofcasual promiscuity (Reigen, 1903, originally written 1896-7); Wedekind (Friihlings Erwachen, 1891) for teenage sexuality.

t Ellis began to publish his Studies in the Psychology of Sex in 1897; Dr Magnus Hirschfeld began to publish his Jahrbuchjilr sexuelle ^wischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Borderline Cases) in the same year.

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REASON  AND    SOCIETY

psychology was not how human beings reasoned, but how little their capacity to reason affected their behaviour. In doing so it was apt to reflect the era of the politics and economy of the masses in two ways, both of them critical, by means of the consciously anti-democratic ‘crowd psychology’ of Le Bon (1841-1931), Tarde (1843-1904) and Trotter (1872-1939), who held that all men in a mob abdicated from rational behaviour, and through the advertising industry, whose enthusiasm for psychology was notorious, and which had long since discovered that soap was not sold by argument. Works on the psy-chology of advertising appeared from before 1909. However, psychology, most of which dealt with the individual, did not have to come to terms with the problems of a changing society. The transformed discipline of sociology did.

Sociology was probably the most original product of the social sci-ences in our period; or, more precisely, the most significant attempt to come to intellectual grips with the historical transformations which are the main subject of this book. For the fundamental problems which preoccupied its most notable exponents were political. How did societies cohere, when no longer held together by custom and the traditional acceptance of cosmic order, generally sanctioned by some religion, which once justified social subordination and rule? How did societies function as political systems under such conditions? In short, how could a society cope with the unpredicted and troubling consequences of democratization and mass culture; or, more generally, of an evolution of bourgeois society which looked like leading to some other kind of society? This set of problems is what distinguishes the men now regarded as the founding fathers of sociology from the bulk of now forgotten positivistic evolutionists inspired by Comte and Spencer (see The Age of Capital, chapter 14,11) who had hitherto represented the subject.

The new sociology was not an established, or even a well-defined, academic subject, or one which has ever since succeeded in establishing an international consensus about its exact content. At most, something like an academic ‘field’ emerged in this period in some European countries, around a few men, periodicals, societies and even one or two university chairs; most notably in France around Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and in Germany around Max Weber (1864-1920). Only in the Americas, and especially in the USA, did sociologists exist under that name in significant numbers. In fact, a good deal of what would now be classified as sociology was the work of men who still continued to regard themselves as something else – Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) as an economist, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923) as a theologian, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) as an economist, Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) as a political scientist, even Benedetto Croce as a philosopher. What gave

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T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

the field some kind of unity was the attempt to understand a society which the theories of political and economic liberalism could not, or could no longer, comprehend. However, unlike the vogue for sociology in some of its later phases, its major concern in this period was how to contain change rather than how to transform, let alone revolutionize society. Hence its ambiguous relation to Karl Marx, who is now often bracketed with Durkheim and Weber as a founding father of twentieth-century sociology, but whose disciples did not always take kindly to this label. As a contemporary German scholar put it: ‘Quite apart from the practical consequences of his doctrines, and the organisation of his followers, who are committed to them, Marx has, even from a scientific point of view, tied the knots which we must make an effort to dis-entangle.’²⁴

Some of the practitioners of the new sociology concentrated on how societies actually worked, as distinct from how liberal theory supposed them to operate. Hence a profusion of publications in what would today be called ‘political sociology’, largely based on the experience of the new electoral-democratic politics, of mass movements or both (Mosca, Pareto, Michels, S. and B. Webb). Some concentrated on what they thought held societies together against the forces of disruption by the conflict of classes and groups within them, and the tendency of liberal society to reduce humanity to a scattering of disoriented and rootless individuals (‘anomie’). Hence the preoccupation of leading and almost invariably agnostic or atheist thinkers like Weber and Durkheim with the phenomenon of religion, and hence the beliefs that all societies needed either religion or its functional equivalent to maintain their fabric, and that the elements of all religion were to be found in the rites of the Australian aborigines, then usually regarded as survivals from the infancy of the human race (see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, n). Conversely, the primitive and barbarous tribes which imperialism now allowed, and sometimes required, anthropologists to study at close quarters – ‘field-work’ became a regular part of social anthropology in the early twentieth century – were now seen not primarily as exhibits of past evolutionary stages, but as effectively functioning social systems.

But whatever the nature of the structure and cohesion of societies, the new sociology could not avoid the problem of the historical evolution of humanity. Indeed, social evolution still remained the core of anthro-pology, and for men such as Max Weber the problem of where bourgeois society had come from and whither it was evolving remained as crucial as it did for the Marxists, and for analogous reasons. For Weber, Durkheim and Pareto – all three liberals of varying degrees of scep-ticism – were preoccupied with the new socialist movement, and made it their business to refute Marx, or rather his ‘materialist conception of

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R E A S ON  AND  SOCIETY

history’, by elaborating a more general perspective of social evolution. They set out, as it were, to give non-Marxian answers to Marxian

questions. This is least	obvious in Durkheim, for in France Marx		was
not influential,  except	as someone providing a slightly	redder	tinge
for the old jacobin-communard  revolutionism. In Italy		Pareto	(best

remembered as a brilliant mathematical economist) accepted the reality of the class struggle, but argued that it would lead not to the overthrow of all ruling classes but to the replacement of one ruling elite by another. In Germany Weber has been called ‘the bourgeois Marx’ because he accepted so many of Marx’s questions, while standing his method of answering them (‘historical materialism’) on its head.

What motivated and determined the development of sociology in our period was thus the sense of crisis in the affairs of bourgeois society, the consciousness of the need to do something to prevent its disintegration or transformation into different, and no doubt less desirable, kinds of society. Did it revolutionize the social sciences, or even create an adequate foundation for the general science of society its pioneers set out to construct? Opinions differ, but most of them are probably sceptical. However, another question about them can be answered with more confidence. Did they provide a means of avoiding the revolution and disintegration which they hoped to hold at bay or reverse?

They did not. For every year brought the combination of revolution and war nearer. We must now trace it.

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CHAPTER      12

TOWARDS  REVOLUTION

Haveyou heard of Sinn Fein in Ireland? …Itisa most interesting movement and resembles very closely the so-called Extremist movement in India. Their policy is not to begfor favours but to wrest them.

Jawaharlal Nehru (aged eighteen) to his father, 12 September 1907′

In Russia the sovereign and the people are both of the Slav race, but simply because the people cannot bear the poison of autocracy, they are willing to sacrifice millions of lives to buy freedom… .But when I look at my country I cannot control my feelings. For not only has it the same autocracy as Russia but for 200 years we have been trampled upon by foreign barbarians.

A Chinese revolutionary, c. 1903-4²

You are not alone, workers and peasants of Russia! If you succeed in overthrowing, crushing and destroying the tyrants offeudal, police-ridden landlord and tsarist Russia your victory will serve as a signalfor a world struggle against the tyranny of capital.

V . I . Lenin, 1905′

I

We have so far considered the Indian summer of nineteenth-century capitalism as a period of social and political stability: of regimes not only surviving but flourishing. And indeed, if we were to concentrate only on the countries of’developed’ capitalism, this would be reasonably plausible. Economically, the shadows of the years of the Great Depression lifted, to give way to the brilliantly sunny expansion and prosperity of the 1900s. Political systems which did not quite know how to deal with the social agitations of the 1880s, with the sudden emerg-

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ence of mass working-class parties dedicated to revolution, or with the mass mobilizations of citizens against the state on other grounds, appeared to discover flexible ways of containing and integrating some and isolating others. The fifteen years or so from 1899 to 1914 were a belle tpoque not only because they were prosperous and life was exceedingly attractive for those who had money and golden for those who were rich, but also because the rulers of most western countries were perhaps worried about the future, but not really frightened about the present. Their societies and regimes, by and large, seemed manageable.

Yet there were considerable areas of the world in which this clearly was not the case. In these areas the years from 1880 to 1914 were an era of constantly possible, of impending or even of actual revolution. Though some of these countries were to be plunged into world war, even in these 1914 is not the apparently sudden break which separates tranquillity, stability and order from an era of disruption. In some – e.g. the Ottoman Empire – the world war itself was merely one episode in a series of military conflicts which had already begun some years earlier. In others – possibly Russia and certainly the Habsburg Empire – the world war was itself largely the product of the insolubility of the problems of domestic politics. In yet another group of countries – China, Iran, Mexico – the war of 1914 played no significant part at all. In short, for the vast area of the globe which thus constituted what Lenin in 1908 acutely called ‘combustible material in world politics’,⁴ the idea that somehow or other, but for the unforeseen and avoidable intervention of catastrophe in 1914, stability, prosperity and liberal progress would have continued, has not even the most superficial plausibility. On the contrary. After 1917 it became clear that the stable and prosperous countries of western bourgeois society themselves would be, in one way or another, drawn into the global revolutionary upheavals which began on the periphery of the single, interdependent world system this society had created.

The bourgeois century destabilized its periphery in two main ways: by undermining the old structures of its economies and the balance of its societies, and by destroying the viability of its established political regimes and institutions. The first of these effects was the more profound and explosive. It accounts for the difference in historical impact between the Russian and Chinese revolutions and the Persian and Turkish. But the second was more readily visible. For, with the exception of Mexico, the global political earthquake zone of 1900-14 consisted mainly of the great geographical belt of ancient empires, some reaching back into the mists of antiquity, which stretched from China in the east to the Habsburgs and perhaps Morocco in the west.

By the standards of the western bourgeois nation-states and empires

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T H E  AGK  OF  EMPIRE

these archaic political structures were rickety, obsolete and, as the many contemporary believers in Social Darwinism would have argued, doomed to disappear. It was their breakdown and break-up which provided the setting for the revolutions of 1910-14, and indeed, in Europe, the immediate setting for both the coming world war and the Russian Revolution. The empires which fell in these years were among the most ancient political forces in history. China, though sometimes disrupted and occasionally conquered, had been a great empire and the centre of civilization for at least two millennia. The great imperial civil service examinations, which selected the scholar-gentry that ruled it, had been held annually with occasional interruptions for over two thousand years. When they were abandoned in 1905, the end of the empire could not but be close. (In fact it was six years away.) Persia had been a great empire and centre of culture for a similar period, though her fortunes fluctuated more dramatically. She had survived her great antagonists, the Roman and Byzantine empires, resurfaced again after conquests by Alexander the Great, Islam, Mongols and Turks. The Ottoman Empire, though very much younger, was the last of that succession of nomadic conquerors who had ridden out of Central Asia since the days of Attila the Hun to overthrow and take over the eastern and western realms: Avars, Mongols, various brands of Turks. With its capital in Constantinople, the former Byzantium, the city of Caesars (Tsarigrad), it was the lineal heir of the Roman Empire, whose western half had collapsed in the fifth century AD but whose eastern half had survived – until conquered by the Turks – for another thousand years. Though the Ottoman Empire had been pushed back since the end of the seventeenth century, it still remained a formidable tri-continental territory. Moreover the sultan, its absolute ruler, was regarded by the majority of the world’s Moslems as their khalif, the head of their religion, and as such the successor of the prophet Mohammed and his seventh-century conquering disciples. The six years which saw the transformation of all three of these empires into constitutional monarchies or republics on the western bourgeois model patently mark the end of a major phase-of the world’s history.

Russia and the Habsburgs, the two great and shaky multinational European empires which were also about to collapse, were not quite comparable, except insofar as both represented a type of political structure – countries run, as it were, like family properties – which increasingly looked like some prehistoric survival into the nineteenth century. Moreover both claimed the title of Caesar (tsar, Kaiser), the former through medieval barbarian ancestors looking to the Roman Empire of the east, the latter to similar ancestors reviving the memories of the Roman Empire of the west. In fact, as empires and European

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powers both were comparatively recent. Moreover, unlike the ancient empires, they were situated in Europe, on the borders between the zones of economic development and backwardness, and thus partly integrated from the start into the economically ‘advanced’ world, and as ‘great powers’ totally integrated into the political system of Europe, a continent whose very definition has always been political.* Hence, incidentally, the enormous repercussions of the Russian Revolution and, in a different way, of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire on the European and global political scene, compared with the relatively modest or purely regional repercussions of, say, the Chinese, Mexican or Iranian revolutions.

The problem of the obsolete empires of Europe was that they were simultaneously in both camps: advanced and backward, strong and weak, wolves and sheep. The ancient empires were merely among the victims. They seemed destined for collapse, conquest or dependency, unless they could somehow acquire from the western imperialists what made them so formidable. By the end of the nineteenth century this was perfectly clear, and most of the larger states and rulers of the ancient world of empires tried, in varying degree, to learn what they understood to be the lessons of the west, but only Japan succeeded in this difficult task and had by 1900 become a wolf among the wolves.

I I

Without the pressure of imperialist expansion, it is not likely that there would have been revolution in the ancient, but by the nineteenth century rather decrepit, empire of Persia, any more than in the most westerly of the islamic kingdoms, Morocco, where the sultan’s govern-ment (the Maghzen) tried, with indifferent success, to extend its area of administration and to establish some sort of effective control over the anarchic and formidable world of Berber fighting clans. (It is indeed not certain whether the events of 1907-8 in Morocco deserve even the courtesy title of a revolution.) Persia was under the double pressure of Russia and Britain, from which she desperately tried to escape by calling in advisers and helpers from other western states – Belgium (on which the Persian constitution was to be modelled), the USA and, after 1914, Germany – who were in no position to provide a real counterweight. Iranian politics already contained the three forces whose conjunction was to make an even greater revolution in 1979: the emancipated and westernized intellectuals, keenly aware of the coun-

* Since there is no geographical feature which clearly demarcates the western prolongation of the Asian land-mass which we call Europe from the rest of Asia.

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try’s weakness and social injustice, the bazaar merchants, keenly aware of foreign economic competition, and the collectivity of the Moslem clergy, who represented the Shia branch of Islam, which functioned as a sort of national Persian religion, capable of mobilizing the traditional masses. They in turn were keenly aware of the incompatibility of western influence and the Koran. The alliance between radicals, bazaris and clergy had already shown its force in 1890-2, when an imperial grant of the tobacco monopoly to a British businessman had to be cancelled following riot, insurrection and a remarkably successful nationwide boycott on the sale and use of tobacco, joined even by the shah’s wives. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, and the first Russian Revolution, temporarily eliminated one of Persia’s tormentors, and gave Persian revolutionaries both encouragement and a programme. For the power which had defeated a European emperor was not only Asian but also a constitutional monarchy. A constitution could thus be seen not only (by emancipated radicals) as the obvious demand of a western revolution but also (by wider sections of public opinion) as some sort of’secret of strength’. In fact, a mass departure of ayatollahs to the holy city of Qpm, and a mass flight of bazaar merchants into the British legation, which incidentally brought Teheran business to a standstill, secured an elected assembly and a constitution in 1906. In practice the 1907 agreement between Britain and Russia to divide Persia peacefully among them gave Persian politics little chance. Defacto the first revolutionary period ended in 1911, though Persia remained, nominally, under something like the constitution of 1906-7 until the revolution of 1979-⁵ On the other hand, the fact that no other imperialist power was in a real position to challenge Britain and Russia probably saved the existence of Persia as a state and of her monarchy, which had little enough power of its own, except a Cossack brigade, whose commander after the first war made himself into the founder of the last imperial dynasty, the Pahlavis (1921-79).

In this respect Morocco was unluckier. Situated at a particularly strategic spot on the global map, the north-western corner of Africa, she looked like a suitable prey to France, Britain, Germany, Spain and anyone else within naval distance. The monarchy’s internal weakness made her particularly vulnerable to foreign ambitions, and the inter-national crises which arose out of the quarrels between the various predators – notably in 1906 and 1911 – played a major role in the genesis of the First World War. France and Spain partitioned her, with international (i.e. British) interests being taken care of by a free port at Tangier. On the other hand, while Morocco lost her independence, the absence of her sultan’s control over the Berber fighting clans was to make the actual French, and even more the Spanish, military con-

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quest of the territory difficult and prolonged.

I ll

The internal crises of the great Chinese and Ottoman empires were both more ancient and more profound. The Chinese Empire had been shaken by major social crisis from the middle of the nineteenth century (see The Age of Capital). It had only overcome the revolutionary threat of the Taiping at the cost of virtually liquidating the empire’s central administrative power and throwing it on the mercy of the foreigners, who had established extra-territorial enclaves and virtually taken over the main source of imperial finance, the Chinese customs admin-istration. The enfeebled empire, under the empress-dowager Tzu-hsi (1835-1908), who was more feared within the empire than outside it, seemed destined to disappear under the combined onslaughts of imperialism. Russia advanced into Manchuria, whence it was to be expelled by its rival Japan, which detached Taiwan and Korea from China after a victorious war in 1894-5 ^{a n} ^ prepared to take over more. Meanwhile the British had enlarged their Hong Kong colony and had practically detached Tibet, which they saw as a dependency of their Indian empire; Germany carved out bases for herself in north China; the French exerted some influence in the neighbourhood of their Indo-chinese empire (itself detached from China) and extended their pos-itions in the south; and even the feeble Portuguese achieved the cession of Macao (1887). While the wolves were ready to form a pack against the prey, as they did when Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, the USA and Japan joined to occupy and loot Peking in 1900 on the pretext of putting down the so-called Boxer Rising, they could not agree on the division of the immense carcass. All the more so since one of the more recent imperial powers, the United States, now increasingly prominent in the Western Pacific, which had long been an area of US interest, insisted on ‘the open door’ to China, i.e. that it had as much right to booty as earlier imperialists. As in Morocco, these Pacific rivalries over the decaying body of the Chinese Empire contributed to the coming of the First World War. More immediately, they both saved China’s nominal independence and caused the final collapse of the world’s most ancient surviving political entity.

Three major forces of resistance existed in China. The first, the imperial establishment of court and Confucian senior civil servants, recognized clearly enough that only modernization on the western (or perhaps more precisely, the western-inspired Japanese) model could save China. But this would have meant the destruction of precisely that

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moral and political system they represented. Conservative-led reform was bound to fail, even if it had not been hampered by court intrigues and divisions, weakened by technical ignorance and wrecked, every few years, by yet another bout of foreign aggression. The second, the ancient and powerful tradition of popular rebellion and secret societies imbued with ideologies of opposition, remained as powerful as ever. In fact, in spite of the defeat of the Taiping, everything combined to reinforce it, as 9-13 millions died of starvation in the north China famine of the late 1870s and the dykes of the Yellow River broke, signifying the failure of an empire whose duty it was to protect them. The so-called Boxer Rising of 1900 was indeed a mass movement, whose vanguard was formed by the organization Fist-fighters for Justice and Unity which was a sprig of the large and ancient Buddhist secret society known as the White Lotus. Yet, for obvious reasons, the cutting edge of these rebellions was militantly xenophobic and anti-modern. It was directed against foreigners, Christianity and machines. While it provided some of the force for a Chinese revolution it could provide neither programme nor perspective for it.

Only in southern China, where business and trade had always been important and foreign imperialism laid the basis for some indigenous bourgeois development, was there a foundation, as yet narrow and unstable, for such a transformation. The local ruling groups were already quietly drawing away from the Manchu dynasty, and here alone the ancient secret societies of opposition allied with, or even developed an interest in, something like a modern and concrete pro-gramme for Chinese renewal. The relations between the secret societies and the young southern movement of republican revolutionaries, among whom Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) was to emerge as the chief inspirer of the first phase of the revolution, have been the subject of much debate and some uncertainty, but there can be no doubt that they were close and essential. (Chinese republicans in Japan, which was a base for their agitation, even formed a special lodge of the Triads in Yokohama for their own use.)⁶ Both shared a rooted opposition to the Manchu dynasty – the Triads were Still dedicated to the restoration of the old Ming dynasty (1368-1644) – a hatred of imperialism, which could be formulated in the phraseology of traditional xenophobia or the modern nationalism borrowed from western revolutionary ideology, and a concept of social revolution, which the republicans transposed from the key of the ancient anti-dynastic uprising to that of the modern western revolution. Sun’s famous ‘three principles’ of nationalism, republicanism and socialism (or more precisely, agrarian reform) may have been formulated in terms derived from the west, notably from John Stuart Mill, but in fact even Chinese who lacked his western

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background (as a mission-educated and widely travelled medical prac-titioner) could see them as logical extensions of familiar anti-Manchu reflections. And for the handful of republican city intellectuals the secret societies were essential to reach the urban and especially the rural masses. They probably also helped to organize support among the overseas communities of Chinese emigrants which Sun Yat-sen’s move-ment was the first to mobilize politically for national purposes.

Nevertheless, the secret societies (as the communists would also later discover) were hardly the best foundation for a new China, and the westernized or semi-westernized radical intellectuals from the southern seaboard were as yet not sufficiently numerous, influential or organized to take power. Nor did the western liberal models inspiring them provide a recipe for governing the empire. The empire fell in 1911 to a (southern and central) revolt in which elements of military rebellion, republican insurrection, withdrawal of loyalty by the gentry, and popular or secret society revolt were combined. However, in practice it was replaced for the time being not by a new regime, but by a congeries of unstable and shifting regional power-structures, mainly under military control (‘war lords’). No stable new national regime was to emerge in China for almost forty years – until the triumph of the Communist Party in 1949.

I V

The Ottoman Empire had long been crumbling, though, unlike all other ancient empires, it remained a military force strong enough to give even the armies of great powers a distinctly hard time. Since the end of the seventeenth century its northern frontiers had been pushed back into the Balkan peninsula and Transcaucasia by the advance of the Russian and Habsburg empires. The Christian subject peoples of the Balkans were increasingly restless and, with the encouragement and assistance of rival great powers, had already transformed much of the Balkans into a collection of more or less independent states which gnawed and nibbled at what remained of Ottoman territory. Most of the remoter regions of the empire, in North Africa and the Middle East, had not been under regular effective Ottoman rule for a long time. They now increasingly, if not quite officially, passed into the hands of the British and French imperialists. By 1900 it was clear that everything from the western borders of Egypt and the Sudan to the Persian Gulf was likely to come under British rule or influence, except Syria from the Lebanon northwards, where the French maintained claims, and most of the Arab peninsula, which, since no oil or anything else of

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commercial value had yet been discovered there, could be left to the disputes of the local tribal chieftains and the Islamic revivalist movements of Beduin preachers. In fact, by 1914 Turkey had almost entirely disappeared from Europe, had been totally eliminated from Africa, and maintained a feeble empire only in the Middle East, where she did not outlast the world war. Yet, unlike Persia and China, Turkey had available an immediate potential alternative to the collapsing empire: a large bloc of an ethnically and linguistically Turkish Moslem population in Asia Minor, which could form the basis of something like a ‘nation-state’ on the approved occidental nineteenth-century model.

This was almost certainly not initially in the mind of the westernized officers and civil servants, supplemented by members of the new secular professions such as law and journalism,* who set out to revive the empire by means of revolution, since the empire’s own half-hearted attempts to modernize itself- most recently in the 1870s – had run into the sand. The Committee for Union and Progress, better known as the Young Turks (founded in the 1890s), which seized power in 1908 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, aimed to establish an all-Ottoman patriotism which cut across ethnic, linguistic and religious divisions, on the basis of the secular verities of the (French) eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The version of the Enlightenment which they chiefly cherished was inspired by the positivism of August Comte, which combined a passionate belief in science and inevitable modernization with the secular equivalent of a religion, non-democratic progress (‘order and progress’, to quote the positivist motto) and planned social engineering undertaken from above. For obvious reasons this ideology appealed to smallish modernizing elites in power in backward, tra-ditionalist countries which they tried by main force to wrench into the twentieth century. It was probably never as influential as in the last part of the nineteenth century in non-European countries.

In this respect as in others the Turkish revolution of 1908 failed. Indeed, it accelerated the collapse of what remained of the Turkish Empire, while saddling the state with the classic liberal constitution, multi-party parliamentary system and the rest, designed for bourgeois countries in which governments were not actually supposed to govern very much, since the affairs of society were in the hidden hands of a dynamic and self-regulating capitalist economy. That the Young Turk regime also continued the empire’s economic and military commitment to Germany, which brought Turkey on to the losing side in the First World War, was to be fatal to them.

* Islamic law did not require a special legal profession. Literacy trebled in the years 1875-1900, thus providing a market for more periodicals.

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Turkish modernization therefore shifted from a liberal-par-liamentary to a military-dictatorial frame and from the hope in a secular-imperial political loyalty to the reality of a purely Turkish nationalism. Unable any longer to overlook group loyalties or to domi-nate non-Turkish communities, Turkey after 1915 was to opt for an ethnically homogeneous nation, which implied the forcible assimilation of such Greeks, Armenians, Kurds and others as were not either expelled en bloc or massacred. An ethno-linguistic Turkish nationalism even permitted imperial dreams on a secular nationalist basis, for large parts of Western and Central Asia, mainly in Russia, were inhabited by people speaking varieties of Turkish languages, whom it was surely the destiny of Turkey to gather into a greater ‘Pan-Turanian’ union. Within the Young Turks the balance thus tilted from westernizing and transnational modernizers to westernizing but strongly ethnic or even racialist modernizers like the national poet and ideologist Zia Gokalp (1876-1924). The real Turkish revolution, starting with the actual abolition of the empire itself, took place under such auspices after 1918. But its content was already implicit in the aims of the Young Turks.

Unlike Persia and China, Turkey thus did not only liquidate an old regime but proceeded fairly soon to construct a new one. The Turkish Revolution inaugurated perhaps the first of the contemporary Third World modernizing regimes: passionately committed to progress and enlightenment against tradition, ‘development’ and a sort of populism untroubled by liberal debating. In the absence of a revolutionary middle class, or indeed any other revolutionary class, intellectuals and especially, after the war, soldiers were to take over. Their leader, Kemal Atatiirk, a tough and successful general, was to carry out the Young Turk modernizing programme ruthlessly: a republic was proclaimed, Islam abolished as a state religion, the Roman alphabet substituted for the Arabic, the women were unveiled and sent to school, and Turkish men, if necessary by military force, were put under bowler hats or other western headgear instead of turbans. The weakness of the Turkish Revolution, notable in its economy, lay in its inability to impose itself on the great mass of rural Turks or to change the structure of agrarian society. Nevertheless, the historical implications of this revolution were great, even though they have been insufficiently recognized by his-torians whose eyes tend to be fixed before 1914 on the immediate international consequences of the Turkish Revolution – the collapse of the empire and its contribution to the origin of the First World War – and after 1917 on the much greater Russian Revolution. For obvious reason, these events overshadowed contemporary Turkish develop-ments.

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V

An even more overlooked revolution of the time began in Mexico in 1910. It attracted little foreign attention outside the United States, partly because diplomatically Central America was Washington’s exclusive backyard (‘Poor Mexico,’ its overthrown dictator had exclaimed, ‘so far from God, so near to the USA’), and because initially the implications of the revolution were entirely unclear. There seemed no immediately evident distinction between this and the 114 other violent changes of government in nineteenth-century Latin America which still form the largest class of events commonly known as ‘revo-lutions’.⁷ Moreover, by the time the Mexican Revolution had emerged as a major social upheaval, the first of its kind in a Third World peasant country, it was to be, once again, overshadowed by events in Russia.

And yet the Mexican revolution is significant, because it was directly born of the contradictions within the world of empire, and because it was the first of the great revolutions in the colonial and dependent world in which the labouring masses played a major part. For while anti-imperialist and what would later be called colonial liberation movements were indeed developing within the old and new colonial empires of the metropoles, as yet they did not seem seriously to threaten imperial rule.

By and large, colonial empires were still controlled as easily as they had been acquired – apart from those mountainous warrior zones such as Afghanistan, Morocco and Ethiopia, which still held off foreign conquest. ‘Native risings’ were repressed without much trouble, though sometimes – as in the case of the Herero in German South-west Africa (the present Namibia) – with notable brutality. Anti-colonial or auton-omist movements were indeed beginning to develop in the socially and politically more complex of the colonized countries, but did not usually achieve that alliance between the educated and westernizing minority and the xenophobic defenders of ancient tradition which (as in Persia) made them into a serious political force. Both distrusted one another for obvious reasons, to the benefit of the colonial power. In French Algeria resistance was centred in the Moslem clergy (oulema) who were already organizing, while the secular Svolufa tried to become Frenchmen of the republican left. In the protectorate of Tunisia it was centred in the educated westernizers, who were already forming a party demanding a constitution (the Destour) and which was the lineal ancestor of the Neo-Destour Party, whose leader, Habib Bourguiba, became the head of independent Tunisia in 1954.

Of the great colonial powers only the oldest and greatest, Britain, had serious premonitions of impermanence (see p. 82 above). She

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acquiesced in the virtual independence of the colonies of white settle-ment (called ‘dominions’ from 1907). Since this was not to be resisted, it was not expected to create problems; not even in South Africa, where the Boers, recently annexed after defeat in a difficult war, seemed reconciled by a generous Liberal settlement, and by the common front of British and Boer whites against the non-white majority. In fact, South Africa caused no serious trouble in either of the two world wars, after which the Boers took that subcontinent over once again. Britain’s other ‘white’ colony, Ireland, was – and has remained – endlessly troublesome, though, as it happened, after 1890 the explosive unrest of the years of the Land League and Parnell seemed to have been defused by Irish political quarrels and by a powerful combination of repression and far-reaching agrarian reform. The problems of British par-liamentary politics revived the Irish issue again after 1910, but the base of support for the Irish insurrectionaries remained so narrow and shaky that their strategy for broadening it was essentially to court martyrdom by a foredoomed rebellion, whose suppression would win the people to their cause. This is indeed what happened after the Easter Rising of 1916, a small putsch by a handful of totally isolated armed militants. The war, as so often, revealed the fragility of political buildings which had seemed stable.

There appeared to be no immediate threat to British rule anywhere else. And yet a genuine colonial liberation movement was visibly devel-oping both in the oldest and in one of the youngest of Britain’s depen-dencies. Egypt, even after the suppression of the young soldiers’ insurrection of Arabi Pasha in 1882, had never been reconciled to British occupation. Its ruler, the khedive, and the local ruling class of large landowners, whose economy had long since been integrated into the world market, accepted the administration of the British ‘proconsul’ Lord Cromer with a marked lack of enthusiasm. The autonomist movement/organization/party later known as the Wafd was already taking shape. British control remained quite firm – indeed it was to last until 1952 – but the unpopularity of direct colonial rule was such that it was to be abandoned after the war (1922) for a less direct form of management, which implied a certain Egyptianization of the admin-istration. Irish semi-independence and Egyptian semi-autonomy, both won in 1921-2, were to mark the first partial retreat of empires.

The liberation movement in India was far more serious. In this subcontinent of almost 300 million inhabitants, an influential bour-geoisie – both commercial, financial, industrial and professional – and an important cadre of educated officials who administered it for Britain were increasingly resentful of economic exploitation, political impotence and social inferiority. One has only to read E. M. Forster’s

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A Passage to India to understand why. An autonomist movement had already emerged. Its chief organization, the Indian National Congress (founded 1885), which was to become the party of national liberation, initially reflected both this middle-class discontent and the attempt by intelligent British administrators like Allan Octavian Hume (who actually founded the organization) to disarm agitation by giving rec-ognition to respectable protest. However, by the early twentieth century Congress had begun to escape from British tutelage, thanks in part to the influence of the apparently non-political ideology of theosophy. As admirers of eastern mysticism, western adepts of this philosophy were apt to sympathize with India, and some, like the ex-secularist and ex-socialist militant Annie Besant, had no difficulty in converting them-selves into champions of Indian nationalism. Educated Indians, and indeed Ceylonese, naturally found western recognition of their own cultural values congenial. However, Congress, though a growing force – and incidentally strictly secular and western-minded – remained an elite organization. Nevertheless, an agitation which set out to mobilize the uneducated masses by the appeal to traditional religion was already on the scene in the west of India. BaI Ganghadar Tilak (1856-1920) defended the holy cows of Hinduism against the foreign menace with some popular success.

Moreover, there were by the early twentieth century two other even more formidable nurseries of Indian popular agitation. The Indian emigration to South Africa had begun to organize collectively against the racism of that region, and the chief spokesman of its successful movement of passive or non-violent mass resistance, as we have seen, was the young Gujerati lawyer who, on his return to India in 1915, was to become the major force for mobilizing the Indian masses in the cause of national independence: Gandhi (see pp. 77-8 above). Gandhi invented the enormously powerful role in Third World politics of the modern politician as a saint. At the same time a more radical version of the politics of liberation was emerging in Bengal, with its sophisticated vernacular culture, its large Hindu middle class, its vast mass of educated and modestly employed lower-middle class, and its intellectuals. The British plan to partition this large province into a predominantly Moslem region allowed the anti-British agitation to develop on a massive scale in 1906-9. (The scheme was abandoned.) The Bengali nationalist movement, which stood to the left of Congress from the start and was never quite integrated into it, combined – at this stage – a religio-ideological appeal to Hinduism with a deliberate imitation of congenial western revolutionary movements such as the Irish and the Russian Narodniks. It produced the first serious terrorist movement in India – just before the war there were to be others in

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north India, based on returned Punjabi emigrants from America (the ‘Ghadr party’) – and by 1905 it already constituted a serious problem for the police. Moreover, the first Indian communists (e.g. M. N. Roy [1887—1954]) were to emerge from the Bengali terrorist movement during the war.⁸ While British control of India remained firm enough, it was already evident to intelligent administrators that some sort of devolution leading, however slowly, to some preferably modest degree of autonomy would become unavoidable. Indeed, the first of such proposals was to be made by London during the war.

Where global imperialism was at its most immediately vulnerable was in the grey zone of informal rather than formal empire, or what would after the Second World War be called ‘neo-colonialism’. Mexico was certainly a country both economically and politically dependent on its great neighbour, but technically it was an independent sovereign state with its own institutions and political decisions. It was a state like Persia rather than a colony like India. Moreover, economic imperialism was not unacceptable to its native ruling classes, inasmuch as it was a potential modernizing force. For throughout Latin America the landowners, merchants, entrepreneurs and intellectuals who con-stituted the local ruling classes and elites dreamed only of achieving that progress which would give their countries, which they knew to be backward, feeble, unrespected and on the margins of the western civilization of which they saw themselves as an integral part, the chance to fulfil their historic destiny. Progress meant Britain, France and, increasingly clearly, the USA. The ruling classes of Mexico, especially in the north where the influence of the neighbouring US economy was strong, had no objection to integrating themselves into the world market and therefore into the world of progress and science, even when despis-ing the ungentlemanly boorishness of gringo businessmen and poli-ticians. In fact, after the revolution it was to be the ‘Sonora gang’, chieftains of the economically most advanced agrarian middle class of that most northern of Mexico’s states, who emerged as the decisive political group in the country. Contrariwise, the great obstacle to modernization was the vast mass of the rural population, immobile and immovable, wholly or partly Indian or black, plunged into ignorance, tradition and superstition. There were moments when the rulers and intellectuals of Latin America, like those of Japan, despaired of their peoples. Under the influence of the universal racism of the bourgeois world (see The Age of Capital, chapter 14, n) they dreamed of a biological transformation of their populations which would make them amenable to progress: by the mass immigration of people of European stock in Brazil and in the southern cone of South America, by mass interbreeding with whites in Japan.

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The Mexican rulers were not particularly attracted by the mass immigration of whites, who were only too likely to be North Americans, and their fight for independence against Spain had already sought legitimation in an appeal to an independent and largely fictitious pre-Hispanic past identified with the Aztecs. Mexican modernization therefore left biological dreaming to others and concentrated directly on profit, science and progress as mediated by foreign investment and the philosophy of Auguste Comte. The group of so-called cientificos devoted itself single-mindedly to these objects. Its uncontested chief, and the political boss of the country since the 1870s, i.e. for the entire period since the great forward surge of the world imperialist economy, was President Porfirio Diaz (1830-1915). And, indeed, the economic development of Mexico under his presidency had been impressive, not to mention the wealth which some Mexicans derived from it, especially those who were in a position to play off rival groups of European entrepreneurs (such as the British oil and constructional tycoon Weetman Pearson) against each other and against the steadily more dominant North Americans.

Then, as now, the stability of regimes between the Rio Grande and Panama was jeopardized by the loss of goodwill in Washington, which was militantly imperialist and took the view ‘that Mexico is no longer anything but a dependency of the American economy’.⁹ Diaz’s attempts to keep his country independent by playing off European against North American capital made him extremely unpopular north of the border. The country was rather too big for military intervention, which the USA practised with enthusiasm at this time in smaller states of Central America, but by 1910 Washington was not in a mood to dis-courage well-wishers (like Standard Oil, irritated by British influence in what was already one of the major oil-producing countries) who might wish to assist Diaz’s overthrow. There is no doubt that Mexican revolutionaries benefited greatly from a friendly northern border; and Diaz was all the more vulnerable because, after winning power as a military leader, he had allowed the army to atrophy, since he under-standably supposed that army coups were a greater danger than popular insurrections. It was his bad luck that he found himself faced by a major armed popular revolution which his army, unlike most Latin American forces, was quite unable to crush.

That he found himself faced with it was due precisely to the striking economic developments over which he had presided so successfully. The regime had favoured business-minded estate owners (hacendados), all the more so since the global boom and substantial railway develop-ment turned formerly inaccessible stretches of land into potential treasure-chests. The free village communities mainly in the centre and

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south of the country which had been preserved under Spanish royal law, and probably reinforced in the first generations of independence, were systematically stripped of their lands for a generation. They were to be the core of the agrarian revolution which found a leader and spokesman in Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919). As it happened, two of the areas where agrarian unrest was most intense and readily mobilized, the states of Morelos and Guerrero, were within easy riding-distance of the capital, and therefore in a position to influence national affairs.

The second area of unrest was in the north, rapidly transformed (especially after the defeat of the Apache Indians in 1885) from an Indian frontier into an economically dynamic border region living in a sort of dependent symbiosis with the neighbouring areas of the USA. It contained plenty of potential malcontents, from former communities of Indian-fighting frontiersmen, now deprived of their land, Yaqui Indians resentful of their defeat, the new and growing middle class, and the considerable number of footloose and self-confident men often owning their guns and horses, who could be found in empty ranching and mining country. Pancho Villa, bandit, rustler and eventually revolutionary general, was typical of these. There were also groups of powerful and wealthy estate-owners such as the Maderos – perhaps the richest family in Mexico – who competed for control of their states with the central government or its allies among the local hacendados.

Many of these potentially dissident groups were in fact beneficiaries of the Porfirian era of massive foreign investments and economic growth. What turned them into dissidents, or rather what turned a com-monplace political struggle over the re-election or possible retirement of President Diaz into a revolution, was probably the growing inte-gration of the Mexican economy into the world (or rather the US) economy. As it happened the American economic slump of 1907-8 had disastrous effects on Mexico: directly in the collapse of Mexico’s own markets and the financial squeeze on Mexican enterprise, indirectly in the flood of penniless Mexican labourers returning home after losing their jobs in the USA. Modern and ancient crisis coincided: cyclical slump and ruined harvests with food prices soaring beyond the range of the poor.

It was in these circumstances than an electoral campaign turned into an earthquake. Diaz, having mistakenly allowed public campaigning by the opposition, easily ‘won’ the elections against the chief challenger, Francisco Madero, but the defeated candidate’s routine insurrection turned, to everyone’s surprise, in a social and political upheaval in the northern borderlands and the rebellious peasant centre which could no longer be controlled. Diaz fell. Madero took over, soon to be assassin-ated. The USA looked for but failed to find among the rival generals

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and politicians someone who was both sufficiently pliable or corrupt and able to establish a stable regime. Zapata redistributed land to his peasant followers in the south, Villa expropriated haciendas in the north when it suited him to pay his revolutionary army, and claimed, as a man sprung from the poor, to be looking after his own. By 1914 nobody had the faintest idea what was going to happen in Mexico, but there could be no doubt whatever that the country was convulsed by a social revolution. The shape of post-revolutionary Mexico was not to become clear until the end of the 1930s.

VI

There is a view among some historians that Russia, perhaps the most rapidly developing economy of the late nineteenth century, would have continued to advance and evolve into a flourishing liberal society had her progress not been interrupted by a revolution which could have been avoided but for the First World War. No prospect would have surprised contemporaries more than this one. If there was one state where revolution was believed to be not only desirable but inevitable, it was the empire of the tsars. Gigantic, lumbering and inefficient, economically and technologically backward, inhabited by 126 million people (1897), of whom 80 per cent were peasants and 1 per cent hereditary nobles, it was organized in a way which to all educated Europeans appeared positively prehistoric by the later nineteenth century, namely as a bureaucratized autocracy. This very fact made revolution the only method of changing state policy other than catch-ing the tsar’s ear and moving the machinery of state into action from above: the first was hardly available to many, and did not necessarily imply the second. Since change of one sort or another was almost universally felt to be needed, virtually everybody from what in the west would have been moderate conservatives to the extreme left was obliged to be a revolutionary. The only question was, of what kind.

The tsar’s governments had been aware since the Crimean War (1854-6) that Russia’s status as a major great power could no longer rest safely on the country’s mere size, massive population and conse-quently vast but primitive military forces. It needed to modernize. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 – Russia was, with Rumania, the last stronghold of serf farming in Europe – had been intended to drag Russian agriculture into the nineteenth century, but it produced neither a satisfied peasantry (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter 10, 11) nor a modernized agriculture. The average yield of grain in European Russia (1898-1902) was just under 9 bushels per acre compared to about 14

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in the USA and 35.4 in Britain.¹⁰ Still, the opening of vast areas of the country to grain production for export turned Russia into one of the main cereal-suppliers in the world. The net harvest of all grains increased by 160 per cent between the early 1860s and the early 1900s, exports multiplied between five- and sixfold but at the cost of making Russian peasants more dependent on a world market price, which (for wheat) fell by almost half during the world agricultural depression.¹¹

Since peasants were collectively neither seen nor heard outside their villages, the discontent of almost 100 millions of them was easy to overlook, although the famine of 1891 drew some attention to it. And yet this discontent was not merely sharpened by poverty, land-hunger, high taxes and low grain-prices, but possessed significant forms of potential organization through the collective village communities, whose position as officially recognized institutions had been, para-doxically, reinforced by the liberation of the serfs, and was further reinforced in the 1880s when some bureaucrats regarded it as an invaluable bastion of traditionalist loyalty against social revol-utionaries. Others, on the opposite ideological grounds of economic liberalism, pressed for its rapid liquidation by transforming its land into private property. An analagous debate divided the revolutionaries. The Narodniks (see The Age of Capital, chapter 9) or Populists – with, it must be said, some uncertain and hesitant support from Marx himself – thought a revolutionized peasant commune could be the base of a direct socialist transformation of Russia, by-passing the horrors of capitalist development; the Russian Marxists believed this was no longer possible because the commune was already splitting into a mutually hostile rural bourgeoisie and proletariat. They would have preferred it to, since they put their faith in the workers. Both sides in both debates testify to the importance of the peasant communes, which held 80 per cent of the land in fifty provinces of European Russia in communal tenure, to be periodically redistributed by communal decision. The commune was indeed disintegrating in the more commercialized regions of the south, but more slowly than the Marxists believed: it remained almost universally firm in the north and centre. Where it remained strong, it was a body articulating village consensus for rev-olution as well as, in other circumstances, for the tsar and Holy Russia. Where it was being eroded, it drew most villagers together in its militant defence. In fact, luckily for the revolution, the ‘class struggle in the village’ predicted by the Marxists had not yet developed far enough to jeopardize the appearance of a massive movement of all peasants, richer and poorer, against gentry and state.

Whatever their views, almost everybody in Russian public life, legal or illegal, agreed that the tsar’s government had mismanaged the

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agrarian reform and neglected the peasants. In fact, it aggravated their discontents at a time when they were already acute, by diverting resources from the agrarian population for a massive bout of state-sponsored industrialization in the 1890s. For the countryside rep-resented the bulk of the Russian tax revenue, and high taxes were, with high protective tariffs and vast capital imports, essential to the project of increasing the power of tsarist Russia by economic modernization. The results, achieved by a mixture of private and state capitalism, were spectacular. Between 1890 and 1904 the railway mileage was doubled (partly by the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway), while the output of coal, iron and steel all doubled in the last five years of the century.¹² But the other side of the coin was that tsarist Russia now also found herself with a rapidly growing industrial proletariat, con-centrated in unusually large complexes of plants in a few major centres, and consequently with the beginnings of a labour movement which was, of course, committed to social revolution.

A third consequence of rapid industrialization was its dis-proportionate development in regions on the non-Great Russian western and southern fringe of the empire – as in Poland, the Ukraine and (the oil industry) Azerbaijan. Both social and national tensions were intensified, especially as the tsarist government attempted to strengthen its political hold by a systematic policy of educational Russ-ification from the 1880s. As we have seen, the combination of social with national discontents is indicated by the fact that among several, perhaps most, of the politically mobilized minority peoples in the Tsarist Empire, variants of the new social democratic (Marxist) movement became the de facto ‘national’ party (see page 162 above). That a Georgian (Stalin) should become the ruler of a revolutionized Russia was less of a historical accident than that a Corsican (Napoleon) should have become the ruler of a revolutionized France.

All European liberals since 1830 were familiar with, and sympathized with, the gentry-based national liberation movement of Poland against the tsarist government, which occupied much the largest part of that partitioned country, although since the defeated insurrection of 1863 revolutionary nationalism was not very visible there.* From about 1870 they also got used to, and supported, the novel idea of an impending revolution in the very heart of the empire ruled by the ‘autocrat of all the Russias’, both because tsarism itself showed signs of internal and external weakness, and because of the emergence of a highly visible

* The parts annexed by Russia formed the core of Poland Polish nationalists also resisted, from the weaker position of a minority, in the part annexed by Germany, but came to a fairly comfortable compromise in the Austrian sector with the Habsburg monarchy, which needed Polish support to establish a political balance among its contending nationalities

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revolutionary movement, initially recruited almost entirely from the so-called ‘intelligentsia’: sons, and to an unprecedented and high degree daughters, of the nobility and gentry, the middle and other educated strata, including – for the first time – a substantial proportion of Jews. The first generation of these were chiefly Narodniks (Populists) (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter 9) looking to the peasantry, which took no notice of them. They were rather more successful at small-group terrorism – dramatically so in 1881 when they succeeded in assassinating the tsar, Alexander 11. While terrorism did not significantly weaken tsarism, it gave the Russian revolutionary movement its high international profile, and helped to crystallize a virtually universal consensus, except on the extreme right, that a Russian revolution was both necessary and inevitable.

The Narodniks were destroyed and scattered after 1881, though they revived, in the form of a ‘Social Revolutionary’ party in the early 1900s, but by this time the villages were prepared to listen to them. They were to become the major rural party of the left, though they also revived their terrorist wing, which was by this time infiltrated by the secret police.* Like all who looked to any sort of Russian revolution, they had been assiduous students of suitable theories from the west, and hence of the most powerful and, thanks to the First International, prominent theorist of social revolution, Karl Marx. In Russia even people who would elsewhere have been liberals were Marxists before 1900, given the social and political implausibility of western liberal solutions, for Marxism at least predicted a phase of capitalist development on the way to its overthrow by the proletariat.

Not surprisingly, the revolutionary movements which grew on the ruins of the Populism of the 1870s were Marxist, although they were not organized into a Russian social democratic party – or rather a complex of rival, though occasionally co-operating social democratic organizations under the general wing of the International – until the late 1890s. By then the idea of a party based on the industrial proletariat had some realistic basis, even though the strongest mass support for social democracy at this time was probably still to be found among the poverty-stricken and proletarianized handicraftsmen and outworkers in the northern part of the Pale, stronghold of the Jewish Bund (1897). We have been used to tracing the progress of the specific group among the Marxist revolutionaries which eventually prevailed, namely that led by Lenin (V.I. Ulyanov, 1870-1924), whose brother had been executed for his part in the assassination of the tsar. Important though

* Its head, the police agent Azev (1869-1918), faced the complex task of assassinating enough prominent persons to satisfy his comrades, and to deliver up enough of them to satisfy the police, without losing the confidence of either

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this is, not least because of Lenin’s extraordinary genius for combining revolutionary theory and practice, three things should be remembered. The Bolsheviks* were merely one among several tendencies in and around Russian social democracy (which was in turn distinct from other nationally based socialist parties of the empire). They did not, in effect, become a separate party until 1912, about the time when they almost certainly became the majority force among the organized working class. Thirdly, from the point of view of foreign socialists, and probably of ordinary Russian workers, the distinctions between different kinds of socialists were incomprehensible or seemed secondary, all being equally deserving of support and sympathy as enemies of tsarism. The main difference between the Bolsheviks and others was that Lenin’s comrades were better organized, more efficient and more reliable.¹³

That social and political unrest was rising and dangerous became obvious to the tsar’s governments, even though peasant unrest subsided for some decades after emancipation. Tsarism did not discourage, and sometimes encouraged, the mass anti-Semitism for which there was an enormous amount of popular support, as the wave of pogroms after 1881 revealed, though there was less support among Great Russians than in Ukraine and the Baltic regions, where the bulk of the Jewish population was concentrated. The Jews, increasingly mistreated and discriminated against, were more and more attracted to revolutionary movements. On the other hand the regime, aware of the potential danger of socialism, played with labour legislation and even, briefly, organized counter-trade unions under police auspices in the early 1900s, which effectively became real unions. It was the massacre of a dem-onstration led from such quarters which actually precipitated the 1905 revolution. However, it became increasingly evident, from 1900 on, that social unrest was rising rapidly. Peasant rioting, long semi-dormant, clearly began to revive from about 1902, at the same time as workers organized what amounted to general strikes in Rostov-on-Don, Odessa and Baku (1902-3).

Insecure regimes are well advised to avoid adventurous foreign poli-cies. Tsarist Russia plunged into them, as a great power (however clay-footed) which insisted on playing what it felt to be its due part in imperialist conquest. Its chosen territory was the Far East – the Trans-Siberian railway was constructed largely to penetrate it. There Russian expansion encountered Japanese expansion, both at the expense of China. As usual in these imperialist episodes, obscure and hopefully

• So named after a temporary majority at the first effective congress of the RSDLP (1903). Russian bolske = more; menshe—less.

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lucrative deals by shady entrepreneurs complicated the picture. Since only the hapless hulk of China had fought a war against Japan, the Russian Empire was the first in the twentieth century to underestimate that formidable state. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, though it killed 84,000 Japanese and wounded 143,000,¹⁴ was a rapid and humiliating disaster for Russia, which underlined the weakness of tsarism. Even the middle-class liberals, who had begun to organize as a political opposition since 1900, ventured into public demonstrations. The tsar, conscious of the rising waves of revolution, speeded up nego-tiations for peace. The revolution broke out in January of 1905 before they had been concluded.

The 1905 revolution was, as Lenin said, a ‘bourgeois revolution achieved by proletarian means’. ‘Proletarian means’ is perhaps an oversimplification, though it was mass workers’ strikes in the capital and sympathetic strikes in most industrial cities of the empire which initiated the government’s retreat and later, once again, exerted the pressure which led to the grant of something like a constitution on 17 October. Moreover, it was the workers who, doubtless with village experience behind them, spontaneously formed themselves into ‘coun-cils’ (Russian: Soviets), among which the St Petersburg Soviet of Wor-kers’ Deputies, established 13 October, functioned not merely as a sort of workers’ parliament but probably for a brief period as the most effective actual authority in the national capital. The socialist parties quickly recognized the significance of such assemblies and some took a prominent part in them – like the young L. B. Trotsky (1879-1940) in St Petersburg.* For, crucial as the intervention of the workers was, concentrated as they were in the capital and other politically sensitive centres, it was – as in 1917 – the outbreak of peasant revolts on a massive scale in the Black Earth region, the Volga valley and parts of Ukraine, and the crumbling of the armed forces, dramatized by the mutiny of the battleship Potemkin, which broke the back of tsarist resistance. The simultaneous mobilization of revolutionary resistance among the minor nationalities was equally significant.

The ‘bourgeois’ character of the revolution could be, and was, taken for granted. Not only were the middle classes overwhelmingly in favour of the revolution, and the students (unlike in October 1917) over-whelmingly mobilized to fight for it, but it was accepted, almost without dissent, by both liberals and Marxists, that the revolution, if successful, could only lead to the establishment of a western bourgeois par-liamentary system with its characteristic civil and political liberties,

* Most other well-known socialists were in exile and unable to return to Russia in time to act effectively.

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within which the later stages of the Marxian class struggle would have to be fought out. In short, there was a consensus that the construction of socialism was not on the immediate revolutionary agenda, if only because Russia was too backward. It was neither economically nor socially ready for socialism.

On this point everyone agreed, except the Social Revolutionaries, who still dreamed of an increasingly implausible prospect of peasant communes transformed into socialist units – a prospect, paradoxically, realized only among the Palestinian kibbutzim, products of about the least typical muzhiks in the world, socialist-nationalist urban Jews emigrating to the Holy Land from Russia after the failure of the 1905 revolution.

And yet Lenin saw as clearly as the tsarist authorities that the liberal –

or any –	bourgeoisie in Russia was numerically and politically much
too feeble	to take over from		tsarism, just	as Russian private capitalist
enterprise	was	too feeble to	modernize	the	country	without  foreign
enterprise	and	state initiative. Even  at		the	peak  of	the  revolution

the authorities made only modest political concessions far short of a bourgeois-liberal constitution – little more than an indirectly elected parliament (Duma) with limited powers over finance and none over the government and ‘fundamental laws’; and in 1907 when revolutionary unrest had subsided and the gerrymandered franchise would still not produce a sufficiently harmless Duma, most of the constitution was abrogated. There was indeed no return to autocracy, but in practice tsarism had re-established itself.

But it could, as 1905 had proved, be overthrown. The novelty of Lenin’s position as against his chief rivals the Mensheviks was that he recognized that, given the weakness or absence of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois revolution had, as it were, to be made without the bourgeoisie. It would be made by the working class, organized and led by the disciplined vanguard party of professional revolutionaries which was Lenin’s formidable contribution to twentieth-century politics, and relying on the support of the land-hungry peasantry, whose political weight in Russia was decisive and whose revolutionary potential had now been demonstrated. This, broadly speaking, remained the Leninist position until 1917. The idea that the workers might, given the absence of a bourgeoisie, take power themselves and proceed directly to the next stage of the social revolution (‘permanent revolution’) had indeed been floated briefly during the revolution – if only in order to stimulate a proletarian revolution in the west, without which the long-term chances of a Russian socialist regime were believed to be negligible. Lenin considered this prospect, but still rejected it as impracticable.

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the peasantry remaining a revolutionary force – and of course also on mobilizing, allying with, or at least neutralizing the forces of national liberation which were plainly revolutionary assets, inasmuch as they were enemies of tsarism. (Hence Lenin’s insistence on the right to self-determination, even of secession from Russia, although the Bolsheviks were organized as a single all-Russian and, as it were, a-national party.) The proletariat was indeed growing, as Russia launched herself into another massive bout of industrialization in the last years before 1914; and the young rural immigrants streaming into the factories in Moscow and St Petersburg were more likely to follow the radical Bolsheviks than the more moderate Mensheviks, not to mention the miserable provincial encampments of smoke, coal, iron, textiles and mud – the Donets, the Urals, Ivanovo – which had always inclined to Bolshevism. After a few years of demoralization following the defeat of the 1905 revolution, an enormous new wave of proletarian unrest once again rose from 1912, its rise dramatized by the massacre of 200 striking workers in the remote (British-owned) Siberian goldfields on the River Lena.

But would the peasants remain revolutionary? The reaction of the tsar’s government to 1905, under the able and determined minister Stolypin, was to create a substantial and conservative body of peasants, while simultaneously improving agricultural productivity, by a whole-hearted plunge into the Russian equivalent of the British ‘enclosure movement’. The peasant commune was to be systematically broken up into private plots, for the benefit of a class of commercially minded entrepreneurial large peasants, the ‘kulaks’. If Stolypin won his bet on ‘the strong and sober’, the social polarization between village rich and land-poor, the rural class differentiation announced by Lenin would indeed take place; but, faced with the actual prospect, he recognized with his habitual and ruthless eye for political realities that it would not help the revolution. Whether the Stolypin legislation could have achieved the expected political result in the longer run, we cannot know. It was quite widely taken up in the more commercialized southern provinces, notably Ukraine, much less so elsewhere.¹⁵ However, as Stolypin himself was eliminated from the tsar’s government in r g n and assassinated shortly thereafter, and as the empire itself had only eight more years of peace in 1906, the question is academic.

What is clear is that the defeat of the 1905 revolution had produced neither a potential ‘bourgeois’ alternative to tsarism, nor given tsarism more than a half-dozen years of respite. By 1912-14 the country was clearly once again seething with social unrest. A revolutionary situation, Lenin was convinced, was once again approaching. By the summer of 1914 all that stood in its way was the strength and solid loyalty of the

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tsar’s bureaucracy, police and armed forces which – unlike 1904-5 – were neither demoralized nor otherwise engaged;¹⁶ and perhaps the passivity of the Russian middle-class intellectuals who, demoralized by the defeat of 1905, had largely abandoned political radicalism for irrationalism and the cultural avant garde.

As in so many other European states, the outbreak of war relaxed accumulating social and political fervour. When this had passed, it become increasingly evident that tsarism was doomed. In 1917 it fell.

By 1914 revolution had shaken all the ancient empires of the globe from the borders of Germany to the China seas. As the Mexican Revolution, the Egyptian agitations and the Indian national movement showed, it was beginning to erode the new ones of imperialism, formal and informal. However, nowhere was its outcome clear as yet, and the significance of the fires flickering among Lenin’s ‘inflammable material in world politics’ was easy to underestimate. It was not yet clear that the Russian Revolution would produce a communist regime – the first in history – and would become the central event in twentieth-century world politics, as the French Revolution had been the central event of nineteenth-century politics.

And yet it was already obvious that, of all the eruptions in the vast social earthquake zone of the globe, a Russian revolution would have much the greatest international repercussion, for even the incomplete and temporary convulsion of 1905-6 had dramatic and immediate results. It almost certainly precipitated the Persian and Turkish rev-olutions, it probably accelerated the Chinese, and, by stimulating the Austrian emperor to introduce universal suffrage, it transformed, and made even more unstable, the troubled politics of the Habsburg Empire. For Russia was a ‘great power’, one of the five keystones of the Euro-centred international system and, taking only home territories into account, much the largest, most populous and best endowed with resources. A social revolution in such a state was bound to have far-reaching global effects, for exactly the same reason that had, among the numerous revolutions of the late eighteenth century, made the French one by far the most internationally significant.

But the potential repercussions of a Russian revolution would be even wider than those of 1789. The sheer physical extent and multi-nationality of an empire which stretched from the Pacific to the borders of Germany meant that its collapse affected a far greater range of countries in two continents than a more marginal or isolated state in

Europe or Asia. And the crucial fact that Russia straddled			the worlds
of the conquerors and the victims, the advanced and the			backward,
gave its	revolution	a vast potential resonance in both. It was both
a major	industrial	country  and  a technologically medieval  peasant

3 0 0

TOWARDS    REVOLUTION

economy; an imperial power and a semi-colony; a society whose intellectual and cultural achievements were more than a match for the most advanced culture and intellect of the western world, and one whose peasant soldiers in 1904-5 gaped at the modernity of their Japanese captors. In short, a Russian revolution could appear to be simultaneously relevant to western labour organizers and to eastern revolutionaries, in Germany and in China.

Tsarist Russia exemplified all the contradictions of the globe in the Age of Empire. AU it would take to make them burst into simultaneous eruption was that world war which Europe increasingly expected, and found itself unable to prevent.

3 01

CHAPTER       I₃

FROM PEACE TO WAR

In the course of the debate [of 2j March igoo] I explained … that I understood by a world policy merely the support and advancement of the tasks that have grown out of the expansion of our industry, our trade, the labour power, activity and intelligence of our people. We had no intention of conducting an aggressive policy of expansion. We wanted only to protect the vital interests that we had acquired, in the natural course of events, throughout the world.

The German chancellor, von Biilow, igoo¹

There is no certainty that a woman will lose her son if he goes to the front; in fact, the coal-mine and the shunting-yard are more dangerous places than the camp.

Bernard Shaw, 1902²

We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture offreedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dyingfor, and scorn for woman.

1. T. Marinetti, igog³

I

The lives of Europeans since August 1914 have been surrounded, impregnated and haunted by world war. At the time of writing most people on this continent over the age of seventy have passed through at least part of two wars in the course of their lives; all over the age of fifty, with the exception of Swedes, Swiss, Southern Irish and Portu-guese, have experienced part of at least one. Even those born since 1945, since the guns ceased to fire across frontiers in Europe, have known scarcely a year when war was not abroad somewhere in the world, and have lived all their lives in the dark shadow of a third, nuclear, world conflict which, as virtually all their governments told them, was held at bay only by the endless competition to ensure mutual annihilation. How can we call such an epoch a time of peace, even if

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global catastrophe has been avoided for almost as long as major war between European powers was between 1871 and 1914? For, as the great philosopher Thomas Hobbes observed:

War consisteth not in battle only, or in the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.⁴

Who can deny that this has been the situation of the world since 1945? This was not so before  1914: peace was the normal and  expected framework of European lives. Since 1815 there had been no war involv-ing all the European  powers. Since  1871 no European  power  had ordered its armed men to fire on those of any other such power. The great powers chose their victims from among the weak, and in the non-European world, though they might miscalculate the resistance of their adversaries: the Boers gave the British far more trouble than expected, and the Japanese established their status as a great power by actually defeating  Russia in  1904-5 with surprisingly little  trouble. On  the territory of the nearest and largest of the potential victims, the long-disintegrating Ottoman Empire, war was indeed a permanent possi-bility as its subject peoples sought to establish or enlarge themselves as independent states and subsequently fought each other, drawing the great  powers into  their conflicts. The  Balkans were known  as  the powder-keg of Europe, and indeed that is where the global explosion of 1914 began. But the ‘Eastern Question’ was a familiar item on the agenda of international diplomacy, and while it had produced a steady succession of international crises for a century, and  even one quite substantial international war (the Crimean War), it had never entirely escaped from control. Unlike the Middle East since 1945, the Balkans, for most Europeans who did not live there, belonged to the realm of adventure stories, such as those of the German boys’ author Karl May, or of operetta. The image of Balkan wars at the end of the nineteenth century was that of Bernard  Shaw’s Arms and the Man,  which was, characteristically,  turned into a musical  {The Chocolate Soldier, by a

Viennese composer in 1908).

Of course the possibility of a general European war was foreseen, and preoccupied not only governments and their general staffs, but a wider public. From the early 1870s on, fiction and futurology, mainly in Britain and France, produced generally unrealistic sketches of a future war. In the 1880s Friedrich Engels already analysed the chances of a world war, while the philosopher Nietzsche crazily, but prophet-ically, hailed the growing militarization of Europe and predicted a war which would ‘say yes to the barbarian, even to the wild animal within us’.⁵ In the 1890s the concern about war was sufficient to produce the

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World (Universal) Peace Congresses – the twenty-first was due in Vienna in September 1914 — the Nobel Peace prizes (1897) and the first of the Hague Peace Conferences (1899), international meetings by mostly sceptical representatives of governments, and the first of many gatherings since in which governments have declared their unwavering but theoretical commitment to the ideal of peace. In the 1900s war drew visibly nearer, in the 1910s its imminence could and was in some ways taken for granted.

And yet its outbreak was not really expected. Even during the last desperate days of the international crisis in July 1914 statesmen, taking fatal steps, did not really believe they were starting a world war. Surely a formula would be found, as so often in the past. The opponents of war could not believe either that the catastrophe they had so long foretold was now upon them. At the very end ofJuly, after Austria had already declared war on Serbia, the leaders of international socialism met, deeply troubled but still convinced that a general war was imposs-ible, that a peaceful solution to the crisis would be found. T personally do not believe that there will be a general war,’ said Victor Adler, chief of Habsburg social democracy, on 29 July.⁶ Even those who found themselves pressing the button of destruction did so, not because they wanted to but because they could not help it, like Emperor William, asking his generals at the very last moment whether the war could not after all be localized in eastern Europe by refraining from attacking France as well as Russia – and being told that unfortunately this was quite impracticable. Those who had constructed the mills of war and turned the switches found themselves watching their wheels beginning to grind in a sort of stunned disbelief. It is difficult for anyone born after 1914 to imagine how deeply the belief that a world war could not ‘really’ come was engrained in the fabric of life before the deluge.

For most western states, and for most of the time between 1871 and 1914, a European war was thus a historical memory or a theoretical exercise for some undefined future. The major function of armies in their societies during this period was civilian. Compulsory military service – conscription – was by now the rule in all serious powers, with the exception of Britain and the USA, though in fact by no means all young men were conscripted; and with the rise of socialist mass movements generals and politicians were – mistakenly, as it turned out *-sometimes nervous about putting arms into the hands of potentially revolutionary proletarians. For the ordinary conscripts, better acquainted with the servitude than the glories of the military life, joining the army became a rite of passage marking a boy’s arrival at manhood, followed by two or three years of drill and hard labour, made more tolerable by the notorious attraction of girls to uniforms. For the

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professional noncommissioned officers the army was a job. For the officers it was a children’s game played by adults, the symbol of their superiority to civilians, of virile splendour and of social status. For the generals it was, as always, the field for those political intrigues and career jealousies which are so amply documented in the memoirs of military chieftains.

For governments and ruling classes, armies were not only forces against internal and external enemies, but also a means of securing the loyalty, even the active enthusiasm, of citizens with troubling sympathies for mass movements which undermined the social and political order. Together with the primary school, military service was perhaps the most powerful mechanism at the disposal of the state for inculcating proper civic behaviour and, not least, for turning the inhabitant of a village into the (patriotic) citizen of a nation. School and military service taught Italians to understand, if not to speak, the official ‘national’ language, and the army turned spaghetti, formerly a regional dish of the impoverished south, into an all-Italian institution. As for the civilian citizenry, the colourful street theatre of military display was multiplied for their enjoyment, inspiration and patriotic identification: parades, ceremonials, flags and music. For the non-military inhabitants of Europe between 1871 and 1914 the most familiar aspect of armies was probably the ubiquitous military band, without which public parks and public occasions were difficult to imagine.

Naturally soldiers, and rather more rarely sailors, also from time to time carried out their primary functions. They might be mobilized against disorder and protest at moments of disturbance and social crisis. Governments, especially those which had to worry about public opinion and their electors, were usually careful about facing troops with the risk of shooting down their fellow citizens: the political consequences of soldiers firing on civilians were apt to be bad, and those of their refusal to do so were apt to be even worse, as demonstrated in Petrograd in 1917. Nevertheless troops were mobilized often enough, and the number of domestic victims of military repression was by no means negligible during this period, even in central and west European states not believed to be on the verge of revolution, like Belgium and the Netherlands. In countries like Italy they could be very substantial indeed.

For the troops, domestic repression was a harmless pursuit, but the occasional wars, especially in the colonies, were more risky. The risk was, admittedly, medical rather than military. Of the 274,000 US troops mobilized for the Spanish-American War of 1898 only 379 were killed and 1600 wounded, but more than 5000 died of tropical diseases. It is not surprising that governments were keen to support the medical researches which, in our period, achieved some control over yellow

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fever, malaria and other scourges of the territories still known as ‘the white man’s grave’. France lost in colonial operations between 1871 and 1908 an average of eight officers per year, including the only zone of serious casualties, Tonkin, where almost half the 300 officers killed in those thirty-seven years fell.⁷ One would not wish to underestimate the seriousness of such campaigns, all the more so since the losses among the victims were disproportionately heavy. Even for the aggressor countries, such wars could be anything but sporting trips. Britain sent 450,000 men to South Africa in 1899-1902, losing 29,000 killed and died of their wounds and 16,000 by disease, at the cost of £220 million. Such costs were far from negligible. Nevertheless, the soldier’s work in western countries was, by and large, considerably less dangerous than that of certain groups of civilian workers such as those in transport (especially by sea) and the mines. In the last three years of the long decades of peace, every year an average of 1430 British coal-miners were killed, an average of 165,000 (or more than 10 per cent of the labour force) injured. And the casualty rate in British coal-mines, though higher than the Belgian or Austrian, was somewhat lower than the French, about 30 per cent below the German, and not much more than one-third of that in the USA.⁸ The greatest risks to life and limb were not run in uniform.

Thus, if we omit Britain’s South African War, the life of the soldier and sailor of a great power was peaceful enough, though this was not the case for the armies of tsarist Russia, engaged in serious wars against the Turks in the 1870s, and a disastrous one against the Japanese in 1904-5; nor of the Japanese, who fought both China and Russia successfully. It is still recognizable in the entirely non-fighting memories and adventures of that immortal ex-member of the famous 91st Regi-ment of the imperial and royal Austrian army, the good soldier Schwejk (invented by its author in 1911). Naturally general staffs prepared for war, as was their duty. As usual most of them prepared for an improved version of the last major war within the experience or memory of the commandants of staff colleges. The British, as was natural for the greatest naval power, prepared for only a modest participation in terrestrial warfare, though it increasingly became evident to the gen-erals arranging for co-operation with the French allies in the years before 1914 that much more would be required of them. But on the whole it was the civilians rather than the men who predicted the terrible transformations of warfare, thanks to the advances of that military technology which the generals – and even some of the technically more open-minded admirals – were slow to understand. Friedrich Engels, that old military amateur, frequently drew attention to their obtuseness, but it was a Jewish financier, Ivan Bloch, who in 1898 published in St

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Petersburg the six volumes of his Technical, Economic and Political Aspects

of the Coming War, a prophetic work which predicted the military stalemate of trench warfare which would lead to a prolonged conflict whose intolerable economic and human costs would exhaust the bel-ligerents or plunge them into social revolution. The book was rapidly translated into numerous languages, without making any mark on military planning.

While only some civilian observers understood the catastrophic character of future warfare, uncomprehending governments plunged enthusiastically into the race to equip themselves with the armaments whose technological novelty would ensure it. The technology of killing, already in the process of industrialization in the middle of the century (see The Age of Capital, chapter 4, 11), advanced dramatically in the 1880s, not only by virtual revolution in the speed and fire-power of small arms and artillery, but also by the transformation of warships by means of far more efficient turbine-engines, more effective protective armour and the capacity to carry far more guns. Incidentally even the technology of civilian killing was transformed by the invention of the ‘electric chair’ (1890), though executioners outside the USA remained faithful to old and tried methods such as hanging and beheading.

An obvious consequence was that preparations for war became vastly more expensive, especially as states competed to keep ahead of, or at least to avoid falling behind, each other. This arms race began in a modest way in the later 1880s, and accelerated in the new century, particularly in the last years before the war. British military expenses remained stable in the 1870s and 1880s, both as a percentage of the total budget and per head of the population. But it rose from £32 million in 1887 to £44.1 million in 1898/9 and over £77 million in 1913/14. And, not surprisingly, it was the navy, the high-technology wing of warfare which corresponded to the missile sector of modern armaments expenditure, which grew most spectacularly. In 1885 it had cost the state £11 million – about the same order of magnitude as in i860. In 1913/14 it cost more than four times as much. Meanwhile German naval expenditure grew even more strikingly: from 90 million Marks per annum in the mid-1890s to almost 400 millions.⁹

One consequence of such vast expenditures was that they required either higher taxes, or inflationary borrowing, or both. But an equally obvious, though often overlooked consequence was that they increas-ingly made death for various fatherlands a by-product of large-scale industry. Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie, two capitalists who knew what had made them millionaires in explosives and steel respectively, tried to compensate by devoting part of their wealth to the cause of peace. In this they were untypical. The symbiosis of war and war

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production inevitably transformed the relations between government and industry, for, as Friedrich Engels observed in 1892, ‘as warfare

became a branch of the grande industrie …  Ia grande Industrie …            became

a political necessity’.¹⁰ And conversely, the state became essential to certain branches of industry, for who but the government provided the customers for armaments? The goods it produced were determined not by the market, but by the never-ending competition of governments to secure for themselves a satisfactory supply of the most advanced, and hence the most effective, arms. What is more, governments needed not so much the actual output of weapons, but the capacity to produce them on a wartime scale, if the occasion arose; that is to say they had to see that their industry maintained a capacity far in excess of any peacetime requirements.

In one way or another states were thus obliged to guarantee the existence of powerful national armaments industries, to carry much of their technical development costs, and to see that they remained profitable. In other words, they had to shelter these industries from the gales which threatened the ships of capitalist enterprise sailing the unpredictable seas of the free market and free competition. They might of course have engaged in armaments manufacture themselves, and indeed had long done so. But this was the very moment when they – or at least the liberal British state – preferred to come to an arrangement with private enterprise. In the 1880s private armament producers took on more than a third of supply contracts for the armed forces, in the 1890s 46 per cent, in the 1900s 60 per cent: the government, inciden-tally, was ready to guarantee them two-thirds.” It is hardly surprising that armaments firms were among, or joined, the giants of industry: war and capitalist concentration went together. In Germany Krupp, the king of cannons, employed 16,000 in 1873, 24,000 around 1890, 45,000 around 1900, and almost 70,000 in 1912 when the fifty-thou-sandth of Krupp’s famous guns left the works. In Britain Armstrong, Whitworth employed 12,000 men at their main works in Newcastle, who had increased to 20,000 – or over 40 per cent of all metalworkers on Tyneside – by 1914, not counting those in the 1500 smaller firms who lived by Armstrong’s sub-contracts. They were also very profitable.

Like the modern ‘military-industrial complex’ of the USA, these giant industrial concentrations would have been nothing without the armaments race of governments. It is therefore tempting to make such ‘merchants of death’ (the phrase became popular among peace campaigners) responsible for the ‘war of steel and gold’, as a British journalist was to call it. Was it not logical for the armaments industry to encourage the acceleration of the arms race, if necessary by inventing national inferiorities or ‘windows of vulnerability’, which could be

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removed by lucrative contracts? A German firm, specializing in the manufacture of machine-guns, managed to get a notice inserted in L« Figaro to the effect that the French government planned to double the number of its machine-guns. The German government consequently ordered 40 million Marks’ worth of these weapons in 1908-10, thus raising the firm’s dividends from 20 to 32 per cent.¹² A British firm, arguing that its government had gravely underestimated the German naval rearmament programme, benefited by £250,000 for each new ‘dreadnought’ built by the British government, which doubled its naval construction. Elegant and shady persons like the Greek Basil Zaharoff, who acted for Vickers (and was later knighted for his services to the Allies in the First World War), saw to it that the arms industry of the great powers sold its less vital or obsolescent products to states in the Near East and Latin America, who were always ready to buy such hardware. In short, the modern international trade in death was well under way.

And yet we cannot explain the world war by a conspiracy of armourers, even though the technicians certainly did their best to convince generals and admirals more familiar with military parades than with science that all would be lost if they did not order the latest gun or battleship. Certainly the accumulation of armaments which reached fearful proportions in the last five years before 1914 made the situation more explosive. Certainly the moment came, at least in the summer of 1914, when the inflexible machine for mobilizing the forces of death could no longer be put into reserve. But what drove Europe into the war was not competitive armament as such, but the international situation which launched powers into it.

I I

The argument about the origins of the First World War has never stopped since August 1914. Probably more ink has flowed, more trees have been sacrificed to make paper, more typewriters have been busy, to answer this question than any other in history – perhaps not even excluding the debate on the French Revolution. As generations have changed, as national and international politics have been transformed, the debate has been revived time and again. Hardly had Europe plunged into catastrophe, before the belligerents began to ask them-selves why international diplomacy had failed to prevent it, and to accuse one another of responsibility for the war. Opponents of the war immediately began their own analyses. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which published the secret documents of tsarism, accused imperi-

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alism as a whole. The victorious Allies made the thesis of exclusive German ‘war guilt’ the cornerstone of the Versailles peace settlement of 1919, and precipitated a huge flood of documentation and historical propagandist writings for, but mainly against, this thesis. The Second World War naturally revived the debate, which took on yet another lease of life some years later as a historiography of the left reappeared in the German Federal Republic, anxious to break with conservative and Nazi German patriotic orthodoxies, by stressing their own version of Germany’s responsibility. Arguments about the dangers to world peace, which have, for obvious reasons, never ceased since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inevitably seek for possible parallels between the origins of past world wars and current international prospects. While propa-gandists preferred comparison with the years before the Second World War (‘Munich’), historians increasingly found the similarities between the 1980s and the 1910s troubling. The origins of the First World War were thus, once again, a question of burning, immediate relevance. In these circumstances any historian who tries to explain, as a historian of our period must, why the First World War occurred plunges into deep and turbulent waters.

Still, we can at least simplify his task by eliminating questions he does not have to answer. Chief among these is that of’war guilt’, which is one of moral and political judgment, but concerns historians only peripherally. If we are interested in why a century of European peace gave way to an epoch of world wars, the question whose fault it was is as trivial as the question whether William the Conqueror had a good legal case for invading England is for the study of why warriors from Scandinavia found themselves conquering numerous areas of Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Of course responsibilities can often be assigned in wars. Few would deny that in the 1930s the posture of Germany was essentially aggressive and expansionist, the posture of her adversaries essentially defensive. None would deny that the wars of imperial expansion in our period, such as the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the South African War of 1899-1902, were provoked by the USA and Britain, and not by their victims. In any case everyone knows that all state governments in the nineteenth century, however concerned about their public relations, regarded wars as normal contingencies of international politics, and were honest enough to admit that they might well take the military initiative. Ministries of War had not yet been universally euphemized into Ministries of Defence.

Yet it is absolutely certain that no government of a great power before 1914 wanted either a general European war or even – unlike the 1850s and 1860s – a limited military conflict with another European

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great power. This is conclusively demonstrated by the fact that where the political ambitions of the great powers were in direct opposition, namely in the overseas zone of colonial conquests and partitions, their numerous confrontations were always settled by some peaceable arrangement. Even the most serious of these crises, those on Morocco in 1906 and 1911, were defused. On the eve of 1914 colonial conflicts no longer appeared to raise insoluble problems for the various competing powers – a fact which has, quite illegitimately, been used to argue that imperialist rivalries were irrelevant to the outbreak of the First World War.

Of course the powers were far from pacific, let alone pacifist. They prepared for a European war – sometimes wrongly* – even as their foreign ministries did their best to avoid what they unanimously con-sidered a. catastrophe. No government in the 1900s pursued aims which, like Hitler’s in the 1930s, only war or the constant menace of war could have achieved. Even Germany, whose chief of staff vainly pleaded for a pre-emptive attack against France while her ally Russia was immobilized by war, and later by defeat and revolution, in 1904-5, used the golden opportunity of temporary French weakness and iso-lation merely to push her imperialist claims on Morocco, a manageable issue over which nobody intended to start a major war, or indeed did so. No government of a major power, even the most ambitious, frivolous and irresponsible, wanted a major one. The old emperor Francis Joseph, announcing the eruption of such a war to his doomed subjects in 1914, was perfectly sincere in saying, ‘I did not want this to happen’ (‘Ich hab es nicht gewollt’), even though it was his government which, in effect, provoked it.

The most that can be claimed is that at a certain point in the slow slide towards the abyss, war seemed henceforth so inevitable that some governments decided that it might be best to choose the most favourable, or least unpropitious, moment for launching hostilities. It has been claimed that Germany looked for such a moment from 1912, but it could hardly have been earlier. Certainly during the final crisis of 1914, precipitated by the irrelevant assassination of an Austrian archduke by a student terrorist in a provincial city deep in the Balkans, Austria knew she risked world war by bullying Serbia, and Germany, deciding to give full backing to her ally, made it virtually certain. ‘The balance is tilting against us,’ said the Austrian Minister of War on 7 July. Was it not best to fight before it tilted further? Germany followed the same line of argument. Only in this restricted sense has the question

* Admiral Raeder even claimed that in 1914 the German naval staff had no plan for war against Britain.¹³

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of’war guilt’ any meaning. But, as the event showed, in the summer of 1914, unlike earlier crises, peace had been written off by all the powers – even by the British, whom the Germans half-expected to stay neutral, thus increasing their chances of defeating both France and Russia. * None of the great powers would have given peace the coup de grdce even in 1914, unless they had been convinced that its wounds were already fatal.

The problem of discovering the origins of the First World War is therefore not one of discovering ‘the aggressor’. It lies in the nature of a progressively deteriorating international situation which increasingly escaped from the control of governments. Gradually Europe found itself dividing into two opposed blocs of great powers. Such blocs, outside war, were in themselves new, and were essentially due to the appearance on the European scene of a unified German Empire, established by diplomacy and war at others’ expense (cf. The Age of Capital, chapter 4) between 1864 and 1871, and seeking to protect itself against the main loser, France, by peacetime alliances, which in time produced counter-alliance. Alliances in themselves, though they imply the possi-bility of war, neither ensure it nor even make it probable. Indeed the German chancellor Bismarck, who remained undisputed world champion at the game of multilateral diplomatic chess for almost twenty years after 1871, devoted himself exclusively, and successfully, to maintaining peace between the powers. A system of power-blocs only became a danger to peace when the opposed alliances were welded into permanence, but especially when the disputes between them turned into unmanageable confrontations. This was to happen in the new century. The crucial question is, why?

However, there was one major difference between the international tensions which led up to the First World War and those which underlay the danger of a third, which people in the 1980s still hoped to avoid. Since 1945 there has never been the slightest doubt about the principal adversaries in a third world war: the USA and the USSR . But in 1880 the line-up of 1914 was quite unpredicted. Naturally some potential allies and enemies were easy to discern. Germany and France would be on opposite sides, if only because Germany had annexed large parts of France (Alsace-Lorraine) after her victory in 1871. Nor was it difficult to predict the permanence of the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary, which Bismarck had forged after 1866, for the internal political equilibrium of the new German Empire made it

* The German strategy (the’Schlieffen Plan’ of 1905) envisaged a rapid knock-out blow against France followed by a rapid knock-out blow against Russia. The former meant the invasion of Belgium, thus providing Britain with an excuse for entering the war, to which she had long been effectively committed.

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essential to maintain the multinational Habsburg Empire in being. Its disintegration into national fragments would, as Bismarck well knew, not only lead to the collapse of the state system of central and eastern Europe, but would also destroy the basis of a ‘little Germany’ dominated by Prussia. In fact, both of these things happened after the First World War. The most permanent diplomatic feature of the period 1871-1914 was the ‘Triple Alliance’ of 1882, which was in effect a German-Austrian alliance, since the third partner, Italy, soon drifted away and eventually joined the anti-German camp in 1915.

Again, it was obvious that Austria, embroiled in turbulent affairs of the Balkans by virtue of her multinational problems, and more deeply than ever since she took over Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878, found herself opposed to Russia in that region.* Though Bismarck did his best to maintain close relations with Russia, it was possible to foresee that sooner or later Germany would be forced to choose between Vienna and St Petersburg, and could not but opt for Vienna. Moreover, once Germany gave up the Russian option, as happened in the late 1880s, it was logical that Russia and France would come together – as indeed they did in 1891. Even in the 1880s Friedrich Engels had envisaged such an alliance, naturally directed against Germany. By the early 1890s two power-groups therefore faced each other across Europe.

Though this made international relations more tense, it did not make a general European war inevitable, if only because the issues which divided France and Germany (namely Alsace-Lorraine) were of no interest to Austria, and those which risked conflict between Austria and Russia (namely the degree of Russian influence in the Balkans) were insignificant for Germany. The Balkans, Bismarck had observed, were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. France had no real quarrels with Austria, nor Russia with Germany. For that matter the issues which divided France and Germany, though permanent, were hardly considered worth a war by most French, and those dividing Austria and Russia, though – as 1914 showed – potentially more serious, only arose intermittently. Three developments turned the alliance system into a time-bomb: a situation of international flux, destabilized by new problems for and ambitions within the powers, the logic of joint military planning which froze confronting blocs into permanence, and the integration of the fifth great power, Britain, into one of the blocs. (Nobody worried much about the tergiversations of Italy, which was

* The southern Slav peoples were partly under the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire (Slovenes, Dalmatian Croats), partly under the Hungarian half (Croats, some Serbs), partly under common imperial administration (Bosnia-Hercegovina), the rest in small independent kingdoms (Serbia, Bulgaria and the mini-principality of Montenegro) and under the Turks (Macedonia).

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only a ‘great power’ by international courtesy.) Between 1903 and 1907, to everyone’s surprise including her own, Britain joined the anti-German camp. The origin of the First World War can best be understood by tracing the emergence of this Anglo-German antag-onism.

The ‘Triple Entente’ was astonishing both for Britain’s enemy and for her allies. In the past Britain had neither tradition of nor any permanent reasons for friction with Prussia – and the same seemed to be true of the super-Prussia now known as the German Empire. On the other hand Britain had been the almost automatic antagonist of France in almost any European war going since 1688. While this was no longer so, if only because France had ceased to be capable of dominating the continent, friction between the two countries was visibly increasing, if only because both competed for the same territory and influence as imperialist powers. Thus relations were unfriendly over Egypt, which was coveted by both but taken over (together with the French-financed Suez Canal) by the British. During the Fashoda crisis of 1898 it looked as though blood might flow, as rival British and French

colonial troops confronted	each other in the hinterland of the Sudan.
In the partition of Africa,	more often than not the gains of one were at

the expense of the other. As for Russia, the British and Tsarist empires had been permanent antagonists in the Balkan and Mediterranean zone of the so-called ‘Eastern Question’, and in the ill-defined but bitterly disputed areas of Central and Western Asia which lay between India and the tsar’s lands: Afghanistan, Iran and the regions opening on the Persian Gulf. The prospect of Russians in Constantinople – and therefore in the Mediterranean – and of Russian expansion towards India was a standing nightmare for British foreign secretaries. The two countries had even fought in the only nineteenth-century European war in which Britain took part (the Crimean War), and as recently as the 1870s a Russo-British war was seriously on the cards.

Given the established pattern of British diplomacy, a war against Germany was a possibility so remote as to be negligible. A permanent alliance with any continental power seemed incompatible with the maintenance of that balance of power which was the chief objective of British foreign policy. An alliance with France could be regarded as improbable, one with Russia almost unthinkable. Yet the implausible became reality: Britain linked up permanently with France and Russia against Germany, settling all differences with Russia to the point of actually agreeing to the Russian occupation of Constantinople – an offer which disappeared from sight with the Russian Revolution of 1917. How and why did this astonishing transformation come about?

It happened because both the players and the rules of the traditional

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game of international diplomacy changed. In the first instance, the board on which it was played became much larger. Power rivalry, formerly (except for the British) largely confined to Europe and adjoin-ing areas, was now global and imperial – outside most of the Americas, destined for exclusive US imperial expansion by Washington’s Monroe Doctrine. The international disputes which had to be settled, if they were not to degenerate into wars, were now as likely to occur over West Africa and the Congo in the 1880s, China in the late 1890s and the Maghreb (1906, 1911) as over the disintegrating body of the Ottoman Empire, and much more likely than over any issues in non-Balkan Europe. Moreover, there were now new players: the USA which, while still avoiding European entanglements, was actively expansionist in the Pacific, and Japan. In fact Britain’s alliance with Japan (1902) was the first step towards the Triple Alliance, since the existence of that new power, which was soon to show that it could actually defeat the Tsarist Empire in war, diminished the Russian threat to Britain and thus strengthened Britain’s position. It therefore made the defusion of various ancient Russo-British disputes possible.

This globalization of the international power-game automatically transformed the situation of the country which had, until then, been the only great power with genuinely worldwide political objectives. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for most of the nineteenth century the function of Europe in British diplomatic calculations was to keep quiet so that Britain could get on with its, mainly economic, activities in the rest of the globe. This was the essence of the characteristic combination of a European balance of power with the global Pax Britannica guaranteed by the only navy of global size, which controlled all the world’s oceans and sea-lanes. In the mid-nineteenth century all other navies of the world put together were hardly larger than the British navy alone. By the end of the century this was no longer so.

In the second place, with the rise of a worldwide industrial capitalist economy, the international game was now played for quite different stakes. This does not mean that, to adapt Clausewitz’s famous phrase, war was henceforth only the continuation of economic competition by other means. This was a view which tempted the historical determinists at the time, ifonly because they observed plenty of examples of economic expansion by means of machine-guns and gunboats. Nevertheless, it was a gross oversimplification. If capitalist development and imperi-alism must bear responsibility for the uncontrolled slide into world conflict, it is impossible to argue that many capitalists themselves were conscious warmongers. Any impartial study of the business press, of the private and commercial correspondence of businessmen, of their public declarations as spokesmen for banking, commerce and industry, shows

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quite conclusively that the majority of businessmen found international peace to their advantage. Indeed, war itself was acceptably only insofar as it did not interfere with ‘business as usual’, and the major objection to war of the young economist Keynes (not yet a radical reformer of his subject) was not only that it killed his friends, but that it inevitably made an economic policy based on ‘business as usual’ impossible. Naturally there were bellicose economic expansionists, but the Liberal journalist Norman Angell almost certainly expressed business con-sensus: the belief that war benefited capital was ‘The Great Illusion’ which gave his book of 1912 its title.

Why indeed should capitalists – even industrialists, with the possible exception of the arms manufacturers – have wished to disturb inter-national peace, the essential framework of their prosperity and expan-sion, since the fabric of free international business and financial transactions depended on it? Evidently those who did well out of international competition had no cause for complaint. Just as the freedom to penetrate the world’s markets has no disadvantages for Japan today, so German industry could well be content with it before 1914. Those who lost out were naturally apt to demand economic protection from their governments, though this is far from the same as demanding war. Moreover, the greatest of the potential losers, Britain, resisted even these demands, and her business interests remained over-whelmingly committed to peace, in spite of the constant fears of German competition which was stridently expressed in the 1890s, and the actual penetration of the British domestic market by German and American capital. As regards Anglo-American relations, we can go even further. If economic competition alone makes for war, Anglo-American rivalry should logically have prepared the ground for military conflict – as some inter-war Marxists still felt it would. Yet it was precisely in the 1900s that the British Imperial General Staff abandoned even the most remote contingency plans for an Anglo-American war. Henceforth this possibility was totally excluded.

And yet the development of capitalism inevitably pushed the world in the direction of state rivalry, imperialist expansion, conflict and war. After 1870, as historians have pointed out:

the shift from monopoly to competition was probably the most important single factor in setting the mood for European industrial and commercial enterprise. Economic growth was also economic struggle – struggle that served to separate the strong from the weak, to discourage some and toughen others, to favour the new, hungry nations at the expense of the old. Optimism about a future of indefinite progress gave way to uncertainty and a sense of agony, in

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the classical meaning of the word. All of which strengthened and was in turn strengthened by sharpening political rivalries, the two forms of competition merging.¹⁴

Plainly the economic world was no longer, as it had been in the mid-century, a solar system revolving around a single star, Great Britain. If the financial and commercial transactions of the globe still, and in fact increasingly, ran through London, Britain was evidently no longer the ‘workshop of the world’, nor indeed its major import market. On the contrary, her relative decline was patent. A number of competing national industrial economies now confronted each other. Under these circumstances economic competition became inextricably woven into the political, even the military, actions of states. The renaissance of protectionism during the Great Depression was the first consequence of this merger. From the point of view of capital, political support might henceforth be essential to keep out foreign competition, and perhaps essential too in parts of the world where the enterprises of national industrial economies competed against one another. From the point of view of states, the economy was henceforth both the very base of international power and its criterion. It was impossible now to conceive of a ‘great power’ which was not at the same time a ‘great economy’ – a transformation illustrated by the rise of the U SA and the relative weakening of the Tsarist Empire.

Conversely, would not the shifts in economic power, which auto-matically changed the balance of political and military force, logically entail a redistribution of parts on the international stage? Plainly this was a popular view in Germany, whose staggering industrial growth gave her an incomparably greater international weight than Prussia had had. It is hardly an accident that among German nationalists in the 1890s the old patriotic chant of’The Watch on the Rhine’, directed exclusively against the French, lost ground rapidly to the global ambitions of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’, which in effect became the German national anthem, though not yet officially.

What made this identification of economic and politico-military power so dangerous was not only national rivalry for world markets and material resources, and for the control of regions such as the Near and Middle East where economic and strategic interests often overlapped. Well before 1914 petro-diplomacy was already a crucial factor in the Middle East, victory going to Britain and France, the western (but not yet American) oil companies and an Armenian middle-man, Calouste Gulbenkian, who secured 5 per cent for himself. Con-versely, the German economic and strategic penetration of the Ottoman Empire already worried the British and helped to bring Turkey into

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the war on the German side. But the novelty of the situation was that, given the fusion between economics and politics, even the peaceful division of disputed areas into ‘zones of influence’ could not keep international rivalry under control. The key to its controllability – as Bismarck, who managed it with unparalleled mastery between 1871 and 1889, knew – was the deliberate restriction of objectives. So long

as states were in a position	to define their diplomatic	aims precisely  –
a  given  shift  in  frontiers,	a  dynastic  marriage,  a	definable	‘com-
pensation’ for the advances made by other states –		both calculation
and settlement were possible. Neither, of course – as Bismarck			himself

had proved between 1862 and 1871 – excluded controllable military conflict.

But the characteristic feature of capitalist accumulation was precisely that it had no limit. The ‘natural frontiers’ of Standard Oil, the Deutsche Bank, the De Beers Diamond Corporation were at the end of the universe, or rather at the limits of their capacity to expand. It was this aspect of the new patterns of world politics which destabilized the structures of traditional world politics. While balance and stability remained the fundamental condition of the European powers in their relations with each other, elsewhere even the most pacific among them did not hesitate to wage war against the weak. Certainly, as we have seen, they were careful to keep their colonial conflicts under control. They never looked like providing the casus belli for a major war but undoubtedly precipitated the formation of the international and eventually belligerent blocs: what became the Anglo-Franco-Russian bloc began with the Anglo-French ‘cordial understanding’ (‘Entente Cordiale’) of 1904, essentially an imperialist deal by which the French gave up their claims to Egypt in return for British backing for their claims in Morocco – a victim on which Germany also happened to have her eye. Nevertheless, all powers without exception were in an expansionist and conquering mood. Even Britain, whose posture was fundamentally defensive, since her problem was how to protect hitherto uncontested global dominance against the new intruders, attacked the South African republics; nor did she hesitate to consider partitioning the colonies of a European state, Portugal, with Germany. In the global ocean all states were sharks, and all statesmen knew it.

But what made the world an even more dangerous place was the tacit equation of unlimited economic growth and political power, which came to be unconsciously accepted. Thus the German emperor in the 1890s demanded ‘a place in the sun’ for his state. Bismarck could have claimed as much – and had indeed achieved a vastly more powerful place in the world for the new Germany than Prussia had ever enjoyed. Yet while Bismarck could define the dimensions of his ambitions,

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carefully avoiding encroachment into the zone of uncontrollability, for William n the phrase became merely a slogan without concrete content. It simply formulated a principle of proportionality: the more powerful a country’s economy, the larger its population, the greater the inter-national position of its nation-state. There were no theoretical limits to the position it might thus feel to be its due. As the nationalist phrase went: ‘Heute Deutschland, morgen die ganze Welt’ (Today Germany, tomorrow the whole world). Such unlimited dynamism might find expression in political, cultural or nationalist-racist rhetoric: but the effective common denominator of all three was the imperative to expand of a massive capitalist economy watching its statistical curves soaring

upwards.  Without  this	it would  have  had	as little  significance  as
the  conviction  of,  say,	nineteenth-century	Polish  intellectuals  that

their (at the time non-existent) country has a messianic mission in the world.

In practical terms, the danger was not that Germany concretely proposed to take Britain’s place as a global power, though the rhetoric of German nationalist agitation readily struck the anti-British note. It was rather that a global power required a global navy, and Germany therefore set out (1897) ^{t 0} construct a great battle-fleet, which had the incidental advantage of representing not the old German states but exclusively the new united Germany, with an officer-corps which rep-resented not Prussian junkers or other aristocratic warrior traditions, but the new middle classes, that is to say the new nation. Admiral Tirpitz himself, the champion of naval expansion, denied that he planned a navy capable of defeating the British, claiming that he only wanted one threatening enough to force them into supporting German global, and especially colonial, claims. Besides, could a country of Germany’s importance not be expected to have a navy corresponding to her importance?

But from the British point of view the construction of a German fleet was more even than yet another strain on the already globally over-committed British navy, already much outnumbered by the united fleets of rival powers, old and new (though such a union was utterly implausible), and hard put to it to maintain even its more modest aim of being stronger than the next two largest navies combined (the ‘two-power standard’). Unlike all other navies, the German fleet’s bases were entirely in the North Sea, opposite Britain. Its objective could not be anything except conflict with the British navy. As Britain saw it, Germany was essentially a continental power, and, as influential geopoliticians like Sir Halford Mackinder pointed out (1904), large powers of this sort already enjoyed substantial advantages over a medium-sized island. Germany’s legitimate maritime interests were

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visibly marginal, whereas the British Empire depended utterly on its sea-routes, and had indeed left the continents (except for India) to the armies of states whose element was the land. Even if the German battle-fleet did absolutely nothing, it must inevitably tie down British ships and thus make difficult, or even impossible, British naval control over waters believed to be vital – such as the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic sea-lanes. What was for Germany a symbol of her international status, and of undefined global ambitions, was a matter of life or death for the British Empire. American waters could be – and in 1901 were – abandoned to a friendly USA, Far Eastern waters to the USA and Japan, because these were both powers with, at the time, purely regional interests, which in any case did not seem incompatible with Britain’s. Germany’s navy, even as a regional navy, which it did not intend to remain, was a threat both to the British Isles and to the global position of the British Empire. Britain stood for as much of the status quo as could be preserved, Germany for its change – inevitably, even if not intentionally, at Britain’s expense. Under the circumstances, and given the economic rivalry between the two coun-tries’ industries, it was not surprising that Great Britain found herself considering Germany as the most probable and dangerous of potential adversaries. It was logical that she should find herself drawing closer to France and, once the Russian danger had been minimized by Japan, to Russia, all the more so since the Russian defeat had, for the first time in living memory, destroyed that equilibrium of the powers on the European continent which British foreign secretaries had so long taken for granted. It revealed Germany as by far the dominant military force in Europe, as she was aready industrially by far the most formidable. This was the background for the surprising Anglo-Franco-Russian Triple Entente.

The division of Europe into the two hostile blocs took almost a quarter of a century, from the formation of the Triple Alliance (1882) to the completion of the Triple Entente (1907). We need not follow it, or the subsequent developments, through all their labyrinthine details. They merely demonstrate that international friction in the period of imperialism was global and endemic, that nobody – least of all the British – knew quite in what direction the cross-currents of their and other powers’ interests, fears and ambitions were taking them, and, though it was widely felt that they took Europe towards a major war, none of the governments knew quite what to do about it. Time and again attempts failed to break up the bloc system, or at least to offset it by rapprochements across the blocs: between Britain and Germany, Germany and Russia, Germany and France, Russia and Austria. The blocs, reinforced by inflexible plans for strategy and mobilization, grew more rigid, the continent drifted uncontrollably towards battle, through

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a series of international crises which, after 1905, were increasingly settled by ‘brinkmanship’ – i.e. by the threat of war.

For from 1905 on the destabilization of the international situation in consequence of the new wave of revolutions on the margins of the fully ‘bourgeois’ societies added new combustible material to a world already preparing to go up in flames. There was the Russian Revolution of 1905, which temporarily incapacitated the Tsarist Empire, encouraging Germany to assert her claims in Morocco, browbeating France. Berlin was forced to retreat at the Algeciras conference (January 1906) by British support for France, partly because a major war on a purely colonial issue was politically unattractive, partly because the German navy felt far too weak as yet to face a war against the British navy. Two years later the Turkish Revolution destroyed the carefully constructed arrangements for international balance in the always explosive Near East. Austria used the opportunity formally to annex Bosnia-Her-cegovina (which she had previously just administered), thus pre-cipitating a crisis with Russia, settled only by threat of military support for Austria by Germany. The third great international crisis, over Morocco in 1911, admittedly had little to do with revolution, and everything to do with imperialism – and the shady operations of free-booting businessmen who recognized its multiple possibilities. Germany sent a gunboat ready to seize the south Moroccan port of Agadir, in order to gain some ‘compensation’ from the French for their imminent ‘protectorate’ over Morocco, but was forced into retreat by what appeared to be a British threat to go to war on the side of the French. Whether this was actually intended is irrelevant.

The Agadir crisis demonstrated that almost any confrontation between two major powers now brought them to the brink of war. When the collapse of the Turkish Empire continued, with Italy attacking and occupying Libya in 1911, and Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece setting about expelling Turkey from the Balkan peninsula in 1912, all the powers were immobilized, either by unwillingness to antagonize a potential ally in Italy, which was by now uncommitted to either side, or by fear of being dragged into uncontrollable problems by the Balkan states. Nineteen-fourteen proved how right they were. Frozen into immobility they watched Turkey being almost driven out of Europe, and a second war between the victorious Balkan pygmy states redrawing the Balkan map in 1913. The most they could achieve was to establish an independent state in Albania (1913) – under the usual German prince, though such Albanians as cared about the matter would have preferred a maverick English aristocrat who later inspired the adventure novels of John Buchan. The next Balkan crisis was precipitated on 28 June 1914 when the Austrian heir to the throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visited the capital of Bosnia, Sarajevo.

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What made the situation even more explosive was that, precisely in this period, domestic politics in the major powers pushed their foreign policies into the danger-zone. As we have seen (see pp. 109, 300 above), after 1905 the political mechanisms for the stable management of regimes began to creak audibly. It became increasingly difficult to control, still more to absorb and integrate, the mobilizations and coun-ter-mobilizations of subjects in the process of turning into democratic citizens. Democratic politics itself had a high-risk element, even in a state like Britain, careful to keep actual foreign policy secret not only from Parliament but from part of the Liberal cabinet. What turned the Agadir crisis from an occasion for potential horse-trading into a zero-sum confrontation was a public speech by Lloyd George, which seemed to leave Germany with no option except war or retreat. Non-democratic politics were even worse. Could one not argue: ‘that the principal cause of the tragic Europe breakdown in July 1914 was the inability of the democratic forces in central and eastern Europe to establish control over the militarist elements in their society and the abdication of the autocrats not to their loyal democratic subjects but to their irresponsible military advisers’?¹⁵ And worst of all, would not countries faced with insoluble domestic problems be tempted to take the gamble of solving them by foreign triumph, especially when their military advisers told them that, since war was certain, the best time for it was now?

This was plainly not the case in Britain and France, in spite of their troubles. It probably was the case in Italy, though fortunately Italian adventurism could not itself set off world war. Was it in Germany? Historians continue to argue about the effect of domestic German politics on its foreign policy. It seems clear that (as in all other powers) grassroots right-wing agitation encouraged and assisted the competitive armaments race, especially at sea. It has been claimed that labour unrest and the electoral advance of Social Democracy made ruling elites keen to defuse trouble at home with success abroad. Certainly there were plenty of conservatives who, like the Duke of Ratibor, thought that a war was needed to get the old order back on its feet, as it had done in 1864-71.’⁶ Still, probably this amounted to no more than that the civilians would be rather less sceptical of the arguments of their bellicose generals than they might otherwise have been. Was it the case in Russia? Yes, insofar as tsarism, restored after 1905 with modest concessions to political liberalization, probably saw its most promising strategy for revival and reinforcement in the appeal to Great Russian nationalism and the glory of military strength. And indeed, but for the solid and enthusiastic loyalty of the armed forces, the situation in 1913-14 would have been closer to revolution than at any time between 1905 and 1917. Still, in 1914 Russia certainly did not

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want war. But, thanks to a few years of military build-up, which German generals feared, it was possible for Russia to contemplate a war in 1914, as it patently had not been a few years earlier.

However, there was one power which could not but stake its existence on the military gamble, because it seemed doomed without it: Austria-Hungary, torn since the mid-1890s by increasingly unmanageable national problems, among which those of the southern Slavs seemed to be the most racalcitrant and dangerous for three reasons. First, because not merely were they troublesome as were other politically organized nationalities in the multinational empire, jostling each other for advan-tages, but they complicated matters by belonging both to the linguis-tically flexible government of Vienna and to the ruthlessly magyarizing government of Budapest. Southern Slav agitation in Hungary not only spilled over into Austria, but aggravated the always difficult relations of the two halves of the empire with each other. Second, because the Austrian Slav problem could not be disentangled from Balkan politics, and had indeed since 1878 been even more deeply entangled in them by the occupation of Bosnia. Moreover, there already existed an inde-pendent south Slav state of Serbia (not to mention Montenegro, a Homeric little highland state of raiding goatherds, gun-fighters and prince-bishops with a taste for blood-feud and the composition of heroic epics) which could tempt southern Slav dissidents in the empire. Third, because the collapse of the Ottoman Empire virtually doomed the Habsburg Empire, unless it could establish beyond any doubt that it was still a great power in the Balkans which nobody could mess about.

To the end of his days Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, could not believe that his tiny match put the world in flames. The final crisis in 1914 was so totally unexpected, so traumatic and, in retrospect, so haunting, because it was essentially an incident in Austrian politics which, Vienna felt, required ‘teaching Serbia a lesson’. The international atmosphere seemed calm. No foreign office expected trouble in June 1914, and public persons had been assassinated at frequent intervals for decades. In principle, nobody even minded a great power leaning heavily on a small and troublesome neighbour. Since then some five thousand books have been written to explain the apparently inexplicable: how, within a little more than five weeks of Sarajevo, Europe found itself at war.* The immediate answer now seems both clear and trivial: Germany decided to give Austria full backing, that is to say not to defuse the situation. The rest followed inexorably. For by 1914 any confrontation between the blocs, in which

* With the exception of Spain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Switzerland, all European states were eventually involved in it, as also Japan and the USA.

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one side or the other was expected to back down, brought them to the verge of war. Beyond a certain point the inflexible mobilizations of military force, without which such a confrontation would not have been ‘credible’, could not be reversed. ‘Deterrence’ could no longer deter but only destroy. By 1914 any incident, however random – even the action of an inefficient student terrorist in a forgotten corner of the continent – could lead to such a confrontation, if any single power locked into the system of bloc and counter-bloc chose to take it seriously. Thus war came, and, in comparable circumstances, could come again.

In short, international crisis and domestic crisis merged in the last years before 1914. Russia, once again menaced by social revolution, Austria, threatened by the disintegration of a politically no longer controllable multiple empire, even Germany, polarized and perhaps threatened with immobilism by her political divisions – all tilted towards their military and its solutions. Even France, united by a reluctance to pay taxes and therefore to find money for massive rearma-ment (it was easier to extend conscript service again to three years), elected a president in 1913 who called for revenge against Germany and made warlike noises, echoing the generals who were now, with murderous optimism, abandoning a defensive strategy for the prospect of a storming offensive across the Rhine. The British preferred battle-ships to soldiers: the navy was always popular, a national glory accept-able to Liberals as the protector of trade. Naval scares had political sex-appeal, unlike army reforms. Few, even among their politicians, realized that the plans for joint war with France implied a mass army and eventually conscription, and indeed they did not seriously envisage anything except a primarily naval and trade war. Still, even though the British government remained pacific to the last – or rather, refused to take a stand for fear of splitting the Liberal government – it could not consider staying out of the war. Fortunately the German invasion of Belgium, long prepared under the Schlieffen Plan, provided London with a morality cover for diplomatic and military necessity.

But how would the masses of Europeans react to a war which could not but be a war of the masses, since all belligerents except the British prepared to fight it with conscript armies of enormous size? In August 1914, even before hostilities broke out 19 million, and potentially 50 million, armed men faced each other across the frontiers.¹⁷ What would the attitude of these masses be when called to the colours, and what would the impact of war be on civilians especially if, as some military men shrewdly suspected – though taking little account of it in their planning – the war would not be over quickly? The British were particularly alive to this problem, because they relied exclusively on volunteers to reinforce their modest professional army of 20 divisions

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(compared with 74 French, 94 German and 108 Russian ones), because their working classes were fed mainly by food shipped from overseas which was extremely vulnerable to a blockade, and because in the immediate pre-war years government faced a public mood of social tension and agitation unknown in living memory, and an explosive situation in Ireland. ‘The atmosphere of war’, thought the Liberal minister John Morley, ‘cannot be friendly to order in a democratic system that is verging on the humour of [i8]48.’* But the domestic atmosphere of the other powers was also such as to disturb their governments. It is a mistake to believe that in 1914 governments rushed into war to defuse their internal social crises. At most, they calculated that patriotism would minimize serious resistance and non-cooperation.

In this they were correct. Liberal, humanitarian and religious oppo-sition to war had always been negligible in practice, though no govern-ment (with the eventual exception of the British) was prepared to recognize a refusal to perform military service on grounds of conscience. The organized labour and socialist movements were, on the whole, passionately opposed to militarism and war, and the Labour and Socialist International even committed itself in 1907 to an international general strike against war, but hard-headed politicians did not take this too seriously, though a wild man on the right assassinated the great French socialist leader and orator Jean Jaures a few days before the war, as he desperately tried to save the peace. The main socialist parties were against such a strike, few believed it to be feasible, and in any case, as Jaures recognized, ‘once war has broken out, we can take no further action’.²⁰ As we have seen, the French Minister of the Interior did not even bother to arrest the dangerous anti-war militants of whom the police had carefully prepared a list for this purpose. Nationalist dissidence did not prove to be a serious factor immediately. In short, the governments’ calls to arms met with no effective resistance.

But governments were mistaken in one crucial respect: they were taken utterly by surprise, as were the opponents of the war, by the extraordinary wave of patriotic enthusiasm with which their people appeared to plunge into a conflict in which at least 20 millions of them were to be killed and wounded, without counting the incalculable millions of births forgone and excess civilian deaths through hunger and disease. The French authorities had reckoned with 5-13 per cent of deserters: in fact only 1.5 per cent dodged the draft in 1914. In Britain, where political opposition to the war was strongest, and where it was deeply rooted in Liberal as well as Labour and socialist tradition,

* Paradoxically the fear of the possible effects of starvation on the British working class suggested to naval strategists the possibility of destabilizing Germany by a blockade which would starve its people. This was in fact attempted with considerable success during the war.¹⁹

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750,000 volunteered in the first eight weeks, a further million in the next eight months.²¹ The Germans, as expected, did not dream of disobeying orders. ‘How will anyone be able to say we do not love our fatherland when after the war so and so many thousands of our good party comrades say “we have been decorated for bravery”.’ Thus wrote a German social democratic militant, having just won the Iron Cross in 1914.²² In Austria not only the dominant people were shaken by a brief wave of patriotism. As the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler acknowledged, ‘even in the nationalities struggle war appears as a kind of deliverance, a hope that something different will come’.²³ Even in Russia, where a million deserters had been expected, all but a few thousands of the 15 millions obeyed the call to the colours. The masses followed the flags of their respective states, and abandoned the leaders who opposed the war. There were, indeed, few enough left of these, at least in public. In 1914 the peoples of Europe, for however brief a moment, went lightheartedly to slaughter and to be slaughtered. After the First World War they never did so again.

They were surprised by the moment, but no longer by the fact of war, to which Europe had become accustomed, like people who see a thunderstorm coming. In a way its coming was widely felt as a release and a relief, especially by the young of the middle classes – men very much more than women – though less so by workers and least by peasants. Like a thunderstorm it broke the heavy closeness of expec-tation and cleared the air. It meant an end to the superficialities and frivolities of bourgeois society, the boring gradualism of nineteenth-century improvement, the tranquillity and peaceful order which was the liberal Utopia for the twentieth century and which Nietzsche had prophetically denounced, together with the ‘pallid hypocrisy admin-istered by mandarins’.²⁴ After a long wait in the auditorium, it meant the opening of the curtain on a great and exciting historical drama in which the audience found itself to be the actors. It meant decision.

Was it recognized as the crossing of a historical frontier – one of those rare dates marking the periodization of human civilization which are more than pedagogic conveniences? Probably yes, in spite of the wide-spread expectations of a short war, of a foreseeable return to ordinary life and the ‘normalcy’ retrospectively identified with 1913, which imbues so many of the recorded opinions of 1914. Even the illusions of the patriotic and militarist young who plunged into war as into a new element, ‘like swimmers into cleanness leaping’.²⁵ had implied utter change. The sense of the war as an epoch ended was perhaps strongest in the world of politics, even though few were as clearly aware as the Nietzsche of the 1880s of the ‘era of monstrous [ungeheure] wars, upheavals [Umstiirze], explosions’ which had now begun,²⁶ and even

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fewer on the left, interpreting it in their	own way, saw	hope in it,
like Lenin. For the socialists the war was	an immediate	and  double

catastrophe, as a movement devoted to internationalism and peace collapsed suddenly into impotence, and the wave of national union and patriotism under the ruling classes swept, however momentarily, over the parties and even the class-conscious proletariat in the belligerent countries. And among the statesmen of the old regimes there was at least one who recognized that all had changed. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ said Edward Grey, as he watched the lights of Whitehall turned off on the evening when Britain and Germany went to war. ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

Since August 1914 we have lived in the world of monstrous wars, upheavals and explosions which Nietzsche prophetically announced. That is what has surrounded the era before 1914 with the retrospective haze of nostalgia, a faintly golden age of order and peace, of unprob-lematic prospects. Such back projections of imaginary good old days belong to the history of the last decades of the twentieth century, not the first. Historians of the days before the lights went out are not concerned with them. Their central preoccupation, and the one which runs through the present book, must be to understand and to show how the era of peace, of confident bourgeois civilization, growing wealth and western empires inevitably carried within itself the embryo of the era of war, revolution and crisis which put an end to it.

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Wirklich, ich lebe infinsteren £eiten/

Das arglose Wort ist lorichl. Eine glatte Stirn

Deutet auf Unempjindlichkeit hin. Der Lachende

Hat diefurchtbare Nachricht

Nur nock nickt empjangen.

Bertolt Brecht, 1937-38′

Preceding decades werefor the first time perceived as a long, almost golden age of uninterrupted, steady forward movement. Just as according to Hegel, we begin to understand an era only as the curtain is rung down on it {‘the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings with the falling of dusk’), so can we apparently bring ourselves to acknowledge the positive features only as we enter a subsequent one, whose troubles we now wish to underline by painting a strong contrast with what came before.

Albert O. Hirschman, 1986²

I

If the word ‘catastrophe’ had been mentioned among the members of the European middle classes before 1913, it would almost certainly have been in connection with one of the few traumatic events in which men and women like themselves were involved in the course of a lengthy, and in general tranquil, lifetime: say, the burning of the Karltheater in Vienna in 1881 during a performance of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, in which almost 1500 lives were lost, or the sinking of the Titanic with a similar number of victims. The much greater catastrophes which affect the lives of the poor – like the 1908 earthquake in Messina, so much vaster and more neglected than the more modest tremors of San Francisco (1905) – and the persistent risks to life, limb and health which always dogged the existence of the labouring classes, are still apt to attract less public attention.

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After 1914 it is a safe bet that the word suggested other and greater calamities even to those most immune to them in their personal lives. The First World War did not turn out to be ‘The Last Days of Humanity’, as Karl Kraus called it in his denunciatory quasi-drama, but nobody who lived an adult life both before and after 1914-18 anywhere in Europe, and increasingly in large stretches of the non-European world, could fail to observe that times had changed dra-matically.

The most obvious and immediate change was that world history now appeared to proceed by a series of seismic upheavals and human cataclysms. Never did the pattern of progress or continuous change appear less plausible than in the lifetime of those who lived through two world wars, two global bouts of revolutions following each of the wars, a period of wholesale and partly revolutionary global decol-onization, two bouts of massive expulsions of peoples culminating in genocide, and at least one economic crisis so severe as to raise doubts about the very future of those parts of capitalism not already overthrown by revolution, — upheavals which affected continents and countries quite remote from the zone of war and European political upheaval. A person born in, say, 1900 would have experienced all these at first hand, or through the mass media which made them immediately accessible, before he or she reached the age of pensionable retirement. And, of course, the pattern of history by upheaval was to continue.

Before 1914 virtually the only quantities measured in millions, outside astronomy, were populations of countries and the data of production, commerce and finance. Since 1914 we have become used to measuring the numbers of victims in such magnitudes: the casualties of even localized wars (Spain, Korea, Vietnam) – larger ones are measured in tens of millions – the numbers of those driven into forced migration or exile (Greeks, Germans, Moslems in the Indian subcontinent, kulaks), even the number massacred in genocide (Armenians, Jews), not to mention those killed by famine or epidemics. Since such human mag-nitudes escape precise recording or elude the grasp of the human mind, they are hotly debated. But the debates are about millions more or less. Nor are these astronomic figures to be entirely explained, and still less justified, by the rapid growth of the world population in our century. Most of them occurred in areas which were not growing all that fast.

Hecatombs on this scale were beyond the range of imagination in the nineteenth century, and those which actually occurred, took place in the world of backwardness or barbarism outside the range of progress and ‘modern civilization’, and were surely destined to retreat in the face of universal, if uneven, advance. The atrocities of Congo and Amazon, modest in scale by modern standards, so shocked the Age of

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Empire – witness Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – just because they appeared as regressions of civilized men into savagery. The state of affairs to which we have become accustomed, in which torture has once again become part of police methods in countries priding themselves on their record of civility, would not merely have profoundly repelled political opinion, but would have been, justifiably, regarded as a relapse into barbarism, which went against every observable historical trend of development since the mid-eighteenth century.

After 1914 mass catastrophe, and increasingly the methods of bar-barism, became an integral and expected part of the civilized world, so much so that it masked the continued and striking advances of technology and the human capacity to produce, and even the unde-niable improvements in human social organization in many parts of the world, until these became quite impossible to overlook during the huge forward leap of the world economy in the third quarter of the twentieth century. In terms of the material improvement of the lot of humanity, not to mention of the human understanding and control over nature, the case for seeing the history of the twentieth century as progress is actually rather more compelling than it was in the nineteenth. For even as Europeans died and fled in their millions, the survivors were becoming more numerous, taller, healthier, longer-lived. And most of them lived better. But the reasons why we have got out of the habit of thinking of our history as progress are obvious. For even when twentieth-century progress is most undeniable, prediction sug-gests not a continued ascent, but the possibility, perhaps even the imminence, of some catastrophe: another and more lethal world war, an ecological disaster, a technology whose triumphs may make the world uninhabitable by the human species, or whatever current shape the nightmare may take. We have been taught by the experience of our century to live in the expectation of apocalypse.

But for the educated and comfortable members of the bourgeois world who lived through this era of catastrophe and social convulsion, it seemed to be, in the first instance, not a fortuitous cataclysm, some-thing like a global hurricane which impartially devastated everything in its path. It seemed to be directed specifically at their social, political and moral order. Its probable outcome, which bourgeois liberalism was powerless to prevent, was the social revolution of the masses. In Europe the war produced not only the collapse or crisis of every state and regime east of the Rhine and the western edge of the Alps, but also the first regime which set out, deliberately and systematically, to turn this collapse into the global overthrow of capitalism, the destruction of the bourgeoisie and the establishment of a socialist society. This was the Bolshevik regime brought to power in Russia by the collapse of tsarism.

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As we have seen, mass movements of the proletariat dedicated to this aim in theory were already in existence in most parts of the developed world, although politicians in parliamentary countries had concluded that they provided no real threat to the status quo. But the combination of war, collapse and the Russian Revolution made the danger immedi-ate and, almost, overwhelming.

The danger of ‘Bolshevism’ dominates not only the history of the years immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917, but the entire history of the world since that date. It has given even its inter-national conflicts for long periods the appearance of civil and ideological war. In the late twentieth century it still dominated the rhetoric of super-power confrontation, at least unilaterally, even though the most cursory look at the world of the 1980s showed that it simply did not fit into the image of a single global revolution about to overwhelm what international jargon called the ‘developed market economies’, still less one orchestrated from a single centre and aiming at the construction of a single monolithic socialist system unwilling to coexist with capi-talism or incapable of doing so. The history of the world since the First World War took shape in the shadow of Lenin, imagined or real, as the history of the western world in the nineteenth century took shape in the shadow of the French Revolution. In both cases it eventually moved out of that shadow, but not entirely. Just as politicians even in 1914, speculated about whether the mood of the pre-war years had recalled 1848, so in the 1980s every overthrow of some regime anywhere in the west or the Third World evokes hopes or fears of’Marxist power’.

The world did not turn socialist, even though in 1917-20 this was regarded as possible, even in the long run as inevitable, not only by Lenin but, at least for a moment, by those who represented and governed bourgeois regimes. For a few months even European capi-talists, or at least their intellectual spokesmen and administrators, seemed resigned to euthanasia, as they faced socialist working-class movements enormously strengthened since 1914, and indeed, in some countries like Germany and Austria, constituting the only organized and potentially state-sustaining forces left in being by the collapse of the old regimes. Anything was better than Bolshevism, even peaceful abdication. The extensive debates (mainly in 1919) on how much of the economies were to be socialized, how they were to be socialized, and how much was to be conceded to the new powers of the proletariats were not purely tactical manoeuvres to gain time. They merely turned out to have been such when the period of serious danger to the system, real or imagined, proved to have been so brief that nothing drastic needed to be done after all.

In retrospect we can see that the alarm was exaggerated. The moment

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of potential world revolution left behind nothing but a single communist regime in an extraordinarily weakened and backward country whose main asset lay in the vast size and resources that were to make her into a political super-power. It also left behind the considerable potential of anti-imperialist, modernizing and peasant revolution, at that time mainly in Asia, which recognized its affinities with the Russian Rev-olution, and those parts of the now divided pre-1914 socialist and labour movements which threw in their lot with Lenin. In industrial countries these communist movements generally represented a minority of the labour movements until the Second World War. As the future was to demonstrate, the economies and societies of the ‘developed market economies’ were remarkably tough. Had they not been, they could hardly have emerged without social revolution from some thirty years of historical gales which might have been expected to wreck unseaworthy vessels. The twentieth century has been full of social revolutions, and there may well be more of them before it ends; but the developed industrial societies have been more immune to them than any others, except when revolution came to them as the by-product of military defeat or conquest.

Revolution thus left the main bastions of world capitalism standing, though for a while even their defenders thought they were about to crumble. The old order fought off the challenge. But it did so – it had to do so – by turning itself into something very different from what it had been in 1914. For after 1914, faced with what an eminent liberal historian called ‘the world crisis’ (Elie Halevy), bourgeois liberalism was entirely at a loss. It could abdicate or be swept away. Alternatively, it could assimilate itself to something like the non-Bolshevik, non-revolutionary, ‘reformist’ social democratic parties which actually emerged in western Europe as the chief guarantors of social and political continuity after 1917, and consequently turned from parties of oppo-sition into parties of potential or actual government. In short, it could disappear or make itself unrecognizable. But in its old form it could no longer cope.

Giovanni Giolitti (1842-1928) of Italy (see pp. 87, 97, 102 above) is an example of the first fate. As we have seen, he had been brilliantly successful at ‘managing’ the Italian politics of the early 1900s: con-ciliating and taming labour, buying political support, wheeling and dealing, conceding, avoiding confrontations. In the socially rev-olutionary post-war situation of his country these tactics utterly failed him. The stability of bourgeois society was re-established by means of the armed middle-class gangs of ‘nationalists’ and fascists, literally waging the class war against a labour movement incapable of itself making a revolution. The (liberal) politicians supported them, vainly

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EPILOGUE

hoping to be able to integrate them into their system. In 1922 the fascists took over as government, after which democracy, parliament, parties and the old liberal politicians were eliminated. The Italian case was merely one among many. Between 1920 and 1939 parliamentary democratic systems virtually disappeared from most European states, non-communist as well as communist.* The fact speaks for itself. For a generation liberalism in Europe seemed doomed.

John Maynard Keynes, also discussed above (see pp. 177, 184), is an example of the second choice, all the more interesting because he actually remained all his life a supporter of the British Liberal Party and a class-conscious member of what he called his class, ‘the educated bourgeoisie’. As a young economist Keynes had been almost quint-essentially orthodox. He believed, rightly, that the First World War was both pointless and incompatible with a liberal economy, not to mention with bourgeois civilization. As a professional adviser to wartime governments after 1914, he favoured the least possible inter-ruption of ‘business as usual’. Again, quite logically, he saw the great (Liberal) war-leader Lloyd George as leading Britain to economic perdition by subordinating everything else to the achievement of mili-tary victory.f He was horrified but not surprised to see large parts of Europe and what he regarded as European civilization collapse in defeat and revolution. Once again correctly, he concluded that an irresponsible politicking peace treaty imposed by the victors would jeopardize what chances of restoring German, and therefore European, capitalist stability on a liberal basis. However, faced with the irrevo-cable disappearance of the pre-war belle Spoque which he had so much enjoyed with his friends from Cambridge and Bloomsbury, Keynes henceforth devoted all his considerable intellectual brilliance, ingenuity and gifts of style and propaganda to finding a way of saving capitalism from itself.

He consequently found himself revolutionizing economics, the social science most wedded to the market economy in the Age of Empire, and which had avoided feeling that sense of crisis so evident in other social sciences (see pp. 270, 271 above). Crisis, first political and then economic, was the foundation of the Keynesian rethinking of liberal orthodoxies. He became a champion of an economy managed and controlled by the state such as would, in spite of Keynes’ evident dedication to capitalism,

* In 1939, of the twenty-seven states of Europe, the only ones which could be described as parliamentary democracies were the United Kingdom, the Irish Free State, France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the four Scandinavian states (Finland only just) Of these all but the United Kingdom, the Irish Free State, Sweden and Switzerland soon disappeared temporarily under occupation by or alliance with fascist Germany

t His attitude to the Second World War, fought against fascist Germany, was naturally very different

333

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

have been regarded as the ante-chamber of socialism by every ministry of finance in every developed industrial economy before 1914.

Keynes is worth singling out because he formulated what was to be the most intellectually and politically influential way of saying that capitalist society could only survive if capitalist states controlled, managed and even planned much of the general shape of their econ-omies, if necessary turning themselves into mixed public/private econ-omies. The lesson was congenial after 1944 to reformist, social democratic and radical-democratic ideologists and governments, who took it up with enthusiasm, insofar as they had not, as in Scandinavia, pioneered such ideas independently. For the lesson that capitalism on the pre-1914 liberal terms was dead was learned almost universally in the period of the two world wars and the world slump, even by those who refused to give it new theoretical labels. For forty years after the early 1930s the intellectual supporters of pure free-market economics were an isolated minority, apart from businessmen whose perspective always makes it difficult to recognize the best interests of their system as a whole, in proportion as it concentrates their minds on the best interests of their particular firm or industry.

The lesson had to be learned, because the alternative in the period of the Great Slump of the 1930s was not a market-induced recovery, but collapse. This was not, as revolutionaries hopefully thought, the ‘final crisis’ of capitalism, but it was probably the only genuinely system-endangering economic crisis so far in the history of an economic system which operates essentially through cyclical fluctuations.

Thus the years between the start of the First and the aftermath of the Second World War were a period of extraordinary crises and convulsions in history. They can best be regarded as the era when the world pattern of the Age of Empire collapsed under the force of the explosions it had been quietly generating in the long years of peace and prosperity. What collapsed was clear: the liberal world system and nineteenth-century bourgeois society as the norm to which, as it were, any kind of’civilization’ aspired. This, after all, was the era of fascism. What the shape of the future would be remained unclear until the middle of the century, and even then the new developments, though perhaps predictable, were so unlike what people had grown accustomed to in the era of convulsions that they took almost a generation to recognize what was happening.

334

EPILOGUE

I I

The period which succeeded this era of collapse and transition, and which still continues, is probably, in terms of the social transformations which affect the ordinary men and women of the world – growing in numbers at a rate unprecedented even in the previous history of the industrializing world – the most revolutionary ever experienced by the human race. For the first time since the stone age the world population was ceasing to consist of people who lived by agriculture and livestock. In all parts of the globe except (as yet) sub-Saharan Africa and the southern quadrant of Asia, peasants were now a minority, in developed countries a tiny minority. This happened in a matter of a single gener-ation. Consequently the world – and not only the old ‘developed’ countries – became urban, while economic development, including major industrialization, was internationalized or globally redistributed in a manner inconceivable before 1914. Contemporary technology, thanks to the internal-combustion engine, the transistor, the pocket calculator, the omni-visible aeroplane, not to mention the modest bicycle, has penetrated the remotest corners of the planet, which are accessible to commerce in a way which few could have imagined even in 1939. Social structures, at least in the developed societies of western capitalism, have been dramatically shaken, including that of the tra-ditional family and household. It is now possible to recognize in retro-spect how much of what made nineteenth-century bourgeois society function was in fact inherited and taken over from a past which the very processes of its development were bound to destroy. All this has happened within a, by historical standards, incredibly brief period – within the memory of men and women born during the Second World War – as the product of the most massive and extraordinary boom of world economic expansion ever experienced. A century after Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto its predictions of the economic and social effects of capitalism seemed to be realized – but not, in spite of the rule of a third of humanity by their disciples, the overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat.

This period is clearly one in which nineteenth-century bourgeois society and all that went with it belong to a past that no longer immediately determines the present, though, of course, both the nine-teenth century and the late twentieth are part of the same long period of the revolutionary transformation of humanity – and nature – which became recognizably revolutionary in the last quarter of the eighteenth. Historians may notice the odd coincidence that the super-boom of the twentieth century occurred exactly one hundred years after the great mid-nineteenth-century boom (1850-73, 1950-73), and consequently

335

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

the late-twentieth-century period of world economic troubles since 1973, began just one hundred years after the Great Depression with which the present book started. But there is no relation between these facts, unless someone were to discover some cyclical mechanism of the economy’s movement which would produce such a neat chronological repetition; and this is rather improbable. Most of us do not want to or need to go back to the 1880s to explain what was troubling the world in the 1980s or 1990s.

And yet the world of the late twentieth century is still shaped by the bourgeois century, and in particular by the Age of Empire, which has been the subject of this volume. Shaped in the literal sense. Thus, for instance, the world financial arrangements which were to provide the international framework for the global boom of the third quarter of this century were negotiated in the middle 1940s by men who had been adult in 1914, and who were utterly dominated by the past twenty-five years’ experience of the Age of Empire’s disintegration. The last important statesmen or national leaders who had been adults in 1914 died in the 1970s (eg. Mao, Tito, Franco, de Gaulle). But, more significantly, today’s world was shaped by what one might call the historical landscape left behind by the Age of Empire and its collapse.

The most obvious piece of this heritage is the division of the world into socialist countries (or countries claiming to be such) and the rest. The shadow of Karl Marx presides over a third of the human race because of the developments we have tried to sketch in chapters 3, 5 and 12. Whatever one might have predicted about the future of the land-mass stretching from the China seas to the middle of Germany, plus a few areas in Africa and in the Americas, it is quite certain that regimes claiming to realize the prognoses of Karl Marx could not possibly have been among the futures envisaged for them until the emergence of mass socialist labour movements, whose example and ideology would in turn inspire the revolutionary movements of back-ward and dependent or colonial regions.

An equally obvious piece of the heritage is the very globalization of the world’s political pattern. If the United Nations of the late twentieth century contain a considerable numerical majority of states from what came to be called the ‘Third World’ (and incidentally states out of sympathy with the ‘western’ powers), it is because they are, over-whelmingly, the relics of the division of the world among the imperial powers in the Age of Empire. Thus the decolonization of the French Empire has produced about twenty new states, that of the British Empire many more; and, at least in Africa (which at the time of writing consists of over fifty nominally independent and sovereign entities), all of them reproduce the frontiers drawn by conquest and inter-imperialist

33⁶

EPILOGUE

negotiation. Again, but for the developments of that period, it was hardly to be expected that the great bulk of them would at the end of this century conduct the affairs of their educated strata and governments in English and French.

Somewhat less obvious an inheritance from the Age of Empire is that all these states should be described, and often describe themselves, as ‘nations’. This is not only because, as I have tried to show, the ideology of’nation’ and ‘nationalism’, a nineteenth-century European product, could be used as an ideology of colonial liberation, and was imported as such by members of westernized elites of colonial peoples, but also because, as chapter 6 has argued, the concept of the ‘nation-state’ in

this period	became available  to groups of any size which  chose so
to describe	themselves, and not only, as the  mid-nineteenth-century

pioneers of ‘the principle of nationality’ took for granted, to medium or large peoples. For most of the states that have emerged to the world since the end of the nineteenth century (and which have, since President Wilson, been given the status of’nations’) were of modest size and/or population, and, since the onset of decolonization, often of tiny size.* Insofar as nationalism has penetrated outside the old ‘developed’ world, or insofar as non-European politics have become assimilated to nationalism, the heritage of the Age of Empire is still present.

It is equally present in the transformation of traditional western family relations, and especially in the emancipation of women. No doubt these transformations have been on an altogether more gigantic scale since the mid-century than ever before, but in fact it was during the Age of Empire that the ‘new woman’ first appeared as a significant phenomenon, and that political and social mass movements dedicated, among other things, to the emancipation of women became political forces: notably the labour and socialist movements. Women’s move-ments in the west may have entered a new and more dynamic phase in the 1960s, perhaps largely as a result of the much increased entry of women, and especially married women, into paid employment outside the home, but it was only a phase in a major historical development which can be traced back to our period, and for practical purposes, not earlier.

Moreover, as this book has tried to make clear, the Age of Empire saw the birth of most of what is still characteristic of the modern urban society of mass culture, from the most international forms of spectator sport to press and film. Even technically the modern media are not fundamental innovations, but developments which have made more

* Twelve of the African states in the early 1980s had populations of less than 600,000, two of them of less than 100,000.

337

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

universally accessible the two basic devices introduced during the Age of Empire: the mechanical reproduction of sound and the moving photograph. The era ofJacques Offenbach has no continuity with the present comparable to the era of the young Fox, Zukor, Goldwyn and ‘His Master’s Voice’.

I ll

It is not difficult to discover other ways in which our lives are still formed by, or are continuations of, the nineteenth century in general and the Age of Empire in particular. Any reader could no doubt lengthen the list. But is this the main reflection suggested by looking back at nineteenth-century history? For it is still difficult, if not imposs-ible, to look back dispassionately on that century which created world history because it created the modern capitalist world economy. For Europeans it carried a particular charge of emotion, because, more than any other, it was the European era in the world’s history, and for the British among them it is unique because, and not only economically speaking, Britain was at its core. For North Americans it was the century when the USA ceased to be part of Europe’s periphery. For the rest of the world’s peoples it was the era when all the past history, however long and distinguished, came to a necessary halt. What has happened to them, or what they have done, since 1914 is implicit in what happened to them between the first industrial revolution and

1914.

It was a century which transformed the world – not more than our own century has done, but more strikingly, inasmuch as such revolutionary and continuous transformation was then new. Looking back, we can see this century of the bourgeoisie and of revolution suddenly heaving into view, like Nelson’s battle-fleet getting ready for action, like it even in what we do not see: the kidnapped crews who manned them, short, poor, whipped and drunk, living on worm-eaten rusks. Looking back we can recognize that those who made it, and increasingly those growing masses who participated in it in the ‘devel-oped’ west, knew that it was destined for extraordinary achievements, and thought that it was destined to solve all the major problems of humanity, to remove all the obstacles in the path of their solution.

In no century before or since have practical men and women had such high, such Utopian, expectations for life on this earth: universal peace, universal culture by means of a single world language, science which would not merely probe but actually answer the most funda-mental questions of the universe, the emancipation of women from

338

EPILOGUE

all their past history, the emancipation of all humanity through the emancipation of the workers, sexual liberation, a society of plenty, a world in which each contributed according to their abilities and received what they needed. These were not only dreams of rev-olutionaries. Utopia through progress was in fundamental ways built into the century. Oscar Wilde was not joking when he said that no map of the world which did not contain Utopia was worth having. He was speaking for Cobden the free trader as well as for Fourier the socialist, for President Grant as well as for Marx (who rejected not Utopian aims, but only Utopian blue-prints), for Saint-Simon, whose Utopia of ‘industrialism’ can be assigned neither to capitalism nor to socialism, because it can be claimed by both. But the novelty about the most characteristic nineteenth-century Utopias was that in them history would not come to a stop.

Bourgeois expected an era of endless improvement, material, intel-lectual and moral, through liberal progress; proletarians, or those who saw themselves as speaking for them, expected it through revolution. But both expected it. And both expected it, not through some historic automatism, but through effort and struggle. The artists who expressed the cultural aspirations of the bourgeois century most profoundly, and became, as it were, the voices articulating its ideals, were those like Beethoven, who was seen as the genius who fought through to victory after struggle, whose music overcame the dark forces of destiny, whose choral symphony culminated in the triumph of the liberated human spirit.

In the Age of Empire there were, as we have seen, voices – and they were both profound and influential among the bourgeois classes – who foresaw different outcomes. But, on the whole, the era seemed, for most people in the west, to come closer than any before to the promise of the century. To its liberal promise, by material improvement, education and culture; to its revolutionary promise, by the emergence, the massed strength and the prospect of the inevitable future triumph of the new labour and socialist movements. For some, as this book has tried to show, the Age of Empire was one of growing uneasiness and fear. For most men and women in the world transformed by the bourgeoisie it was almost certainly an age of hope.

It is on this hope that we can now look back. We can still share it, but no longer without scepticism and uncertainty. We have seen too many promises of Utopia realized without producing the expected results. Are we not living in an age when, in the most advanced countries, modern communications, means of transport and sources of energy have abolished the distinction between town and country, which was once thought achievable only in a society that had solved virtually

339

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

all its problems? But ours demonstrably has not. The twentieth century has seen too many moments of liberation and social ecstasy to have much confidence in their permanence. There is room for hope, for human beings are hoping animals. There is even room for great hopes for, in spite of appearances and prejudices to the contrary, the actual achievement of the twentieth century in material and intellectual pro-gress – hardly in moral and cultural progress – is extraordinarily impressive and quite undeniable.

Is there still room for the greatest of all hopes, that of creating a world in which free men and women, emancipated from fear and material need, will live the good life together in a good society? Why not? The nineteenth century taught us that the desire for the perfect society is not satisfied by some predetermined design for living, Mormon, Owenite or whatever; and we may suspect that even if such a new design were to be the shape of the future, we would not know, or be able today to determine, what it would be. The function of the search for the perfect society is not to bring history to a stop, but to open out its unknown and unknowable possibilities to all men and women. In this sense the road to Utopia, fortunately for the human race, is not blocked.

But, as we know, it can be blocked: by universal destruction, by a return to barbarism, by the dissolution of the hopes and values to which the nineteenth century aspired. The twentieth has taught us that these things are possible. History, the presiding divinity of both centuries, no longer gives us, as men and women used to think, the firm guarantee that humanity would travel into the promised land, whatever exactly this was supposed to be. Still less that they would reach it. It could come out differently. We know th at it can, because we live in the world the nineteenth century created, and we know that, titanic though its achievements were, they are not what was then expected or dreamed.

But if we can no longer believe that history guarantees us the right outcome, neither does it guarantee us the wrong one. It offers the option, without any clear estimate of the probability of our choice. The evidence that the world in the twenty-first century will be better is not negligible. If the world succeeds in not destroying itself, the probability will be quite strong. But it will not amount to certainty. The only certain thing about the future is that it will surprise even those who have seen furthest into it.

340

TABLES

T A B L ES

TABLE    I

STATES AND POPULATIONS 1880-1914 (MILLIONS OF

PERSONS)

		1880	“9H
E/K	*UK	35-3	45
R	*France	37-6	4 0
E	•Germany	45-2	68
E	•Russia	97-7	161 (1910)
E/K	•Austria	37-6	51
K	•Italy	28.5	36
K	Spain	.6.7	20.5
K, 1908R	Portugal	4 . 2	5-25
K	Sweden	4.6	5-5
K	Norway	‘•9	2-5
K	Denmark	2 . 0	2-75
K	Netherlands	4 . 0	6-5
K	Belgium	5-5	7-5
R	Switzerland	2 . 8	3-5
K	Greece	1.6	4-75
K	Roumania	5-3	7-5
K	Serbia	i-7	4-5
K	Bulgaria	2.0	4-5
K	Montenegro	–	0.2
K	Albania	O	0.8
E	Finland (in Russia)	2 . 0	2-9
R	USA	50.2	92.0 (1910)
E	Japan	c- 3 6	53
E	Ottoman Empire	c. 21	C. 20
E	China	c.420	C.450
	Other states, orders of magnitude of population:
	Over 10 millions		Brazil, Mexico
	5-10 millions		Persia, Afghanistan, Argentina
	2-5 millions		Chile, Colombia, Peru,
			Venezuela, Siam
	Below 2 millions		Bolivia, Cuba, Costa Rica,
			Domin. Republic, Ecuador, El
			Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti,
			Honduras, Nicaragua,
			Panama, Paraguay, Uruguay

E = empire, K = kingdom, R = republic. * The great powers of Europe.

342

T A B L ES

T A B L E  2

URBANISATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY

	EUROPE,		1800-1890
	Number of cities			Total urban population
	(10,000 and over)				(percentage)
	1800	1850	1890	1800	1850	1890
Europe	364	878	1709	IO	16.7	29
N. and W.*	1 05	2 4 6	543	‘4-9	26.1	43-4
Cen tralf	’35	3 0 6	6 2 9	7-i	12-5	26.8
Mediterranean^:	” 3	292	4 0 4	12.9	18.6	22.2
Eastern§	11	34	133	4 . 2	7-5	18
England/Wales	44	148	356	20.3	40.8	61.9
Belgium	20	26	61	18.9	20.5	34-5
France	78	165	232	8.8	‘4-5	25-9
Germany	53	133	382	5-5	10.8	28.2
Austria/Bohemia	8	17	IOI	5-2	6.7	18.1
Italy	74	183	215	14.6	20.3	21.2
Poland	3	17	32	2-4	9-3	14.6

* Scandinavia, UK, Netherlands, Belgium

f Germany, France, Switzerland

• Italy, Spain, Portugal

• Austria/Bohemia, Poland

Source: Jan deVries, European Urbanisation 1500-1800 (London, 1984), Table 3.8.

343

T A B L ES

TABLE   3

EMIGRATION TO LANDS OF EUROPEAN SETTLEMENT 1871-1911 (MILLIONS OF

PERSONS)

Years		Total	Britain/	Spain/	Germany/	Others
			Ireland	Portugal	Austria
1871	-80	3-<	1.85	0.15	o-75	o-35
1881	-90	7.0	3-25	o-75	1.8	1.2
1891	-1900	6.2	2-15	1.0	1-25	1.8
1901-11		11.3	3 ‘ 5	1.4	2.6	4-»5
		27.6	10.4	3-3	6.4	7-5

IMMIGRATION TO (MILLIONS OF PERSONS):

Years	Total	USA	Canada	Argentina/	Australia/	Others
				Brazil	N.Z.
1871-80	4.0	2.8	0.2	o-5	0.2	0.3
1881-90	7-5	5-2	0.4	1.4	o-3	0.2
1891-1900	6.4	3-7	0 . 2	1.8	•45	0.25
1900 – n	‘4-9	8.8	1.1	2.45	1.6	°-95
	32.8	20.5	«•9	6.15	2-5	‘•7

Based on A. M. Carr Saunders, World Population (London, 1936). The difference between the totals for immigration and emigration should warn readers about the unreliability of these calculations.

344

TABLES

TABLE   4

ILLITERACY

1850

<9’3

Countries of low	Medium illiteracy	High illiteracy
illiteracy: below 30%	30-50%	over 50%
adults
Denmark	Austria	Hungary
Sweden	Czech lands	Italy
Norway	France	Portugal
Finland	England	Spain
Iceland	Ireland	Rumania
Germany	Belgium	all Balkans & Greece
Switzerland	Australia	Poland
Netherlands		Russia
Scotland		USA (non-whites)
USA (whites)		rest of world
Countries of low	Medium	High
illiteracy: below 10%	10-30%	above 30%
(As above)	N. Italy	Hungary
France	N.W. Yugoslavia	Centr. & S. Italy
England	(Slovenia)	Portugal
Ireland		Spain
Belgium		Rumania
Austria		all Balkans & Greece
Australia		Poland
New Zealand		Russia
		USA (non-whites)
		rest of world
	TABLE  5

UNIVERSITIES (NUMBER OF INSTITUTIONS)

	‘875	‘913
North America	c.360	c.500
Latin America	c.30	c.40
Europe	C I I O	c. 150
Asia	c-5	c. 20
Africa	0	«•5
Australasia	2	«•5

345

T A B L ES

MODERNITY

Newsprint used in different parts of the world, c. 1880

(Source, calculated from M. G. Mulhall, The Progress of the World Since the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1880, reprinted 1971), p.gi-)

	In the world		In Europe
		Rest ot world
	Australasia	2%
UUn	1 %		Iberian peninsula
America 1 4%			12%

Low countries (Benelux) 4 7%

Austna-HunRary

10 9%

Telephones in the world in 1912

(Source: Weltimrtschqftliches Archiv, 1913, I/ii, p. 143.)

Africa   1— Rest of world

World total (in 000s)	‘2,453
USA	8,362
Europe	3.239

346

TABLES

TABLE   6

THE PROGRESS OF THE TELEPHONE: SOME CITIES (PHONES PER ioo INHABITANTS

	•895	Rank	1911	Rank
Stockholm	4.1	i	199	2
Christiania (Oslo)	3	2	6-9	8
Los Angeles	2	3	24	i
Berlin	i 6	4	53	9
Hamburg	• 5	5	47	10
Copenhagen	i 2	6	7	7
Boston	i	7	9-2	4
Chicago	0.8	8	11	3
Pans	0 7	9	2.7	12
New York	0 6	10	8.3	6
Vienna	0 5	11	2-3	‘3
Philadelphia	°3	12	8.6	5
London	0 . 2	‘3	2 8	11
St Petersburg	0 2	‘4	2.2	•4

Source Weltwirtschqftliches Archtv, 1913, I/11, p 143

TABLE 7

% OF WORLD’S AREA IN INDEPENDENT STATES IN 1913

North America	32%
Central & South America	92.5%
Africa	3.4%
Asia	70% excluding Asiatic Russia
Oceania	43.2% including Asiatic Russia
	0%
Europe	99%

Source, calculated from League of Nations International Statistical Tearbook (Geneva, 1926)

347

T A B L ES

TABLE     8

BRITISH INVESTMENTS ABROAD:% SHARE

	1860-70	1911-13
British Empire	36	46
Latin America	10.5	22
USA	27	19
Europe	25	6
Other	3.5	7

Source: C. Feinstein cited in M. Barratt Brown, After Imperialism (London 1963), p. 110.

TABLE     9

WORLD OUTPUT OF PRINCIPAL TROPICAL COMMODITIES, 1880-1910 (IN 000 TONS)

	1880	1900	1910
Bananas	30	300	1,800
Cocoa
	6 0	102	227
Coffee	55«	97°	1,090
Rubber	11	53	87
Cotton fibre	950	1,200	1,770
Jute	6 0 0	1,220	1,560
Oil Seeds	–	–	2,700
Raw sugar cane	1,850	3,34°	6,320
Tea	’75	2 9 0	360

Source: P. Bairoch, The Economic Development of the Third World Since igoo (London, 1975), p. 15

348

TABLES

T A B L E  IO

WORLD PRODUCTION AND WORLD TRADE,

1 7 8 1 – 1 9 7 1 ( 1 9 1 3 = 1 0 0 )

	Production	Trade
1781-90	i.8	2.2	(1780)
1840	7-4	5-4
1870	‘9-5	23.8
1880	26.9	38	(1881-5)
1890	41.i	48	(1891-5)
1900	58.7	67	(i9°’-5)
i9’3	100.0	100
1929	153-3	i’3	(1930)
1948	274.0	103
1971	950.0	520

Source: W. W. Rostow, TAe World Economy: History and Prospect (London, 1978), Appendices A and B.

349

TABLES

T A B L E  I I

SHIPPING: TONNAGE (VESSELS OVER ioo TONS ONLY) IN ooo TONS

	1881	1913
World total	18,325	46,970
Great Britain	7,010	18,696
USA	2,370	•3,429
Norway	1,460	2,458
Germany	1,150	5,082
Italy	1,070	1,52«
Canada	1,140	1.735
France	840	2,201
Sweden	470	1,047
Spam	450	841
Netherlands	420	1,310
Greece	330	723
Denmark	230	762
Austria-Hungary	290	1,011
Russia	740	974

* British dominions

Source Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics (London, 1881) and League of Nations, International Statistics Yearbook igi3, Table 76

THE ARMAMENTS RACE

Military expenditure by the great powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, Russia, Italy and France) 1880-1914

1880 j	—		A £ ]  32 m
	M ill ill muni		/ i n
1890				£158m
			1I1IIIIIF	1
1900				‘ £205 m
1910	••••!!•!Mllllllllllllllil					) £288 r
	! H I I I I I H I I I I H I I H H M			11111111111111 H H H I M
1914		, . , J		, 1 , ,  ,	‘	<	>	) £397 m
								>
0	50	100	150	200	250	300	350	400
				£ million

(Source  The Times Atlas of World History (London, 1978), p 250 )

35°

TABLES

TABLE    12

ARMIES (IN ooos)

		1879	1913
	Peacetime	Mobilized	Peacetime	Mobil
Great Britain	1 36	c 600	160	700
India	c 200	–	2 4 9
Austria-Hungary	267	772	8 0 0	3,000
France	5°3	1,000	1,200	3.500
Germany	4 1 9	1,300	2,200	3,800
Russia	766	1,213	1,400	4,400

TABLE I 3

NAVIES (IN NUMBER OF BATTLESHIPS)

	1900	i9! 4
Great Britain	49	64
Germany	‘4	4 0
France	23	28
Austria-Hungary	6	16
Russia	16	23

351

MAPS

Map i  International migrations 1820-1910 (Source  The Times Atlas of World History)

S^

“W*	rk	<H>^>

J

COUNTRIES	EXPORTATION OF
INVESTING
ABROAD
BRITAIN	^ B r i t i s h capital
FRANCE	=	French capital
U S A	^	USA capital
O other	K M German capital
	=	Other capital

f   J foreign capital invested

^ ^*- *^*&-~/Jl/      S-³  AUSTRIA”

• ” v INDIA

/GERMAN

AEAST AFRICA

V-

UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA

Foreign investment in 1914 (m $ million)

Russia f| _{5 0} o

USAf-= _{^ 3 5 1 0}

HoUand (U=_==14100

Germany*^–_{= i » 5 6 5 0}

France    s~\^^ __J~^v£280

United

Kingdom

V ^

.,.”^N

,USTKALlA

O

• a

Map 2  Movements of capital 1875-1914

Map 5.  Opera and nationalism: performances of Wagner’s Siegfried 1875-1914

Language code :

G = German

(G) New YoA 1887 _{I = Italian} E = English F = French

Flem = Flemish

Russ = Russian

H = Hungarian

Sw = Swedish

Pol = Polish

Dan = Danish

St Petersburg

*

Moscow

Map 4. Europe in 1914

Tfe

Maldivc Is (Br)

<vBrillsh East Africa ^ _{S c y c h c} | _{k s} i_s. (_Br) ^German East Africa

^Portuguese  I K

S^ Ea si Africa^B*

J	Fiji (Br)
	SPrMadn
	Colon!*) powers in 1914

Map 5- The world divided: empires in 1914

358                                                                                                                                               359

NOTES

OVERTURE

[	P Nora in Pierre Nora (ed ), Les heux de la memoire, vol  I La Ripubhque
	(Pans 1984), p xix
2	G Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (London 1964), p 1

CHAPTER  I   THE CENTENARIAN  REVOLUTION

1 Finlay Peter Dunne, Mr hooky Says (New York 1910), pp 46-7 2 M Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics (London 1892 edn), p 573

• P Bairoch, ‘Les grandes tendances des dispantes economiques nationales depuis la Revolution Industnelle’ in Seventh International Economic History Congress, Edinburgh ig?8 Four’A’ Themes (Edinburgh 1978), pp 175-86

• See V G Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse (London 1982), pp 34-6, and D R Headnck, Tools of Empire (New York 1981),

	passim
5	Peter Flora, State, Economy and Society in Western Europe 1815-1975 A Data
	Handbook, 1 (Frankfurt, London and Chicago 1983), p 78
6	W W  Rostow, The World Economy  History and Prospect (London 1978),

P 52

7    Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller (London 1898), vi

• P Bairoch el al, The Working Population and Its Structure (Brussels 1968) for such data

• H L Webb, The Development of the Telephone in Europe (London 1911)

• P Bairoch, De JSricho a Mexico Villes etSconomie dans I’histoire (Pans 1985), partie C, passim for data

• Historical Statistics of the United States, From Colonial Times to /5157 (Wash-ington i960), census of 1890

• Carlo Cipolla, Literacy and Development m the West (Harmondsworth 1969), P 76

• Mulhall, op cit, p 245

• Calculated on the basis of ibid, p 546, ibid, p 549

15   Ibid,   p   100

361

T H E  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

• Roderick Floud, ‘Wirtschaftliche und soziale Einflusse auf die Kor-pergrossen von Europaern seit 1750’, Jahrbuch fur Wirtschqftsgeschchte (East Berlin 1985), 11, pp. 93-118.

• Georg v. Mayr, Statistik und Gesellschaftslehre, n: Bevolkerungsstatistik, 2 (Tubingen 1924), p. 427.

• Mulhall, at., ‘Post Office’, ‘Press’, ‘Science’.

• Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge 1902), 1, p. 4.

• John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Representative Government

(Everyman edn, 1910), p. 73.

• John Stuart Mill, ‘Civilisation’ in Dissertations and Discussions (London, n.d.), p. 130.

C H A P T E R 2 : AN ECONOMY  CHANGES        GEAR

• V. Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century (London 1905), p. 245.

• Cited in E. Maschke, ‘German Cartels from 1873-1914’ in F. Crouzet,

  1. Chaloner and W. M. Stern (eds.), Essays in European Economic History

(London 1969), p. 243.

• From ‘Die Handelskrisen und die Gewerkschaften’, reprinted in Die langen

Wellen der Konjunktur. Beitrage zur Marxistischen Konjunktur- und Knsentheorie

von Parvus, Karl Kautsky, Leo Trotski und Ernest Mandel (Berlin 1972), p. 26. 4 D. A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes (New York 1889), pp. 1-2.

• , p. vi.

• Alfred Marshall, Official Papers (London 1926), p. 98-9.

• C R . Fay, Cooperation at Home and Abroad (1908; London 1948 edn), 1, pp.49 and 114.

• Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760-1gjo

(Oxford i98i),p.259.

• X. v. Neumann-Spallart, Ubersuhten der Weltwirthschaft, Jg. 1881-82

(Stuttgart 1884), pp. 153 and 185 for the basis of these calculations.

10 P. Bairoch, ‘Citta/Campagna’ in Enaclopedia Emaudi, m (Turin 1977), p 89.

• See D. Landes, Revolution in Time (Harvard 1983), p. 289.

• Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass. 1980), P’ 75°-

• Williams’ book was originally a series of alarmist articles published in the imperialist W. E. Henley’s Mew Review. He was also active in the anti-aliens agitation.

14 C. P. Kindleberger, ‘Group Behavior and International Trade’, Journal of Political Economy, 59 (Feb. 1951), p. 37.

• Bairoch, Commerce extirieur et dtveloppement iconomique de I’Europe au XIXe sikle (Paris-Hague 1976), pp. 309-11.

362

NOTES

• (Folke Hilgerdt), Industrialization and Foreign Trade (League of Nations, Geneva 1945), pp. 13, 132-4.

17   H. W. Macrosty, The Trust Movement in British Industry (London 1907),

1. i.

• William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cle-veland and New York 1959), p. 44.

• Bairoch, De Jincho a Mexico, 288.

20 W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations i8jo-igi3 (London 1978), appen-dix IV.

• , p. 275.

• John R. Hanson 11, Trade in Transition: Exportsfrom the Third World 1840-igoo (New York, 1980), p. 55.

• Sidney Pollard, ‘Capital Exports 1870-1914: Harmful or Beneficial?’

Economic History Review, xxxvm (1985), p. 492.

• They were Lloyd’s Weekly and Le Petit Pansien.

• Mathias, Retailing Revolution (London 1967).

• According to the estimates of J. A. Lesourd and Cl. Gerard, Nouvelle

Htstoire £conomique I: Le XIXe Siecle (Paris 1976), p. 247.

CHAPTER  3 :       THE AGE OF EMPIRE

• Cited in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics i8go-ig20

(Chicago 1984), p. 77.

2   Finlay Peter Dunne, Mr Dooley’s Philosophy (New York 1900), pp. 93-4.

• I. Lenin, ‘Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism’, originally published in mid-1917. The later (posthumous) editions of the work use the word ‘highest’ instead of’latest’.

• A. Hobson, Imperialism (London 1902), preface; (1938 edn), p.xxvii.

• Sir Harry Johnston, A History of the Colonization of Africa by Alien Races

(Cambridge 1930; first edn 1913), p. 445.

• Michael Barratt Brown, The Economics of Imperialism (Harmondsworth 1974), p. 175; for the vast and, for our purposes, oversophisticated debate

on this subject, see Pollard, ‘Capital Exports 1870-1914’, loc. cit.

7   W. G. Hynes, The Economics ofEmpire. Britain, Africa and the Mew Imperialism, i8jo-i8g5 (London 1979), passim.

• Cited in D. C. M. Piatt, Finance, Trade and Politics: British Foreign Policy r8i^-igi4 (Oxford 1968), pp. 365-6.

• Max Beer, “Der neue enghsche Imperialismus’, Meue £«(, xvi (1898),

304. 304. More generally, B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought i8g$-igi4 (London i960).

• E. C. Bodley, The Coronation of Edward VII. A Chapter of European and

Imperial History (London 1903), pp. 153 and 201.

• Burton Benedict et al., The Anthropology of World’s Fairs. San Francisco’s

363

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

Panama Pacific International Exposition ofigi^  (London and Berkeley 1983),

P 23

• Encyclopedia of Missions (2nd edn New York and London 1904), appendix iv, pp 838-9

• Dichonnaire de spirituality (Pans 1979), x, ‘Mission’, pp 1398-9

• Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Vienna 1909, 1923 edn), p 470

• P Bairoch, ‘Geographical Structure and Trade Balance of European Foreign Trade from 1800 to 1970’, Journal of European Economic History, 3 (1974), pp 557-608, CommerceexUneur et dtveloppement iconomiquede VEurope au XlXe sikle, p 81

16	P J	Cam and A G Hopkins,’The Political Economy ofBritish Expansion
	Overseas, 1750-1914′, Economic History Review, xxxin		(1980), pp  463-
	90
17	J E	Flint,’Britain and the Partition of West Africa’in J E	Flint and G
	Williams (eds ), Perspectives of Empire (London 1973), p 111
18	C Southworth, The French Colonial Venture (London 1931), appendix table
	7  However, the average dividend for companies operating in French
	colonies in that year was 4 6 per cent
19	M K	Gandhi, Collected Works, 1 1884-96 (New Delhi 1958)

• For the unusually successful, for a while, incursion of Buddhism into western milieux, seeJan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras (Middletown, Conn 1978), pp 501-3, and the export of Indian holy men abroad, largely via champions drawn from among Theosophists Among them Vivekananda (1863-1902) of’Vedanta’ can claim to be the first of the commercial gurus of the modern West

• R H Gretton, A Modern History ofthe English People, 11 1899-1910 (London 1913)» P 25

• W L Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1800-1902 (New York 1968 edn), pp 387 and 448 More generally, H Gollwitzer, Die gelbe Gefahr Geschichte eines Schlagworts Studien zum imperiahstischen Denken (Gottingen 1962)

• Rudyard Kipling, ‘Recessional’ in R Kipling’s Verse, Inclusive Edition 1885-igi8 (London n d ), p 377

• Hobson, op cit (1938 edn), p 314

• See H G Wells, The Time Machine (London 1895)

• H G v Schulze-Gaevernitz, Bntischer Imperialisms und enghscher Freihandel ZU Begmn des 20 Jahrhunderts (Leipzig 1906)

CHAPTER  4         THE POLITICS OF DEMOCRCY

i    Gaetano Mosca, Elementi di scienza pohtica (1895), trs as The Ruling Class

(New York 1939), pp 333-4

2   Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, I (London 1983), p 156

3⁶4

N O T ES

• Edward A Ross, ‘Social Control vn Assemblage’, American Journal of Sociology, Ii (1896-7), p 830

• Among the works which then appeared, Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941),

Elementi di scienza politico, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Industrial Democracy

(1897), M Ostrogorski (1854-1919), Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902), Robert Michels (1876-1936), Z^ur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Political Parties) (1911), Georges Sorel (1847-1922), Reflexions on Violence (1908)

• Hilaire Belloc, Sonnets and Verse (London 1954), p 151 ‘On a General Election’, Epigram xx

• David Fitzpatnck, “The Geography of Irish Nationalism’, Past & Present,

78 (Feb  1978), pp 127-9)

• H – J Puhle, Pohtische Agrarbewegungen in kapitahstischen Industriegesellschafte

(Gottingen 1975), p 64

• G Hohorst, J  Kocka and G A  Ritter, Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch

	Materiahen zur Statistik des Kaiserreichs i8yo-igi4 (Munich 1975), p	177
9	Michels, op cit (Stuttgart 1970 edn), part vi, ch 2
10	R F  Foster, Lord Randolph Churchill, a Political Life (Oxford 1981), p 395
Ii	C Benoist, UOrganisation du suffrage unwersel Lacnsedel’etatmoderne (Pans
	‘897)
12	C Headlam (ed ), The Milner Papers (London 1931-3), 11, p 291
13	T H S  Escott, Social Transformations of the Victorian Age (London	1897),
	p 166

• Flora, op cit, ch 5

• Calculated from Hohorst, Kocka and Ritter, op cit, p 179

• Gary B Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival Germans in Prague 186i-igi4

(Princeton 1981), pp 92-3

• Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London 1908), p 21

• David Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual

The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition” c 1820-1977′ in E J Hobsbawm and T Ranger (eds ), The Invention of Tradition (Cam-bridge 1983), pp 101-64

• The distinction comes from Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, first published in the Fortnightly Review (1865-67), as part of the debate on the Second Reform Bill, 1 e on whether to give workers the vote

• Rosemonde Sanson, Les 14 Juillet fite et conscience nationale, i78g-igjfj (Pans 1976), p 42, on the motives of the Pans authorities in combining popular amusements and public ceremony

• Hans-Georg John, Pohtik und Turnen die deutsche Turnerschaft als nationale Bewegung im deutschen Kaiserreuh von 1870-1914 (Ahrensberg bei Hamburg

i976)>PP 3⁶-9

• T believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters’ (Debate on the Third Reading of the

365

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

	Reform Bill, Parliamentary Debates, 15 July	1867, p 1549, col 1)	This is
	the original version of the phrase which, shortened, became familiar
23	Cannadine, op at, p 130
24	Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade	(Cambridge, Mass	1955),
	pp  218-22

• Maurice Dommanget, Eugtne Pother, membre de la Commune et chantre de VInternationale (Pans 1971), p 138

• V I Lenin, State and Revolution part 1, section 3

CHAPTER 5       WORKERS OF THE WORLD

• The labourer Franz Rehbein, remembering in 1911 From Paul Gohre (ed ), Das Leben ernes Landarbeiters (Munich 1911), cited in W Emmerich (ed ), Proletansche Lebenslaufe, 1 (Reinbek 1974), p 280

• Samuel Gompers, Labor in Europe and America (New York and London i9io),pp 238-9

3	Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit   Arbeiterkultur in Osterreich igiS-igj^  (Vienna
	1981)
4	Sartonus v Waltershausen, Die italiemschen Wanderarbeiter (Leipzig 1903),
	pp  13, 20, 22 and 27 I owe this reference to Dirk Hoerder
5	Bairoch, De Jincho a Mexico, pp 385-6

• W H Schroder, Arbeitergeschichte und Arbeiterbewegung Industnearbeit und Organisationsverhalten im ig undfruhen 20 Jahrhundert (Frankfurt and New York 1978), pp 166-7 and 304

• Jonathan Hughes, The Vital Few American Economic Progress and its Pro-tagonists (London, Oxford and New York 1973), p 329

• Bairoch, ‘Citta/Campagna’, p 91

9   W Woytinsky, Die Welt in £ahlen, n Die Arbeit (Berlin 1926), p 17

• Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten ketnen Sozialismus^? (Tubingen 1906)

• Jean Touchard, La Gauche en France depuis igoo (Pans 1977), p 62, Luigi Cortesi, // Socialismo Itahano tra riforme e nvoluzione Dibatli congressuali del Psi i8g2-ig2i (Ban 1969), p 549

• Maxime Leroy, La Coutdme ouvnere (Pans 1913), 1, p 387

• D Crew, Bochum Sozialgeschwhte emer Industnestadt (Berlin and Vienna

1980), p  200

14   Guy Chaumel, Histoire des chemmots et de leurs syndicats (Pans 1948), p 79,

n 22

• Crew, op at, pp 19, 70 and 25

• Yves Lequin, Les Ouvners de la rigion lyonnaise, 1 La Formation de la classe ouvnere rigionale (Lyon 1977), p 202

• The first recorded use of’big business’ (OED Supplement 1976) occurs in 1912 in the USA, ‘Grossmdustne’ appears earlier, but seems to become common during the Great Depression

• Askwith’s memorandum is cited in H Pelhng, Popular Politics and Society

366

N O T ES

	in Late Victorian Britain (London 1968), p 147
19	Maurice Dommanget, Histoire du Premier Mai (Pans 1953), p 252
20	W L	Guttsman, The German Social-Democratic Party tSy^-igjj		(London
	i98i),p		96
21	Ibid,	p	160
22	Mit uns zieht du neue Zelt   Arbeiterkultur in Osterreich igi8-ig^4			Eine Aus-
	stellung		der Osterreichischen Gesellschaft fur  Kulturpohtik und des Meidhnger
	Kulturkreises, 23 Janner-30 August 1981 (Vienna), p 240

• Constitution of the British Labour Party

• Robert Hunter, Socialists at Work (New York 1908) p 2

• Georges Haupt, Programm und Wirkhchkeit Du Internationale Sozialdemokratie vor igi4 (Neuwied 1970), p 141

• And perhaps even more popular, the anti-clerical Corvin’s Pfaffenspiegel

(H -J Steinberg, Soziahsmus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie  Z^ur  Ideologie der

Partei vor dem ersten Weltkneg [Hanover 1967], p 139) The SPD Congress (Parteitag) 1902 observes that only anti-clerical party literature really sells Thus in 1898 the Manifesto is issued in an edition of 3000, Bebel’s Chnstenthum und Soziahsmus in 10,000 copies, in 1901-4 the Manifesto was issued in 7000 copies, Bebel’s Chnstenthum in 57,000 copies

27    K Kautsky, La Questione Agrana (Milan 1959 edn), p 358 The quotation is at the start of Part 11,1 c

C H A P T E R  6      WAVING  FLAGS      NATIONS AND      NATIONALISM

• I owe this quotation from the Italian writer F Jovine (1904-1950) to Martha Petrusewicz of Princeton University

• H G Wells, Anticipations (London 5th edn 1902), pp 225-6

• Alfredo Rocco, What Is Nationalism and What Do the Nationalists WanP

(Rome 1914)

• See Georges Haupt, Michel Lowy and Claudie Weill, Les Marxistes et la

question natwnale 1848-1914 Uudes et textes (Pans 1974)

• E Bnx, Die Umgangsprachen in Altosterreich zwischen Agitation und Assimilation Die Sprachenstatistik in den zisleithanischen Volkszahlungen 1880-igw (Vienna, Cologne and Graz 1982), p 97

6    H Roos, A History of Modern Poland (London 1966), p 48

• Lluis Garcia 1 Sevilla, ‘Llengua, nacio 1 estat al diccionano de la reial academia espanyola’, L’Avenf, Barcelona (16 May 1979), pp 50-5

• Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States (London 1977), p 85

• I owe this information to Dirk Hoerder

• Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ‘Naturalization and Citi-zenship’, p 747

11	Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origins and Spread
	of Nationalism (London 1983), pp  107-8
12	C Bobinska and Andrzej Pilch (eds ), Employment-seeking Emigrations of the
	367

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

Poles World-Wide XIXand  XX C. (Cracow 1975) pp. 124-6.

• Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics i8go-ig20 (Chicago 1984), pp. 54 ff.

• Lonn Taylor and Ingrid Maar, The American Cowboy (Washington DC 1983). PP-9&-8.

• Hans Mommsen, Nationalitdtenfrage und Arbeiterbewegung (Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus, Trier 1971), pp. 18-19.

• History of the Hungarian Labour Movement. Guide to the Permanent Exhibition of the Museum of the Hungarian Labour Movement (Budapest 1983), pp. 31 ff.

• Marianne Heiberg, ‘Insiders/Outsiders; Basque Nationalism’, Archives

Europknnes de Sociologie,xvi (1975), pp. 169-93.

• Zolberg, ‘The Making ofFlemings and Walloons: Belgium 1830-1914’,

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, v (1974), pp. 179-235; H.-J. Puhle, ‘Baskischer Nationalisms im spanischen Kontext’ in H. A. Winkler (ed.), Nationalisms in der Welt von Heute (Gottingen 1982), especially pp. 60-5.

• Enciclopedia Italiana, ‘Nazionalismo’.

• Peter Hanak, ‘Die Volksmeinung wahrend den letzten Kriegsjahren in Osterreich-Ungarn’ in R. G. Plaschka and K. H. Mack (eds.), Die Auflos-

ung des Habsburgerreiches: Zusammenbruch und Neuorientierung im Donauraum

(Vienna 1970), pp. 58-67.

CHAPTER 7: WHO’S WHO OR THE UNCERTAINTIES OF THE

BOURGEOISIE

• William James, The Principles ofPsychology (New York 1950), p. 291. I owe this reference to Sanford Elwitt.

• G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909; Modern Library edn), p. 249.

• Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York 1961), p.495.

• Mark Girouard, TAe Victorian Country House (New Haven and London ^r979)> pp. 208-12.

• S. Adams, Edwardian Portraits (London 1957), pp. 3-4.

• This is a basic theme of Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna (London 1980).

• Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of

Institutions (1899). Revised edition New York 1959.

• D. Rubinstein, ‘Wealth, Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain’, Past & Present, 76 (Aug. 1977), p. 102.

• Adolf v. Wilke, Alt-Berliner Erinnerungen (Berlin 1930), pp. 232 f.

• L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London”1963), pp. 122-7.

• Touchard, cit., p. 128.

• Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-^45 (Oxford 1973), 1, p. 37; D. C. Marsh,

The Changing Social Structure ofEngland and Wales i8yi-ig6i   (London 1958),

122. 122.

368

N O T ES

• A. Ritter and J. Kocka, Deutsche Sozialgeschichte. Dokumente und Skizzen.

Band II1870-1914 (Munich 1977), pp. 169-70.

• Paul Descamps, !.’Education dans les icoles Anglaises (Paris 1911), p. 67.

• Zeldin, cit., 1, pp. 612-13.

• , 11, p. 250; H.-U. Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871-1918 (Gottingen 1973), p. 126; Ritter and Kocka, op. cit., pp. 341-3.

• Ritter and Kocka, cit., pp. 327-8 and  352; Arno Mayer,  The

Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York 1981), p. 264.

• Hohorst, Kocka and Ritter, cit., p. 161; J. J. Mayeur, Les Dibuts de la IHe Ripublique 1871-1898 (Paris 1973), p. 150; Zeldin, op. cit., 11, p. 330. Mayer, op. cit., p. 262.

• Ritter and Kocka, op. cit., p. 224.

• Cassis, Les Banquiers de la City a I’ipoque Edouardienne 1890-1914 (Geneva 1984).

• Skidelsky, cit., 1 p. 84.

• Crew, cit., p. 26.

• v. Schmoller, Was verstehen wir unter dem Mittelstande? Hat er im 19.

Jahrhundert zu- oder abgenommen? (Gottingen 1907).

• Sombart, Die deutsche Volkswirthschaft im 19. Jahrhundert und im Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin 1903), pp. 534 and 531.

• Pollard, ‘Capital Exports 1870-1914’, pp. 498-9.

• R. Lawson, John Bull and His Schools: A Bookfor Parents, Ratepayers and Men of Business (Edinburgh and London 1908), p. 39. He estimated the ‘middle class proper’ at c. half a million.

• John R. de S. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the Victorian

Public School (London 1977).

• Raimond Baird, American College Fraternities: a descriptive analysis of the

Society System of the Colleges of the United States with a detailed account of each

fraternity (New York 1890), p. 20.

• Mayeur, cit., p. 81.

• Escott, cit., pp. 202-3.

• The Englishwoman’s Tear-Book (1905), p. 171.

• Escott, cit., p. 196.

• As can be verified from the Victoria County History for that county.

• Principles of Economics (London 8th edn 1920), p. 59.

• Skidelsky, cit., pp. 55-6.

• Wilsher, The Pound in Tour Pocket 1870-1970 (London 1970), pp. 81, 96 and 98.

• Hughes, cit., p. 252.

38    Cited in W. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution (Princeton 1974),

p p. 205-12.

369

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

• Sartorius v. Waltershausen, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte 1815-1914 (2nd ednjena 1923), p. 521.

• g. in Man and Superman, Misalliance.

41    Robert Wohl, The Generation 0/1914 (London 1980), pp. 89, 169 and 16.

C H A P T E R  8 :    THE  NEW     WOMAN

• Nunberg and E. Federn (eds.), Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, 1: 1906-1908 (New York 1962), pp. 199-200.

• Cited in W. Ruppert (ed.), Die Arbeiter: Lebensformen, Alltag und Kultur

(Munich 1986), p. 69.

• Anthony, Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia (New York 1915), p. 231.

• Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Jena 1902 edn), ‘BeruP, p. 626, and ‘Frauenarbeit’, p. 1202.

• , ‘Hausindustrie’, pp. 1148 and 1150.

• Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York 1978), p. 124.

• Handworterbuch, ‘Frauenarbeit’, pp. 1205-6.

• For Germany: Hohorst, Kocka and Ritter, cit., p 68, n. 8; for Britain, Mark Abrams, The Condition of the British People 1911-1945 (London 1946), pp. 60-1; Marsh, op. cit., p. 127.

• Zeldin, cit., n, p. 169.

• Cadbury, M. C. Matheson and G. Shann, Women’s Work and Wages (London 1906), pp. 49 and 129. The book describes conditions in Birm-ingham.

• Margaret Bryant, The Unexpected Revolution (London 1979), p. 108.

• Edmee Charnier, L’Evolution intellectuelleftminine (Paris 1937), pp. 140 and

189. See also H.-J. Puhle, ‘Warum gibt es so wenige Historikerinnen?’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 7 Jg. (1981), especially p. 373.

• Rosa Levine-Meyer, Levini (London 1973), p. 2.

• First translated into English in 1891.

• Caroline Kohn, Karl Kraus (Stuttgart 1966), p. 259, n. 40; J. Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras, 604.

• Donald R. Knight, Great White City, Shepherds Bush, London: yoth Anniversary,

1908-1978 (New Barnet 1978), p. 26.

• I owe this point to a student of Dr S. N. Mukherjee of Sydney University.

• Claude Willard, Les Guesdistes (Paris 1965), p. 362.

• D. H. Cole, A History ofthe Labour Partyfrom 1914 (London 1948), p. 480; Richard J. Evans, The Feminists (London 1977), p. 162.

• Woytinsky, cit., n, provides the basis for these data.

• Calculated from Men and Women of the Time (1895).

• For conservative feminism, see also E. Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century (1961 edn), vi, p. 509.

• For these developments see S. Giedion, Mechanisation Takes Command (New

370

N O T ES

York 1948), passim; for the quotation, pp. 520-1.

• Rodelle Weintraub (ed.), Bernard Shaw and Women (Pennsylvania State University 1977), pp. 3-4.

• Jean Maitron and Georges Haupt (eds.), Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier international: L’Autriche (Paris 1971), p. 285.

• E. B. Howarth, Cambridge Between Two Wars (London 1978), p. 45-

• P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg (London 1966), 1, p. 144.

CHAPTER 9:   THE ARTS TRANSFORMED

i    Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe in Paris (trs. New York 1915), pp. 120-

• Laing, Modern Science and Modem Thought (London 1896), pp. 230-1, originally published 1885.

• T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York 1971), p. 67.

• Peter Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting and Performance i8go-igi4 (Cambridge, Mass. 1985), p. 102.

• The word was coined by M. Agulhon, ‘La statuomanie et l’histoire’,

Ethnologic Frangaise 3-4 (1978).

• John Willett, ‘Breaking Away’, New York Review of Books, 28 May 1981,

PP^ 47-9-

7 The Englishwoman’s Year-Book (1905), ‘Colonial journalism for women’, P- 138.

• Among the other series which cashed in on the thirst for self-education and culture in Britain, we may mention the Camelot Classics (1886-91), the 300-odd volumes of Cassell’s National Library (1886-90 and 1903-7), Cassell’s Red Library (1884-90) Sir John Lubbock’s Hundred Books, published by Routledge (also publisher of Modern Classics from 1897) from 1891, Nelson’s Classics (1907-) – the ‘Sixpenny Classics’ only lasted

1905-7 – and Oxford’s World’s Classics. Everyman (1906-) deserves credit for publishing a major modern classic, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, in itsfirstfiftytitles, between Macaulay’s History ofEngland and Lockhart’s

Life of Sir Walter Scott.

• Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Geschichte der poetischen Mationalliteratur der Deut-schen, 5 vols. (1836-42).

• Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht in Sdmtliche Werke (Stuttgart 1965), ix, pp. 65 and 587.

• Hinton Thomas, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society i8go-igi8 (Man-chester 1984), stresses – one might say overstresses – his appeal for lib-ertarians. Nevertheless, and in spite of Nietzsche’s dislike of anarchists (cf. Jenseits von Gut und Base in Samtliche Werke, VII, pp. 114, 125), in French anarchist circles of the 1900s ‘on discute avec fougue Stirner, Nietzsche

et surtout Le Dantec’ (Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France [Paris 1975]!, p. 421).

37′

			THE AGE OF EMPIRE
12	Eugenia W  Herbert, Artists and Social Reform			France and Belgium		1885-
	i8g8	(New Haven	1961), p 21
13	Patrizia Doghani, La ‘Scuola delle Reclute’ L’Internazionale Giovanile Socialista
	dallafine dell’ottocento, alia prima guerra mondiale (Turin 1983), p  147
14	G W	Plechanow, Kunst und Literatur (East Berlin 1955), p			295
15	J C	HoIl, Lajeune	Peinture contemporaine (Pans	1912), pp	14-15
16	‘On	the spiritual in art’, cited in New York Review of Books, 16 Feb				1984,
	p 28
17	Cited in Romein,		Watershed of Two Eras, p 572

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

• Max Raphael, Von Monet zu Picasso Grundzuge einer Aesthehk und Enlwicklung der modernen Malerei (Munich 1913)

• The role of countries with a strong democratic and populist press, and lacking a large middle-class public, in the evolution of the modern political cartoon is to be noted For the importance of pre-1914 Australia in this connection, see E J Hobsbawm, Introduction to Communist Cartoons by ‘Espoir’ and others (London 1982), p 3

21	Peter Bachlin, Der Film als Ware (Basel 1945), p			214, n	14
22	T  Baho (ed ), The American Film Industry (Madison, Wis				1985), p	86
23	G P	Brunetta, Storm del cinema itahano iSg^-ig^jj		(Rome 1979), p		44
24	Baho, op at,  p		98
25	Ibid,	p  8y, Mil	uns zieht die Neue £eil,p   185

• Brunetta, op at, p 56

• Luigi Chianni, ‘Cinematography’ in Encyclopedia of World Art (New York, London and Toronto i960), in, p 626

CHAPTERIO		GERTAINTIESUNDERMINED  THESCIENGES
1	Laing, op at,	p 51
2	Raymond  Pearl, Modes of Research in Genetics (New York  1915), p  159
	The passage is reprinted from 31913 lecture
3	Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Fieldfor Saenhfic
	Method in Philosophy (London 1952 edn), p  109
4	Carl Boyer, A History of Mathematics (New York 1968), p 82

• Bourbaki, Aliments d’hutoire des mathimatiques (Pans 1960), p 27 The group of mathematicians publishing under this name were interested in

the history of their subject primarily in relation to their own work

6	Boyer, op at,	p	649
7	Bourbaki, p	43
8	F  Dannemann,		Die  Maturwissenschqften in ihrer Entwicklung  und ihrem
	Zusammenhange (Leipzig and Berlin 1913), iv, p 433

• Henry Smith Williams, The Story of Nineteenth-Century Science (London and New York 1900), p 231

• Ibid, pp  230-1

372

NOTES

11

Ibid,  p 236

12

C C

Gilhspie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton i960), p 507

13

Cf

Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (New York 1949)

14

J D

Bernal, Science in History (London 1965), p 630

15

Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago  1979,

ong

Basel 1935), pp  68-9

16

W

Treue and K

Mauel

(eds ), Naturwissenschaft,

Technik und Wirtschaft

irn 19 Jahrhundert,

2 vols

(Gottingen

1976), 1, pp

271-4 and

348-56

17

Nietzsche, Der WiUe zur Macht, book iv, e g  pp

607-9

18

C

Webster (ed ),Biology,

Medicine and Society 1840-1940 (Cambridge 1981),

P

225

19

ibid,

p  221

20

As is suggested by the titles of A

Ploetz and F

Lentz, Deutsche Gesellschaft

fur

Rassenhygiene (1905

‘German

Society for Racial

Hygiene’), and  the

Society’s journal

Archiv fur  Rassen-

und Gesellschaftsbiologie

(‘Archives  of

Racial and Social Biology’), or G

F

Schwalbe’s ^eitschriftfur

Morphologie

und Anthropologic, Erb-

und Rassenbiologie (1899

‘Journal for

Morphology,

Anthropology, Genetic and Racial Biology’)

Cf J

Sutter,

L’Euginique

Problemes-MUhodes-Rhultats (Pans

1950), pp  24-5)

• Kenneth M Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society A Historical Appraisal

(Baltimore 1972), p 37

• Cited in Romein, op cit, p 343

• Webster, op at, p 266

24	Ernst Mach in Neue Osterreichische Biographic, 1 (Vienna 1923)
2 5	J J  Salomon, Science and Politics (London 1973), p  xiv

• Gilhspie, op cit, p 499

• Nietzsche, WiUe zur Macht, Vorrede, p 4

• Ibid, aphorisms, p 8

• Bernal (op cit, p 503) estimates that in 1896 there were perhaps 50,000 persons in the world carrying on ‘the whole tradition of science’, of whom 15,000 did research The number grew from 1901 to 1915 there were in the USA alone c 74,000 first degrees or bachelors in the natural sciences

and 2577 doctoral degrees in natural sciences and engineering (D M Blank and George J Stigler, The Demand and Supply of Scientific Personnel

[New York 1957], pp  5-6)

• G W Roderick, The Emergence of a Scientific Society (London and New York 1967), p 48

• Frank R Pfetsch, Z^ur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftspohtik in Deutschland ’75°-‘9’4 (Berlin 1974), pp 340 ff

• The prizes have been taken to 1925 so as to allow for some lag in recognizing achievements of the brilliant young in the last pre-1914 years

• Joseph Ben-David, ‘Professions in the Class Systems of Present-Day Soci-eties’, Current Sociology, 12 (1963-4), pp 262-9

373

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

• Paul Levy, Moore G E Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford 1981), PP 309-1i

CHAPTER I I REASON AND SOCIETY i Rolland, op at, p 222

2   Nunberg and Federn, op at,  11, p 178

• Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen 1968), p 166

4	Guy		Vincent,	L’Ecole pnmaire frangaise Etude soaologique (Lyon 1980),
	P 332, n  779
5	Vivekananda,			Works, part iv, cited in Sedition Committee igi8			Report (Cal-
	cutta		1918), p	17 n
6	Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge 1971), p 249
7	R	M	Goodndge,  ‘Nineteenth  Century  Urbanisation			and	Religion
	Bristol and Marseille, 1830-1880′, Soaological Yearbook ofReligion in Britain,
	i (London 1969) p 131
8	‘La bourgeoisie adhere au rationnahsme, Pmstituteur au sociahsme’ –
	Gabriel Le Bras, Etudes de soaologie rttigieuse, 2 vols					(Pans 1955-6), 1,
	P	‘ 5 1
9	A	Fliche and V			Martin, Histoire de l’£ghse  Le pontificat de Pie IX (2nd
	edn Pans 1964), p				130

• S Bonnet, C Santini and H Barthelemy, ‘Appartenance politique et attitude rehgieuse dans !’immigration italienne en Lorraine siderurgique,

Archives de Soaologie des Religions 13 (1962), pp 63-6

• R Duocastella, ‘Geographie de la pratique rehgieuse en Espagne’, Social

Compass, xn (1965), p 256, A Leoni, Soaologia e geografia religtosa di una

Diocesi saggio sulla pratica rehgiosa nella Diocesi di Mantova (Rome 1952),

P  ” 7

• Halevy, op at, V, p 171

• Massimo Salvadon, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution (London 1979), PP 23-4

• Not to mention the sister of the socialist leader Otto Bauer who, under another name,figuresprominently in Freud’s case-book See Ernst Glaser,

Im Umfeld des Austromarxismus (Vienna 1981),passim

• For this episode see Marx-Engels Arckv, ed D Rjazanov (reprint Erlangen 1970.». P HO

• The fullest discussions of the expansion of Marxism are not available m English , cf E J Hobsbawm, ‘La diffusione del Marxismo, 1890-1905’,

Studi Stonci, xv (1974), pp 241-69, Storia del Marxismo, 11 // marxismo nell’eta delta seconda Internazionale (Turin 1979), pp 6-110, articles by F Andreucci and E J Hobsbawm

• E v Bohm-Bawerk, Z^um Abschluss des Marxschen Systems (Berlin 1896), long remained the most powerful orthodox critique of Marx Bohm-

374

NOTES

Bawerk held cabinet office in Austria three times during this period

18 Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics, originally published in 1872 The 1887 series was edited by Kegan Paul

• Otto Hmtze, ‘Ober individualistische und kollektivistische Geschichts auffassung’, Histonsche geitschrift, 78 (1897), p 62

• See in particular the long polemic of G v Below, ‘Die neue histonsche

Methode’, Histonsche ^eitschrift, 81 (1898), pp  193-273

• Schorske, op cit, p 203

• William MacDougall (1871-1938), An Introduction to Social Psychology

(London 1908)

• William James, Varieties of Religious Belief (New York 1963 edn), p 388

• E Gothein, ‘Gesellschaft und Gesellschaftswissenschaft’ in Handworterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (Jena 1900), iv, p 212

CHAPTER  12      TOWARDS REVOLUTION

i	D Norman (ed ), Nehru, The First Sixty Years, 1 (New York 1965), p 12
2	Mary Clabaugh Wright (ed ) China in Revolution  The First Phase /900-/0/5
	(New Haven 1968), p 118

• Collected Works, ix, p 434

• Selected Works (London 1936), iv, pp 297-304

• For a comparison of the two Iranian revolutions, see Nikki R Keddie, ‘Iranian Revolutions in Comparative Perspective’, American Historical Review, 88 (1983), pp 579-98

• John Lust, ‘Les societes secretes, les mouvements populaires et la rev-

olution de i g i i ‘ i n j Chesneaux rf a/ (eds), Mouvements populaires et sonde’s secretes en Chine aux XIXe et XXe sikles (Pans 1970), p 370

• Edwin Lieuwen, Arms and Politics in Latin America (London and New York

1961 edn), p 21

• For the transition, see chapter 3 of M TV” Roy’s Memoirs (Bombay, New Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, London and New York 1964)

• Friednch Katz, The Secret War in Mexico Europe, The United States and the

Mexican Revolution (Chicago and London 1981), p 22

• Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801-igiy (Oxford 1967), p 507

• P I Lyashchenko, History ofthe Russian National Economy (New York 1949),

	PP 453. 4 6 8 a n d	5 2 0
12	Ibid, pp 528-9
13	Michael Futrell,	Northern Underground	Episodes of Russian Revolutionary
	Transport and Communication Through Scandinavia and Finland (London 1963),
	passim
14	M S Anderson, The Ascendancy ofEurope 1815-1914. (London 1972), p 266
15	T Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford 1972), p 38 n
16	I follow the arguments of L  Haimson’s		pathbreaking articles in Slavic

375

THE AGE OF EMPIRE

Review, 23 (1964), pp. 619-42 and 24 (1965), pp. 1-22,’Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia 1905-17′.

CHAPTER    1 3 :    FROM PEACE TO WAR

1   Fiirst von Bulow, Denkwiirdigkeiten, I (Berlin 1930), pp. 415-16.

• Bernard Shaw to Clement Scott, 1902: G. Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters, i8g&-igw (London 1972), p. 260.

• Marinetti, cit., p. 42.

• Leviathan, part 1, ch. 13.

5    Wille Z^ur  Macht, loc. cit., p. 92.

• Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War: The Collapse of the Second

International (Oxford 1972), pp. 220 and 258.

• Gaston Bodart, Losses of Life in Modern Wars (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Oxford 1916), pp. 153 ff.

• Stanley Jevons, The British Coal Trade (London 1915), pp. 367-8 and 374-

• Ashworth, ‘Economic Aspects of Late Victorian Naval Adminis-tration’, Economic History Review, x x n (1969), p. 491.

to Engels to Danielson, 22 Sept. 1892: Marx-Engels Werke, xxxvin (Berlin i968),p.467.

11. Clive Trebilcock, ‘ “Spin-off” in British Economic History: Armaments and Industry, 1760-1914’, Economic History Review, xxn (1969), p. 480.

• Romein, cit., p. 124.

• Admiral Raeder, Strugglefor the Sea (London 1959), pp. 135 and 260.

• David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge 1969), pp. 240-1.

15   D. C. Watt, A History of the World in the Twentieth Century (London 1967),

i, p. 220.

• A. G. Lennox (ed.), The Diary of Lord Bertie of Thame 1914-1918 (London 1924). PP-352 and 355.

• Chris Cook and John Paxon, European Political Facts 1848-1918 (London 1978), p. 188.

• Norman Stone, Europe Transformed 1878-1918 (London 1983), p. 331.

• Offner, ‘The Working Classes, British Naval Plans and the Coming of

the Great War’, Past & Present, 107 (May 1985), pp. 204-26, discusses this at length.

• Haupt, cit., p. 175.

• Marc Ferro, La Grande Guerre 1914-1918 (Paris 1969), p. 23.

• Emmerich (ed.), Proletarische Lebensldufe (Reinbek 1975), 11, p. 104.

• Haupt, cit., p. 253 n.

• Wille zur Macht, 92.

• Rupert Brooke, ‘Peace’ in Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (London 1915).

• Wille zur Macht, 94.

376

NOTES

EPILOGUE

• Bertolt Brecht, ‘An die Nachgeborenen’ in Hundert Gedichte igi&-igso (East Berlin 1955), p. 314.

• Albert O. Hirschman, The Political Economy of Latin American Development:

Seven Exercises in Retrospection (Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, December 1986), p. 4.

377

F U R T H E R    R E A D I N G

‘A shilling life will give you all the facts,’ wrote the poet W. H. Auden about the subject of his reflections. It costs more today, but anyone who wishes to find out, or to be reminded of, the main events and personalities of nineteenth-century history should read this book together with one of the many basic school or college texts, such as Gordon Craig’s Europe 1815-1914 (1971), and may usefully also consult such reference works as Neville Williams, Chronology of the Modern World (1969), which gives the main events under various subjects for each year since 1763. Among textbooks on the period covered in this book, the early chapters in James JoIl, Europe Since 1870 (various editions) and Norman Stone, Europe Transformed 1878-1918 (1983) are to be recommended. D. C. Watt, History of the World in the Twentieth Century, vol.i: 1890-1918 (1967) is strong on international relations. The present author’s The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 and The Age of Capital 1848-I8J$ provide the background to this volume, which continues the survey of the nineteenth century begun in the earlier volumes.

There are by now numerous more or less impressionistic or rather pointillist pictures of Europe and the world in the last decades before 1914, among which Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower (1966) is the most widely distributed. Edward R. Tannenbaum, 1900, The Generation Before the Great War (1976) is less well known. The one I like best, partly because I have drawn heavily on its encyclopaedic erudition, partly because I share an intellectual tradition and historical ambition with the author, is the late Jan Romein’s The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in igoo (1976).

There are a number of collective or encyclopaedic works, or reference compendia, which cover subjects in our period as well as much else. The relevant volume (xn) of the Cambridge Modem History is not to be recommended, but those of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe

(vols, vi and vn) contain excellent studies. The Cambridge History of the British Empire represents an obsolete and useless style of history, but the

379

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

histories of Africa, China and especially Latin America belong properly to the historiography of the late twentieth century. Among historical atlases the Times Atlas of World History (1978), compiled under the direction of an original and imaginative historian, G. Barraclough, is outstanding, the Penguin Atlas of Modern History is very useful. Chambers Biographical Dictionary contains brief data on a surprising number of persons of all periods up to the present in a single volume. Michael MulhalPs Dictionary of Statistics (1898 edition reprinted 1969) remains indispensable for the nineteenth century. B. Mitchell’s European His-torical Statistics (1980) is the essential modern compendium, primarily economic. Peter Flora (ed.), State, Economy and Society in Western Europe 1815-1975 (1983) contains a mass of information on political, in-stitutional and administrative, educational and other matters. Jan Romein’s The Watershed of Two Eras is not designed as a work of reference, but can be consulted as such, especially on matters of culture and ideas.

On a subject of special interest for the period, I. Ferenczi and W. F. Wilcox (eds.), International Migration, 2 vols (1929-31) is still the best source. On a topic of permanent interest, C. McEvedy and R. Jones,

An Atlas of World Population History (1978) is convenient. Some works of reference on more specialized subjects are mentioned under separate headings. Anyone who would like to know how the nineteenth century saw itself just before the First World War should consult the 11 th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (the last British one, 1911), which, because of its excellence, is still available in many good reference libraries.

ECONOMIC    HISTORY

On  the economic history of the period, brief introductions  are  W.

Woodruff, Impact of Western Man: A Study of Europe’s Role in the World

Economy 1750-1960 (1966)  and  W. Ashworth,  A Short History of the

International Economy Since 1850 (various editions). The Cambridge Economic

History of Europe (vols, vi and vn) and C. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe (vols, iv and v, parts 1 and 2) (1973-5), are co-operative ventures ranging in quality from the good to the outstanding. Paul Bairoch’s The Economic Development of the Third World Since igoo (1975) extends the range. Of the many useful works of this author, unfortunately only some of them translated, P. Bairoch and M. Levy-Leboyer (eds.), Disparities in Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution (1981) contains relevant material. A. Milward and S. B. Saul,

The Economic Development of Continental Europe 1780-1870 (1973) and The Development of the Economies of Continental Europe 1850-1914 (1979) are much more than just college texts. S. Pollard and C. Holmes (eds.),

380

F U R T H E R  READING

Documents of European Economic History, vol.  II:  Industrial Power and

National Rivalry 1870-1914 (1972) concern our period. D. S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (various editions) is much the best and most exciting treatment of technological developments. Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Con-quest (1981) integrates the history of British and continental indus-trialization.

On economic themes of importance for this period, see the discussions on theme B9 (‘From Family Firm to Professional Management’) at the Eighth International Economic History Congress (Budapest 1982). Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Management Revolution in

American Business (1977) and Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy (1976) are to the point. A. Maizels, Industrial Growth and World Trade, W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations 1870-1913 (1978), Herbert Feis, Europe, the World’s Banker (repr. from 1930) and M. de Cecco, Money and Empire: The International Gold Standard 1890-1914. (1974) discuss other topics relevant to the economy of the times.

SOCIETY

Most of the world consisted of peasants, and T. Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Societies (1971) is an excellent introduction to their world; the same author’s The Awkward Class (1972) deals with the Russian peasantry; Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) throws much light on the French; Max Weber’s ‘Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany’ (in H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber, numer-ous editions, pp. 363-85) is broader than its title suggests. The old petty-bourgeoisie is discussed in G. Crossick and H. G. Haupt (ed.),

Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in 19th Century Europe (1984). There is by now an immense literature on the working class, but almost always confined to one country, occupation or industry. Peter Stearns, Lives of Labor (1971), Dick Geary, European Labor Protest 1848-1939 (1981), Charles, Louise and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century 1830-1930 (1975) and E.J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (1964 and other editions) and Worlds of Labour (1984) cover a wider area, at least in part. Even fewer studies see workers in the context of their relation to other classes. David Crew, Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum 1860-1914

(1979) is one. The classic study of the transformation from peasants to workers is F. Znaniecki and W. I. Thomas, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1984, originally published 1918).

There are even fewer comparative studies of the middle classes or bourgeoisies, though national histories or studies are now, fortunately, more common. Theodore Zeldin’s France 1848-1945, 2 vols. (1973) contains much material on this as on other aspects of society, but no analysis whatever. The early chapters of R. Skidelsky, John Maynard

38.

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

Keynes, vol. I, 1880-1920 (1983) constitute a case-study of social mobility by a combination of accumulation and examination-passing; and various studies by William Rubinstein, mainly in Past & Present, throw a more general light on the British bourgeoisie. The general topic of social mobility is authoritatively discussed in Hartmut Kaelble, Social

Mobility in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Europe and America in Comparative Perspective (1985). Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (1982) is widely comparative, and contains valuable material, notably on the relations between middle and upper classes, embedded in a con-troversial thesis. As always, in the nineteenth century novels and plays are the best presentations of the worlds of aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Culture and politics as the illumination of a bourgeois predicament are beautifully used in Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna (1980).

The great movement for the emancipation of women has produced a large quantity of historical literature of varying quality, but there is no single book about the period which is satisfactory. Though it is neither historical nor primarily concerned with the developed world, Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (1970) is important. Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (1978) is basic;

see also the section ‘Sexual division of labor and industrial	capitalism’
in the excellent review of women’s studies Signs, (Winter	1981). T.
Zeldin, France 1848-1945, vol. 1 has a chapter on women. Few		national
histories have. On feminism  there is a great deal. Richard J.		Evans

(who has written a book on the German movement) covers the ground comparatively in The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australia 1840-1920 (1977). However, many of the unpolitical ways in which the situation of women changed, usually for the better, and their relation to movements other than those of the secular left, have not been systematically investigated. On the main demographic changes see D. V. Glass and E. Grebenik, ‘World Popu-lation, 1800-1950’ in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. iv (1965) and C. Cipolla, The Economic History of World Population (1962). D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History (1965) contains a crucial paper by J. Hajnal on the historic differences between the west European marriage pattern and the others.

Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City 1780-1914 (1981) and Peter Hall, The World Cities (1966) are modern introductions to nineteenth-century urbanization; Adna F. Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nine-teenth Century (1897, ^{a n c} ‘ recent reprints) is a contemporary survey, which remains important.

On religion and churches Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe (1974) is brief and lucid. D. E. Smith, Religion and Political

Development (1970) is more geared  to the non-European  world,  for

382

FURTHER  READING

which W. C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (1957), though old, is still important.

EMPIRE

The basic contemporary text on imperialism is J. A. Hobson’s Imperi-alism (1902, many subsequent editions). For the debate on the subject, Wolfgang Mommsen, Theories of Imperialism (1980) and R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (1972). The conquest of colonies is illuminated by Daniel Headrick, Tools ofEmpire: Technology

and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (1981) and V. G. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse 1815-1960 (1982).

1. G. Kiernan’s marvellous The Lords of Human Kind (1972) is much the best survey of ‘European attitudes to the outside world in the imperial age’ (its subtitle). On the economics of imperialism, see P.J.

Cain, Economic Foundations of British Overseas Expansion 1815-1914 (1980), A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (1973) and the old but valuable Herbert Feis, already mentioned, as well as J. F. Rippy,

British Investments in Latin America 1822-1949 (1959) and – on the Amer-ican side – Charles M. Wilson’s study of United Fruit, Empire in Green and Gold (1947).

On the views of policy-makers, J. Gallagher and R. F. Robinson,

Africa and the Victorians (1958) and D. C. M. Piatt, Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy 1815-1914 (1968). On the domestic impli-cations and roots of imperialism, Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (i960) and, for those unable to read German, H.-U. Wehler, ‘Bismarck’s Imperialism 1862-1890’P&rf & Present, 48 (1970). On some of the effects of empire in the receiving countries, Donald Denoon,

Settler Capitalism (1983), Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886-1914, 2 vols. (1982) and – a neglected corner – Edward Bristow, The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery (1982). Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (1979) is a vivid picture of the biggest of the imperial wars.

POLITICS

The historical problems of the coming of popular politics can only be studied country by country. Still, a few general works may be useful. Some contemporary enquiries are indicated in notes to chapter 4. Among these Robert Michels’ Political Parties (various editions) is still interesting, because based on hard looks at the subject. Eugene and Pauline Anderson’s Political Institutions and Social Change in Continental Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1967) is useful on the growth of the state apparatus; Andrew McLaren, A Short History of Electoral Systems in Western Europe (1980) is just what it says; Peter Kohler, F. Zacher and

383

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

Martin  Partington  (eds.),  The Evolution of Social Insurance               i88i-ig8i

(1982) unfortunately only covers Germany, France, Britain, Austria and Switzerland. Much the fullest collection of data for reference on all relevant matters is Peter Flora, State, Economy and Society in Western

Europe, mentioned above. E.J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (1983) deals with non-institutional reactions to the democratization of politics, especially in the essays by D. Cannadine and E.J. Hobsbawm. Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber (eds.), The

European Right: A Historical Profile (1965) is a guide to that part of the political spectrum which is not discussed in the text, except incidentally in connection with nationalism.

On the emergence of the labour and socialist movements the standard work of reference is G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, m, parts i and 2, ‘The Second International’ (1956). James JoIl, The Second

International 188g-1914 (1974) is briefer. W. Guttsman, The German Social-Democratic Party 18^-1933 (1981) is the most convenient survey of a

classical ‘mass party’; Georges Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism i88g-igi4 (1986) and M. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Rev-olution (1979) are good introductions to expectations and ideologies. J. P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, 2 vols. (1967) and Isaac Deutscher’s Life of Trotsky, vol. 1: The Prophet Armed (1954) see socialism through the eyes of prominent participants.

On nationalism, the relevant chapters in my Age of Revolution and

Age of Capital may be consulted. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism

(1983) is a recent analysis of the phenomenon and Hugh Seton-Watson,

Nations and States (1977) is encyclopaedic. M. Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (1985) is fundamental. On the relationship between nationalism and labour movements see my essay ‘What is the Workers’ Country?’ in Worlds of Labour (1984). Though apparently of only specialized interest, the Welsh studies in D. Smith and H. Francis, A People and a Proletariat (1980) are extremely relevant.

CULTURAL  AND INTELLECTUAL           HISTORY

1. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (numerous editions) is the best-known introduction to the transformations of ideas in this period; George Lichtheim, Europe in the Twentieth Century (1972), though pubr lished as a general history, is essentially about intellectual developments. Like all this author’s work, it is dense but immensely rewarding. Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras (already mentioned) provides endless material. For the sciences, C. C. Gillispie, On the Edge of Objec-tivity (i960), which covers a much more extensive period, is a soph-isticated introduction. The field is too vast for a brief survey – C. C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 16 vols. (1970-80) and

384

FURTHER  READING

Philip P. Wiener (ed.), Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 4 vols. (1973-4) are excellent for reference; and W. F. Bynum, E.J. Browne and Roy Porter (eds.), Dictionary of the History of Science (1981) and the Fontana

Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977) are good and brief. On the crucial areas of physics, Ronald W. Clark, Einstein, the Life and Times (1971) may be supplemented by R. McCormmach (ed.), Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences vol. n (1970) for the reception of relativity. The same author’s novel Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (1982) is a fine evocation of the average conventional scientist and, incidentally, of German academics. C. Webster (ed.), Biology, Medicine and Society 1840-1940 (1981) may introduce readers to the worlds of genetics, eugenics, medicine and the social dimensions of biology.

Reference works for the arts, usually without much historical sense, abound: the Encyclopedia of World Art is very useful for the visual arts; the New Grove Dictionary of Music, 16 vols. (1980) is too much written by experts for other experts. The general surveys of Europe in and around 1900 usually contain much about the arts of the period (e.g. Romein). General histories of the arts are a matter of taste unless pure chronicles. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (1958) is a fairly inflexible Marxist version. W. Hofmann, Turning-Points in Twentieth-century Art 1890-1917 (1969) is interesting but also debatable. The link between William Morris and modernism is stressed in N. Pevsner,

Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). Mark Girouard, The Victorian Country House (1971) and Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement

1860-1900 (1977) are good on the links between architecture and class lifestyles. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avantgarde in France 1885 to World War One (rev. edn. 1967) is instructive and fun. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922 (1971) is quite excellent. For theatre, and indeed the avant garde of a major European centre, P. Jelavich, Munich and Theatrical Modernism (1985). Roy Pascal,

From Naturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society 1880-1918

(1973) is to be recommended.

Among books seeking to integrate the arts with contemporary society and other intellectual trends, Romein and Tannenbaum are, as usual, to be consulted. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918

(1983) is adventurous and exciting. Readers must judge whether it is also convincing.

On the major trends in the social and human sciences, J. A. Schum-peter,. History of Economic Analysis (various editions since 1954) is ency-clopaedic and tart: for reference only. G. Lichtheim, Marxism (1961) repays attentive reading. Sociologists, always inclined to ruminate about what their subject is, have also investigated its history. The articles under the heading ‘Sociology’ in the International Encyclopedia of

385

T H E AGE OF  EMPIRE

the Social Sciences (1968), vol. xv, are a guide. The history of his-toriography in our period is not easily surveyed, except in George Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (1975). However, the article ‘History’ in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, ed. E. R. A. Seligman (1932) – which has in many respects not been superseded by the International Encyclopedia of 1968 – gives a good picture of its debates. It is by Henri Berr and Lucien Febvre.

NATIONAL     HISTORIES

A bibliography confined to the English language is adequate for coun-tries using this language, and (thanks largely to the strength of East Asian studies in the USA) is not inadequate for the Far East, but it inevitably omits most of the best and authoritative works on most European countries.

For Britain R. T. Shannon, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865-1915 (1974) is a good text, strong on cultural and intellectual themes, but George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (originally 1935), some fifty years old and wrong on most details, is still the most exciting way to start looking at the nation’s history during this period. Elie Halevy,

A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, (1895-1915), vols. iv and v, is even older, but the work of a remarkably intelligent, erudite and perceptive contemporary observer. For readers totally ignorant of

British history R. K. Webb, Modern Britain from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (1969) is ideal.

Fortunately some excellent French manuals have been  translated.

1. M. Mayeur and M. Reberioux, The Republicfrom its Origins to the Great

War 1871-1914 (1984) is the best short history there is; Georges Dupeux, French Society 1789-1970 (1976) is also to be recommended. T. Zeldin, France 1848-1945 (1973) is encyclopaedic (except on economic matters) and quirky; Sanford Elwitt, The Third Republic Defended: Bourgeois Reform in France 1880-1914 (1986) analyses the ideology of the republic’s rulers; Eugene Weber’s notable Peasants into Frenchmen analyses one of the republic’s major achievements.

German works have been less translated, though H.-U. Wehler, The German Empire 1871-1918 (1984) is fortunately available; it may still usefully be supplemented by an old book by a very able Weimar

Marxist, Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic (1931). Gordon Craig, German History 1867-1945 (1981) is comprehensive. Volker Berghahn, Modem Germany, Society, Economics and Politics in the Twentieth Century (1986) provides more general background. J . J . Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (1974), Carl Schor-

ske,	German Social Democracy 1905-1917 (1955) –  old but perceptive  –
and	Geoffrey Eley, Reshaping the German Right (1980) – polemical – help

386

FURTHER READING

to understand German politics.

For Austria-Hungary C. A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire (1968) is the most convenient general account; R. A. Kann, The Multinational Empire: Nationalism and National Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy 1848-igi8, 2 vols. (1970) is exhaustive and sometimes exhausting. For those who can get hold of it, H. Wickham Steed, The Habsburg Monarchy (1913) is what a gifted and informed journalist would have seen at the time: Steed was Times correspondent. Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna is about politics as well as culture. Various writings by Ivan Berend and George Ranki, two excellent Hungarian economic historians, survey and analyse Hungary in particular and east-central Europe in general to good effect.

Our period in Italy is not particularly well covered for those who do not read Italian. There are some general histories such as Denis Mack-Smith, Italy: A Modern History (1969) by an author whose major work falls into earlier and later periods. Christopher Seton-Watson, Italy

from	Liberalism to Fascism i8yi—ig2§	(1967) is less lively than the great
philosopher Benedetto Croce’s old		but relevant History of Italy	I8JI-
I9I5	(!929)> which, however, omits most of what does not interest		an

idealist thinker and much of what interests a modern historian. For Spain, on the other other hand, English readers have two outstanding general works: Raymond Carr’s dense but immensely rewarding Spain

i8o8-ig3g	(1966) and	Gerald	Brenan’s marvellous if’unscientific’  The
Spanish Labyrinth (1950). The			history of the Balkan peoples and states
is covered	in various	works	by J.  and/or B. Jelavich, e.g.  Barbara

Jelavich, History of the Balkans, vol. n on the twentieth century (1983), but I cannot resist drawing attention to Daniel Chirot, Social Change in a Peripheral Society: The Creation of a Balkan Colony (1976), which analyses the tragic fate of the Rumanian people, and Milovan Djilas’ Land Without Justice (1958) which recreates the world of the brave Mon-tenegrins. Stanford J. Shaw and E. K. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol.11: 1808-1975 (1977) is authoritative but not exactly exciting.

It would be misleading to suggest that the general histories of other European countries available in English are really satisfactory, though monographic work (e.g. in the Scandinavian Economic History Review or other journals) is quite another matter.

The Cambridge Histories of Africa, Latin America and China – all available for our period – are good guides to their respective continents or regions. John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation (1978) deals with all the countries of the Far East, and incidentally provides (chapters 17-18, 22-23) ^a useful introduction to modern Japanese history, for which,

387

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

more generally, see J. Whitney Hall, Japan: From Prehistory to Modern Times (1986 edn), John Livingston et al., The Japan Reader, vol. 1: 1800-1945 (1974) and Janet E. Hunter, A Concise Dictionary of Modern Japanese History (1984). Non-orientalists interested in Japanese life and culture may enjoy Edward Seidensticker’s Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to Earthquake … 1867-1923 (1985). The best introduction to modern India is Judith M. Brown, Modern India (1985), with a good bib-liography.

Some works on China, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Mexico, Russia and other regions in ferment are indicated under the heading of’Revo-lutions’.

For some reason there is a shortage of good introductions to the history of the twentieth-century USA, though there is no shortage of college manuals of all kinds, or of ruminations on the nature of being an American, and there is a mountain of monographs. The updated version of an old standby, S. E. Morison, H. S. Commager and W. E. Leuchtenberg, The Growth of the American Republic (6th edn 1969) is still better than most. However, George Kennan, American Diplomacy igoo-igfjo (1951, expanded edn 1984) is to be recommended.

REVOLUTIONS

For comparative perspectives on twentieth-century revolutions, Bar-

rington Moore’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1965)

is a classic, and has inspired Theda Scocpol, States and Revolutions (1978). Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1972) is important; E.J. Hobsbawm ‘Revolution’ in Roy Porter and M. Teich (eds.), Revolution in History (1986) is a brief comparative survey of the problems.

The historiography of tsarist Russia, its collapse and revolution, is too vast for even a cursory shortlist. Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801-igiy (1967), easier to refer to than read, and Hans Rogger,

Russia in the Age of Modernisation 1880-igiy        (1983) provide the data.

1. G. Stavrou (ed.), Russia under the Last Tsar (1969) contains essays by various hands on a variety of topics. P. Lyashchenko, History of the Russian National Economy (1949) should be supplemented by the relevant parts of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe. On the Russian peas-antry Geroid T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (1932 and, often reprinted since), is the best way to start, though it is out of date.

Teodor Shanin’s Russia as a Developing Society, vol 1: Russia’s Turn of Century (1985) and vol. 11: Russia igo§-oy: Revolution as a Moment of Truth

(1986), an extraordinary and not easy work, tries to see the revolution both from below and in the light of its influence on subsequent Russian history. L. Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (various editions) provides a participant’s communist view full of intelligence and brio.

388

F U R T H E R READING

The English edition of Marc Ferro’s The Russian Revolution of February igij contains a convenient bibliography.

The English bibliography of the other great revolution, the Chinese, is also lengthening, though by far the greatest part of it deals with the period since 1911. J. K. Fairbank, The United States and China (1979) is really a short modern history of China. The same author’s The Great Chinese Revolution i8oo-ig8§ (1986) is even better. Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (eds.), China Readings 1: Imperial China (1967) provides background; F. Wakeman, The Fall of Imperial China (1975) lives up to its title. V. Purcell, The Boxer Rising (1963) is the fullest account of this episode. Mary Clabaugh Wright (ed.), China in Revolution: the First Phase /000-/0/5 (1968) may introduce readers to more monographic studies.

On the transformations of other ancient eastern empires, Nikki R.

Keddie, Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran (1981)

is authoritative. On the Ottoman Empire, Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961, revised 1969) and D. Kushner, The Rise of

Turkish Nationalism i8j&-igo8 (1977) may be supplemented by N. Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (1964) and Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy (1981).

For the only actual revolution erupting out of imperialism in our period, the Mexican, two works may serve as an introduction: the early chapters of Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico (1981) – or the same author’s chapter in the Cambridge History of Latin America – and John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (1969). Both authors are superb. There is no equally good introduction to the much-disputed history of Indian national liberation. Judith Brown’s Modern India (1985) provides the best start, A. Maddison, Class Structure and Economic

Growth in India and Pakistan Since the Mughals (1971) the economic and social background. For those who want a taste of the more monographic, C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad i88o~ig20 (1975) is by a brilliant Indianist; L. A. Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement 1876-1940 (1974.) is about the most radical region.

On the Islamic region outside Turkey and Iran, there is not much to recommend. P.J. Vatikiotis, The Modern History of Egypt (1969) may be consulted, but the famous anthropologist E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949) (on Libya) is more fun. It was written to inform the British commanders who found themselves fighting in these deserts in the Second World War.

PEACE  AND  WAR

A good recent introduction to the problems of the origin of the First World War is James JoIl, The Origins of the First World War (1984). A.J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (1954) is old but

389

T HE  AGE  OF  EMPIRE

excellent     on    the    complications      of  international        diplomacy.      Paul

Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism i86o-igi4 (1980), Zara Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (1977), F R.

Bridge, From Sadowa to Sarajevo: The Foreign Policy of Austria-Hungary 1866-1914 (1976) and Volker Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War

(1973) are fine examples of recent monographs  Geoffrey Barraclough’s

From Agadir to Armageddon: The Anatomy of a Crisis (1982) is the work of one of the most original historians of his time. For war and society in general, William H. McNeil, The Pursuit of Power (1982) is stimulating; for the specific period of the present book, Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe 1870-igyo (1983); for the pre-war arms race, Norman Stone,

The Eastern Front igi^-igiy (1978), chapters 1-2. Marc Ferro, The Great War (1973) is a good conspectus of the impact of war. Robert Wohl, The Generation of1914 (1979) discusses some of those who looked forward to war; Georges Haupt, Aspects of International Socialism i8ji-igi4 (1986) discuss those who did not – and, with special brilliance, Lenin’s attitude to war and revolution.

Note: This guide to further reading has assumed that readers are in command only of English. Unfortunately today this is likely to be the case in the Anglo-Saxon world. It also assumes that, if sufficiently interested, they will consult the numerous specialist academic journals in the historical field.

390

INDEX

Action Francatse, I60, 266 Adams family, 186

Aden, 67

Adenauer, Konrad, 3 Adler, Alfred, 267« Adler, Fnedrich, 267«

Adler, Victor, 131, 227, 267/1, 3°4> 3² ° adultery, 206

advertising, 106, 203, 223, 273 aeronautics, 28

Africa states in, 23, 336, colonial division, 58, 68, 76, 314, Christianity in, 77, influence on western art, 223

Agadir crisis, 1911, 321-2 agrarian question, 137

agriculture in Europe, 20-1, and trade depression, 36-7, decline in Britain, 40, and protectionism, 43, world growth, 48, labour, 113—14, unionization in, 124

Akroyd family, 167 Albania, 145, 321

Alexander H, Tsar of Russia, 295 Algeciras conference, 1906, 321 Algeria, 286

Alsace-Lorraine, 145, 312-13 Amazon atrocities, 329

American Revolution 1876 centenary, 13 Amsterdam, 20

Amundsen, Roald, 13

anarchism, 100, 118, 124, 129, 132 Ancient Order of Hibernians (Ireland), 93 Angell, Norman, 316

Anglo-French  International  exhibition,   1907,

207

anti-clericalism, 131, 134, 210, 265 anti-Semitism, 89, 91, 158-60, 162, in Russia,

296

Anti-Trust Act, 1890 (USA), 43 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 234 Apostles (Cambridge society), 261 Arabi Pasha, 287

architects numbers of, 172

architecture, 232-3

Argentina race in, 32, immigration, 35, 153, exports to Britain, 40, wheat production, 51, labour party in, 65, crises in, 65, investment in, 75, migrant Italian labour, 113-14

anstocracy, 171, 175 Aristotle, 85 armaments, 307-9, 351 Armenia, 162

armies, 304-6, 352

Armstrong (Whitworth) company, 116, 308 art nouveau (Jugendstil), 227, 229-30, 232 arts-and-crafts movement, 227, 229, 236 aspinn, 52

Asquith, Herbert Henry, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, 109

Assiette au Beurre (journal), 88 Ataturk, Kemal, 285

atoms, 244 & n atrocities, 72, 329-30

Australia democracy in, 23, 86, exports to Britain, 40, drought, 48, labour party in, 65, 117, white immigrant policy, 72

Austria universal suffrage, 86, People’s Party, 91, national movements, 96, 107, 146, decline of liberals in, 104, Social Democrats, 135, language disputes, 156, domestic (sweated) industries, 197, women Social Democrats in, 210, declares war on Serbia, 304, 311, 322-4, alliances, 313, popular support for war, 326, see also Habsburg Empire

Austro-Marxists, 144

avant-garde (arts) and high art, 7-8, 11, 81, 224, 227, 230-2, 234-6, and Russian ballet, 220, and cinema, 238-9, 241

Azegho, Massimo d’, 150 Azev, Evno F , 295»

Baku, 51

Bakumn, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 133

Balabanoff, Angelica, 212, 224»

391

I N D EX

Balkans, 17, 303, 313-14, 321

birth rate, 193-4

ballet, Russian, 241

Bismarck, Prince Otto von and mass electorate,

Balmaceda, Jose Manuel, 75«

86-8, anti-clericahsm,  91, 99, and  weak

banks, 44

opposition, 98, considers suspending con-

Barcelona  ‘tragic week’ (1909), 109

stitution,

100, social insurance programme,

Baring crisis, 1890, 75

103, on

‘blood and iron’,  189, maintains

Barney, Natalie, 214

world peace, 312-13, 318, and Habsburg

Barres, Maurice, 159, 188

Empire, 313

Basque National Party, 145, 155

Bizet, Georges

Carmen, 227

Basques

language,  146,  156,  and  Catholic

Blackpool illuminations, 106

Church, 162

Bloch,  Ivan

Technical, Economic and Political

Bateson, William, 253, 255

Aspects of the Coming War, 306-7

Bauhaus, 228, 233

Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 234

Bebel, August, 95, 115, 158, 214, Woman and

Bochum, 125-6, 177

Socialism, 209

Boer War (South African War), 1899-1902 and

Becquerel, Jean, 249

gold, 66, 74, opposition to, 72, Liberals and,

Bedford

Park (London), 166

103, recruitment for,

160, difficulty of, 303,

Beecham, Sir Thomas, 186

British casualties, 306, causes, 310

beef prices, 65

Bohemia, 162

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 339

Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen von, 268

behaviourism, 270

Bohr, Niels, 8

Behrens, Peter, 233

Boldini, Giovanni, 222

Bekhterev, Vladimir Mikhailovich, 271

Bolsheviks, Bolshevism, 162, 296, 299, 330-1

Belfast, 109, 120

Bombay

population, 20

Belfast,

109, 120

Bon March6 (store), 29

Belgium

agriculture, 20, economy, 41-2, col-

Borodin, Aleksandr Porfirevich, 19

onial empire, 59, 66, 68, franchise, 85, 87,

Bosnia, 323

Catholics in, 91, 108, workers’riots, 99, 128,

Boston, Mass, 153, 168

Labour Party, 117, language question, 156-

Bourbaki (collective name), 245-6

7, in

Schheffen

Plan,

31211, 324, see also

bourgeoisie

and

capitalism,  8-10,

chapter  7

Flemings

passim, culture, 11-12, and progress, 33, and

belle ipoque, 46, 48, 55, 109, 166

democratization, 84, 168, 170, decline of,

BeneS, Edvard, 162

98, and revolutionary threat,

100, 330, and

Bengal, 288-9

alien poor,  153, political behaviour, 168,

Benjamin, Walter, 232

wealth, 169, and family, 169, 187, definition

Bennett, Arnold, 221

of,

170, and

landed

aristocracy,

171, 175,

Benoist, C

The Organisation of Universal Suffrage,

and

crisis

of

reason,

262-3, 27*» l n

*9°5

97

Russian

revolution,

297-9,

and

post-

war

changes, 331-6,

339, see also middle

Benz, Carl Fnednch, 28

classes

Berenson, Bernard, 222

Bourguiba, Habib, 286

Berlage, Hendnk Petrus, 230, 233

Berlin, 21, 126, 166

Boxer Rising, 1900, 281-2

Berlin, Congress of, 1878, 159

Brahmo Samaj, 265

Bermuda, 67

Brancusi, Constantin, 223

Bernadette, St, 210

Branting, Karl Hjalmar, 131

Bernhardt,

Fnednch

A J

von  Germany and the

Brazil, 23-4, 32, 35, 65, 153

Next War, 254

Brooke, Rupert, 190

Bernhardt, Sarah, 240

Brouwer, L E J ,

246, 256

Bernstein, Eduard, IOI, 133

Bruant,

Anstide

Belleville-Mtmlmontant

(song),

Besant, Annie, 212, 214, 288

140

bicycles, 52

Bryan, William Jennings, 38, 96

bi-metalhsm, 38

Buenos Aires, 20

Binet, Alfred, 270

Bukovina, 17-18

biology

and social theones, 252, 256

Bulgaria, 20, 145

biometncians, 255

Bund der Landwtrte (Germany), 93

Birmingham, 20

Bundists (Jewish), 148, 162, 295

birth control, 194-5, 2H> a 53B

Burns, John,

io8n

392

			I N D EX
Cabot family (Boston), 168				Cobden, Richard, 339
Calcutta, 20				cocoa, 64-5
California  white policy, 72				coffee, 64-5
Canada, 24, 50				Colette, 211, 256
Canovas del Castillo, Antonio, 98, ioon				collectivism, 54, 103
Cantor, George, 245-6				Colombia, 65
capital world movement, 354				colonialism  chapter 3 passim, spread of, 57-60,
capitalism	and  bourgeois society,  8-10,		and	and monopoly capitalism, 61-2, and supply
optimism, u ,  and imperialism,  12, inter-				of  raw  materials,  63-4,  and  need  for
nationalist,  41, competition  and  monop-				markets,  66-7,  political-strategic  motiv-
olies, 43-4, 52, and colonialism, 61,65-6,69,				ation, 67-9, radical condemnation of, 72,
73, democracy accepts, 110-11, and  war,				economic results, 76, and assimilation, 152,
315-16, adapts after revolution and  war,				break-up, 287, 336
331-4				Committee  for  Union  and  Progress  (Young
Caribbean  colonialism, 58				Turks), 31, 284-5
Carnegie, Andrew, 103, 186, 307				communes (Russia), 293, 298
Carnot, Sadi, ioon				Communist International, see Internationals
Carpenter, Edward, 214				Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels), 135, 335
Caruso, Enrico, 220				communist parties, 7
catastrophes, 329-30				Compagnie Francaise de l’Afnque Occidentale,
Cezanne, Paul, 231, Still Life with Omons, 256				76
Chagall, Marc, 223				‘Compromise’ 1867, 145«, 146
Chaliapin, Fedor, 220				Comte, Auguste, 77, 273, 284, 290
Chamberlain, Joseph, 251				Congo, 66, 68, 72, 329
Chandler, Alfred		The Visible Hand, 7		Connolly, James, 143
Chanel, Coco, 218				Conrad, Joseph, 80, 223, Heart of Darkness, 330
Chaplin, Charlie, 237				conscription, 304
Charpenticr, Gustave Louise, 227				Constantinople (Istanbul), 1711, 20, 278, 314
Chekhov, Anton, 19,221, The Cherry Orchard, 187 constructivism, 230
chemistry, 260				consumer goods, 53
Chessplayers, The (Satyajit Ray film), 79				Conway, !Catherine, 212
children  labour,		195, 198-9, see also birth	rate,	co-operation, 36-7, 13m
families				Copenhagen, 22
Chile, 7511				copper, 63
China  economy, 15, as state, 23, torture in, 24,				Cornwall, 69«
revolution,  277-9,  281-3,  and  western				coronations, 105
imperialism, 281				Corporation of Foreign Bondholders, 75
Christian Democratic parties, 91				Corradmi, Enrico, 159
Christianity	and	colonialism, 71, 76-7, see also		corruption (government), 96-7
Roman Catholic Church				Creighton, Mandell, 30
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 9711				crime, 30
Churchill, Winston S , 3, 79, 113				Crimean War, 1854-5, 314
cinema, 28, 220, 227-30, 238-9				Croce, Benedetto, 268, 273
cities  and  towns,  20-1,  dwellers,  49,  180,				Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of, 287
migration to, 113,115-16, industries in, 116,				Cromwell, Oliver, 93«
125, working classes in, 125-6, urbanization				Crossley, John, 167
in Europe, 342				Cuba, 24, 57-8, 64, 73
civil service and bureaucracy, 96-7, 103, 156				Cubism, 221, 230-1, 234-5, 238
class, social	and	democracy,  85, 88-9,  con-		Curie, Mane (Sklodkowska-Cune), 192, 212
sciousness, 119-21, 127, 129-31, existence				Czechoslovakia, 154, 162
denied,	170,	see also bourgeoisie,  middle		Czernowit/ (Cernovtsi), 18
classes, working classes
Clauscwitz, Carl von, 315				Daimler, Gottlieb, 28
Clemenceau, Georges, 82				Dalmatia, 17
Clydeside, 22				dancing (popular), 237
coal importance, 26, mining labour, 115, trade				Dano, Ruben, 224
unions, 122-3, 128, mining casualties, 306				Darwin, Charles, 38, 252, 261, 263

393

I N D EX

Darwinism, 243, 254, social, 252, 254, 267, 278 Death in Venice (Visconti film), 169

death rates, 193

Debussy, Claude, 220, 225 Delms, Frederick, 186

democracy chapter 4 passim, and liberal bour-geoisie, 10, in nation-states, 23-4, progress to, 30, 54, 84-7, compatible with capitalism, n o

Democratic Party (USA), 154

Denmark peasants, 20, developed economy, 21, democracy in, 23, modernizes agriculture, 36, cooperatives, 37, exports to Britain, 40, colonies and dependancies, 59, universal male suffrage, 85, open voting, 87, socialists support government in, 102, infant mortality, 193

department stores, 29 Depretis, Agostino, 99 Deroulede, Paul, 159 Diaghilev, Serge, 236, 241 diamonds, 63, 74

Diaz, Porfino, 264, 290-1 Dicey, A V , 54, 103

Dictionary of Modem   Thought,  3

Ellis, Havelock, 214, 221, 272 emigration, 36-7, 69-70, 153, 344, 353 emperors, 56-7

Empire Day (Britain), 70

empires, chapter 3 passim, 356-7, see also imperi-

alism
energy sources, 26-7
Engels, Friednch, no,	133, 214, 267, and war,
303, 306, 308, 313, Origin of the Family, 215,
see also Communist	Manifesto

Englishwoman’s  Tear-Book, 21271

Ensor, James, 225, 228

Entente Cordiale (France-Britain), 318 entertainment, popular, 237

ether, luminiferous, 247-9 Ethiopia, 23, 57, 68, 159 Eton College, 177, 178 eugenics, 253

Europe developed economy, 15-19, population, 19, cultural dominance, 19, nation-states, 23, 358, democracies in, 110-11

Everyman’s Library, 222, 225 evolution, 255, see also Darwinism executions, 307

Dietrich, Marlene, 18971

Disraeli, Benjamin, 86 Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Alexandru, 224« doctors numbers, 172

domestic (sweated) labour, 197 Donets Basin, 51

Dongen, Kees van, 223 Dostoievsky, Fedor, 19 Dreiser, Theodore, 221

Dreyfus, Captain Alfred case, 5, 89 & 71, 99-100, 102, 152, 160, 266

Dublin, 109, 143 Duhem, Pierre, 257

Durkheim, Emile, 88, 93, 273-5 Duveen, Joseph, Baron, 185

Easter Rising, 1916 (Ireland), 287

Eastern Question, 303, 314, see also Balkans Edison, Thomas Alva, 28

education mass, 25, 156, and national identity, 149-50, and language, 156-7, of middle-classes, 174-5, 177—9, 181, of girls, 179,202-4, and Old Boy networks, 179, and culture, 226-7, popular, 263, and illiteracy, 344

Edward VII, King of Great Britain, 5 Egypt, 2, 16, 68, 287, 300, 318 Eight-Hour Day, 129, 137

Einstein, Albert, 8, 244, 247, 249, 256-7, 261, 272 electricity, 27

Elgar, Sir Edward, 106, 220 Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, 10071 Elen, Gus, 140«

Fabian Society, Fabianism, 134, 202, 253 Fackel (journal), 88

families bourgeois, 169, 187, size, 193-5, 197, and position of women, 214-15, social changes, 335

famines, 29, 37

fascism, i n , 160, 333-4 fashion, 205, 217-18 Fashoda crisis, 1898, 314

Federation of Land Workers (Italy), 12471 feminism, 208-9, 212-13, ^s“ ^a^^s0 women Fenians, 162

Ferrer, Francisco, 100 Finland, 85-6, 128, 139, 162

First World War as natural break in history, 6-7, and economic competition, 54, 61, and nationalism, 108, 161, 163-4, and labour movement, 124, welcomed, 190, and rev-olution, 277, and decay of China, 281, immi-nence, 303-6, 326, armament and preparation for, 307-9, 311, origins, 309-12, 314, 322-4, alliances and power-blocs, 312-14, 320, and world economic situation, 314-15, national patriotism, 325-6, effect, 327, 328-9

Flemings and Flanders, 108, 155-7, 162, see also Belgium

Flemish language, 156-7

Fontane, Theodore Der Stechlm, 176 foodstuffs sources of supply, 63-4 football, 182

Ford, Henry, 45, 52, 115

394

I N D EX

Forster, E M , 185, A Passage to India, 287-8 Fourier, Charles, 214, 339

Fox, William, 239

France agriculture, 20, as state, 23, illiteracy in, 25, progress in, 30-1, tariffs, 36, 39, 43, agricultural co-operatives, 37, wage fluct-uations, 49, colonial empire, 57-9, 76, gal-licizes colonial subjects, 71, colonial imports, 76/1, universal male suffrage, 85-6, Jews in, 89, 158, government numbers and changes, 96, scandals, 97, right minonty, 98, Four-teenth of July, 106-7, unrest and strikes, ^I09> 123, Socialist party representation, 117, trade unions, 122-3, socialism in, 138-9, doctors in, 172, middle-class education, 174-5, stable population, 194-5, female labour, 199, disestablishes Catholic Church, 266, and First World War, 311-13, 324, alliances, 314, 318, 320-r, decolonization, 336, see also Dreyfus, Alfred

France, Anatole, 24

Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austro-Hungary, 107, 311

Franco Bahamonde, General Francisco, 3, 336 Franklin, Benjamin, 14

Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, 321 Frederick, Christine, 215

free thinkers, 263-4

free trade, 39-40, 43, 159, see also tariffs French Revolution 1889 centenary, 13

Freud,   Sigmund,    205«,  244,  267«,   271-2,

Interpretation of Dreams, 256 functionahsm, 233

Gaelic Athletic Association (Ireland), 93 Gaelic language, 158

Gaelic League (Ireland), 146 Galileo Galilei, 263

Galton, Sir Francis, 254 Gambetta, Leon, 173

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma), 3, 77-8, 264, 288

garden cities, 229 Gaudi, Antonio, 225 Gaulle, Charles de, 3, 336 genetics, 243, 253-5 George, Stefan, 185, 234 Georgia (Russia), 162

German Federation of Worker Choirs, 131 Germany agriculture, 20, as state, 23, oil con-

sumption, 27, expectation of life, 29, indus-trial and economic development, 35,42,46-7, 317, tariffs, 36, 39, 43, co-operation in, 37, cartels, 43, economic concentration m, 54, colonial empire, 59, 67, 75, universal male suffrage, 85, Social Democrats, 92, 95, 99, 102-3, 116— 17, 130, 133-6 209, 267-

70, national expression, 106-7, ^z4²» ^r5^!> ‘Little’, 106, 108, 313, trade unions, 122, numbers ofJews m, 158, founded, 159, mili-tary service in, 161, middle classes antag-onised, 170, reserve officer corps, 175, university students, 175, 178, city dwellers, 180, bourgeois liberalism in, 188-9, dom-estic (sweated) industries, 197, working women, 199-201, science teaching in, 251, 259, and responsibility for First World War, 310-12, 322-4, antagonism and rivalry with Britain, 313-14, 319-20, international pos-ition, 319, navy, 319-21 and Morocco, 321, blockade of, 325*1, popular support for war, 326

Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 226 Ghadr party (India), 289 Ghent, 155

Gibraltar, 67

Gilbert, W S and Sullivan, Sir Arthur Patience, 227

Giohtti, Giovanni, 87, 97, 102, 332 Gissmg, George, 223

Gladstone, William Ewart, 88, 95 Godel, Kurt, 246

Gogh, Vincent van, 124, 221, 228

gold and silver prices, 38, new supplies, 46, sources, 63, and Boer War, 66, and imperi-alist expansion, 74

gold standard, 96 Goldman, Emma, 212, 224« Gorki, Maxim, 210

Gothic, the, 228, 233

Grant, General Ulysses S , 339

Great Britain and world economy, n , agri-culture, 20, 36, 40, as state, 23, power machinery in, 27, free trade, 397-40, exports capital, 39, food imports, 39-40, industrial dominance, 41, decline and competition, 46-7, 51, wage fluctuations, 49, overseas investments, 51, 65-6, 74-5, 348, trade, 52, 74-5, colonial empire, 57-9, 74-5, 287, atti-tude to colonial subjects, 71, democratic system, 87, 92, scandals, 97, military vol-unteers, 108, 160, constitutional crises, 109, trade unionism in, 121, labour unrest, 128, landed aristocracy in, 171, 175, compulsory education, 178, working women, 199, 201, science graduates, 260, and Persia, 280, new Dominions and independence, 287, and First World War, 311-12, 324, in alliances and power blocs, 313-15, 318, naval strength, 315 319-21, 324, and pre-war economy, 316-17, army, 324-5, decol-onization, 336

Great Depression, 35-46

Great War, see First World War

395

I N D EX

Greene, Graham, 24 Grey, Sir Edward, 327 Griffith, D W , 240 Gns,Juan, 223 Gropius, Walter, 236

gross national products, 15 Grosz, Otto, 214 Gulbenkian, Calouste, 317 Gutenberg, Johann, 263

Habsburg Empire (Austro-Hungary) and Turks, 17, as state, 23, suffrage and voting, 92, moderate Slav parties in, 98, 1867 compromise, 145«, 146, and language dis-putes, 156-7, labour and socialist movement, 161, nationalism in, 163, working women, 195«, and First World War, 277,312-13, 323, and revolution, 278-9, and Poland, 294», and southern Slavs, 323, see also Austria, Hungary

Hague Peace Conferences, 304 Halevy, Elie, 332

Hamburg, 131 Hamsun, Knut, 228 Hanover, 94

Hardy, G H , 246, 261

Hardy, Thomas, 221

Hardy-Weinberg law (mathematics), 246 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 221, 228

Heals (furniture makers), 227 Hebrew language, 146-7, 158

Heimat (German television serial), 14811

Helphand,	A L  (‘Parvus’),  46,	135,  22411,
268
Henckel von Donnersmarck, Pnnce, 173
Hertz, Heinnch, 248-9
Herzl, Theodor, 145, 147, 162
Hilbert, David, 245-6
Hilferding, Rudolf, 135, 268
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 272
Histonsche Zeitschnfi, 269
Hitler, Adolf, 3, 81, 162, 253
Ho Chi-minh, 3
Hobbes, Thomas, 303
Hobson, J	A , 60, 66, 83
holidays, 205, see also leisure
Hollywood (USA), 239-41, see also cinema
Home Rule (Ireland), 109, 121
homosexuals, 214
Honduras, 50
Hong Kong, 281
Horta, Victor, Baron, 225, 230, 233
housing bourgeois, 166-8
Howard, Ebenezer, 229
Hume, Allan Octavian, 288
Hungary,	87,  145«,  157,  see also	Habsburg

Empire

Husserl, Edmund, 257, Logische Untersuckungen,

256

Huysmans, Jons Karl, 228

Ibsen, Hennk, 187, 193, 205, 221, 228 Iglesias, Pablo, 115

illiteracy, 25, 345

Immigration Restriction League (USA), 153 imperialism and capitalism, 11-12, 61-2, 65-

6, 69, 73, and business depression, 45, and economic competition, 54, rulers, 56-7, development of, 57-60, concept of, 60, Marxism and, 6t, social, 69, and patriotism, 70, 105, impact on world, 73-83, creates new elites, 76-7, and westernization, 76-9, and western interest in foreign parts, 80-1, uncertainties of, 82-3, and medical research, 251, end of, and new states, 336, percentage of world’s area, 347

Impressionism (art), 221, 223 Independent Labour Party (Britain), 108

India industry in, 21, 113, position in British Empire, 68-9, and westernization, 77-9, western interest in, 81, religion and political agitation m, 264-5, independence move-ment, 287-9, 3 ^{0 0}

Indian National Congress, 288 Indochina, 58, 281

Indonesia, 152

industry world distribution, 21, trusts and con-centrations, 43-4, scientific management, 44-5, world growth, 48, and labour, 113-16

intelligence testing, 270-1

International Statistical Congress, 1873, 146 ‘Internationale’ (anthem), 107

Internationals First (Marx’s), 130, 295, Second (Communist), 34, 72, 101, 129-30, 162

intuition  and science, 244-6

Ireland emigration from, 37,93, population loss, 41, 194, nationalism, 92-3, 96, 98, 107-8, 145, 162, working-class divisions, 120, and Gaelic language, 158, Catholicism and, 162, unrest in, 287

iron and steel, 35

Isaacs, Rufus {later 1st Marquess of Reading), 97 Istanbul, see Constantinople

Italy as state, 23, 145/1, 150, 159, poor in, 24, state of development, 25, tariffs, 39,43, emi-gration from, 43, 154, colonialism, 57, 59, 67-8, franchise, 87, socialist party in, 117, 138, trade unions in, 122, 124«, defeated by Ethiopia, 159, alliances and power blocs, 313, occupies Libya, 321, military adven-turism, 322, post-war changes, 332

James family, 186

James, Henry, 19, 223

396

I N D EX

James, William, 271

Janacek, Leos, 220

Japan  in world economy, 19, industry in, 21, as

• state, 23, embraces western ways, 31-2, and race, 32, ruler, 57, colonial empire, 58-9,68, western attitude to, 80, influence on western art, 81, 223, 232, parliamentananism, 87, preserves empire, 279, war with Russia (1904-5), 280, 297, 303, 306, expels Rus-sians from Manchuria, 281, 1902 alliance with Britain, 315, navy, 320

Jaures,Juan, 131, 325 Jevons, W S , 271

Jews class differences, 32, immigration controls on, 40«, and liberal decline, 104, support socialism, 139-40, Zionism, 145-8,152,162, and Hebrew language, 146-7, 158, and Viennese culture, 167, and Russian rev-olutionary movement, 296, Russian emi-grants to Palestine, 298, see also anti-Semitism, Dreyfus, Alfred

Joyce, James, 225

Jugendstil, see art nouveau

Jung-Wien, 227

^r95> ^T 9-8-9, see also trade unions, working classes

Labour Party (Australia), 65, 117

Labour Party (Britain) founded, 94, par-liamentary representation and pact with Liberals, 102, 132, and Welsh nationalism, 155, and bourgeois political privilege, 168, women in, 210

Labour  Representation  Committee   (Britain),

102

Ladies Home Journal, 215 Laemmle, Carl, 239 Lagerlof, Selma, 21 r, 221 Lahque, Rene J , 230

Land and Labour Association (Ireland), 93 Land League (Ireland), 287

language and nationalism, 146-7, 150-1, 156-8, immigrants’, 153-4, and official positions, 156-7

Latin America, 22-3, 32, 35, 75, 289 Latvia, 162

Lawrence, D H , 214

Le Bon, Gustave, 273

Le Corbusier (C E Jeanneret), 233 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Mane, 228

Kahnweiler, Daniel Henry, 235 Kandinsky, Vassily, 231, 263 Kautsky, Karl, 133, 135, 144, 154, 267 Kelvin, William Thomson, Baron, 244

Keynes, John Maynard age, 3, background and education, 177, 337, father, 184, as bour-geois, 227, in Apostles, 261, on war, 316, 333, adapts to post-war situation, 333-4

Khaki election (Britain), 1900, 103 Kipling, Rudyard, 82

Klimt, Gustav, 207 Klondike, 46 Kodak girl, 106

Kokoschka, Oskar, 236 Kollontai, Alexandra, 212 Kollwitz, Kathe, 228

Kondrahev, Nikolai Dmitnevich, 46-8 Koran, Holy, 30

Korea, 281

Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 242

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von Psychopathic Sexuatis, 272

Kraus, Karl, 88, 185, 206-7, 230, 261, 329 Krupp, Alfred, 173, 251, 308

Krupp industries, 116 Kuhn, Thomas, 250

kulaks (Russia), 299, see also peasantry Kuhscioff, Anna, 212, 224«

Kulturkampf, 99

labour women, 53-4, 195-200, movement of, 113-15, and socialist parties, 116-17, child,

Lehar, Franz, 220

leisure, 174, 184-5, see also sport

Lenin, V I (Ulyanov) age, 3, on imperialism, 12, 59–60, 72, on democratic republic, 110-11, and socialist theory, 136, and national question, 144, and free love, 214, rev-olutionary theory and success, 295-6, 298-9,331-2, and 1905 revolution, 297, and First World War, 327, and development of post-war world, 331-2, Materialism and Empi-nocriticism, 261

Leoncavallo, Ruggiero, 220

Leopold II, King of the Belgians, 66, 68 Leverhulme, WUham H Lever, 1st Viscount, 171 Lex Arons, 1898 (Germany), 267

Liberal Party (Britain), 72, 93-4, 102, 108, 132,

155

liberalism use of, 9-10, and the state, 40, and economic theory, 40-1, anti-imperialism, 70, and Protestantism, 91, decline, 103-5, German, 188-9, bourgeois, 188-90, accepts reformist social democracy, 332-3

Liberia, 23, 58

Liberty (fabrics shop), 227 Libya, 321

Liege (Belgium), 124-5 life, expectation of, 29

linguistics, 270, see also language Lipchitz, Jacques, 223

Lipton, Sir Thomas, 53, 171 Lisbon, 22

literacy, 29-30, see also education, illiteracy

397

I N D EX

living, standard of, 15, 28-9, 184

Lloyd George, David, 97, 108, 145, 163, 322, 333 Lloyds Bank, 44

London, 21, 126, as business centre, 51-2 ‘long waves’ (economic cycles), 46-7 Loos, Adolf, 233

Lorentz, H A , 248-9 Loti, Pierre, 80

Louis Philippe, King of France, 85 Lowe, Robert, io6n

Lowell family (Boston), 168 Lueger, Karl, 91, 99, 101 Lukacs, Georg, 185

Luxemburg, Rosa, 135, 144, 155, 192, 211-12, 216, 2240, 268

Lyon,126

Macao, 281

MacDonald, James Ramsay, 132 MacDougall, William, 271

Mach, Ernst, 248, 256-7, 261, 267« Mackenzie, Fred A American Invaden, 42 Mackmder, Sir Halford, 319

McKinley, William, 39, 100« Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 233 Madero, Francisco, 291 Maeterlinck, Maunct, 225, 228 Mahler, Gustav, 220, 236 Mallarme, Stephane, 228

Malta, 67

Malthus, Thomas, 254 Manaus (Brazil), 31 Manchuria, 281 Mann Act (USA), 213 Mann, Heinnch, 189

Mann, Thomas, 168, 185, 189, 221, 226 Mao Tse-tung, 3, 335

Marconi scandal (Britain), 1913, 97 Mannetti, F T , 190

marriage, 194, 196-8, 215-16, see also families, women

‘Marseillaise’ (anthem), 107

Marshall, Alfred, 36, Principles of Economics, 184 Martm du Gard, Roger, 221

Martyn, Caroline, 212 Marx, Eleanor, 212

Marx, Karl and Marxism and trade cycles, 46, and imperialism, 60-1, 72, dominates Inter-national, 101, ideological changes, 101-2, on democratic republic, no, dominates socialist parties, 118, 132, 134-5, influence on workers, 131 -4, 263, and revolution, 136, and peasants, 137, and scientific socialism, 259, 263, 267, in India, 264, appeal to intel-lectuals, 267-9, and economic history, 270, and sociology, 274-5, ^{a n} d Russia, 293, 295-6, global influence, 336, and Utopia, 339

Mary, Virgin, 210 Masaryk, Thomas, 154

Mascagni, Pietro, 220, Cavallerta Rushcana, 227 mass media, 53, 87, 337-8

masses, the and democracy, 85-90, and religion, 91-2, ideological, 93, and First World War, 108-9, education of, 263, and revolution, 277, see also working classes

mathematics, 245-7, ²5^T> ²5& Maurras, Charles, 266

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (formerly Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft), 252

Maxwell, James Clerk, 248

May Day, 129-30, 135, 227 May, Karl, 303

Mayer, Louis B , 239

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 144 meat overseas supplies, 64 Medici Society (Britain), 221 Melba, Dame Nellie, 220 Melbourne (Australia), 20 Mehne, Felix-Jules, 39

Men and Women of the Time, 211

Mendel, Gregor Johann, 254-5 Menger, Carl, 270-1 Mensheviks, 162, 298-9 Mermaid Series, 222

Merrill, Stuart, 223

Messina earthquake, 1908, 328 Metternich, Clemens von, 18 Meunier, Constantin, 225

Mexico modernization, 31, 289-92, revolution in, 277, 279, 286-7, 300

Michels, Robert, 88, 95, 274 Michelson, A A , 248-9

middle classes chapter 7passim, wealth, 55, effect of imperialism on, 81, lower, 127, 156, 178, 180-1, 183-4, assimilation of lower classes, 151, support nationalism, 155-6, 161, life-style, 165-9, 176, 181, houses, 166-8, cate-gorized and defined, 170-4, 177, 181, 183-4, occupations, 171-3, social mobility, 173-4, 177, education, 174-5, 177—8, and sport, 174, 179, 181-3, numbers, 177-8, 181, and domestic servants, 180, earnings and expenses, 184-5, and stage careers, 186, poli-tics and values, 188-90, family size, 194, women, 202-3, 208, see also bourgeoisie

Middle East as term, 17, oil, 54, 62-3, 317 Middlesbrough, 125

Milan, 20, 99

Mill, John Stuart, 33, 282

Millerand, Alexandre, 139

Milner, Alfred, Viscount, 97

mining and minerals, 63, see also coal missionaries, 71, 76

Mobius, Paul Julius, 206

398

I N D EX

modernism (art), 7-8, 224-8, 230, 235, see also avant-garde

Modighani, Amedeo, 223 monopoly, 43-4, see also capitalism

Monroe Doctrine (USA), 58 & n, 68, 315 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de

Persian Letters, 79

Moore, G E , 261 moral statistics, 29-30

Moreas, Jean    (Yannis  Papadiamantopoulos),

223

Morgan, John Pierpont, 103, 179, 185 Mormons, 95K

Morley, E W , 248-9 Motley, John, 1080,325

Morocco, 23, 57H, 279-81, 311, 318, 321, see also Agadir crisis

Morozov, Savva, 187, 222

Morris, William, 225, 227, 229, 232-3 Morrison, Arthur A Child of the Jago, 140 mortality, see death rates

Mosca, Gaetano, 88, 273-4 motor cars, 28, 52-3, 182, 184-5 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 186 Munch, Edvard, 228

Munich, 20

music, 220, 224, 227, 241-2 music hall, 237

Mussolini, Bemto, 3 Muthesius, Hermann, 233

Napoleon Bonaparte, 16, 294

Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 56 Narodmks (Populists, Russia), 293, 295 nation-states, 22-3, and market, 40-1, and

public ownership, 54-5, and republicanism, 105, and working-class unity, 127-9, ^an<^ autonomy, 144-6, nationalism, 146-7, 150-i, 156-7, territory, 147-9, and patriotism, 148-9, 159-64, new, 336-7

national socialists, 162

nationalism chapter 6 passim, emergence of, 92-3, 96, 98, 101, 142-4, expressions and symbols of, 106-7, ¹ ^ , and working-class divisions, 120, right-wing, 143-4, and migrants, 153-5, separatism, 155, see also individual countries

naturalism, 228, 232 ‘nature and nurture’, 252

Naumburg-Merseburg (Germany), 130 navies, 315, 319-21, 324, 352

Near East as term, 17 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 3 neo-positivism, 257

Netherlands agriculture, 20, colonial empire, 58-9, 68, 76, resists democratization, 86, voting privileges, 87, Catholic parties in,

91, and Indonesian nationalism, 152, infant mortality in, 193

Neue Zjit (journal), 227 New Delhi, 82

New English Arts Club, 222, 227

New Zealand, 24, 37, 65, 86, 114 Newall, Bertha Philpotts, 216 newspapers, 53, 237-8 newsprint, 346

Nice (France), 145

Nietzsche, Fnedrich and 19th-century values, 188, 231, on German spirit, 226, as modern, 228, and arts, 235, on crisis of expectations, 258-60, on coming war, 303, 326-7, Thus

Spake J^arathustra, 206, Will to Power, 82, 252

Nijinsky, Vaslav Fomich, 220 nitrates, 64, 75«

Nobel, Alfred, 307

Nobel prizes 19,224,260,304 nonconformity (religious), 92« Nordau, Max Degeneration, 258 North Africa, 30-1

Norway, 41, 85-6, 145, 158 nutrition, 29

Oceania, see Pacific oil, 27,54,62-3,317 Oklahoma, 137 oligopoly, 43

Olympic Games, 182, see also sport opera, 220, 227, 355

opera houses, 26, 31, 51 ornament, 233 Orthodox Church, 92 Ostrogorski, M , 88

Ostwald, Wilhelm, 257, Inorganic Chemistry, 256 Otto, King of Bavaria, 149

Ottoman Empire (Turkey) excluded from Europe, 17, as state, 23, and Young Turks, 31, revolution, 77, 277-8, 281, 283-5, 3⁰⁰> 321, western respect for, 79, and First World War, 277, 303, 318, German influence, 317

Oxford University, 266

Pacific and Oceania, 58, 68, 76 Pahlavi dynasty (Iran), 280 Paine, Tom, 263

Pan-German League, 152, 189 Panama Canal, 58

Panama scandal, 1892-3 (France), 97 Pannekoek, A , 268

Paraguay, 50

Pareto, Vilfredo, 88, 273-5

Pans population, 21, Commune, 1871, 84 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 92, 95

Parti Ouvner Francois, 126, 210 Parvus, see Helphand, A L

399

I N D EX

Pascin, Jules, 223

Pathe, Charles, 239

patriotism, 70, 143-4, H^-g, 159-61, 164, see also nationalism, First World War

Pavlov, 1, 270

Pearson, Karl, 253-5, ²57

Pearson, Weetman, 290

Peary, Admiral Robert Edwin, 13

peasantry, peasants literacy, 25, prosperous, 29, revolts, 36, as political force, 89-90, emi-gration by, 114, and socialism, 136-7, unin-terested in nationalism, 155, women, 197, and Russian revolution, 298-9, as minority, 335, see also kulaks

Peking, 20 Pennsylvania, 22

People’s Party (Austria), 91 Perret, Auguste, 233

Persian Empire, 23, revolution, 277-80, 300 Peru, 75«

pessimism, 258-9 Petrograd, see St Petersburg

petty bourgeoisie, 89, see also bourgeoisie, middle classes

philanthropy, 186-7 Philippines, 57 phylloxera, 36 physics, 247-51, 257-8

Picasso, Pablo, 221, 223, 225, 235, 244 Pickford, Mary, 239

Pilsudski, Josef, 148 Pius X, Pope, 90

Planck, Max, 8, 244, 247, 250, 256 Plekhanov, Georgn Valentinovich, 227, 231 plutocracy, 181, 183

poetry, 234

Poincare, Henri, 246, 257

Poland national question, 145, 148, 155, 162, emigration from, 152, Socialist Party, 162, arm-Russian liberation movement, 294

Pomerania, 104

population, 14, 19, 20, 50, 193, 342 populism (USA), 36, 38, 90, 96 Populists (Russia), see Narodmks Portugal, 18, 25, 370, 57, 59, 68, 318

positivism, 77, 232, 284, see also neo-positivism Post-Impressionism, 221

post-modernism, 8

Potemkin (Russian battleship), 297 Pound, Ezra, 223

Prague, 104

press, 87-8, see also mass media, newspapers prices, 36-8, 48, 184

Princip, Gavnlo, 323 production figures, 349 professions, 166, 172

progress, 26-33, ²59. ²&7> ²^9> 33°

proletariat, see working classes Promenade Concerts (London), 221

protectionism, 40, 42-3, 54, 67, 317, see also free trade, tariffs

Protestantism, 91-2

Proust, Marcel, 214, 221, 232, 272 Prussia, 86, 87, 94, 104 psychoanalysis, 243, 272 psychology, 171-2

public schools (Britain), 174, 178 Puccini, Giacomo, 220, Tosca, 256 Puerto Rico, 57-8

Quakers, 176«

quantum theory, 250, 256

race, 32, 252-4
Radek, Karl, 242«
radiation, 249
radio telegraphy, 28
Raeder, Admiral Erich, 31m
Raiffeisen	(Germany), 37
railways	development, 27, 52, 62, financing, 66,
and trade unions,		122-3, stations, 225, 233,
in Russia, 294, 296
Raphael, Max, 234
Rappoport, Angelo S , 224«
Rathenau, Walter, 235
Ratibor, Duke of, 322
Ray, Satyajit, 79
reason, 262-3, 264-6, 271
Reform Acts (Britain)		1867, 85, 89, 1883, 85
Reger, Max, 220
relativity, 247, 249
religion and reason, 264-7, strength, 265
Remington, Frederick,		153
Renan, Ernest, 188
Republican Party (USA), 98
republicanism, 105, n o

Rerum Novarum, 1891 (Encyclical), 91 Rtvolte, La (journal), 228

revolution chapter 12 passim, and social change, io, 132-3, and extension of franchise, 85, tolerated, 100, outbreaks, 136, and sociology, 275, threats of, 277, 330-2, see also individual countries

revolutionary syndicalism, 134 Rhine-Westphahan Coal Syndicate, 43 Rhine-Westphahan steel syndicate, 176 Rhodes, Cecil, 69

Richthofen sisters, 214

Rilke, Rainer Mana, 185, 234 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Andreevich, 19 Ritz, Cesar, 184

Roanne (France), 126 Rockefeller, John D , 103, 185-6 Rohmer, Sax, 80

400

I N D EX

Roland-Hoist, Henrietta, 212 Rolland, Romain, 221

Roman Catholic Church attitude to progress, 30, coloured bishops, 71-2, and political mass movements, 90-1, tolerates trade unions, 120-1, and national groups, 154-5, 162, and women, 210, reaction against, 265-6, see also anti-clericalism

Roman Empire, 17

Rontgen, Wilhelm Conrad, 249

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 3 Roosevelt, Theodore, 104, 153«, 179

Rosebery, Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of, 93», 184

Ross, Sir Ronald, 251

Rostand, Edmond L’Aiglon, 256 Rothschild, house of, 42 Rousseau, Henri (Douanier), 71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 93 Rousseau, Waldeck, 102

Roy, M N , 289

Royal Tournament (London), 106 rubber, 63-5

Ruhr, 22

Ruskm, John, 78, 232

Russell, Bertrand, 245-6, 256, 261, Pnnapia Mathematica (with Whitehead), 257

Russia (Russian Empire) and Turks, 17, Europe-Asia division, 18, cultural achieve-ments, 19, as state, 23, state of development, 25, illiteracy in, 25, famines, 29, 292, indus-trial development, 35, 54, 294, 299, imperi-alism, 57-9, 68, 1905 revolution, 86, 100, 277, 279-80, 296-9, 321, democratization, 87, 100, peasantry, 90, 292-4, religion and politics in, 92, Duma, 100, 298, and wor-king-class voters, 128-9, calendar, 129«, national question, 149, 294, 1917 revol-ution, 163-4, ²78» 3⁰⁰> 3°9> 33°~²» infant mortality, 193, and First World War, 277, 311—13, 322-4, and Persia, 280, in Man-churia, 281, pre-revolutionary conditions, 292-4, grain production, 292-3, rev-olutionary movements, 294-300, global effect of 1917 revolution, 300-1, antagon-ism with Britain, 314, in Triple Entente, 314-15, 320, popular support for war, 326

Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5,280, 297, 303, 306,

320

Ruthenes, 154

Rutherford, Ernest, Baron, 260

Ryba-Seidl, Amalie, 216

St Petersburg (later Petrograd, then Leningrad),

297. 3°5

Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de, comte, 339

Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of, 85

Sammlungspohtik, 102

San Francisco earthquake, 1905, 328 Sanger, Margaret, 214

Sarajevo, 321

Sargent, John Singer, 222 Saussure, Fernand de, 270-1 Savoy (France), 145

Scandinavia, 21, 29, 103, see also individual coun-tries

Schindler (Mahler), Alma, 236 Schlieffen Plan, 31211, 324 Schmoller, Gustav von, 177 Schneider, P & J , 19511 Schnitzler, Arthur, 272

Schonberg, Arnold, 234-5, ²4²> ²44

schools and national identity, 149-50, and lan-guage, 157, see also education, public schools

Schremer, Olive, 214 Schulze-Gaevernitz, H G von, 83 Schumpeter, Josef Alois, 47, 17411

Schwejk, good soldier (fictional character), 306 science, 243-61, and social sciences, 268-9 scientific management, 43-5, 53

Scotland universities, 17811 Scott, Captain Robert Falcon, r3 ‘Secessions’ (art), 222, 231 secularization, 266-7

Serbia, 304, 323

serfdom, 24, abolition, 1861 (Russia), 292-3 servants, domestic, 180, 208

Seurat, Denis, 231

sex non-marital, 30, and emancipation of women, 205-7, 213—14, Freud and, 272

Shaw, George Bernard, 190, 193, 215, 221, 225, 227, Arms and the Man, 303

Shaw, Norman, 166

Shchukin, P 1, 222 shipbuilding, 52

shipping sail and steam-powered, 27-8, British, and world economy, 39, 51, growth, 50, tonnage figures, 350

Sibelius, Jan, 220 Sicily, ig5« silver, 38

Simpliassimus (journal), 88 slavery, 24, see also serfdom Slump (1930s), 334

Smith, Adam, 45, 54, 85, The Wealth of Nations, 40

Social Christian Party (Austria), 99, 101

Social Democratic Party (German), 92, 95, 99, strength, 102-3, “6 – 17, 130-1, 135, and revolution, 133-4, 136, Marxism, 135, 267-8, 270, and women, 209

Social Revolutionaries (Russia), 90, 298

4OI

I N D EX

social sciences, 252, 263, 267-73 social welfare, 102-3

socialism, socialists rise and development of, 7, ^I0> 35> 99) 116-18, and pnvate sector, 54, European preponderance, 72, kept from governments, 102, and democratic repub-licanism, n o , and organization of prolet-ariat, 124, 126-7, championship of universal suffrage, 128-9, parliamentary represen-tation, 130, and social revolution, 132-5, and mass basis, 136-9, and progress, 138-9, and nationalism, 162, women and, 209-10, 212-13, see also individual countries and parties, chapter 5 passim

sociology, 273-5

Sombart, Werner, 176«, 177, 272 Sorel, Georges, 88, 191

Sousa, John Philip, 106

South Africa gold, 47,63, 67, 74, Cornish miners in, 69«, Indian immigrants, 78, dominion status, 287

South-West Africa, German {now Namibia), 286 Soutine, Haim, 223

Soviets, 297

Spain, 25, 29, 57, 59, 68, 98

Spanish-American War, 1898, 68, 104, 305, 310 Spencer, Herbert, 188, 273

sport, 174, 179, 181—3, ²⁰5> ^{2 0} 7 Stacy, Enid, 212

Stalin, Josef Vissanonovich (Dzhugashvih), 3, 144, 294

Standard Oil Company, 43, 290, 318 Statue of Liberty, 231

stature increase in, 29 steam, 26, 115 steamships, 27-8

Stolypm, Peter Arkadevich, 299 Stopes, Mane, 214

Strauss, Richard, 220, 235, Salome, 227 Stravinsky, Igor, 221

strikes, 109, 128

Stnndberg, August, 206, 228 suburbs, 166-7, ¹ ^¹

Sudan, 68

suffrage, women’s, 86, 201-2, 213 sugar, 64, 73

Sullivan, Louis, 233

Sun Yat-sen, 282-3 Suttner, Bertha von, 212

sweated industries, see domestic industries Sweden, 25, 35, 59, 73, 86, 109, 128 Switzerland, 14, 20, 23, 41, 85, 87, 197 Syllabus of Errors, 1864,90

Synge, John Milhngton, 225

Taaffe, Eduard, Count von, 98

Taiwan, 281

Tangier, 280 Tarde, Gabriel, 273

tariffs, 36, 39, 73, see also free trade, protectionsm Tata company (India), 21

Taylor, F W (and ‘Taylonsm’), 44-5 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 19

tea, 64 teachers, 263

technology, 27-8, 52, 233-4, 3²5 telegraphy, 27, 54

telephones, 52, 346-7 Teresa of Lisieux, St, 210 Theosophical Society, 265 Thomson, J J , 247 Tibet, 281

Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 230

Tilak, BaI Ganghadar, 288 tin, 63-5, 69«

Tirpitz, Admiral Alfred von, 319 Titanic (ship), 5, 328 TitoJosipBroz, 3, 335

Tolstoi, Lev, Count, 19, 78 Tonkin, 306

torture, 24

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 106, 236

trade depression, 35-46, cycles, 46-8, boom, 46-50, in primary products, 50, between developed countries, 73-4, world, 349

trade	unions		and	agricultural depression,	37,
resisted,			101,	and working-class divisions,
121, in Britain, 121, organization of,					122,
126, 131, ‘industrial unionism’, 128, women
in, 210, 213
tradition		invention of, 105-6
transport		trade unions, 12^-3
Trans-Siberian Railway, 14, 294, 296
Triple Alliance  (Germany-Austria-Italy), 313,
320
Triple Entente (Britain-France-Russia), 314, 320
Troeltsch, Ernst, 273
tropical commodities, 348
Trotsky, Leon B , 297
Trotter, Wilfred, 273
trusts (business), 43-4, 176
Tuchman, Barbara				The Proud Tower, 7
Tunisia, 286
Turati, Fihppo, 131
Turkey, see Ottoman Empire
Turner (gymnastic associations), 159
Twain, Mark,			ig
Tyneside, 22
Tyrol, 226
Tzu-hsi, Empress of China, 281
UFA films, 240
Ulster	Protestants,			91, working-class divisions,

120-1

402

I N D EX

Umberto, King of Italy, ioon United Fruit Company, 64 United Irish League, 92-3 United Nations, 336

United States of America economic develop-ment, 19, 35, 46-7, as state, 23, democracy in, 23-4, 86, electricity in, 27, mass con-sumerism in, 29, progress idealised, 31, tariffs, 36, populism in, 36, 38, 90, 96, coop-eratives, 37, trusts, 43, 176, economic uncer-tainties in, 54, colonialism, 57-9, 67-8, 75, 315, federal civil service, 970, lacks social welfare, 103, forms of national expression, 106-7, ¹5°i labour, 114-15, trade unionism, 122, socialism in, 137, English language in, 150-1, immigrants, 152-5, marriage into European aristocracy, 171, college fra-ternities, 179, cinema m, 238-41, ‘open door’ China policy, 281, and Mexico, 289-91, and war with Britain, 316, economic strength, 317, navy, 320, see also Spanish-American War

United States Steel, 43, 176

universities, 25, 177-9, ²⁰4> 345> ^{see  a}^^{so  e c m} “

cation

Uruguay, 40, 50, 65

Utah, 95«

Utopia, 339

vacuum cleaners, 52

Vatican, 99, see also Roman Catholic Church Vatican Council, 1870, 90

Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 220

Veblen, Thorstein, 169, 185, 273 vegetable oils, 64

Velde, Henry Clemens van de, 225, 232 Verhaeren, Ermle, 225

Verne, Jules, 258

Versailles Treaty, 1919, 310 Vestey, William, 1st Baron, 171 Vickers company, 116

Victor Emmanuel Monument, 231 Victoria, Queen, 106, 149 Viele-Griffin, Francis, 223

Vienna population, 21, working-class divisions, 120, proletarian quarters, 126, bourgeois quarters, 166, culture, 168, Secession, 222, 231, Marxism in, 267, Karltheater burned down, 328

Villa, Pancho, 291-2 vitalism, 254 Vivekananda, Swami, 264 Vries, Hugo de, 255

wages, 48-9 Wagner, Otto, 233

Wagner, Richard, 220, 227, Siegfried, 355 Wales nonconformism, 91, nationalism, 108,

145, 151, 155, language, 151, 1560, uni-versities, 157

Wallas, Graham, 105 Walras, Leon, 271 Wanamakers (store), 29

‘War of the Pacific’, 1879-82, 75« Warner Brothers (film corporation), 239

wars, see Boer War, First World War, Russo-Japanese War, Spanish-American War

Wassermann, August von, 251 Watson, J B , 270

wealth distribution of, 28-9

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 88, 185, 192, 211™ 12,274

Weber, Max, 88, 152, 174«, 176«, 180, 188, 214, 272-4

Wedekind, Frank, 272

Weimnger, Otto Sex and Character, 206 Weizmann, Chaim, 162

Wells, D A , 35 Wells, H G ,83,221 Werfel, Franz, 236

Westermarck, Edward Alexander History of Human Marriage, 215

Western Federation of Miners (USA), 120 wheat, 36, 48, 50-1

Whiteley’s Universal Emporium, 23, 168 Whitman, Walt, 19

Who’s Who, 174.T1

Werner Werkstatte, 230

Wilde, Oscar, 214, 223, 225, 228, 339, Salome,

227

William I, Emperor of Germany, 106

William II, Emperor of Germany, 82, 106, 171,

304, 318-19

Williams, E E   Made in Germany, 42

Williams, R Vaughan, see Vaughan Williams, Ralph

Wilson scandal (France), 1885, 97 Wilson, Woodrow, 144, 337 Wimbome, Lady, 184

wine and phylloxera, 36 Wister, Owen, 1530 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 261 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 216

women chapter 8 passim, working, 53-4, 195— 200, 337, suffrage, 86, 201-2, 213, 216, middle-class education, 179, 202-4, ^an(* sport, 182, bourgeois, 187-8, 191, 202, emancipation of, 192-218, 337, and birth rate, 193-5, ^{a s} consumers, 203, 207, social freedom, 204-5, sexual behaviour and lib-eration, 205-7, ^{2 1} S ^– M J position in house-hold, 209, political involvement, 210-13, occupations and achievements, 211-12,

403

I N D EX

future, 214-15, and family, 215-16, and religion, 264

Women’s Social and Political Union (‘suffrag-ettes’), 213

wool, 65

Woolf, Virginia, 185 work (occupations), 53

Worker Rabbit Breeders, 131

Worker Stamp Collectors, 131 Workers’ Cycling Club ‘Solidarity’, 131

working classes (proletariat)	chapter 5 passim,
rise of, io, agitation, 45-6, and distribution
of wealth, 55, as political force, 88, 112-13,
116-18, differences and	divisions, 119-21,

124, organization of, 124-7, ¹²⁰J^–S*! ^J39~ 41, relations with lower middle classes, 127, and nation-state, 128-9, ideology and social revolution, 132-3, 136, solidarity, 136, 140, as majority, 136-7, and national question, 144, exclusion of foreign workers, 153, and sport, 182, and revolution, 277, 298, 330-1

World (Universal) Peace Congresses, 304

World’s Classics, 222

Wundt, Wilhelm, 271

xenophobia, 153, 158-60

Yeats, William Butler, ^25, 234, 263 Yiddish language, 147

Young Turks, see Committee for Union and Pro-gress

Young Wales movement, 145, 155 youth and bourgeoisie, 169, 174

Zabern affair, 100 Zaharoff, Sir Basil, 309 Zanardelh, Giuseppe, 102 Zapata, Emihano, 291-2 Zasuhch, Vera, 212 Zeno, 246

Zionism, 145-8, 152, 162, see also Jews Zola, Emile, 228

404

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Alexandria in 1917, Eric Hobsbawm was educated in Vienna, Berlin, London, and Cambridge He has taught for most of his career at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he is Emeritus Professor of Economic History, and he currently spends part ofeach year teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of Labour’s Turning Point,

1880-igoo, Primitive Rebels; The Age ofRevolution, Labouring Men, Industry and

Empire, Bandits, Captain Swing (with George Rude); Revolutionaries; The Age of

Capital, Workers; and The Age ofEmpire.

The Age of Revolution

 

 

 

The Age of

Revolution

 

i789-1848

 

 

ERIC HOBSBAWM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

V I N T A G E        B O O K S

 

A Division of Random House, Inc.

 

New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1996

 

Copyright © 1962 by E. J. Hobsbawm

 

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,

 

a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain in hardcover by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, in 1962.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Hobsbawm, E.J. (EricJ.), 1917-

 

The Age of Revolution, 1789-1898 / Eric Hobsbawm.—1st Vintage Books ed. p. cm.

 

Originally published: London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

 

ISBN 0-679-77253-7

 

1. Europe—History—1789-1900. Industrial revolution.

 

 

D299.H6 1996 940.2’7—dc20 96-7765

 

CIP

 

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

 

Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6

 

 

C O N T E N TS

 

 

 

 

 

	PREFACE			IX
	INTRODUCTION			I
		PART  I.   DEVELOPMENTS
I	THE WORLD IN THE I 7 8 0 S			7
2	T H E INDUSTRIAL R E V O L U T I O N			27
3	THE FRENCH REVOLUTION			53
4	WAR			77
5	PEACE			99
6	REVOLUTIONS			log
7	NATIONALISM			I32
		PART // .	RESULTS
8	LAND			149
9	T O W A R D S  AN I N D U S T R I A L  W O R L D			L68
IO  T H E C A R E E R  O P E N  T O T A L E N T				18 2
I I  T H E L A B O U R I N G  P O O R				2 0 0
12	I D E O L O G Y :	R E L I G I O N		217
13	I D E O L O G Y :	S E C U L A R		234
14 THE ARTS				253
15  S C I E N C E				277
16	C O N C L U S I O N :  T O W A R D S		1848	297
	MAPS			309
	N O T E S			321
	B I B L I O G R A P H Y			332
	I N D E X			339

 

 

 

 

MAPS

 

 

 

 

		page
i	Europe in 1789	309
2	Europe in 1810	310
3	Europe in 1840	311
4	World Population in Large Cities: 1800-1850	31a
5	Western Culture 1815-1848: Opera	314
6	The States of Europe in 1836	316
7 Workshop of the World		317
8	Industrialization of Europe: 1850	318
9	Spread of French Law	320

 

 

 

PREFACE

 

 

 

 

T H I S book traces the transformation of the world between 1789 and 1848 insofar as it was due to what is here called the ‘dual revolu-tion’—the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous (Brit-ish) Industrial Revolution. It is therefore strictly neither a history of Europe nor of the world. Insofar as a country felt the repercussions of the dual revolution in this period, I have attempted to refer to it, though often cursorily. Insofar as the impact of the revolution on it in this period was negligible, I have omitted it. Hence the reader will find something about Egypt here, but not about Japan; more about Ireland than about Bulgaria, about Latin America than about Africa. Naturally this does not mean that the histories of the countries and peoples neg-lected in this volume are less interesting or important than those which are included. If its perspective is primarily European, or more precisely, Franco-British, it is because in this period the world—nor at least a large part of it—was transformed from a European, or rather a Franco-British, base. However, certain topics which might well have deserved more detailed treatment have also been left aside, not only for reasons of space, but because (like the history of the USA) they are treated at length in other volumes in this series.

 

The object of this book is not detailed narrative, but interpretation and what the French call haute vulgarisation. Its ideal reader is that theoretical construct, the intelligent and educated citizen, who is not merely curious about the past, but wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be what it is today and whither it is going. Hence it would be pedantic and uncalled-for to load the text with as heavy an apparatus of scholarship as it ought to carry for a more learned public. My notes therefore refer almost entirely to the sources of actual quota-tions and figures, or in some cases to the authority for statements which are particularly controversial or surprising.

 

Nevertheless, it is only fair to say something about the material on which a very wide-ranging book such as this is based. All historians are more expert (or to put it another way, more ignorant) in some fields than in others. Outside a fairly narrow zone they must rely largely on

 

 

IX

PREFACE

 

the work of other historians. For the period 1789 to 1848 this secondary literature alone forms a mass of print so vast as to be beyond the know-ledge of any individual, even one who can read all the languages in which it is written. (In fact, of course, all historians are confined to a handful of languages at most.) Much of this book is therefore second- or even third-hand, and it will inevitably contain errors, as well as the inevitable foreshortenings which the expert will regret, as the author does. A bibliography is provided as a guide to further study.

 

Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of die subject is, for practical purposes, essential. I have attempted, very roughly, to divide the book into two. parts. The firstjdeals broadly .with the main developments ©f-the period_r-while.lhc_aecond sketches the kind of society produced by the dual revolution. There are, however, deliberate overlaps, and the distinction is a matter not of theory but of pure convenience.

 

My thanks are due to various people with whom I have discussed aspects of this book or who have read chapters in draft or proof, but who are not responsible for my errors; notably J. D. Bernal, Douglas Dakin, Ernst Fischer, Francis Haskell, H. G. Koenigsberger and R. F. Leslie. Chapter 14 in particular owes much to the ideas of Ernst Fischer. Miss P. Ralph helped considerably as secretary and research assistant. Miss E. Mason compiled the index.

 

1. J. H.

 

London, December ig6i

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

X

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

WORDS are witnesses which often speak louder than documents. Let us consider a few English words which were invented, or gained their modern meanings, substantially in the period of sixty years with which this volume deals. They are such words as ‘industry’, ‘indus-trialist’, ‘factory’, ‘middle class’, ‘working class’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’. They include ‘aristocracy’ as well as ‘railway’, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ as political terms, ‘nationality’, ‘scientist’ and ‘engineer’, ‘proletariat’ and (economic) ‘crisis’. ‘Utilitarian’ and ‘statistics’, ‘soci-ology’ and several other names of modern sciences, ‘journalism’ and ‘ideology’, are all coinages or adaptations of this period.* So is ‘strike’ and ‘pauperism’.

 

To imagine the modern world without these words (i.e. without the things and concepts for which they provide names) is to measure the profundity of the revolution which broke out between 1789 and 1848, and forms the greatest transformation in human history since the remote times when men invented agriculture and metallurgy, writing, the city and the state. This revolution has transformed, and continues to trans-form, the entire world. But in considering it we must distinguish care-fully between its long-range results, which cannot be confined to any social framework, political organization, or distribution of international power and resources, and its early and decisive phase, which was closely tied to a specific social and international situation. The great revolution of 1789-1848 was the triumph not of’industry’ as such, but of capitalist industry; not of liberty and equality in general but of middle class or ‘bourgeois’ liberal society; not of ‘the modern economy’ or ‘the modern state’, but of the economies and states in a particular geographical region of the world (part of Europe and a few patches

 

of North America), whose centre was the neighbouring and rival states of Great Britain and France. The transformation of 1789-1848 is

 

* Most of these either have international currency, or were fairly literally translated into various languages. Thus ‘socialism’ or ‘journalism’ are fairly international, while the com-bination ‘iron road’ is the basis of the name of the railway everywhere except in its country of origin.

 

I

 

INTRODUCTION

 

essentially the twin upheaval which took place in those two countries, and was propagated thence across the entire world.

 

But it is not unreasonable to regard this dual revolution—the rather more political French and the industrial (British) revolution—not so much as something which belongs to the history of the two countries which were its chief carriers and symbols, but as the twin crater of a rather larger regional volcano. That the simultaneous eruptions should occur in France and Britain, and have slightly differing characters, is neither accidental nor uninteresting. But from the point of view of the historian of, let us say, AD 3000, as from the point of view of the Chinese or African observer, it is more relevant to note that they occurred somewhere or other in North-western Europe and its overseas prolongations, and that they could not with any probability have been expected to occur at this time in any other part of the world. It is equally relevant to note that they are at this period almost incon-ceivable in any form other than the triumph of a bourgeois-liberal capitalism.

 

It is evident that so profound a transformation cannot be understood without going back very much further in history than 1789, or even than the decades which immediately preceded it and clearly reflect (at least in retrospect), the crisis of the ancien regimes of the North-western world, which the dual revolution was to sweep away. Whether or not we regard the American Revolution of 1776 as an eruption of equal significance to the Anglo-French ones, or merely as their most important immediate precursor and stimulator; whether or not we attach funda-mental importance to the constitutional crises and economic reshuffles and stirrings of 1760-89, they can clearly explain at most the occasion and timing of the great breakthrough and not its fundamental causes. How far back into history the analyst should go—whether to the mid-seventeenth century English Revolution, to the Reformation and the beginning of European military world conquest and colonial exploita-tion in the early sixteenth century, or even earlier, is for our purposes irrelevant, for such analysis in depth would take us far beyond the chronological boundaries of this volume.

 

Here we need merely observe that the social and economic forces, the political and intellectual tools of this transformation were already prepared, at all events in a part of Europe sufficiently large to revolu-tionize the rest. Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximiza-tion of private profit was the foundation of government policy. Nor is it to trace the evolution of the technology, the scientific knowledge, or the

 

 

2

I N T R O D U C T I ON

 

ideology of an individualist, secularist, rationalist belief in progress. By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted, though we cannot yet assume that they were sufficiently powerful or wide-spread. On the contrary, we must, if anything, safeguard against the temptation to overlook the novelty of the dual revolution because of the familiarity of its outward costume, the undeniable fact that Robes-pierre’s and Saint-Just’s clothes, manners and prose would not have been out of place in a drawing-room of the ancien rSgime, that the Jeremy Bentham whose reforming ideas expressed the bourgeois Britain of the 1830s was the very man who had proposed the same ideas to Catherine the Great of Russia, and that the most extreme statements of middle class political economy came from members of the eighteenth-century British House of Lords.

 

Our problem is thus to explain not the existence of these elements of a new economy and society, but their triumph; to trace not the progress of their gradual sapping and mining in previous centuries, but their decisive conquest of the fortress. And it is also to trace the profound changes which this sudden triumph brought within the countries most immediately affected by it, and within the rest of the world which was now thrown open to the full explosive impact of the new forces, the ‘conquering bourgeois’, to quote the title of a recent world history of this period.

 

Inevitably, since the dual revolution occurred in one part of Europe, and its most obvious and immediate effects were most evident there, the history with which this volume deals is mainly regional. Inevitably also, since the world revolution spread outwards from the double crater of England and France it initially took the form of a European expansion in and conquest of the rest of the world. Indeed its most striking conse-quence for world history was to establish a domination of the globe by a few western regimes (and especially by the British) which has no parallel in history. Before the merchants, the steam-engines, the ships and the guns of the west—and before its ideas—the age-old civilizations and empires of the world capitulated and collapsed. India became a province administered by British pro-consuls, the Islamic states were convulsed by crisis, Africa lay open to direct conquest. Even the great Chinese Empire was forced in 1839-42 to open its frontiers to western exploitation. By 1848 nothing stood in the way of western conquest of any territory that western governments or businessmen might find it to their advantage to occupy, just as nothing but time stood in the way of the progress of western capitalist enterprise.

 

And yet the history of the dual revolution is not merely one of the triumph ofthe new bourgeois society. It is also the history of the emergence

 

 

3

INTRODUCTION

 

of the forces which were, within a century of 1848, to have turned expan-sion into contraction. What is more, by 1848 this extraordinary future reversal of fortunes was already to some extent visible. Admittedly, the world-wide revolt against the west, which dominates the middle of the twentieth century, was as yet barely discernible. Only in the Islamic world can we observe the first stages of that process by which those conquered by the west have adopted its ideas and techniques to turn the tables on it: in the beginnings of internal westernizing reform within the Turkish empire in the 1830s, and above all in the neglected and significant career of Mohammed AIi of Egypt. But within Europe the forces and ideas which envisaged the supersession of the triumphant new society, were already emerging. The ‘spectre of communism’ already haunted Europe by 1848. It was exorcized in 1848. For a long time thereafter it was to remain as powerless as spectres in fact are, especially in the western world most immediately transformed by the dual revolution. But if we look round the world of the 1960s we shall not be tempted to underestimate the historic force of the revolutionary socialist and communist ideology born out of reaction against the dual revolution, and which had by 1848 found its first classic formulation. The historic period which begins with the construction of the first factory system of the modern world in Lancashire and the French Revolution of 1789 ends with the construction of its first railway net-work and the publication of the Communist Manifesto.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part I

 

DEVELOPMENTS

 

 

 

CHAPTER	1
T H E  W O R L D  IN	T H E  1780s

 

Le dix-huittime stick doit lire mis au Panlhion.—Saint-Just¹

 

 

I

 

T H E first thing to observe about the world of the 1780s is that it was at once much smaller and much larger than ours. It was smaller geo-graphically, because even the best-educated and best-informed men then livings—let ussayaman like the scientist and traveller Alexandervon Humboldt (1769-1859)—knew only patches of the inhabited globe. (The ‘known worlds’ of less scientifically advanced and expansionist communities than those of Western Europe were clearly even smaller, diminishing to the tiny segments of the earth within which the illiterate Sicilian peasant or the cultivator in the Burmese hills lived out his life, and beyond which all was and always would forever be unknown.) Much of the surface of the oceans, though by no means all, had already been explored and mapped thanks to the remarkable competence of eighteenth-century navigators like James Cook, though human know-ledge of the sea-bed was to remain negligible until the mid-twentieth century. The main outlines of the continents and most islands were known, though by modern standards not too accurately. The size and height ofthe mountain ranges in Europe were known with some approach to precision, those in parts of Latin America very roughly, those in Asia hardly at all, those in Africa (with the exception of the Atlas) for practical purposes not at all. Except for those of China and India, the course of the great rivers of the world was mysterious to all but a hand-ful of trappers, traders or coureurs-de-bois, who had, or may have had, knowledge of those in their regions. Outside of a few areas—in several continents they did not reach more than a few miles inland from the coast—the map of the world consisted of white spaces crossed by the marked trails of traders or explorers. But for the rough-and-ready second- or third-hand information collected by travellers or officials in remote outposts, these white spaces would have been even vaster than

 

in fact they were.

 

Not only the ‘known world’ was smaller, but the real world, at any rate in human terms. Since for practical purposes no censuses are

 

 

7

THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

 

available, all demographic estimates ate sheer guesses, but it is evident that the earth supported only a fraction of today’s population; probably not much more than one-third. If the most usually quoted guesses are not too wide of the mark Asia and Africa supported a somewhat larger proportion of the world’s people than today, Europe, with about 187 million in 1800 (as against about 600 million today), a somewhat smaller one, the Americas obviously a much smaller one. Roughly, two out of every three humans would be Asians in 1800, one out of everyfiveEuropean, one out of ten African, one out of thirty-three Ameri-can or Oceanian. It is obvious that this much smaller population was much more sparsely distributed across the face of the globe, except perhaps for certain small regions of intensive agriculture or high urban concentration, such as parts of China, India and Western or Central Europe, where densities comparable to those of modern times may have existed. If population was smaller, so also was the area of effective human settlement. Climatic conditions (probably somewhat colder and wetter than today, though no longer quite so cold or wet as during the worst period of the ‘little ice age’ of c. 1300-1700) held back the limits of settlement in the Arctic. Endemic disease, such as malaria, still restricted it in many areas, such as Southern Italy, where the coastal plains, long virtually unoccupied, were only gradually peopled during the nineteenth century. Primitive forms of the economy, notably hunt-ing and (in Europe) the territorially wasteful seasonal transhumance of livestock, kept large settlements out of entire regions—such as the plains of Apulia: the early nineteenth-century tourist’s prints of the Roman campagna, an empty malarial space with a few ruins, a few cattle, and the odd picturesque bandit, are familiar illustrations of such landscapes. And of course much land which has since come under the plough was still, even in Europe, barren heath, waterlogged fen, rough grazing or forest.

 

Humanity was smaller in yet a third respect: Europeans were, on the whole, distinctly shorter and. lighter than they are today. To take one illustration from the abundance of statistics about the physique of con-scripts on which this generalization is based: in one canton on the Ligurian coast 72 per cent of the recruits in 1792-9 were less than 1-50 metres (5 ft. 2 in.) tall.² That did not mean that the men of the later eighteenth century were more fragile than we are. The scrawny, stunted, undrilled soldiers of the French Revolution were capable of a physical endurance equalled today only by the undersized guerillas in colonial mountains. A week’s unbroken marching, with full equipment, at the rate of thirty miles a day, was common. However, the fact remains that human physique was then, by our standards, very poor,

 

 

8

THE WORLD IN THE       1780S

 

as is indicated by the exceptional value kings and generals attached to the ‘tall fellows’, who were formed into the ilite regiments of guards, cuirassiers and the like.

 

Yet if the world was in many respects smaller, the sheer difficulty or uncertainty of communications made it in practice much vaster than it is today. I do not wish to exaggerate these difficulties. The later eighteenth century was, by medieval or sixteenth century standards, an age of abundant and speedy communications, and even before the revolution of the railways, improvements in roads, horse-drawn vehicles and postal services are quite remarkable. Between the 1760s and the end of the century the journey from London to Glasgow was shortened from ten or twelve days to sixty-two hours. The system of mail-coaches or diligences, instituted in the second half of the eighteenth century, vastly extended between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the coming of the railway provided not only relative speed—the postal service from Paris to Strasbourg took thirty-six hours in 1833—but also regularity. But the provision for overland passenger-transport was small, that for overland goods transport both slow and prohibitively expensive. Those who conducted government business or commerce were by no means cut off from one another: it is estimated that twenty million letters passed through the British mails at the beginning of the wars with Bonaparte (at the end of our period there were ten times as many); but for the great majority of the inhabitants of the world letters were useless, as they could not read, and travel—except perhaps to and from rrarkets—altogether out of the ordinary. If they or their goods moved overland, it was overwhelmingly on foot or by the slow speeds ofcarts, which even in the early nineteenth century carried five-sixths of French goods traffic at somewhat less than twenty miles a day. Couriers flew across long distances with dispatches; postillions drove mail-coaches with a dozen or so passengers each shaking their bones or, if equipped with the new leather suspension, making them violently sea-sick. Noblemen raced along in private carriages. But for the greater part of the world the speed of the carter walking beside his horse or mule governed land transport.

 

Under the circumstances transport by water was therefore not only easier and cheaper, but often also (except for the uncertainties of wind and weather) faster. It took Goethe four and three days respectively to sail from Naples to Sicily and back during his Italian tour. The mind boggles at the time it would have taken him to travel overland in any-thing like comfort. To be within reach of a port was to be within reach of the world: in a real sense London was closer to Plymouth or Leith than to villages in the Breckland of Norfolk; Seville was more accessible

 

 

9

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

from Veracruz than from Valladolid, Hamburg from Bahia than from the Pomeranian hinterland. The chief drawback of water transport was its intermittency. Even in 1820 the London mails for Hamburg and Holland were made up only twice a week, those for Sweden and Portugal once weekly, those for North America once a month. Yet there can be no doubt that Boston and New York were in much closer contact with Paris than, let us say, the Carpathian county of Maramaros was with Budapest. And just as it was easier to transport goods and men in quantity over the vast distances of the oceans—easier, for instance, for 44,000 to set sail for America from Northern Irish ports in five years (1769-74) than to get five thousand to Dundee in three generations— so it was easier to link distant capitals than country and city. The news of the fall of the Bastille reached the populace of Madrid within thirteen days; but in Peronne, a bare 133 kilometres from the capital, ‘the news from Paris’ was not received until the 28th.

 

The world of 1789 was therefore, for most of its inhabitants, incalcul-ably vast. Most of them, unless snatched away by some awful hazard, such as military recruitment, lived and died in the county, and often in the parish, of their birth: as late as 1861 more than nine out often in seventy of the ninety French departments lived in the department of their birth. The rest of the globe was a matter of government agents and rumour. There were no newspapers, except for a tiny handful of the middle and upper classes—5,000 was the usual circulation of a French journal even in 1814—and few could read in any case. News came to most through travellers and the mobile section of the popula-tion: merchants and hawkers, travelling journeymen, migratory crafts-men and seasonal labourers, the large and mixed population of the vagrant and footloose ranging from itinerant friars or pilgrims to smugglers, robbers and fairground folk; and, of course, through the soldiers who fell upon the population in war or garrisoned them in peace. Naturally news also came through official channels—through state or church. But even the bulk of the local agents of such state-wide or ecumenical organizations were local men, or men settled for a life-time’s service among those of their kind. Outside the colonies the official nominated by his central government and sent to a succession of provincial posts was only just coming into existence. Of all the sub-altern agents of the state perhaps only the regimental officer habitually expected to live an unlocalized life, consoled only by the variety of wine, women and horses of his country.

 

 

 

 

 

10

THE WORLD IN THE       I 7 8 0 S

 

II

 

Such as it was, the world of 1789 was overwhelmingly rural, and nobody can understand it who has not absorbed this fundamental fact. In countries like Russia, Scandinavia or the Balkans, where the city had never nourished excessively, between 90 and 97 per cent of the population were rural. Even in areas with a strong though decayed urban tradition, the rural or agricultural percentage was extraordin-arily high: 85 per cent in Lombardy, 73-80 per cent in Venetia, more than 90 per cent in Calabria and Lucania, according to available estimates.³ In fact, outside of a few very flourishing industrial or com-mercial areas we should be hard put to it to find a sizeable European state in which at least four out of every five inhabitants were not countrymen. And even in England itself, the urban population only just outnumbered the rural population for the first time in 1851.

 

The word ‘urban’ is, of course, ambiguous. It includes the two European cities which by 1789 can be called genuinely large by our standards, London, with about a million, and Paris, with about half a million, and the score or so with a population of 100,000 or more: two in France, two in Germany, perhaps four in Spain, perhaps five in Italy (the Mediterranean was traditionally the home of cities), two in Russia, and one each in Portugal, Poland, Holland, Austria, Ireland, Scotland, and European Turkey. But it also includes the multitude of small provincial towns in which the majority of city-dwellers actually lived; the ones where a man could stroll in a few minutes from the cathedral square surrounded by the public buildings and-the houses of the notables, to the fields. Of the 19 per cent of Austrians who, even at the end of our period (1834), lived in towns, .well over three-quarters lived in towns of less than 20,000 inhabitants; about half in towns of between two and five thousand. These were the towns through which the French journeymen wandered on their Tour de France; whose sixteenth-century profiles, preserved likefliesin amber by the stagnation of subsequent centuries, the German romantic poets evoked in the background of their tranquil landscapes; above which the cliffs of Spanish cathedrals towered; among whose mud the Chassidic Jews venerated their miracle-working rabbis and the orthodox ones disputed the divine subtleties of the law; into which Gogol’s inspector-general drove to terrify the rich, and Chichikov to ponder on the purchase of dead souls. But these also were the towns out of which the ardent and ambitious young men came to make revolutions or their first million; or both. Robespierre came out of Arras, Gracchus Babeuf out of Saint-Quentin, Napoleon out of Ajaccio.

 

 

11

THE  AGE  OF    REVOLUTION

 

These provincial towns were none the less urban for being small. The genuine townsmen looked down upon the surrounding countryside with the contempt of the quick-witted and knowledgeable for the strong, slow, ignorant and stupid. (Not that by the standards of the real man of the world the sleepy back-country township had anything to boast about: the German popular comedies mocked ‘Kraehwinkel’—the petty municipality—as cruelly as the more obvious rural hayseeds.) The line between town and country, or rather between town occupations and farm occupations, was sharp. In many countries the excise barrier, or sometimes even the old line of the wall, divided the two. In extreme cases, as in Prussia, the government, anxious to keep its taxable citizens under proper supervision, secured a virtually total separation of urban and rural activities. Even where there was no such rigid administrative division, townsmen were often physically distinct from peasants. In a vast area of Eastern Europe they were German, Jewish or Italian islands in a Slav, Magyar or Rumanian lake. Even townsmen of the same religion and nationality as the surrounding peasantry looked different: they wore different dress, and indeed were in most cases (except for the exploited indoor labouring and manufacturing population) taller, though perhaps also slenderer.* They were probably, and certainly prided themselves on being, quicker in mind and more literate. Yet in their mode of life they were almost as ignorant of what went on outside their immediate district, almost as closed-in, as the village.

 

The provincial town still belonged essentially to the economy and society of the countryside. It lived by battening on the surrounding peasantry and (with relatively few exceptions) by very little else except taking in its own washing. Its professional and middle classes were the dealers in corn and cattle, the processers of fan?i-products, the lawyers and notaries who handled the affairs of noble estates or the interminable litigations which are part of land-owning or land-holding communities; the merchant-entrepreneurs who put out and collected for and from the rural spinners and weavers; the more respectable of the repre-sentatives of government, lord or church. Its craftsmen and shop-keepers supplied the surrounding peasantry or the townsmen, who lived off the peasantry. The provincial city had declined sadly since its heyday in the later middle ages. It was only rarely a ‘free city’ or city state; only rarely any longer a centre of manufactures for a wider market or a staging-post in international trade. As it had declined, it clung with increasing stubbornness to that local monopoly of its market

 

* Thus in 1823-7 townsmen in Brussels were on average 3 cm. taller than men from the surrounding rural communes, townsmen in Louvain 2 cm. There is a considerable body of military statistics on this point, though all from the nineteenth century.⁴

 

12

 

T HE  WORLD  IN  THE    I 780S

 

which it defended against all comers: much of the provincialism which the young radicals and big city slickers mocked, derived from this movement of economic self-defence. In Southern Europe the gentlemen and even sometimes the nobles lived in it on the rents of their estates. In Germany the bureaucracies of the innumerable small principalities, themselves barely more than large estates, administered the wishes of Serenissimus there with the revenues collected from a dutiful and silent peasantry. The provincial town of the late eighteenth century might be a prosperous and expanding community, as its townscape, dominated by stone buildings in a modest classical or rococo style still bears witness in parts of Western Europe. But that prosperity came from the countryside.

 

Ill

 

The agrarian problem was’ therefore the fundamental one in the world of 1789, and it is easy to see why the first systematic school of continental economists, the French Physiocrats, assumed as a matter of course that the land, and the land rent, was the sole source of net income. And the crux of the agrarian problem was the relation between those who culti-vated the land and those who owned it, those who produced its wealth and those who accumulated it.

 

From the point of view of agrarian property relations, we may divide Europe—or rather the economic complex whose centre lay in Western Europe—into three large segments. To the west of Europe there lay the overseas colonies. In these, with the notable exception of the Northern United States of America and a few less significant patches of independent farming, the typical cultivator was an Indian working as a forced labourer or virtual serf, or a Negro working as a slave; some-what more rarely, a peasant tenant, share-cropper or the like. (In the colonies of the Eastern Indies, where direct cultivation by European planters was rarer, the typical form of compulsion by the controllers of the land was the forced delivery of quotas of crops, e.g. spice or coffee in the Dutch islands.) In other words the typical cultivator was unfree or under political constraint. The typical landlord was the owner of the large quasi-feudal estate (hacienda, finca, estancia) or of a slave plantation. The characteristic economy of the quasi-feudal estate was primitive and self-contained, or at any rate geared to purely regional demands: Spanish America exported mining products, also produced by what were virtually Indian serfs, but nothing much in the way of farm-products. The characteristic economy of the slave-plantation zone, whose centre lay in the Caribbean islands, along the northern coasts of

 

 

13

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

South America (especially in Northern Brazil) and the southern ones of the USA, was the production .of a few vitally important export crops, sugar, to a lesser extent tobacco and coffee, dye-stuffs and, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, above all cotton. It therefore formed an integral part of the European economy and, through the slave-trade, of the African. Fundamentally the history of this zone in our period can be written in terms of the decline of sugar and the rise of cotton.

 

To the east of Western Europe, more specifically to the east of a line running roughly along the river Elbe, the western frontiers of what is today Czechoslovakia, and then south to Trieste, cutting off Eastern from Western Austria, lay the region of agrarian serfdom. Socially, Italy south of Tuscany and Umbria, and Southern Spain belonged to this region, though Scandinavia (with the partial exception of Denmark and Southern Sweden) did not. This vast zone contained its patches of technically free peasants: German peasant colonists scattered all over it from Slovenia to the Volga, virtually independent clans in the savage rocks of the Illyrian hinterland, almost equally savage peasant-warriors like the Pandurs and Cossacks on what had until lately been the military frontier between Christian and Turk or Tartar, free pioneer squatters beyond the reach of lord and state, or those who lived in the vast forests, where large-scale farming was out of the question. On the whole, however, the typical cultivator was unfree, and indeed almost drenched by the flood of serfdom which had risen almost without a break since the later fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. It was least obvious in the Balkan areas which had been, or still were, under the direct adminis-tration of the Turks. Though the original agrarian system of the Turkish pre-feudalism, a rough division of the land in which each unit supported a non-hereditary Turkish warrior, had long degenerated into a system of hereditary landed estates under Mohammedan lords, these lords seldom engaged in farming. They merely sucked what they could from their peasantry. This is why the Balkans, south of the Danube and Save, emerged from Turkish domination in the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries substantially as peasant countries, though extremely poor ones, and not as countries of concentrated agricultural property. Still, the Balkan peasant was legally unfree as a Christian, and de facto unfree as a peasant, at least so long as he was within reach of the lords.

 

Over the rest of the area, however, the typical peasant was a serf, devoting a large part of the week to forced labour on the lord’s land, or its equivalent in other obligations. His unfreedom might be so great as to be barely distinguishable from chattel slavery, as in Russia and those parts of Poland where he could be sold separately from the land: a notice in the Gazette de Moscou in 1801 advertised ‘For sale, three

 

 

14

THE  WORLD  IN THE      I 780S

 

coachmen, well-trained and.very presentable, also two girls, aged 18 and 15, both of good appearance and skilled in different kinds of manual work. The same house has for sale two hairdressers, one, aged 2i, can read, write, play a musical instrument and do duty as postilion, the other suitable for dressing ladies’ and gentlemen’s hair; also pianos and organs.’ (A large proportion of serfs served as domestics; in Russia almost 5 per cent of all serfs in 1851.⁸) In the hinterland of the Baltic Sea—the main trade-route with Western Europe—servile agriculture produced largely export crops for the importing countries of the west: corn, flax, hemp and forest products mostly used for shipping. Elsewhere it relied more on the regional market, which con-tained at least one accessible region of fairly advanced manufacturing and urban development, Saxony and Bohemia and the great capital of Vienna. Much of it, however, remained backward. The opening of the Black Sea route and the increasing urbanization of Western Europe, and notably of England, had only just begun to stimulate the corn-exports of the Russian black earth belt, which were to remain the staple of Russian foreign trade until the industrialization of the USSR. The eastern servile area may therefore also be regarded as a food and raw-material producing ‘dependent economy’ of Western Europe, analogous to the overseas colonies.

 

The servile areas of Italy and Spain had similar economic charac-teristics, though the legal technicalities of the peasants’ status were somewhat different. Broadly, they were areas of large noble estates. It is not impossible that in Sicily and Andalusia several of these were the lineal descendants of Roman latifundia, whose slaves and coloni had turned into the characteristic landless day-labourers of these regions. Cattle-ranching, corn-production (Sicily is an ancient export-granary) and the extortion of whatever was to be extorted from the miserable peasantry, provided the income of the dukes and barons who owned them.

 

The characteristic landlord of the servile area was thus a noble owner and cultivator or exploiter of large estates. Their vastness staggers the imagination: Catherine the Great gave between forty and fifty thousand serfs to individual favourites; the Radziwills of Poland had estates as large as half of Ireland; Potocki owned three million acres in the Ukraine; the Hungarian Esterhazy’s (Haydn’s patrons) at one time owned nearly seven million acres. Estates of several hundreds of thou-sands of acres were common.* Neglected, primitive and inefficient

 

* Eighty estates of over (roughly) 25,000 acres (10,000 ha) were confiscated in Czecho-slovakia after 1918, among them 500,000 acres each from the Schoenborns and the Schwarzenbergs, 400,000 from the Liechtensteins, 170,000 from the Kinskys.”

 

 

15

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

though these often were, they yielded princely incomes. The Spanish grandee might, as a French visitor observed of the desolate Medina Sidonia estates, ‘reign like a lion in the forests whose roar frightens away whatever might approach him’,⁷ but he was not short of cash, even by the ample standards of the British milord.

 

Below the magnates, a class of country gentlemen of varying size and economic resources exploited the peasantry. In some countries it was inordinately large, and consequently poor and discontented; dis-tinguished from the non-noble chiefly by its political and social privi-leges and its disinclination to engage in ungentlemanly pursuits such as work. In Hungary and Poland it amounted to something like one in ten of the total population, in Spain at the end of the eighteenth cen-tury to almost half a million—or, in 1827, ^{t o} 10 per cent of the total European nobility;⁸ elsewhere it was much smaller.

 

IV

 

In the rest of Europe the agrarian structure was socially not dissimilar. That is to say that for the peasant or labourer anybody who owned an estate was a ‘gentleman’ and a member of the ruling class, and con-versely noble or gentle status (which gave social and political privileges and was still nominally the only road to the highest offices of state) was inconceivable without an estate. In most countries of Western Europe the feudal order implied by such ways of thinking was still politically very alive, though economically increasingly obsolete. Indeed, its very economic obsolescence, which made noble and gentle incomes limp increasingly far behind the rise in prices and expenditure, made the aristocracy exploit its one inalienable economic asset, the privileges of birth and status, with ever-greater intensity. AU over continental Europe the nobleman elbowed his low-born rivals out of offices of profit under the crown: from Sweden, where the proportion of com-moner officers fell from 66 per cent in 1719 (42 per cent in 1700) to 23 per cent in 1780,* to France, where this ‘feudal reaction’ precipitated the French Revolution (see below Chapter 3). But even where it was in some ways distinctly shaky, as in France where entry into the landed nobility was relatively easy, or even more in Britain where landed and noble status was the reward for any kind of wealth, provided it was large enough, the link between estate-ownership and ruling-class status remained, and had indeed lately become somewhat closer.

 

Economically, however, western rural society was very different. The characteristic peasant had lost much of his servile status in the late middle ages, though still often retaining a great many galling marks of

 

 

16

 

THE WORLD IN THE  I 780S

 

legal dependence. The characteristic estate had long ceased to be a unit of economic enterprise and had become a system of collecting rents and other money incomes. The more or less free peasant, large, medium or small, was the characteristic cultivator of the soil. If a tenant of some sort he paid rent (or, in a few areas, a share of the crop) to a landlord. If technically a freeholder, he probably still owed the local lord a variety of obligations which might or might not be turned into money (such as the obligation to send his corn to the lord’s mill), as well as taxes to the prince, tithes to the church, and some duties of forced labour, all of which contrasted with the relative exemption of the higher social strata. But if these political bonds were stripped away, a large part of Europe would emerge as an area of peasant agriculture; gen-erally one in which a minority of wealthy peasants tended to become commercial farmers selling a permanent crop surplus to the urban market, and a majority of small and medium peasants lived in some-thing like self-sufficiency off their holdings unless these were so small as to oblige them to take part-time work in agriculture or manufacture for wages.

 

Only a few areas had pushed agrarian development one stage further towards a purely capitalist agriculture. England was the chief of these. There landownership was extremely concentrated, but the charac-teristic cultivator was a medium-sized commercial tenant-farmer oper-ating with hired labour. A large undergrowth of smallholders, cottagers and the like still obscured this. But when this was stripped -away (roughly between 1760 and 1830) what emerged was not peasant agriculture but a class of agricultural entrepreneurs, the farmers, and a large agrarian proletariat. A few European areas where commercial investment traditionally went into farming, as in parts of Northern Italy and the Netherlands, or where specialized commercial crops were produced, also showed strong capitalist tendencies, but this was excep-tional. A further exception was Ireland, an unhappy island which com-bined the disadvantages of the backward areas of Europe with those of proximity to the most advanced economy. Here a handful of absentee latifundists similar to the Andalusian or Sicilian ones exploited a vast mass of tenants by means of extortionate money-rents.

 

Technically European agriculture was still, with the exception of a few advanced regions, both traditional and astonishingly inefficient. Its products were still mainly the traditional ones: rye, wheat, barley, oats and in Eastern Europe buckwheat, the basic food of the people, beef cattle, sheep, goats and their dairy products, pigs and fowl, a certain amount offruit and vegetables, wine, and a certain number of industrial raw materials such as wool, flax, hemp for cordage, barley for beer, etc.

 

 

17

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

The food of Europe was still regional. The products of other climates were still rarities, verging on luxury, except perhaps for sugar, the most important foodstuff imported from the tropics and the one whose sweetness has created more human bitterness than any other. In England (admittedly the most advanced country) the average annual consumption per head in the 1790s was 14 lb. But even in England the average per capita consumption of tea in the year of the French Revo-lution was hardly 2 ounces per month.

 

The new crops imported from the Americas or other parts of the tropics had made some headway. In Southern Europe and the Balkans maize (Indian corn) was already quite widespread—it had helped fix mobile peasants to their plots in the Balkans—and in Northern Italy rice had made some progress. Tobacco was cultivated in various princi-palities, mostly as a government monopoly for revenue purposes, though its use by modern standards was negligible: the average Englishman in 1790 smoked, snuffed or chewed about one and a third ounces a month. Silkwork culture was common in parts of Southern Europe. The chief of the new crops, the potato, was only just making its way, except perhaps in Ireland where its ability to feed more people per acre at subsistence level than any other food had already made it a staple of cultivation. Outside England and the Low Countries the systematic cultivation of root and fodder crops (other than hay) was still rather exceptional; and only the Napoleonic wars brought about the massive production of beet for sugar.

 

The eighteenth century was not, of course, one of agricultural stag-nation. On the contrary, a long era of demographic expansion, of growing urbanization, trade and manufacture, encouraged agricultural improvement and indeed required it. The second half of the century saw the beginning of that startling and henceforward unbroken rise in population which is so characteristic of the modern world: between 1755 and 1784, for instance, the rural population of Brabant (Belgium) rose by 44 per cent.¹⁰ But what impressed the numerous campaigners for agricultural improvement, who multiplied their societies, govern-ment reports and propagandist publications from Spain to Russia, was the size of the obstacles to agrarian advance rather than its progress.

 

V

 

The world of agriculture was sluggish, except perhaps for its capitalist sector. That of commerce, manufactures, and the technological and intellectual activities which went with both, was confident, brisk and expansive, and the classes which benefited from them, active, deter-

 

 

18

THE WORLD IN THE  I 780S

 

mined and optimistic. The contemporary observer would be most immediately struck by the vast deployment of trade, which was closely tied to colonial exploitation. A system of maritime trade currents, growing rapidly in volume and capacity, circled the earth, bringing its profits to the mercantile communities of North Atlantic Europe. They used colonial power to rob the inhabitants of the East Indies* of the commodities exported thence to Europe and Africa, where these and European goods were used to buy slaves for the rapidly growing planta-tion systems of the Americas. The American plantations in turn ex-ported their sugar, cotton, etc. in ever vaster and cheaper quantities to the Atlantic and North Sea ports whence they were redistributed east-wards, together with the traditional manufactures and commodities of European East-West trade: textiles, salt, wine and the rest. From ‘the Baltic’ in turn came the grain, timber, flax. From Eastern Europe came the grain, timber, flax and linen (a profitable export to the tropics), hemp and iron of this second colonial zone. And between the relatively developed economies of Europe—which included, economically speak-ing, the increasingly active communities of white settlers in the north-ern British colonies of America (after 1783, the Northern USA)—the web of trade became ever more dense.

 

The nabob or planter returned from the colonies with wealth beyond the dreams of provincial avarice, the merchant and shipper whose splendid ports—Bordeaux, Bristol, Liverpool—had been built or rebuilt in the century, appeared to be the true economic victors of the age, comparable only with the great officials and financiers who drew their wealth from the profitable service of states, for this was still the age when the term ‘office of profit under the crown’ had its literal meaning. Beside him the middle class of lawyers, estate managers, local brewers, traders and the like, who accumulated a modest wealth from the agri-cultural world, lived low and quiet lives, and even the manufacturer appeared little better than a very poor relation. For though mining and manufactures were expanding rapidly, and in all parts of Europe, the merchant (and in Eastern Europe also often the feudal lord) remained their chief controllers.

 

This was because the chief form of expanding industrial production was the so-called domestic or putting-out system, in which the merchant bought the products of the handicraftsman or of the part-time non-agricultural labour of the peasantry for sale in a wider market. The mere growth of such trade inevitably created rudimentary conditions

 

* Also to some extent of the Far East, where they bought the tea, silks, china, etc. for which there was a growing European demand. But the political independence of China and Japan made this trade as yet a somewhat less piratical one.

 

‘9

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

for an early industrial capitalism. The craftsman selling his wares might turn into little more than a worker paid on piece-rates (especially when the merchant supplied him with his raw material, and perhaps leased out productive equipment). The peasant who also wove might become the weaver who also had a small plot. Specialization of processes and functions might divide the old craft or create a complex of semi-skilled workers from among peasants. The old master-craftsmen, or some special group of crafts, or some group of local intermediaries might turn into something like subcontractors or employers. But the key controller of these decentralized forms of production, the one who linked the labour of lost villages or back streets with the world market, was some kind of merchant. And the ‘industrialists’ who were emerging or about to emerge from the ranks of the producers themselves were petty opera-tors beside him, even when they were not directly dependent upon him. There were a few exceptions, especially in industrial England. Iron-masters, men like the great potter Josiah Wedgwood, were proud and respected, their establishments visited by the curious from all over Europe. But the typical industrialist (the word had not yet been invented) was as yet a petty-officer rather than a captain of industry.

 

Nevertheless, whatever their status, the activities of commerce and manufacture flourished brilliantly. The most brilliantly successful of eighteenth-century European states, Britain, plainly owed its power to its economic progress, and by the 1780s all continental governments with any pretence to a rational policy were consequently fostering economic growth, and especially industrial development, though with very varying success. The sciences, not yet split by nineteenth-century academicism into a superior ‘pure’ and an inferior ‘applied’ branch, devoted themselves to the solution of productive problems: the most striking advances of the 1780s were those of chemistry, which was by tradition most closely linked to workshop practice and the needs of industry. The Great Encyclopaedia of Diderot and d’Alembert was not merely a compendium of progressive social and political thought, but of technological and scientific progress. For indeed the conviction of the progress of human knowledge, rationality, wealth, civilization and control over nature with which the eighteenth century was deeply imbued, the ‘Enlightenment’, drew its strength primarily from the evident progress of production, trade, and the economic and scientific rationality believed to be associated inevitably with both. And its greatest champions were the economically most progressive classes, those most directly involved in the tangible advances of the time: the mer-cantile circles and economically enlightened landlords, financiers, scientifically-minded economic and social administrators, the educated

 

 

20

THE WORLD IN THE  I 780S

 

middle class, manufacturers and entrepreneurs. Such men hailed a Benjamin Franklin, working printer and journalist, inventor, entre-preneur, statesman and shrewd businessman, as the symbol of the active, self-made, reasoning citizen of the future. Such men in England, where the new men had no need of transatlantic revolutionary incar-nations, formed the provincial societies out of which both scientific, industrial and political advance sprang. The Lunar Society of Birming-ham included the potter Josiah Wedgwood, the inventor of the modern steam engine James Watt and his business partner Matthew Boulton, the chemist Priestley, the gentleman-biologist and pioneer of evolutionary theories Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of a greater Darwin), the great printer Baskerville. Such men everywhere flocked into the lodges of Freemasonry, where class distinctions did not count and the ideology of the Enlightenment was propagated with a dis-interested zeal.

 

It is significant that the two chief centres of the ideology were also those of the dual revolution, France and England; though in fact its ideas gained widest international currency in their French formulations (even when these were merely gallicized versions of British ones). A secular, rationalist and progressive individualism dominated ‘en-lightened’ thought. To set the individual free from the shackles which fettered him was its chief object: from the ignorant traditionalism of the Middle Ages, which still threw their shadow across the world, from the superstition of the churches (as distinct from ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion), from the irrationality which divided men into a hierarchy of higher and lower ranks according to birth or some other irrelevant criterion. Liberty, equality and (it followed) the fraternity of all men were its slogans. In due course they became those of the French Revo-lution. The reign of individual liberty could not but have the most beneficent consequences. The most extraordinary results could be looked for—could indeed already be observed to follow from—the unfettered exercise of individual talent in a world of reason. The passionate belief in progress of the typical ‘enlightened’ thinker reflected the visible increases in knowledge and technique, in wealth, welfare and civilization which he could see all round him, and which he ascribed with some justice to the growing advance of his ideas. At the beginning of his century witches were still widely burned; at its end enlightened governments like the Austrian had already abolished not only judicial torture but also slavery. What might not be expected if the remaining obstacles to progress such as the vested interests of feudality and church, were swept away?

 

It is not strictly accurate to call the ‘enlightenment’ a middle class

 

 

21

THE AOE OF  REVOLUTION

 

ideology, though there were many enlighteners—and politically they were the decisive ones—who assumed as a matter of course that the free

society	would	be a capitalist society.11  In theory its	object was to
set all	human	beings free. AU progressive, rationalist	and humanist

ideologies are implicit in it, and indeed came out of it. Yet in practice the leaders of the emancipation for which the enlightenment called were likely to be the middle ranks of society, the new, rational men of ability and merit rather than birth, and the social order which would emerge from their activities would be a ‘bourgeois’ and capitalist one.

 

It is more accurate to call the ‘enlightenment’ a revolutionary ideology, in spite of the political caution and moderation of many of its continental champions, most of whom—until the 1780s—put their faith in enlightened absolute monarchy. For illuminism implied the abolition of the prevailing social and political order in most of Europe.

 

It was too much to expect the anciens regimes to abolish themselves voluntarily. On the contrary, as we have seen, in some respects they were reinforcing themselves against the advance of the new social and economic forces. And their strongholds (outside Britain, the United Provinces and a few other places where they had already been defeated) were the very monarchies to which moderate enlighteners pinned their faith.

 

VI

 

With the exception of Britain, which had made its revolution in the seventeenth century, and a few lesser states, absolute monarchies ruled in all functioning states of the European continent; those in which they did not rule fell apart into anarchy and were swallowed by their neighbours, like Poland. Hereditary monarchs by the grace of God headed hier-archies of landed nobles, buttressed by the traditional organization and orthodoxy of churches and surrounded by an increasing clutter of insti-tutions which had nothing but a long past to recommend them. It^ is true that the sheer needs of state cohesion and efficiency in an age of acute international rivalry had long obliged monarchs to curb the anarchic tendencies of their nobles and other vested interests, and to staff their state apparatus so far as possible with non-aristocratic civil servants. Moreover, in the latter part of the eighteenth century these needs, and the obvious international success of capitalist British power, led most such monarchs (or rather their advisers) to attempt pro-grammes of economic, social, administrative and intellectual modern-ization. In those days princes adopted the slogan of ‘enlightenment’ as governments in our time, and for analogous reasons, adopt those of

 

 

22

TtTE WORLD IN THE  I 78OS

 

‘planning’; and as in our day some who adopted them in theory did very little about them in practice, and most who did so were less interested in the general ideals which lay behind the ‘enlightened’ (or the ‘planned’) society, than in the practical advantage of adopting the most up-to-date methods of multiplying their revenue, wealth and power.

 

Conversely, the middle and educated classes and those committed to progress often looked to the powerful central apparatus of an ‘enlight-ened’ monarchy to realize their hopes. A prince needed a middle class and its ideas to modernize his state; a weak middle class needed a prince to batter down the resistance of entrenched aristocratic and clerical interests to progress.

 

Yet in fact absolute monarchy, however modernist and innovatory, found it impossible—and indeed showed few signs of wanting—to break loose from the hierarchy of landed nobles to which, after all, it belonged, whose values it symbolized and incorporated, and on whose support it largely depended. Absolute monarchy, however theoretically free to do whatever it liked, in practice belonged to the world which the enlightenment had baptized fiodaliti or feudalism, a term later popu-larized by the French Revolution. Such a monarchy was ready to use all available resources to strengthen its authority and taxable revenue within and its power outside its frontiers, and this might well lead it to foster what were in effect the forces of the rising society. It was prepared to strengthen its political hand by playing off one estate, class or province against another. Yet its horizons were those of its history, its function and its class. It hardly ever wanted, and was never able to achieve, the root-and-branch social and economic transformation which the progress of the economy required and the rising social groups called for.

 

To take an obvious example. Few rational thinkers, even among the advisers of princes, seriously doubted the need to abolish serfdom and the surviving bonds of feudal peasant dependence. Such a reform was recognized as one of the primary points of any ‘enlightened’ programme, and there was virtually no prince from Madrid to St Petersburg and from Naples to Stockholm who did not, at one time or another in the quarter-century preceding the French Revolution, subscribe to such a programme. Yet in fact the only peasant liberations which took place from above before 1789 were in small and untypical states like Denmark and Savoy, and on the personal estates of some other princes. One major such liberation was attempted, by Joseph II of Austria, in 1781; but it failed, in the face of the political resistance of vested interests and of peasant rebellion in excess of what had been anticipated, and had to

 

 

23

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

remain uncompleted. What did abolish agrarian feudal relations all over Western and Central Europe was the French Revolution, by direct action, reaction or example, and the revolution of 1848.

 

There was thus a latent, and would soon be an overt, conflict between the forces of the old and the new ‘bourgeois’ society, which could not be settled within the framework of the existing political regimes, except of course where these already embodied bourgeois triumph, as in Britain. What made these regimes even more vulnerable, was that they were subject to pressure from three directions: from the new forces, from the entrenched, and increasingly stiff resistance of the older vested interests, and from foreign rivals.

 

Their most vulnerable point was the one where the opposition of old and new tended to coincide: in the autonomist movements of the remoter or the least firmly controlled provinces or colonies. Thus in the Habsburg monarchy the reforms of Joseph II in the 1780s produced uproar in the Austrian Netherlands (the present Belgium) and a revo-lutionary movement which in 1789 joined naturally with that of the French. More commonly, communities of white settlers in the overseas colonies of European states resented the policy of their central govern-ment, which subordinated the colonial interests strictly to the metro-politan. In all parts of the Americas, Spanish, French and British, as well as in Ireland, such settler movements demanded autonomy—not always for regimes which represented economically more progressive forces than the metropolis—and several British colonies either won it peacefully for a time, like Ireland, or took it by revolution, like the USA. Economic expansion, colonial development and the tensions of the attempted reforms of ‘enlightened absolutism’ multiplied the occa-sions for such conflicts in the 1770s and 1780s.

 

In itself provincial or colonial dissidence was not fatal. Old-estab-lished monarchies could survive the loss of a province or two, and the main victim of colonial autonomism, Britain, did not suffer from the weaknesses of the old regimes and therefore remained as stable and dynamic as ever in spite of the American revolution. There were few regions in which the purely domestic conditions for a major transfer of power existed. What made the situation explosive was international rivalry.

 

For international rivalry, i.e. war, tested the resources of a state as nothing else did. When they could not pass this test, they shook, cracked, or fell. One major such rivalry dominated the European international scene for most of the eighteenth century, and lay at the core of its recurrent periods of general war: 1689-1713, 1740-8, 1756-63, 1776-83 and, overlapping into our period, 1792-1815. This was the

 

 

24

THE  WORLD  IN  THE      1 7 8 0 S

 

Conflict between Britain and France, which was also, in a sense, that between the old and the new regimes. For France, though rousing British hostility by the rapid expansion of its trade and colonial empire, was also the most powerful, eminent and influential, in a word the classical, aristocratic absolute mbnarchy. Nowhere is the superiority of the new to the old social order more vividly exemplified than in the conflict between these two powers. For the British not only won, with varying degrees of decisiveness in all but one of these wars. They sup-ported the effort of organizing, financing and waging them with rela-tive ease. The French monarchy, on the other hand, though very much larger, more populous, and, in terms of her potential resources, wealthier than Britain, found the effort too great. After its defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) the revolt of the American colonies gave it the opportunity to turn the tables on its adversary. France took it. And indeed, in the subsequent international conflict Britain was badly defeated, losing the most important part of her American empire; and France, the ally of the new USA, was consequently victorious. But the cost was excessive, and the French government’s difficulties led it inevitably into that period of domestic political crisis, out of which, six years later, the Revolution emerged.

 

VII

 

It remains to round off this preliminary survey of the world on the eve of the dual revolution with a glance at the relations between Europe (or more precisely North-western Europe) and the rest of the world. The complete political and military domination of the world by Europe (and her overseas prolongations, the white settler communities) was to be the product of the age of the dual revolution. In the late eighteenth century several of the great non-European powers and civilizations still confronted the white trader, sailor and soldier on apparently equal terms. The great Chinese empire, then at the height of its effectiveness under the Manchu (Ch’ing) dynasty, was nobody’s victim. On the contrary, if anything the current of cultural influence ran from east to west, and European philosophers pondered the lessons of the very different but evidently high civilization, while artists and craftsmen embodied the often misunderstood motifs of the Far East in their works and adapted its new materials’Cchina’) to European uses. The Islamic powers, though (like Turkey) periodically shaken by the military forces of neighbouring European states (Austria and above all Russia), were far from the helpless hulks they were to become in the nineteenth century. Africa remained virtually immune to European military pene-

 

 

25

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

tration. Except for small areas round the Cape of Good Hope, the whites were confined to coastal trading posts.

 

Yet already the rapid and increasingly massive expansion of Euro-pean trade and capitalist enterprise undermined their social order; in Africa through the unprecedented intensity of the awful traffic in slaves, around the Indian Ocean through the penetration of the rival colonizing powers, in the Near and Middle East through trade and military conflict. Already direct European conquest began to extend significantly beyond the area long since occupied by the pioneer colonization of the Spaniards and Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the white North American settlers in the seventeenth. The crucial advance was made by the British, who had already established direct territorial control over part of India (notably Bengal), virtually over-throwing the Mughal empire, a step which was to lead them in our period to become the rulers and administrators of all India. Already the relative feebleness of the non-European civilizations when con-fronted with the technological and military superiority of the west was predictable. What has been called ‘the age of Vasco da Gama’, the four centuries of world history in which a handful of European states and the European force of capitalism established a complete, though as is now evident, a temporary, domination of the entire world, was about to reach its climax. The dual revolution was to make European expansion irresistible, though it was also to provide the non-European world with the conditions and equipment for its eventual counter-attack.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

26

CHAPTER      2

 

THE INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION

 

Such works, however their operations, causes, and consequences, have infinite merit, and do great credit to the talents of this very ingenious and useful man, who will have the merit, wherever he goes, of setting men to think. . . . Get rid of that dronish, sleepy, and stupid indifference, that lay/ negligence, which enchains men in the exact paths of their forefathers, without enquiry, without thought, and without ambition, andyou are sure of doing good. What trains of thought, what a spirit of exertion, what a mass and power of effort have sprung in every path of life, from the works of such men as Brindley, Watt, Priestley, Harrison, Arkwright…. In what path of life can a man be found that will not animate his pursuitfrom seeing the steam-engine of Watt?

 

Arthur Young, Tours in England and Wales¹

 

From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out tofertilize the whole world. From thisfilthysewer pure goldflows.Here humanity attains its most com-plete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.

 

1. de Toqueville on Manchester in 1835*

 

 

 

I

 

L E T US begin with the Industrial Revolution, that is to say with Britain. This is at first sight a capricious starting-point, for the reper-cussions of this revolution did not make themselves felt in an obvious and unmistakable way—at any rate Outside England—until quite late in our period; certainly not before 1830, probably not before 1840 or thereabouts. It is only in the 1830s that literature and the arts began to be overtly haunted by that rise of the capitalist society, that world in which all social bonds crumbled except the implacable gold and paper ones of the cash nexus (the phrase comes from Carlyle). Balzac’s Comidie Humaine, the most extraordinary literary monument of its rise, belongs to that decade. It is not until about 1840 that the great stream of official and unofficial literature on the social effects of the Industrial Revolution begins to flow: the major Bluebooks and statistical enquiries

 

in England, Villerme^s Tableau de Vetat physique et moral des ouvriers, Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England, Ducpetiaux’s work in Belgium, and scores of troubled or appalled observers from Germany to Spain and the USA. It was not until the 1840s that the proletariat, that child of the Industrial Revolution, and Communism, which was now

 

 

27

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

attached to its social movements—the spectre of the Communist Manifesto—walked across the continent. The very name of the Indus-trial Revolution reflects its relatively tardy impact on Europe. The thing existed in Britain before the word. Not until the 1820s did English and French socialists—themselves an unprecedented group—invent it, probably by analogy with the political revolution of France.³

 

Nevertheless it is as well to consider it first, for two reasons. First, because in fact it “broke out’—to use a question-begging phrase—before the Bastille was stormed; and second because without it we cannot understand the impersonal groundswell of history on which the more obvious men and events of our period were borne; the uneven com-plexity of its rhythm.

 

What does the phrase ‘the Industrial Revolution broke out’ mean? It means that some time in the 1780s, and for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid and up to the present limitless multiplication of men, goods and services. This is now technically known to the economists as the ‘take-off into self-sustained growth’. No previous society had been able to break through the ceiling which a pre-industrial social structure, defective science and technology, and consequently periodic breakdown, famine and death, imposed on production. The ‘take-off’ was not, of course, one of those phenomena which, like earthquakes and large meteors, take the non-technical world by surprise. Its pre-history in Europe can be traced back, depending on the taste of the historian and his par-ticular range of interest, to about AD 1000, if not before, and earlier attempts to leap into the air, clumsy as the experiments of young ducklings, have been flattered with the name of ‘industrial revolution’ —in the thirteenth century, in the sixteenth, in the last decades of the seventeenth. From the middle of the eighteenth century the process of gathering speed for the take-off is so clearly observable that older historians have tended to date the Industrial Revolution back to 1760. But careful enquiry has tended to lead most experts to pick on the 1780s rather than the 1760s as the decisive decade, for it was then that, so far as we can tell, all the relevant statistical indices took that sudden, sharp, almost vertical turn upwards which marks the ‘take-off’. The economy became, as it were, airborne.

 

To call this process the Industrial Revolution is both logical and in line with a well-established tradition, though there was at one time a fashion among conservative historians—perhaps due to a certain shy-ness in the presence of incendiary concepts—to deny its existence, and substitute instead platitudinous terms like ‘accelerated evolution’.

 

 

28

THE INDUSTRIAL     REVOLUTION

 

If the sudden, qualitative and fundamental transformation, which happened in or about the 1780s, was not a revolution then the word has no commonsense meaning. The Industrial Revolution was not indeed an episode with a beginning and an end. To ask when it was ‘complete’ is senseless, for its essence was that henceforth revolutionary change became the norm. It is still going on; at most we can ask when the economic transformations had gone far enough to establish a substan-tially industrialized economy, capable of producing, broadly speaking, anything it wanted within the range of the available techniques, a ‘mature industrial economy’ to use the technical term. In Britain, and therefore in the world, this period of initial industrialization probably coincides almost exactly with the period with which this book deals, for if it began with the ‘take-off’ in the 1780s, it may plausibly be said to be concluded with the building of the railways and the construction of a massive heavy industry in Britain in the 1840s. But the Revolution itself, the ‘take-off period’, can probably be dated with as much pre-cision as is possible in such matters, to some time within the twenty years from 1780 to 1800: contemporary with, but slightly prior to, the French Revolution.

 

By any reckoning this was probably the most important event in world history, at any rate since the invention of agriculture and cities. And it was initiated by Britain. That this was not fortuitous, is evident. If there was to be a race for pioneering the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, there was really only one starter. There was plenty of industrial and commercial advance, fostered by the intelligent and economically far from naive ministers and civil servants of every en-lightened monarchy in Europe, from Portugal to Russia, all of whom were at least as much concerned with ‘economic growth’ as present-day administrators. Some small states and regions did indeed industrialize quite impressively for example, Saxony and the bishopric of Liege, though their industrial complexes were too small and localized to exert the world-revolutionary influence of the British ones. But it seems clear that even before the revolution Britain was already a long way ahead of her chief potential competitor in per capita output and trade, even if still comparable to her in total output and trade.

 

Whatever the British advance was due to, it was not scientific and technological superiority. In the natural sciences the French were almost certainly ahead of the British; an advantage which the French Revolution accentuated very sharply, at any rate in mathematics and physics, for it encouraged science in France while reaction suspected it in England. Even in the social sciences the British were still far from that superiority which made—and largely kept—economics a pre-

 

 

29

 

THE  AGE  OF    REVOLUTION

 

eminently Anglo-Saxon subject; but here the Industrial Revolution put them into unquestioned first place. The economist of the 1780s would read Adam Smith, but also—and perhaps more profitably—the French physiocrats and national income accountants, Quesnay, Turgot, Dupont de Nemours, Lavoisier, and perhaps an Italian or two. The French produced more original inventions, such as the Jacquard loom (1804)—a more complex piece of apparatus than any devised in Britain—and better ships. The Germans possessed institutions of tech-nical training like the Prussian Bergakademie which had no parallel in Britain, and the French Revolution created that unique and impressive body, the Ecole Polytechnique. English education was a joke in poor taste, though its deficiencies were somewhat offset by the dour village schools and the austere, turbulent, democratic universities of Calvinist Scotland which sent a stream of brilliant, hard-working, career-seeking and rationalist young men into the south country: James Watt, Thomas Telford, Loudon McAdam, James Mill. Oxford and Cambridge, the only two English universities, were intellectually null, as were the somnolent public or grammar schools, with the exception of the Academies founded by the Dissenters who were ex-cluded from the (Anglican) educational system. Even such aristocratic families as wished their sons to be educated, relied on tutors or Scottish universities. There was no system of primary education whatever before the Quaker Lancaster (and after him his Anglican rivals) established

 

a sort of voluntary mass-production of elementary literacy in the early nineteenth century, incidentally saddling English education forever after with sectarian disputes. Social fears discouraged the education of the poor.

 

Fortunately few intellectual refinements were necessary to make the Industrial Revolution.* Its technical inventions were exceedingly modest, and in no way beyond the scope of intelligent artisans experi-menting in their workshops, or of the constructive capacities of carpenters, millwrights and locksmiths: the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, the mule. Even its scientifically most sophisticated machine, James Watt’s rotary steam-engine (1784), required no more physics than had been available for the best part of a century—the proper

 

* ‘On the one hand it is gratifying to see that the English derive a rich treasure for their political life, from the study of the ancient authors, however pedantically this might be conducted; so much so that parliamentary orators not infrequently cited the ancients to good purpose, a practice which was favourably received by, and not without effect upon, their Assembly. On the other hand it cannot but amaze us that a country in which the manufac-turing tendencies are predominant, and hence the need to familiarize the people with the sciences and arts which advance these pursuits is evident, the absence of these subjects in the curriculum of youthful education is hardly noticed. It is equally astonishing how much is nevertheless achieved by men lacking any formal education for their professions.’ W. Wachsmuth, Europatischc SittengcschichU 5, 2 (Leipzig 1839), p. 736.

 

 

30

THE INDUSTRIAL      REVOLUTION

 

theory of steam engines was only developed ex post facto by the French-man Carnot in the 1820s—and could build on several generations of practical employment for steam engines, mostly in mines. Given the right conditions, the technical innovations of the Industrial Revolu-tion practically made themselves, except perhaps in the chemical industry. This does not mean that early industrialists were not often interested in science and on the look-out for its practical benefits.*

 

But the right conditions were visibly present in Britain, where more than a century had passed since the first king had been formally tried and executed by his people, and since private profit and economic development had become accepted as the supreme objects of govern-ment policy. For practical purposes the uniquely revolutionary British solution of the agrarian problem had already been found. A relative handful of commercially-minded landlords already almost monopo-lized the land, which was cultivated by tenant-farmers employing landless or smallholders. A good many relics of the ancient collective economy of the village still remained to be swept away by Enclosure Acts (1760-1830) and private transactions, but we can hardly any longer speak of a ‘British peasantry’ in the same sense that we can speak of a French, German or Russian peasantry. Farming was already predominantly for the market; manufacture had long been diffused throughout an unfeudal countryside. Agriculture was already prepared to carry out its three fundamental functions in an era of industrializa-tion: to increase production and productivity, so as to feed a rapidly rising non-agricultural population; to provide a large and rising surplus of potential recruits for the towns and industries; and to provide a mechanism for the accumulation of capital to be used in the more modern sectors of the economy. (Two other functions were probably less important in Britain: that of creating a sufficiently large market among the agricultural population—normally the great mass of the people—and of providing an export surplus which helps to secure capital imports.) A considerable volume of social overhead capital— the expensive general equipment necessary for the entire economy to move smoothly ahead—was already being created, notably in shipping, port facilities, and the improvement of roads and waterways. Politics were already geared to profit. The businessman’s specific demands might encounter resistance from other vested interests; and as we shall see, the agrarians were to erect one last barrier to hold up the advance of the industrialists between 1795 and 1846. On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the indus-trialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money.

 

 

31

 

THE  AGE  OF   REVOLUTION

 

The businessman was undoubtedly in the process of getting more money, for the greater part of the eighteenth century was for most of Europe a period of prosperity and comfortable economic expansion; the real background to the happy optimism of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss. It may well be argued that sooner or later this expansion, assisted by a gentle inflation, would have pushed some country across the threshold which separates the pre-industrial from the industrial economy. But the problem is not so simple. Much of eighteenth-century industrial expansion did not in fact lead immediately, or within the foreseeable future, to industrial revolution, i.e. to the creation of a mechanized ‘factory system’ which in turn produces in such vast quantities and at such rapidly diminishing cost, as to be no longer dependent on existing demand, but to create its own market.* For instance the building trade, or the numerous small scale industries producing domestic metal goods —nails, pots, knives, scissors, etc.—in the British Midlands and York-shire, expanded very greatly in this period, but always as a function of the existing market. In 1850, while producing far more than in 1750, they produced in substantially the old manner. What was needed was not any kind of expansion, but the special kind of expansion which produced Manchester rather than Birmingham.

 

Moreover, the pioneer industrial revolutions occurred in a special historical situation, in which economic growth emerges from the criss-crossing decisions of countless private entrepreneurs and investors, each governed by the first commandment of the age, to buy in the cheapest market and to sell in the dearest. How were they to discover that maximum profit was to be got out of organizing industrial revolution rather than out of more familiar (and in the past more profitable) business activities? How were they to learn, what nobody could as yet know, that industrial revolution would produce an unexampled accel-eration in the expansion of their markets? Given that the main social foundations of an industrial society had already been laid, as they almost certainly had in the England of the later eighteenth century, they required two things: first, an industry which already offered exceptional rewards for the manufacturer who could expand his output quickly, if need be by reasonably cheap and simple innovations, and second, a world market largely monopolized by a single producing nation.f

 

* The modern motor industry is a good example of this. It is not the demand for motor-cars existing in the i8gos which created an industry of the modern size, but the capacity to produce cheap cars which produced the modern mass demand for them.

 

t ‘Only slowly did purchasing power expand with population, income per head, transport costs and restraints on trade. But the market was expanding, and the vital question was when would a producer of some mass consumption goods capture enough of it to allow fast and continuous expansion of their production.’⁵

 

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THE INDUSTRIAL      REVOLUTION

 

These considerations apply in some ways to all countries in our period. For instance, in all of them the lead in industrial growth was taken by the manufacturers of goods of mass consumption—mainly, but not exclusively, textiles⁶—because the mass market for such goods already existed, and businessmen could clearly see its possibilities of expansion. In other ways, however, they apply to Britain alone. For the pioneer industrialists have the most difficult problems. Once Britain had begun to industrialize, other countries could begin to enjoy the benefits of the rapid economic expansion which the pioneer industrial revolution stimulated. Moreover, British success proved what could be achieved by it, British technique could be imitated, British skill and capital imported. The Saxon textile industry, incapable of making its own inventions, copied the English ones, sometimes under the super-vision of English mechanics; Englishmen with a taste for the continent, like the Cockerills, established themselves in Belgium and various parts of Germany. Between 1789 and 1848 Europe and America were flooded with British experts, steam engines, cotton machinery and investments.

 

Britain enjoyed no such advantages. On the other hand it possessed an economy strong enough and a state aggressive enough to capture the markets of its competitors. In effect the wars of 1793-1815, the last and decisive phase of a century’s Anglo-French duel, virtually eliminated all rivals from the non-European world, except to some extent the young USA. Moreover, Britain possessed an industry admirably suited to pioneering industrial revolution under capitalist conditions, and an economic conjuncture which allowed it to: the cotton industry, and colonial expansion.

 

II

 

The British, like all other cotton industries, had originally grown up as a by-product of overseas trade, which produced its raw material (or rather one of its raw materials, for the original product was fustian, a mixture of cotton and linen), and the Indian cotton goods or calicoes which won the markets that the European manufacturers were to attempt to capture with their own imitations. To begin with they were not very successful, though better able to reproduce the cheap and coarse goods competitively than the fine and elaborate ones. Fortu-nately, however, the old-established and powerful vested interest of the woollen trade periodically secured import prohibitions of Indian cali-coes (which the purely mercantile interest of the East India Company sought to export from India in the largest possible quantities), and

 

 

33

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

thus gave the native cotton industry’s substitutes a chance. Cheaper than wool, cotton and cotton mixtures won themselves a modest but useful market at home. But their major chances of rapid expansion were to lie overseas.

 

Colonial trade had created the cotton industry, and continued to nourish it. In the eighteenth century it developed in the hinterland of the major colonial ports, Bristol, Glasgow but especially Liverpool, the great centre of the slave trades. Each phase of his inhuman but rapidly expanding commerce stimulated it. In fact, during the entire period with which this book is concerned slavery and cotton marched together. The African slaves were bought, in part at least, with Indian cotton goods; but when the supply of these was interrupted by war or revolt in and about India, Lancashire was able to leap in. The plantations of the West Indies, where the slaves were taken, provided the bulk of the raw cotton for the British industry, and in return the planters bought Man-chester cotton checks in appreciable quantities. Until shortly before the ‘take-off’ the overwhelming bulk of Lancashire cotton exports went to the combined African and American markets.⁷ Lancashire was later to repay its debt to slavery by preserving it; for after the 1790s the slave plantations of the Southern United States were extended and main-tained by the insatiable and rocketing demands of the Lancashire mills, to which they supplied the bulk of their raw cotton.

 

The cotton industry was thus launched, like a glider, by the pull of the colonial trade to which it was attached; a trade which promised not only great, but rapid and above all unpredictable expansion, which encouraged the entrepreneur to adopt the revolutionary techniques required to meet it. Between 1750 and 1769 the export of British cottons increased more than ten times over. In such situations the rewards for the man who came into the market first with the most cotton checks were astronomical and well worth the risks of leaps into technological adventure. But the overseas market, and especially within it the poor and backward ‘under-developed areas’, not only expanded dramatically from time to time, but expanded constantly without apparent limit. Doubtless any given section of it, considered in isolation, was small by industrial standards, and the competition of the different ‘advanced economies’ made it even smaller for each. But, as we have seen, supposing any one of the advanced economies managed, for a sufficiently long time, to monopolize all or almost all of it, then its prospects really were limitless. This is precisely what the British cotton industry succeeded in doing, aided by the aggressive support of the British Government. In terms of sales, the Industrial Revolution can be described except for a few initial years in the 1780s as the triumph of

 

 

34

THE INDUSTRIAL     REVOLUTION

 

the export market over the home: by 1814 Britain exported about four yards of cotton cloth for every three used at home, by 1850 thirteen for every eight.⁸ And within this expanding export market, in turn, the semi-colonial and colonial markets, long the main outlets for British goods abroad, triumphed. During the Napoleonic Wars, when the European markets were largely cut off by wars and blockades, this was natural enough. But even after the wars they continued to assert them-selves. In 1820 Europe, once again open to free British imports, took 128 million yards of British cottons; America outside the USA, Africa and Asia took 80 millions; but by 1840 Europe took 200 million yards, while the ‘under-developed’ areas took 529 millions.

 

For within these areas British industry had established a monopoly by means of war, other people’s revolutions and her own imperial rule. Two regions deserve particular notice. Latin America came to depend virtually entirely on British imports during the Napoleonic Wars, and after it broke with Spain and Portugal (see pp. 109-10, 239 below) it became an almost total economic dependency of Britain, being cut off from any political interference by Britain’s potential European com-petitors. By 1820 this impoverished continent already took more than a quarter as much of British cotton cloths as Europe; by 1840 it took almost half as much again as Europe. The East Indies had been, as we have seen, the traditional exporter of cotton goods, encouraged by the East India Company. But as the industrialist vested interest prevailed in Britain, the East India mercantile interests (not to mention the Indian ones) were pressed back. India was systematically deindustrialized and became in turn a market for Lancashire cottons: in 1820 the subcontinent took only 11 million yards; but by 1840 it already took 145 million yards. This was not merely a gratifying extension of Lancashire’s markets. It was a major landmark in world history. For since the dawn of time Europe had always imported more from the East than she had sold there; because there was little the Orient required from the West in return for the spices, silks, calicoes, jewels, etc., which it sent there. The cotton shirtings of the Industrial Revolution for the first time re-versed this relationship, which had been hitherto kept in balance by a mixture of bullion exports and robbery. Only the conservative and self-satisfied Chinese still refused to buy what the West, or western-controlled economies offered, until between 1815 and 1842 western traders, aided by western gun-boats, discovered an ideal commodity which could be exported en masse from India to the East: opium.

 

Cotton therefore provided prospects sufficiently astronomical to tempt private entrepreneurs into the adventure of industrial revolution, and an expansion sufficiently sudden to require it. Fortunately it also pro-

 

 

35

THE  AGE  OF   REVOLUTION

 

vided the other conditions which made it possible. The new inventions which revolutionized it—the spinning-jenny, the water-frame, the mule in spinning, a little later the power-loom in weaving—were suf-ficiently simple and cheap, and paid for themselves almost immediately in terms of higher output. They could be installed, if need be piecemeal, by small men who started off with a few borrowed pounds, for the men who controlled the great accumulations of eighteenth-century wealth were not greatly inclined to invest large amounts in industry. The expansion of the industry could be financed easily out of current profits, for the combination of its vast market conquests and a steady price-inflation produced fantastic rates of profit. ‘It was not five per cent or ten per cent,’ a later English politician was to say, with justice, ‘but hundreds per cent and thousands per cent that made the fortunes of Lancashire.’ In 1789 an ex-draper’s assistant like Robert Owen could start with a borrowed £100 in Manchester; by 1809 he bought out his partners in the New Lanark Mills for £84,000 in cash. And his was a relatively modest story of business success. It should be remembered that around 1800 less than 15 per cent of British families had an income of more than £50 per year, and of these only one-quarter earned more than £200 a year.⁹

 

But the cotton manufacture had other advantages. All its raw mat-erial came from abroad, and its supply could therefore be expanded by the drastic procedures open to white men in the colonies—slavery and the opening of new areas of cultivation—rather than by the slower procedures of European agriculture; nor was it hampered by the vested interests of European agriculturalists.* From the 1790s on British cotton found its supply, to which its fortunes remained linked until the 1860s, in the newly-opened Southern States of the USA. Again, at crucial points of manufacture (notably spinning) cotton suffered from a shortage of cheap and efficient labour, and was therefore pushed into mechaniza-tion. An industry like linen, which had initially rather better chances of colonial expansion than cotton, suffered in the long run from the very ease with which cheap, non-mechanized production could be expanded in the impoverished peasant regions (mainly in Central Europe, but also in Ireland) in which it mainly flourished. For the obvious way of industrial expansion in the eighteenth century, in Saxony and Normandy as in England, was not to construct factories, but to extend the so-called ‘domestic’ or ‘putting-out’ system, in which workers—sometimes former independent craftsmen, sometimes former peasants with time on their hands in the dead season—worked up the

 

* Overseas supplies of wool, for instance, remained of negligible importance during our entire period, and only became a major factor in the 1870s.

 

 

36

 

T HE  INDUSTRIAL    REVOLUTION

 

raw material in their own homes, with their own or rented tools, receiving it from and delivering it back to merchants who were in the process of becoming employers.* Indeed, both in Britain and in the rest of the economically progressive world, the bulk of expansion in the initial period of industrialization continued to be of this kind. Even in the cotton industry such processes as weaving were expanded by creating hosts of domestic handloom weavers to serve the nuclei of mechanized spinneries, the primitive handloom being a rather more efficient device than the spinning-wheel. Everywhere weaving was mechanized a generation after spinning, and everywhere, incidentally, the handloom weavers died a lingering death, occasionally revolting against their awful fate, when industry no longer had any need of them.

 

IH

 

The traditional view which has seen the history of the British Industrial Revolution primarily in terms of cotton is thus correct. Cotton was the first industry to be revolutionized, and it is difficult to see what other could have pushed a host of private entrepreneurs into revolution. As late as the 1830s cotton was the only British industry in which the factory or ‘mill’ (the name was derived from the most widespread pre-industrial establishment employing heavy power-operated machinery) predominated; at first (1780-1815) mainly in spinning, carding and a few ancillary operations, after 1815 increasingly also in weaving. The ‘factories’ with which the new Factory Acts dealt were, until the 1860s, assumed to be exclusively textile factories and predominantly cotton mills. Factory production in other textile branches was slow to develop before the 1840s, and in other manufactures was negligible. Even the steam engine, though applied to numerous other industries by 1815, was not used in any quantity outside mining, which had pioneered it. In 1830 ‘industry’ and ‘factory’ in anything like the modern sense still meant almost exclusively the cotton areas of the United Kingdom.

 

This is not to underestimate the forces which made for industrial innovation in other consumer goods, notably in other textiles,! in food and drink, in pottery and other household goods, greatly stimulated by the rapid growth of cities. But in the first place these employed far fewer people: no industry remotely approached the million-and-a-half

 

* The ‘domestic system’, which is a universa Jstage of manufacturing development on the road from home or craft production to modern industry, can take innumerable forms, some of which can come fairly close to the factory. If an eighteenth-century writer speaks of ‘manufactures’ this is almost invariably and in all western countries what he means.

 

t In all countries possessing any kind of marketable manufactures, textiles tended to predominate: in Silesia (1800) they formed 74 per cent of the value of all manufacture.”‘

 

 

37

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

people directly employed by or dependent on employment in cotton in 1833.^u I ^{n t n e} second place their power to transform was much smaller: brewing, which was in most respects a technically and scientifically much more advanced and mechanized business, and one revolutionized well before cotton, hardly affected the economy around it, as may be proved by the great Guinness brewery in Dublin, which left the rest of the Dublin and Irish economy (though not local tastes) much as it was before its construction.¹² The demand derived from cotton—for more building and all activities in the new industrial areas, for mach-ines, for chemical improvements, for industrial lighting, for shipping and a number of other activities—is itself enough to account for a large proportion of the economic growth in Britain up to the 1830s. In the third place, the expansion of the cotton industry was so vast and its weight in the foreign trade of Britain so great, that it dominated the movements of the entire economy. The quantity of raw cotton imported into Britain rose from 11 million lb. in 1785 to 588 million lb. in 1850; the output of cloth from 40 million to 2,025 million yards.¹³ Cotton manufactures formed between 40 and 50 per cent of the annual declared value of all British exports between 1816 and 1848. If cotton flourished, the economy flourished, if it slumped, so did the economy. Its price movements determined the balance of the nation’s trade. Only agri-culture had a comparable power, and that was visibly declining.

 

Nevertheless, though the expansion of the cotton industry and the cotton-dominated industrial economy ‘mocks all that the most romantic imagination could have previously conceived possible under any cir-cumstances’,¹⁴ its progress was far from smooth, and by the 1830s and early 1840s produced major problems of growth, not to mention revo-lutionary unrest unparalleled in any other period of recent British history. This first general stumbling of the industrial capitalist economy is reflected in a marked slowing down in the growth, perhaps even in a decline, in the British national income at this period.¹⁸ Nor was this first general capitalist crisis a purely British phenomenon.

 

Its most serious consequences were social: the transition to the new economy created misery and discontent, the materials of social revolu-tion. And indeed, social revolution in the form of spontaneous risings of the urban and industrial poor did break out, and made the revolu-tions of 1848 on the continent, the vast Chartist movement in Britain. Nor was discontent confined to the labouring poor. Small and inadapt-able businessmen, petty-bourgeois, special sections of the economy, were also the victims of the Industrial Revolution and of its ramifica-tions. Simple-minded labourers reacted to the new system by smashing the machines which they thought responsible for their troubles; but a

 

 

38

THE INDUSTRIAL     REVOLUTION

 

surprisingly large body of local businessmen and farmers sympathized profoundly with these Luddite activities of their labourers, because they too saw themselves as victims of a diabolical minority of selfish innovators. The exploitation of labour which kept its incomes at sub-sistence level, thus enabling the rich to accumulate the profits which financed industrialization (and their own ample comforts), antagonized the proletarian. However, another aspect of this diversion of national income from the poor to the rich, from consumption to investment, also antagonized the small entrepreneur. The great financiers, the tight community of home and foreign ‘fund-holders’ who received what all paid in taxes (cf. chapter on War)—something like 8 per cent of the entire national income¹⁶—were perhaps even more unpopular among small businessmen, farmers and the like than among labourers, for these knew enough about money and credit to feel a personal rage at their disadvantage. It was all very well for the rich, who could raise all the credit they needed, to clamp rigid deflation and monetary orthodoxy on the economy after the Napoleonic Wars: it was the little man who suffered, and who, in all countries and at all times in the nineteenth century demanded easy credit and financial unorthodoxy.* Labour and the disgruntled petty-bourgeois on the verge of toppling over into the unpropertied abyss, therefore shared common discontents. These in turn united them in the mass movements of ‘radicalism’, ‘democracy’ or ‘republicanism’ of which the British Radicals, the French Republicans and the American Jacksonian Democrats were the most formidable between 1815 and 1848.

 

From the point of view of the capitalists, however, these social problems were relevant to the progress of the economy only if, by some horrible accident, they were to overthrow the social order. On the other hand there appeared to be certain inherent flaws of the economic process which threatened its fundamental motive-force: profit. For if the rate of return on capital fell to nothing, an economy in which men produced for profit only must slow down into that ‘stationary state’ which the economists envisaged and dreaded.¹⁷

 

The three most obvious of these flaws were the trade cycle of boom and slump, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline, and (what amounted to the same thing) the shortage of profitable investment opportunities. The first of these was not regarded as serious, except by the critics of capitalism as such, who were the first to investigate it and to consider it as an integral part of the capitalist economic process and

 

* From the post-napoleonic Radicalism in Britain to the Populists in the USA, all protest movements including farmers and small entrepreneurs can be recognized by their demand for financial unorthodoxy: they were all ‘currency cranks*.

 

 

39

 

THE  AGE  OF   REVOLUTION

 

as a symptom of its inherent contradictions.* Periodic crises of the economy leading to unemployment, falls in production, bankruptcies, etc. were well known. In the eighteenth century they generally reflected some agrarian catastrophe (harvest failures, etc.) and on the continent of Europe, it has been argued, agrarian disturbances remained the primary cause of the most widespread depressions until the end of our period. Periodic crises in the small manufacturing and financial sectors of the economy were also familiar, in Britain at least from 1793. After the Napoleonic Wars the periodic drama of boom and collapse—in 1825-6, in 1836-7, in 1839-42, in 1846-8—clearly dominate’ the economic life of a nation at peace. By the 1830s, that crucial decade in our period of history, it was vaguely recognized that they were regular periodic phenomena, at least in trade and finance.¹⁸ However, they were still commonly regarded by businessmen as caused either by particular mistakes—e.g. overspeculation in American stocks—or by outside interference with the smooth operations ofthe capitalist economy. They were not believed to reflect any fundamental difficulties of the system.

 

Not so the falling margin of profit, which the cotton industry illus-trated very clearly. Initially this industry benefited from immense advantages. Mechanization greatly increased the productivity (i.e. re-duced the cost per unit produced) of its labour, which was in any case abominably paid, since it consisted largely of women and children.f Of the 12,000 operatives in the cotton mills of Glasgow in 1833, only 2,000 earned an average of over 11s. a week. In 131 Manchester mills average wages were less than 1 vs., in only twenty-one were they higher.¹⁹ And the building of factories was relatively cheap: in 1846 an entire weaving plant of 410 machines, including the cost of ground and buildings, could be constructed for something like ^iijOoo.²⁰ But above all the major cost, that of raw material, was drastically cut by the rapid expansion of cotton cultivation in the Southern USA after the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin in 1793. If we add that entrepreneurs enjoyed the bonus of a profit-inflation (i.e. the general tendency for prices to be higher when they sold their product than when they made it), we shall understand why the manufacturing classes felt buoyant.

 

After  1815 these advantages appeared increasingly offset by the

 

* The Swiss Simonde de Sismondi, and the conservative and country-minded Malthus, were the first to argue along these lines, even before 1825. The new socialists made their crisis-theory into a keystone of their critique of capitalism.

t E. Baines in 1835 estimated the average wages of all the spinning and weaving operatives at I os. a week—allowing for two unpaid weeks holiday a year—and of the handloom weavers at ys,

 

40

THE INDUSTRIAL     REVOLUTION

 

narrowing margin of profit. In the first place industrial revolution and competition brought about a constant and dramatic fall in the price of the finished article but not in several of the costs of production.²¹ In the second place after 1815 the general atmosphere of prices was one of deflation and not inflation, that is to say profits, so far from enjoying an extra boost, suffered from a slight lag. Thus, while in 1784 the selling-price of a lb. of spun yarn had been 10s. 1 id., the cost of its raw material 2s. (margin, 8s. nd.), in 1812 its price was 2^. 6d., its raw material cost is. 6d. (margin is.) and in 1832 its price njrf., its raw material cost l\d., and the margin for other costs and profits therefore only 4«?.^2a Of course the situation, which was general throughbut British—and indeed all advanced—industry was not too tragic. ‘Profits are still sufficient’, wrote the champion and historian of cotton in 1835, in extreme understatement, ‘to allow of a great accumulation of capital in the manufacture.’²³ As the total sales soared upwards, so did the total of profits even at their diminishing rate. All that was needed was continued and astronomic expansion. Nevertheless, it seemed that the shrinking of profit-margins had to be arrested or at least slowed down. This could only be done by cutting costs. And of all the costs wages— which McCulloch reckoned at three times the amount per year of the raw material—were the most compressible.

 

They could be compressed by direct wage-cutting, by the substitution of cheaper machine-tenders for dearer skilled workers, and by the competition of the machine. This last reduced the average weekly wage of the handloom weaver in Bolton from 33s. in 1795 and 14*. in 1815 to 5s. 6d. (or more precisely a net income of 41. i\d.) in 1829-34.²⁴ And indeed money wages fell steadily in the post-Napoleonic period. But there was a physiological limit to such reductions, unless the labourers were actually to starve, as of course the 500,000 handloom weavers did. Only if the cost of living fell could wages also fall beyond that point. The cotton manufacturers shared the view that it was kept artificially high by the monopoly of the landed interest, made even worse by the heavy protective tariffs which a Parliament of landlords had wrapped around British farming after the wars—the Corn Laws. These, moreover, had the additional disadvantage of threatening the essential growth of British exports. For if the rest of the not yet indus-trialized world was prevented from selling its agrarian products, how was it to pay for the manufactured goods which Britain alone could— and had to—supply? Manchester business therefore became the centre of militant and increasingly desperate opposition to landlordism in general and the Corn Laws in particular and the backbone of the Anti-Corn Law League of 1838-46. But the Corn Laws were not

 

 

41

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

abolished until 1846, their abolition did not immediately lead to a fall in the cost of living, and it is doubtful whether before the age of railways and steamers even free food-imports would have greatly lowered it.

The industry was thus under immense pressure to mechanize (i.e. to lower costs by labour-saving) to rationalize and to expand its produc-tion and sales, thus making up by the mass of small profits per unit for the fall in the margins. Its success was variable. As we have seen the actual rise in production and exports was gigantic; so, after 1815, was the mechanization of hitherto manual or partly-mechanized occupations, notably weaving. This took the form chiefly of the general adoption of existing or slightly improved machinery rather than of further technological revolution. Though the pressure for technical innovation increased significantly—there were thirty-nine new patents in cotton spinning, etc., in 1800-20, fifty-one in the 1820s, eighty-six in the 1830s and a hundred and fifty-six in the 1840s²⁵—the British cotton industry was technologically stabilized by the 1830s. On the other hand, though the production per operative increased in the post-Napoleonic period, it did not do so to any revolutionary extent. The really substantial speed-up of operations was to occur in the second half of the century.

 

There was comparable pressure on the rate of interest on capital, which contemporary theory tended to assimilate to profit. But considera-tion of this takes us to the next phase of industrial development—the construction of a basic capital-goods industry.

 

IV

 

It is evident that no industrial economy can develop beyond a certain point until it possesses adequate capital-goods capacity. This is why even today the most reliable single index of any country’s industrial potential is the quantity of its iron and steel production. But it is also evident that under conditions of private enterprise the extremely costly capital investment necessary for much of this development is not likely to be undertaken for the same reasons as, the industrialization of cotton or other consumer goods. For these a mass market already exists, at least potentially: even very primitive men wear shirts or use household equipment and foodstuffs. The problem is merely how to put a suffi-ciently vast market sufficiently quickly within the purview of business-men. But no such market exists, e.g., for heavy iron equipment such as girders. It only comes into existence in the course of an industrial revolution (and not always then), and those who lock up their money in the very heavy investments required even by quite modest iron-

 

 

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THE INDUSTRIAL     REVOLUTION

 

works (compared to quite large cotton-mills) before it is visibly there, are more likely to be speculators, adventurers and dreamers than sound businessmen, In fact in France a sect of such speculative techno-logical adventurers, the Saint-Simonians (cf. pp. 176, 241), acted as chief propagandists of the kind of industrialization which needed heavy and long-range investment.

 

These disadvantages applied particularly to metallurgy, especially of iron. Its capacity increased, thanks to a few simple innovations such as that of puddling and rolling in the 1780s, but the non-military demand for it remained relatively modest, and the military, though gratifyingly large thanks to a succession of wars between 1756 and 1815, slackened off sharply after Waterloo. It was certainly not large enough to make Britain into an outstandingly large producer of iron. In 1790 she out-produced France by only forty per cent or so, and even in 1800 her output was considerably less than half of the combined continental one, and amounted to the, by later standards, tiny figure of a quarter of a million tons. If anything the British share of world iron output tended to sink in the next decades.

 

Fortunately they applied less to mining, which was chiefly the mining of coal. For coal had the advantage of being not merely the major source of industrial power in the nineteenth century, but also a major form of domestic fuel, thanks largely to the relative shortage of forests in Britain. The growth of cities, and especially of London, had caused coal mining to expand rapidly since the late sixteenth century. By the early eighteenth it was substantially a primitive modern industry, even employing the earliest steam engines (devised for similar purposes in non-ferrous metal mining, mainly in Cornwall) for pumping. Hence coal mining hardly needed or underwent major technological revolu-tion in our period. Its innovations were improvements rather than transformations of production. But its capacity was already immense and, by world standards, astronomic. In 1800 Britain may have pro-duced something like ten million tons of coal, or about 90 per cent of the world output. Its nearest competitor, France, produced less than a million.

 

This immense industry, though probably not expanding fast enough for really massive industrialization on the modern scale, was sufficiently large to stimulate the basic invention which was to transform the capital goods industries: the railway. For the mines not only required steam engines in large quantities and of great power, but also required efficient means of transporting the great quantities of coal from coal-face to shaft and especially from pithead to the point of shipment. The ‘tramway’ or ‘railway’ along which trucks ran v.’as an obvious answer;

 

 

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T HE  AGE OF   REVOLUTION

 

to pull these trucks by stationary engines was tempting; to pull them by moving engines would not seem too impractical. Finally, the costs of overland transport of bulk goods were so high that it was likely to strike coal-owners in inland fields that the use of these short-term means of transport could be profitably extended for long-term haulage. The line from the inland coalfield of Durham to the coast (Stockton-Darlington 1825) was the first of the modern railways. Technologically the railway is the child of the mine, and especially the northern English coalmine. George Stephenson began life as a Tyneside ‘engine-man’, and for years virtually all locomotive drivers were recruited from his native coalfield.

 

No innovation of the Industrial Revolution has fired the imagination as much as the railway, as witness the fact that it is the only product of nineteenth century industrialization which has been fully absorbed into the imagery of popular and literate poetry. Hardly had they been proved technically feasible and profitable in England (c. 1825-30), before plans to build them were made over most of the Western world, though their execution was generally delayed. The first short lines were opened in the USA in 1827, in France in 1828 and 1835, in Germany and Belgium in 1835 and even in Russia by 1837. The reason was doubtless that no other invention revealed the power and speed of the new age to the layman as dramatically; a revelation made all the more striking by the remarkable technical maturity of even the very earliest railways. (Speeds of up to sixty miles per hour, for instance, were perfectly practicable in the 1830s, and were not substantially im-proved by later steam-railways.) The iron road, pushing its huge smoke-plumed snakes at the speed of wind across countries and conti-nents, whose embankments and cuttings, bridges and stations, formed a body of public building beside which the pyramids and the Roman aqueducts and even the Great Wall of China paled into provincialism, was the very symbol of man’s triumph through technology.

 

In fact, from an economic point of view, its vast expense was its chief advantage. No doubt in the long run its capacity to open up countries hitherto cut off by high transport costs from the world market, the vast increase in the speed and bulk of overland communi-cation it brought for men and goods, were to be of major importance. Before 1848 they were economically less important: outside Britain because railways were few, in Britain because for geographical reasons transport problems were much less intractable then in large landlocked countries.* But from the perspective of the student of economic develop-

 

* No point in Britain is more than 70 miles from the sea, and all the chief industrial areas of the nineteenth century, with one exception, are either on the sea or within easy reach of it.

 

 

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T HE  INDUSTRIAL    REVOLUTION

 

ment the immense appetite of the railways for iron and steel, for coal, for heavy machinery, for labour, for capital investment, was at this stage more important. For it provided just that massive demand which was needed if the capital goods industries were to be transformed as profoundly as the cotton industry had been. In the first two decades of the railways (1830-50) the output of iron in Britain rose from 680,000 to 2,250,000, in other words it trebled. The output of coal between 1830 and 1850 also trebled from 15 million tons to 49 million tons. That dramatic rise was due primarily to the railway, for on average each mile of line required 300 tons of iron merely for track.²⁶ The industrial advances which for the first time made the mass pro-duction of steel possible followed naturally in the next decades.

 

The reason for this sudden, immense, and quite essential expansion lay in the apparently irrational passion with which businessmen and investors threw themselves into the construction of railways. In 1830 there were a few dozen miles of railways in all the world—chiefly consisting of the line from Liverpool to Manchester. By 1840 there were over 4,500 miles, by 1850 over 23,500. Most of them were projected in a few bursts of speculative frenzy known as the ‘railway manias’ of 1835-7 ^an(^ especially in 1844-7; ^{m o s t} of them were built in large part with British capital, British iron, machines and know-how.* These investment booms appear irrational, because in fact few railways were much more profitable to the investor than other forms of enterprise, most yielded quite modest profits and many none at all: in 1855 the average interest on capital sunk in the British railways was a mere 3 • 7 per cent. No doubt promoters, speculators and others did exceed-ingly well out of them, but the ordinary investor clearly did not. And •yet by 1840 £28 millions, by 1850 £240 millions had been hopefully invested in them.²⁸

 

Why? The fundamental fact about Britain in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution was, that the comfortable and rich classes accumulated income so fast and in such vast quantities as to exceed all available possibilities of spending and investment. (The annual “investible surplus in the 1840s was reckoned at about £60 millions.²⁹) No doubt feudal and aristocratic societies would have succeeded in throwing a great deal of this away in riotous living, luxury building and other uneconomic activities.! Even in Britain the sixth Duke of Devonshire, whose normal income was princely enough succeeded in leaving his heir £1,000,000 of debts in the mid-nineteenth century

 

* In 1848 one third of the capital in the French railways was British.”

 

t Of course such spending also stimulates the economy, but very inefficiently, and hardly at all in the direction of industrial growth.

 

 

45

THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

 

(which he paid off by borrowing another^ 1,500,000 and going in for the development of real estate values)³⁰. But the bulk of the middle classes, who formed the main investing public, were still savers rather than spenders, though by 1840 there are many signs that they felt sufficiently wealthy to spend as well as to invest. Their wives began to turn into ‘ladies’, instructed by the handbooks of etiquette which multiply about this period, their chapels began to be rebuilt in ample and expensive styles, and they even began to celebrate their collective glory by constructing those shocking town halls and other civic mon-strosities in Gothic and Renaissance imitations, whose exact and Napoleonic cost their municipal historians recorded with pride.*

 

Again, a modern socialist or welfare society would no doubt have distributed some of these vast accumulations for social purposes. In our period nothing was less likely. Virtually untaxed, the middle classes therefore continued to accumulate among the hungry populace, whose hunger was the counterpart of their accumulation. And as they were not peasants, content to hoard their savings in woollen stockings or as golden bangles, they had to find profitable investment for them. But where? Existing industries, for instance, had become far too cheap to absorb more than a fraction of the available surplus for investment: even supposing the size of the cotton industry to be doubled, the capital cost would absorb only a part of it. What was needed was a sponge large enough to hold all of it.f

 

Foreign investment was one obvious possibility. The rest of the world—mostly, to begin with, old governments seeking to recover from the Napoleonic Wars and new ones borrowing with their usual dash and abandon for indeterminate purposes—was only too anxious for unlimited loans. The English investor lent readily. But alas, the South American loans which appeared so promising in the 1820s, the North American ones which beckoned in the 1830s, turned only too often into scraps of worthless paper: of twenty-five foreign government loans sold between 1818 and 1831, sixteen (involving about half of the £42 millions at issue prices) were in default in 1831. In theory these loans should have paid the investor 7 or 9 per cent; in fact in 1831 he received an average of 3 • 1 per cent. Who would not be discouraged by experi-ences such as those with the Greek 5 per cent loans of 1824 and 1825 which did not begin to pay any interest at all until the 1870s?³² Hence it is natural that the capital flooding abroad in the speculative booms

 

* A few cities with eighteenth century traditions never ceased public building; but a typical new industrial metropolis like Bolton in Lancashire built practically no conspicuous and non-utilitarian structures before 1847-8.”

 

t The total capital—fixed and working—of the cotton industry was estimated by McCulloch at £34 millions in 1833, £47 millions in 1845.

 

 

46

THE  INDUSTRIAL     REVOLUTION

 

of 1825 and 1835-7, should seek an apparently less disappointing employment.

 

John Francis, looking back on the mania from 1851, described the rich man who ‘saw the accumulation of wealth, which with an indus-trial people always outstrips the ordinary modes of investment, legiti-mately and justly employed . . . He saw the money which in his youth had been thrown into war loans and in his manhood wasted on South American mines, forming roads, employing labour and increasing business. (The railway’s) absorption of capital was at least an absorp-tion, if unsuccessful, in the country that produced it. Unlike foreign mines and foreign loans, they could not be exhausted or utterly value-less.’³³

 

Whether it could have found other forms of home investment—for instance in building—is an academic question to which the answer is still in doubt. In fact it found the railways, which could not conceivably have been built as rapidly and on as large a scale without this torrent of capital flooding into them, especially in the middle 1840s. It was a lucky conjuncture, for the railways happened to solve virtually all the problems of the economy’s growth at once.

 

V

 

To trace the impetus for industrialization is only one part of the his-torian’s task. The other is to trace the mobilization and redeployment of economic resources, the adaptation of the economy and the society which were required to maintain the new and revolutionary course.

 

The first and perhaps the most crucial factor which had to be mobi-lized and redeployed was labour, for an industrial economy means a sharp proportionate decline in the agricultural (i.e. rural) and a sharp rise in the non-agricultural (i.e. increasingly in the urban) population, and almost certainly (as in our period) a rapid general increase in population. It therefore implies in the first instance a sharp rise in the supply of food, mainly from home agriculture—i.e. an ‘agricultural revolution’.*

 

The rapid growth of towns and non-agricultural settlements in Britain had naturally long stimulated agriculture, which is fortunately so inefficient in its pre-industrial forms that quite small improvements —a little rational attention to animal-husbandry, crop-rotation, ferti-lization and the lay-out of farms, or the adoption of new crops—can

 

* Before the age of railway and the steamship—i.e. before the end of our period—the possibility of importing vast quantities of food from abroad was limited, though Britain became on balance a net importer of food from the 1780s.

 

 

47

THE  AGE  OF   REVOLUTION

 

produce disproportionately large results. Such agricultural change had preceded the industrial revolution and made possible the first stages of rapid population increases, and the impetus naturally continued, though British farming suffered heavily in the slump which followed the abnormally high prices of the Napoleonic Wars. In terms of tech-nology and capital investment the changes of our period were probably fairly modest until the 1840s, the period when agricultural science and engineering may be said to have come of age. The vast increase in output which enabled British farming in the 1830s to supply 98 per cent of the grain for a population between two and three times the mid-eighteenth century size,⁸* was achieved by general adoption of methods pioneered in the earlier eighteenth century, by rationalization and by expansion of the cultivated area.

 

All these in turn were achieved by social rather than technological transformation: by the liquidation of medieval communal cultivation with its open field and common pasture (the ‘enclosure movement’), of self-sufficient peasant farming, and of old-fashioned uncommercial attitudes towards the land. Thanks to the preparatory evolution of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries this uniquely radical solution of the agrarian problem, which made Britain a country of a few large land-owners, a moderate number of commercial tenant farmers and a great number of hired labourers, was achieved with a minimum of trouble, though intermittently resisted not only by the unhappy rural poor but by the traditionalist country gentry. The ‘Speenhamland System’ of poor relief, spontaneously adopted by gentlemen-justices in several counties in and after the hungry year of 1795, has been seen as the last systematic attempt to safeguard the old rural society against the cor-rosion of the cash nexus.* The Corn Laws with which the agrarian interest sought to protect farming against the post-1815 crisis, in the

teeth of all economic	orthodoxy, were in part a manifesto  against
the  tendency  to  treat	agriculture  as  an  industry  just  like  any

other, to be judged by the criteria of profitability alone. But these were doomed rearguard actions against the final introduction of capitalism into the countryside; they were finally defeated in the wave of middle class radical advance after 1830, by the new Poor Law of 1834 and the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846.

 

In terms of economic productivity this social transformation was an immense success; in terms of human suffering, a tragedy, deepened by the agricultural depression after 1815 which reduced the rural poor to

 

* Under it the poor were to be guaranteed a living wage by subsidies from the rates where necessary; the system, though well-intentioned, eventually led to even greater pauperization than before.

 

 

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T HE  INDUSTRIAL    REVOLUTION

 

demoralized destitution. After 1800 even so enthusiastic a champion of enclosure and agricultural progress as Arthur Young was shaken by its social effects.³⁵ But from the point of view of industrialization these also were desirable consequences; for an industrial economy needs labour, and where else but from the former non-industrial sector was it to come from? The rural population at home or, in the form of (mainly Irish) immigration, abroad, were the most obvious sources supple-mented by the miscellaneous petty producers and labouring poor.* Men must be attracted into the new occupations, or if—as was most probable—they were initially immune to these attractions and unwilling to abandon their traditional way of life³⁶—they must be forced into it. Economic and social hardship was the most effective whip; the higher money wages and greater freedom of the town the supplementary carrot. For various reasons the forces tending to prise men loose from their historic social anchorage were still relatively weak in our period, compared to the second half of the nineteenth century. It took a really sensational catastrophe such as the Irish hunger to produce the sort of massive emigration (one and a half millions out of a total population of eight and a half millions in 1835-50) which became common after 1850. Nevertheless, they were stronger in Britain than elsewhere. Had they not been, British industrial development might have been as hampered as that of France was by the stability and rela-tive comfort of its’ peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, which deprived industry of the required intake of labour.f

 

To acquire a sufficient number of labourers was one thing; to acquire sufficient labour of the right qualifications and skills was another. Twentieth century experience has shown that this problem is as crucial and more difficult to solve. In the first place all labour had to learn how to work in a manner suited to industry, i.e. in a rhythm of regular unbroken daily work which is entirely different from the seasonal ups and downs of the farm, or the self-controlled patchiness of the inde-pendent craftsman. It had also to learn to be responsive to monetary incentives. British employers then, like South African ones now, con-stantly complained about the ‘laziness’ of labour or its tendency to work until it had earned a traditional week’s living wage and then to

 

* Another view holds that the labour supply comes not from such transfers, but from the rise in the total population, which as we know was increasing very rapidly. But this is to miss the point. In an industrial economy not only the numbers, but the proportion of the non-agricultural labour force must increase steeply. This means that men and women who would otherwise have stayed in the village and lived as their forefathers did, must move elsewhere at some stage of their lives, for the towns grow faster than their own natural rate of increase, which in any case tended normally to be lower than the villages. This is so whether the farming population actually diminishes, holds its numbers, or even increases.

 

t Alternatively, like the USA, Britain would have had to rely on massive immigration. In fact she did rely partly on the immigration of the Irish.

 

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

stop. The answer was found in a draconic labour discipline (fines, a ‘Master and Servant’ code mobilizing the law on the side of the em-ployer, etc.), but above all in the practice where possible of paying labour so little that it would have to work steadily all through the week in order to make a minimum income (cf. pp. 198-9). In the factories, where the problem of labour discipline was more urgent, it was often found more convenient to employ the tractable (and cheaper) women and children: out of all workers in the English cotton mills in 1834-47 about one-quarter were adult men, over half women and girls and the balance, boys below the age of eighteen.³⁷ Another common way of ensuring labour discipline, which reflected the small-scale, piece-meal process of industrialization in this early phase, was sub-contract or the practice of making skilled workers the actual employers of their un-skilled helpers. In the cotton industry, for instance, about two-thirds of the boys and one-third of the girls were thus ‘in the direct employ of operatives’ and hence more closely watched, and outside the factories proper such arrangements were even more widespread. The sub-employer, of course, had a direct financial incentive to see that this hired help did not slack.

 

It was rather more difficult to recruit or train sufficient skilled or technically trained workers, for few pre-industrial skills were of much use in modern industry, though of course many occupations, like building, continued practically unchanged. Fortunately the slow semi-industrialization of Britain in the centuries before 1789 had built up a rather large reservoir of suitable skills, both in textile technique and in the handling of metals. Thus on the continent the locksmith, one of the few craftsmen used to precision work with metals, became the ancestor of the machine-builder and sometimes provided him with a name, whereas in Britain the millwright, and the ‘engineer’ or ‘engine-man’ (already common in and around mines) did so. Nor is it accidental that the English word ‘engineer’ describes both the skilled metal-worker and the designer and planner; for the bulk of higher technologists could be, and was, recruited from among these mechanically skilled and self-reliant men. In fact, British industrialization relied on this unplanned supply of the higher skills, as continental industrialism could not. This explains the shocking neglect of general and technical educa-tion in this country, the price of which was to be paid later.

 

Beside such problems of labour supply, those of capital supply were unimportant. Unlike most other European countries, there was no shortage of immediately investible capital in Britain. The major diffi-culty was that those who controlled most of it in the eighteenth century —landlords, merchants, shippers, financiers, etc.—were reluctant to

 

 

50

THE  INDUSTRIAL     REVOLUTION

 

invest it in the new industries, which therefore had often to be started by small savings or loans and developed by the ploughing back of profits. Local capital shortage made the early industrialists—especially the self-made men—harder, thriftier and more grasping, and their workers therefore correspondingly more exploited; but this reflected the imper-fect flow of the national investment surplus and not its inadequacy. On the other hand the eighteenth-century rich were prepared to sink their money in certain enterprises which benefited industrialization; most notably in transport (canals, dock facilities, roads and later also rail-ways) and in mines, from which landowners drew royalties even when they did not themselves manage them.

 

Nor was there any difficulty about the technique of trade and finance, private or public. Banks and banknotes, bills of exchange, stocks and shares, the technicalities ofoverseas and wholesale trade, and marketing, were familiar enough and men who could handle them or easily learn to do so, were in abundant supply. Moreover, by the end of the eighteenth century government policy was firmly committed to the supremacy of business. Older enactments to the contrary (such as those of the Tudor social code) had long fallen into desuetude, and were finally abolished—except where they touched agriculture—in 1813-35. In theory the laws and financial or commercial institutions of Britain were clumsy and designed to hinder rather than help economic develop-ment; for instance, they made expensive ‘private acts’ of Parliament necessary almost every time men wished to form a joint-stock company. The French Revolution provided the French—and through their in-fluence the rest of the continent—with far more rational -and effective machinery for such purposes. In practice the British managed perfectly well, and indeed considerably better than their rivals.

 

In this rather haphazard, unplanned and empirical way the first major industrial economy was built. By modern standards it was small and archaic, and its archaism still marks Britain today. By the standards of 1848 it was monumental, though also rather shocking, for its new cities were uglier, its proletariat worse off, than elsewhere,* and the fog-bound, smoke-laden atmosphere in which pale masses hurried to and fro troubled the foreign visitor. But it harnessed the power of a million horses in its steam-engines, turned out two million yards of cotton cloth per year on over seventeen million mechanical spindles, dug almost fifty million tons of coal, imported and exported £170 millions worth of goods in a single year. Its trade was twice that of its nearest competitor, France: in 1780 it had only just exceeded it. Its cotton

 

* ‘On the whole the condition of the working class seems distinctly worse in England than in France in 1830-48,’ concludes a modern historian.³⁸

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

consumption was twice that of the USA, four times the French. It pro-duced more than half the total pig-iron of the economically developed world, and used twice as much per inhabitant as the next-most indus-trialized country (Belgium), three times as much as the USA, more than four times as much as France. Between £200 and £300 million of British capital investment—a quarter in the USA, almost a fifth in Latin America—brought back dividends and orders from all parts of the world.⁸⁹ It was, in fact, the ‘workshop of the world’.

 

And both Britain and the world knew that the Industrial Revolution launched in these islands by and through the traders and entrepreneurs, whose only law was to buy in the cheapest market and sell without restriction in the dearest, was transforming the world. Nothing could stand in its way. The gods and kings of the past were powerless before the businessmen and steam-engines of the present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

52

CHAPTER      3

 

THE FRENCH  REVOLUTION

 

An Englishman not filled with esteem and admiration at the sublime manner in

 

which one of the most IMPORTANT REVOLUTIONS the world has ever seen is now effecting, must be dead to every sense of virtue and of freedom; not one of my countrymen who has had the good fortune to witness the transactions of the last three days in this great city, but will testify that my language is not hyperbolical.

 

The Morning Post (July a i ,	1789) on the fall of the Bastille
Soon the enlightened nations will	put on trial those who have hitherto ruled over

 

them. The kings shall flee into the deserts, into the company of the wild beasts whom they resemble; and Nature shall resume her rights.

 

Saint-Just. Sur la Constitution de la France, Discours prononci a la Convention 24 avril 1793

 

 

I

 

I F the economy of the nineteenth century world was formed mainly under the influence of the British Industrial Revolution, its politics and ideology were formed mainly by the French. Britain provided the model for its railways and factories, the economic explosive which cracked open the traditional economic and social structures of the non-European world; but France made its revolutions and gave them their ideas, to the point where a tricolour ofsome kind became the emblem of virtually every emerging nation, and European (or indeed world) politics between 1789 and 1917 were largely the struggle for and against the principles of 1789, or the even more incendiary ones of 1793. France provided the vocabulary and the issues of liberal and radical-demo-cratic politics for most of the world. France provided the first great example, the concept and the vocabulary of nationalism. France pro-vided the codes of law, the model of scientific and technical organiza-tion, the metric system of measurement for most countries. The ideology of the modern world first penetrated the ancient civilizations which had hitherto resisted European ideas through French influence. This was the work of the French Revolution.*

 

* This difference between the British and French influences should not be pushed too far. Neither centre of the dual revolution confined its influence to any special field of human activity, and the two were complementary rather than competitive. However, even when both converged most clearly—as in socialism, which was almost simultaneously invented and named in both countries—they converged from somewhat different directions.

 

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

The later eighteenth century, as we have seen, was an age of crisis for the old regimes of Europe and their economic systems, and its last decades werefilledwith political agitations sometimes reaching the point of revolt, of colonial movements for autonomy sometimes reaching that of secession: not only in the USA (1776-83), but also in Ireland (1782-4), in Belgium and Liege (1787-90), in Holland (1783-7), in Geneva, even—it has been argued—in England (1779). So striking is this clustering of political unrest that some recent historians have spoken of an ‘age of democratic revolution’ of which the French was only one, though the most dramatic and far-reaching.¹

 

Insofar as the crisis of the old regime was not purely a French phenomenon, there is some weight in such observations. Just so it may be argued that the Russian Revolution of 1917 (which occupies a position of analogous importance in our century) was merely the most dramatic of a whole cluster of similar movements, such as those which —some years before 1917—finally ended the age-old Turkish and Chinese empires. Yet this-is to miss the point. The French Revolution may not have been an isolated phenomenon, but it was far more funda-mental than any of the other contemporary ones and its consequences were therefore far more profound. In the first place, it occurred in the most powerful and populous state of Europe (leaving Russia apart). In 1789 something like one European out of every five was a Frenchman. In the second place it was, alone of all the revolutions which preceded and followed it, a mass social revolution, and immeasurably more radical than any comparable upheaval. It is no accident that the American revolutionaries, and the British ‘Jacobins’ who migrated to France because of their political sympathies, found themselves mod-erates in France. Tom Paine was an extremist in Britain and America; but in Paris he was among the most moderate of the Girondins. The results of the American revolutions were, broadly speaking, countries carrying on much as before, only minus the political control of the British, Spaniards and Portuguese. The result of the French Revolution was that the age of Balzac replaced the age of Mme Dubarry.

 

In the third place, alone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so. The American revolution has remained a crucial event in American history, but (except for the countries directly in-volved in and by it) it has left few major traces elsewhere. The French Revolution is a landmark in all countries. Its repercussions rather than those of the American revolution, occasioned the risings which led to the liberation of Latin America after 1808. Its direct influence radiated as far as Bengal, where Ram Mohan Roy was inspired by it to found the

 

 

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THE  FRENCH     REVOLUTION

 

first Hindu reform movement and the ancestor of modern Indian nationalism. (When he visited England in 1830, he insisted on travelling in a French ship to demonstrate his enthusiasm for its principles.) It was, as has been well said, ‘the first great movement of ideas in Western Christendom that had any real effect on the world of Islam’,² and that almost immediately. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Turkish word ‘vatan’, hitherto merely describing a man’s place of birth or residence, had begun to turn under its influence into something like ‘patrie’; the term ‘liberty’, before 1800 primarily a legal term denoting the opposite to ‘slavery’, had begun to acquire a new political content. Its indirect influence is universal, for it provided the pattern for all subsequent revolutionary movements, its lessons (interpreted according to taste) being incorporated into modern socialism and communism.*

 

The French Revolution thus remains the revolution of its time, and not merely one, though the most prominent, of its kind. And its origins must therefore be sought not merely in the general conditions of Europe, but in the specific situation of France. Its peculiarity is perhaps best illustrated in international terms. Throughout the eighteenth century France was the major international economic rival of Britain. Her foreign trade, which multiplied fourfold between 1720 and 1780, caused anxiety; her colonial system was in certain areas (such as the West Indies) more dynamic than the British. Yet France was not a power like Britain, whose foreign policy was already determined sub-stantially by the interests of capitalist expansion. She was the most powerful and in many ways the most typical of the old aristocratic absolute monarchies of Europe. In other words, the conflict between the official framework and the vested interests of the old regime and the rising new social forces was more acute in France than elsewhere.

 

The new forces knew fairly precisely what they wanted. Turgot, the physiocrat economist, stood for an efficient exploitation of the land, for free enterprise and trade, for a standardized, efficient administration of a single homogeneous national territory, and the abolition of all restrictions and social inequalities which stood in the way of the develop-ment of national resources and rational, equitable administration and taxation. Yet his attempt to apply such a programme as the first minis-ter of Louis XVII in 1774—6 failed lamentably, and the failure is characteristic. Reforms of this character, in modest doses, were not incompatible with or unwelcome to absolute monarchies. On the con-trary, since they strengthened their hand, they were, as we have seen,

 

* This is not to underestimate the influence of the American Revolution. It undoubtedly helped to stimulate the French, and in a narrower sense provided constitutional models—in competition and sometimes alternation with the French—for various Latin American states, and inspiration for democratic-radical movements from time to time.

 

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

widely propagated at this time among the so-called ‘enlightened despots’. But in most of the countries of ‘enlightened despotism’ such reforms were either inapplicable, and therefore mere theoretical flour-ishes, or unlikely to change the general character of their political and social structure; or else they failed in the face of the resistance of the local aristocracies and other vested interests, leaving the country to relapse into a somewhat tidied-up version of its former state. In France they failed more rapidly than elsewhere, for the resistance of the vested interests was more effective. But the results of this failure were more catastrophic for the monarchy; and the forces of bourgeois change were far too strong to relapse into inactivity. They merely transformed their hopes from an enlightened monarchy to the people or ‘the nation’.

 

Nevertheless, such a generalisation does not take us far towards an understanding of why the revolution broke out when it did, and why it took the remarkable road it did. For this it is most useful to consider the so-called ‘feudal reaction’ which actually provided the spark to explode the powder-barrel of France.

 

The 400,000 or so persons who, among the twenty-three million Frenchmen, formed the nobility, the unquestioned ‘first order’ of the nation, though not so absolutely safeguarded against the intrusion of lesser orders as in Prussia and elsewhere, were secure enough. They enjoyed considerable privileges, including exemption from several takes (but not from as many as the better-organized clergy), and the right to receive feudal dues. Politically their situation was less brilliant. Abso-lute monarchy, while entirely aristocratic and even feudal in its ethos, had deprived the nobles of political independence and responsibility and cut down their old representative institutions—estates and parle-ments—so far as possible. The fact continued to rankle among the higher aristocracy and among the more recent noblesse de robe created by the kings for various purposes, mostly finance and administration; an ennobled government middle class which expressed the double dis-content of aristocrats and bourgeois so far as it could through the surviving law-courts and estates. Economically the nobles’ worries were by no means negligible. Fighters rather than earners by birth and tra-dition—nobles were even formally debarred from exercising a trade or profession—they depended on the income of their estates, or, if they belonged to the favoured minority of large or court nobles, on wealthy marriages, court pensions, gifts and sinecures. But the expenses of noble status were large and rising, their incomes—since they were rarely businesslike managers of their wealth, if they managed it at all—fell. Inflation tended to reduce the value of fixed revenues such as rents.

 

 

56

 

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It was therefore natural that the nobles should use their one main asset, the acknowledged privileges of the order. Throughout the eigh-teenth century, in France as in many other countries, they encroached steadily upon the official posts which the absolute monarchy had pre-ferred to fill with technically competent and politically harmless middle class men. By the 1780s four quarterings of nobility were needed even to buy a commission in the army, all bishops were nobles and even the keystone of royal administration, the intendancies, has been largely recaptured by them. Consequent/ the nobility not merely exasperated the feelings of the middle class by their successful competition for official posts; they also undermined the state itself by an increasing tendency to take over provincial and central administration. Similarly they—and especially the poorer provincial gentlemen who had few other resources—attempted to counteract the decline in their income by squeezing the utmost out of their very considerable feudal rights to exact money (or more rarely service) from the peasantry. An entire profession, the feudists, came into existence to revive obsolete rights of this kind or to maximize the yield of existing ones. Its most celebrated member, Gracchus Babeuf, was to become the leader of the first com-munist revolt in modern history in 1796. Consequently the nobility exasperated not only the middle class but also the peasantry.

 

The position of this vast class, comprising perhaps 80 per cent of all Frenchmen, was far from brilliant. They were indeed in general free, and often landowners. In actual quantity noble estates covered only one-fifth of the land, clerical estates perhaps another 6 per cent with regional variations.³ Thus in the diocese of Montpellier the peasants already owned 38 to 40 per cent of the land, the bourgeoisie 18 to 19, the nobles 15 to 16, the clergy 3 to 4, while one-fifth was common land.⁴ In fact, however, the great majority were landless or with insufficient holdings, a deficiency increased by the prevailing technical backward-ness; and the general land-hunger was intensified by the rise in popu-lation. Feudal dues, tithes and taxes took a large and rising proportion of the peasant’s income, and inflation reduced the value of the re-mainder. For only the minority of peasants who had a constant surplus for sale benefited from the rising prices; the rest, in one way or another, suffered from them, especially in times of bad harvest, when famine prices ruled. There is little doubt that in the twenty years preceding the Revolution the situation of the peasants grew worse for these reasons.

 

The financial troubles of the monarchy brought matters to a head. The administrative and fiscal structure of the kingdom was grossly obsolete, and, as we have seen, the attempt to remedy this by the

 

 

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reforms of 1774-6 failed, defeated by the resistance of vested interests headed by the parlements. Then France became involved in the American War of Independence. Victory over England was gained at the cost of final bankruptcy, and thus the American Revolution can claim to be the direct cause of the French. Various expedients were tried with diminishing success, but nothing short of a fundamental reform, which mobilized the real and considerable taxable capacity of the country could cope with a situation in which expenditure outran revenue by at least 20 per cent, and no effective economies were possible. For though the extravagance of Versailles has often been blamed for the crisis, court expenditure only amounted to 6 per cent of the total in 1788. War, navy and diplomacy made up one-quarter, the service of the existing debt one-half. War and debt—the American War and its debt —broke the back of the monarchy.

 

The government’s crisis gave the aristocracy and the parlements their chance. They refused to pay without an extension of their privileges. The first breach in the front of absolutism was a hand-picked but nevertheless rebellious ‘assembly of notables’ called in 1787 to grant the government’s demands. The second, and decisive, was the des-perate decision to call the States-General—the old feudal assembly of the realm, buried since 1614. The Revolution thus began as an aristo-cratic attempt to recapture the state. This attempt miscalculated for two reasons: it underestimated the independent intentions of the ‘Third Estate’—the fictional entity deemed to represent all who were neither nobles nor clergy, but in fact dominated by the middle class—and it overlooked the profound economic and social crisis into which it threw its political demands.

 

The French Revolution was not made or led by a formed party or movement in the modern sense, nor by men attempting to carry out a systematic programme. It hardly even threw up ‘leaders’ of the kind to which twentieth century revolutions have accustomed us, until the post-revolutionary figure of Napoleon. Nevertheless a striking consensus of general ideas among a fairly coherent social group gave the revolu-tionary movement effective unity. The.group was the ‘bourgeoisie’; its ideas were those of classical liberalism, as formulated by the ‘philoso-phers’ and ‘economists’ and propagated by freemasonry and in informal associations. To this extent ‘the philosophers’ can be justly made responsible for the Revolution. It would have occurred without them; but they probably made the difference between a mere breakdown of an old regime and the effective and rapid substitution of a new one.

 

In its most general form the ideology of 1789 was the masonic one expressed with such innocent sublimity in Mozart’s Magic Flute (1791),

 

 

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one of the earliest of the great propagandist works of art of an age whose highest artistic achievements so often belonged to propaganda. More specifically, the demands of the bourgeois of 1789 are laid down in the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens of that year. This document is a manifesto against the hierarchical society of noble privilege, but not one in favour of democratic or egalitarian society. ‘Men are born and live free and equal under the laws,’ said its first article; but it also provides for the existence of social distinctions, if ‘only on grounds of common utility’. Private property was a natural right, sacred, inalienable and inviolable. Men were equal before the law and careers were equally open to talent; but if the race started without handicaps, it was equally assumed that the runners would not finish together. The declaration laid down (as against the noble hier-archy or absolutism) that ‘all citizens have a right to co-operate in the formation of the law’; but ‘either personally or through their repre-sentatives’. And the representative assembly which it envisaged as the fundamental organ of government was not necessarily a democratically elected one, nor the regime it implied one which eliminated kings. A constitutional monarchy based on a propertied oligarchy expressing itself through a representative assembly was more congenial to most bourgeois liberals than the democratic republic which might have seemed a more logical expression of their theoretical aspirations; though there were some who did not hesitate to advocate this also. But on the whole the classical liberal bourgeois of 1789 (and the liberal of 1789-1848) was not a democrat but a believer in constitutionalism, a secular state with civil liberties and guarantees for private enterprise, and government by tax-payers and property-owners.

 

Nevertheless officially such a regime would express not simply his class interests, but the general will of ‘the people’, which was in turn (a significant identification) ‘the French nation’. The king was no longer Louis, by the Grace of God, King of France and Navarre, but Louis, by the Grace of God and the constitutional law of the state, King of the French. ‘The source of all sovereignty,’ said the Declara-tion, ‘resides essentially in the nation.’ And the nation, as Abb6 Sieyes put it, recognized no interest on earth above its own, and accepted no law or authority other than its own—neither that of humanity at large nor of other nations. No doubt the French nation, and its subsequent imitators, did not initially conceive of its interests clashing with those of other peoples, but on the contrary saw itself as inaugurating, or taking part in, a movement of the general liberation of peoples from tyranny. But in fact national rivalry (for instance that of French busi-nessmen with British businessmen) and national subordination (for

 

 

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instance that of conquered or liberated nations to the interests of la grande nation) were implicit in the nationalism to which the bourgeois of 1789 gave its first official expression. ‘The people’ identified with ‘the nation’ was a revolutionary concept; more revolutionary than the bourgeois-liberal programme which purported to express it. But it was also a double-edged one.

 

Since the peasants and labouring poor were illiterate, politically modest or immature and the process of election indirect, 610 men, mostly of this stamp, were elected to represent the Third Estate. Most were lawyers who played an important economic role in provincial France; about a hundred were capitalists and businessmen. The middle class had fought bitterly and successfully to win a representation as large as that of the nobility and clergy combined, a moderate ambition for a group officially representing 95 per cent of the people. They now fought with equal determination for the right to exploit their potential majority votes by turning the States General into an assembly of indi-vidual deputies voting as such, instead of the traditional feudal body deliberating and voting by ‘orders’, a situation in which nobility and clergy could always outvote the Third. On this issue the first revolu-tionary break-through occurred. Some six weeks after the opening of the States General the Commons, anxious to forestall action by king, nobles and clergy, constituted themselves and all who were prepared to join them on their own terms a National Assembly with the right to recast the constitution. An attempt at counter-revolution led them to formulate their claims virtually in terms of the English House of Commons. Absolutism was at an end as Mirabeau, a brilliant and disreputable ex-noble, told the King: ‘Sire, you are a stranger in this assembly, you have not the right to speak here.’⁵

The Third Estate succeeded, in the face of the united resistance of the king and the privileged orders, because it represented not merely the views of an educated and militant minority, but of far more power-ful forces: the labouring poor of the cities, and especially of Paris, and shortly, also, the revolutionary peasantry. For what turned a limited reform agitation into a revolution was the fact that the calling of the States-General coincided with a profound economic and social crisis. The later 1780s had been, for a complexity of reasons, a period of great difficulties for virtually all branches of the French economy. A bad harvest in 1788 (and 1789) and a very difficult winter made this crisis acute. Bad harvests hurt the peasantry, for while they meant that large producers could sell grain at famine prices, the majority of men on their insufficient holdings might well have to eat up their seed-corn, or buy food at such prices, especially in months immediately preceding the new

 

 

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harvest (i.e. May-July). They obviously hurt the uiban poor, whose cost of living—bread was the staple food—might well double. It hurt them all the more as the impoverishment of the countryside reduced the market for manufactures and therefore also produced an industrial depression. The country poor were therefore desperate and restless with riot and banditry; the urban poor were doubly desperate as work ceased at the very moment that the cost of living soared. Under normal circum-stances little more than blind-rioting might have occurred. But in 1788 and 1789 a major convulsion in the kingdom, a campaign of propaganda and election, gave the people’s desperation a political perspective. They introduced the tremendous and earth-shaking idea of liberation from gentry and oppression. A riotous people stood behind the deputies of the Third Estate.

 

Counter-revolution turned a potential mass rising into an actual one. Doubtless it was only natural that the old regime should have fought back, if necessary with armed force; though the army was no longer wholly reliable. (Only unrealistic dreamers can suggest that Louis XVI might have accepted defeat and immediately turned him-self into a constitutional monarch, even if he had been a less negligible and stupid man than he was, married to a less chicken-brained and irresponsible woman, and prepared to listen to less disastrous advisers.) In fact counter-revolution mobilized the Paris masses, already hungry, suspicious and militant. The most sensational result of their mobiliza-tion was the capture of the Bastille, a state prison symbolizing royal authority, where the revolutionaries expected to find arms. In times of revolution nothing is more powerful than the fall of symbols. The capture of the Bastille, which has rightly made July 14th into the French national day, ratified the fall of despotism and was hailed all over the world as the beginning of liberation. Even the austere philoso-pher Immanuel Kant of Koenigsberg, it is said, whose habits were so regular that the citizens of that town set their watches by him, post-poned the hour of his afternoon stroll when he received the news, thus convincing Koenigsberg that a world-shaking event had indeed hap-pened. What is more to the point, the fall of the Bastille spread the revolution to the provincial towns and the countryside.

 

Peasant revolutions are vast, shapeless, anonymous, but irresistible movements. What turned an epidemic of peasant unrest into an irre-versible convulsion was a combination of provincial town risings and a wave of mass panic, spreading obscurely but rapidly across vast stretches of the country: the so-called Grande Peur of late July and early August 1789. Within three weeks of July 14th the social structure of French rural feudalism and the state machine of royal France lay in

 

 

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fragments. All that remained of state power was a scattering of doubt-fully reliable regiments, a National Assembly without coercive force, and a multiplicity of municipal or provincial middle class adminis-trations which soon set up bourgeois armed ‘National Guards’ on the model of Paris. Middle class and aristocracy immediately accepted the inevitable: all feudal privileges were officially abolished though, when the political situation had settled, a stiff price for their redemption was fixed. Feudalism was not finally abolished until 1793. By the end of August the Revolution had also acquired its formal manifesto, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Conversely, the king resisted with his usual stupidity, and sections of the middle class revolu-tionaries, frightened by the social implications of the mass upheaval, began to think that the time for conservatism had come.

 

In brief, the main shape of French and all subsequent bourgeois-revolutionary politics were by now clearly visible. This dramatic dia-lectical dance was to dominate the future generations. Time and again we shall see moderate middle class reformers mobilizing the masses against die-hard resistance or counter-revolution. We shall see the masses pushing beyond the moderates’ aims to their own social revolu-tions, and the moderates in turn splitting into a conservative group henceforth making common cause with the reactionaries, and a left wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved moderate aims with the help of the masses, even at the risk of losing control over them. And so on through repetitions and variations of the pattern of resistance—mass mobilization—shift to the left—split-among-moderates-and-shift-to-the-right—until either the bulk of the middle class passed into the henceforth conservative camp, or was defeated by social revolution In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth century we increas-ingly find (most notably in Germany) that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, pre-ferring a compromise with king and aristocracy. The peculiarity of the French Revolution is that one section of the liberal middle class was prepared to remain revolutionary up to and indeed beyond the brink of anti-bourgeois revolution: these were the Jacobins, whose name came to stand for ‘radical revolution’ everywhere.

 

Why? Partly, of course, because the French bourgeoisie had not yet, like subsequent liberals, the awful memory of the French Revolution to be frightened of. After 1794 it would be clear to moderates that the Jacobin regime had driven the Revolution too far for bourgeois comfort and prospects, just as it would be clear to revolutionaries that ‘the sun

 

 

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of 1793′, if it were to rise again, would have to shine on a non-bourgeois society. Again, the Jacobins could afford radicalism because in their time no class existed which could provide a coherent social alternative to theirs. Such a class only arose in the course of the industrial revolu-tion, with the ‘proletariat’ or, more precisely, with the ideologies and movements based on it. In the French Revolution the working class— and even this is a misnomer for the aggregate of hired, but mostly non-industrial, wage-earners—as yet played no significant independent part. They hungered, they rioted, perhaps they dreamed; but for practical purposes they followed non-proletarian leaders. The peasantry never provides a political alternative to anyone; merely, as occasion dictates, an almost irresistible force or an almost immovable object. The only alternative to bourgeois radicalism (if we except small bodies of ideo-logues or militants powerless when deprived of mass support) were the ‘Sansculottes’, a shapeless, mostly urban movement of the labouring poor, small craftsmen, shopkeepers, artisans, tiny entrepreneurs and the like. The Sansculottes were organized, notably in the ‘sections’ of Paris and the local political clubs, and provided the main striking-force of the revolution—the actual demonstrators, rioters, constructors of barricades. Through journalists like Marat and Hubert, through local spokesmen, they also formulated a policy, behind which lay a vaguely defined and contradictory social ideal, combining respect for (small) private property with hostility to the rich, government-guaranteed work, wages and social security for the poor man, an extreme, egali-tarian and libertarian democracy, localized and direct. In fact the Sansculottes were one branch of that universal and important political trend which sought to express the interests of the great mass of ‘little men’ who existed between the poles of the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘prole-tarian’, often perhaps rather nearer the latter than the former because they were, after all, mostly poor. We can observe it in the United States (as Jeffersonianism and Jacksonian democracy, or populism) in Britain (as ‘radicalism’), in France (as the ancestors of the future ‘republicans’ and radical-socialists), in Italy (as Mazzinians and Gari-baldians), and elsewhere. Mostly it tended to settle down, in post-revolutionary ages, as a left-wing of middle-class liberalism, but one loth to abandon the ancient principle that there are no enemies on the left, and ready, in times of crisis, to rebel against ‘the wall of money’ or ‘the economic royalists’ or ‘the cross of gold crucifying mankind’. But Sansculottism provided no real alternative either. Its ideal, a golden past of villagers and small craftsmen or a golden future of small farmers and artisans undisturbed by bankers and millionaires, was unrealizable. History moved dead against them. The most they could do—and this

 

 

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they achieved in 1793-4—^was to erect roadblocks in its path, which have hampered French economic growth from that day almost to this. In fact Sansculottism was so helpless a phenomenon that its very name is largely forgotten, or remembered only as a synonym of Jacobinism, which provided it with leadership in the year II.

 

II

 

Between 1789 and 1791 the victorious moderate bourgeoisie, acting through what had now become the Constituent Assembly, set about the gigantic rationalization and reform of France which was its object. Most of the lasting institutional achievements of the Revolution date from this period, as do its most striking international results, the metric system and the pioneer emancipation of the Jews. Economically the perspectives of the Constituent Assembly were entirely liberal: its policy for the peasantry was the enclosure of common lands and the encouragement of rural entrepreneurs, for the working-class, the ban-ning of trade unions, for the small crafts, the abolition of guilds and corporations. It gave little concrete satisfaction to the common people, except, from 1790, by means of the secularization and sale of church lands (as well as those of the emigrant nobility) which had the triple advan-tage of weakening clericalism, strengthening the provincial and peasant entrepreneur, and giving many peasants a measurable return for their revolutionary activity. The Constitution of 1791 fended off excessive democracy by a system of constitutional monarchy based on an admit-tedly rather wide property-franchise of ‘active citizens’. The passive, it was hoped, would live up to their name.

 

In fact, this did not happen. On the one hand the monarchy, though now strongly supported by a powerful ex-revolutionary bourgeois fac-tion, could not resign itself to the new regime. The Court dreamed of and intrigued for a crusade of royal cousins to expel the governing rabble of commoners and restore God’s anointed, the most Catholic king of France, to his rightful place. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), a misconceived attempt to destroy, not the Church, but the Roman absolutist allegiance of the Church, drove the majority of the clergy and of their faithful into opposition, and helped to drive the king into the desperate, and as it proved suicidal, attempt to flee the country. He was recaptured at Varennes (June 1791) and henceforth republicanism became a mass force; for traditional kings who abandon their peoples lose the right to loyalty. On the other hand, the uncon-trolled free enterprise economy of the moderates accentuated the fluctuations in the level of food-prices, and consequently the militancy

 

 

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of the urban poor, especially in Paris. The price of bread registered the political temperature of Paris with the accuracy of a thermometer; and the Paris masses were the decisive revolutionary force: not for nothing was the new French tricolour constructed by combining the old royal white with the red-and-blue colours of Paris.

 

The outbreak of war brought matters to a head; that is to say it led to the second revolution of 1792, the Jacobin Republic of the Year II, and eventually to Napoleon. In other words it turned the history of the French Revolution into the history of Europe.

 

Two forces pushed France into a general war: the extreme right and the moderate left. For the king, the French nobility and the growing aristocratic and ecclesiastical emigration, camped in various West German cities, it was evident that only foreign intervention could restore the old regime.* Such intervention was not too easily organized, given the complexities of the international situation, and the relative political tranquillity of other countries. However, it was increasingly evident to nobles and divinely appointed rulers elsewhere that the restoration of Louis XVI’s power was not merely an act of class soli-darity, but an important safeguard against the spread of the appalling ideas propagated from France. Consequently the forces for the recon-quest of France gathered abroad.

 

At the same time the moderate liberals themselves, most notably the group of politicians clustering round the deputies from the mercantile Gironde department, were a bellicose force. This was partly because every genuine revolution tends to be ecumenical. For Frenchmen, as for their numerous sympathisers abroad, the liberation of France was merely the first instalment of the universal triumph of liberty; an attitude which led easily to the conviction that it was the duty of the fatherland of revolution to liberate all peoples groaning under oppres-sion and tyranny. There was a genuinely exalted and generous passion to spread freedom among the revolutionaries, moderate and extreme; a genuine inability to separate the cause of the French nation from that of all enslaved humanity. Both the French and all other revolutionary movements were to accept this view, or to adapt it, henceforth until at least 1848. All plans for European liberation until 1848 hinged on a joint rising of peoples under the leadership of the French to overthrow European reaction; and after 1830 other movements of national and liberal revolt, such as the Italian or Polish, also tended to see their own nations in some sense as Messiahs destined by their own freedom to initiate everyone else’s.

 

On the other hand, considered less idealistically, war would also

 

* Something like 300,000 Frenchmen emigrated between 1789 and 1795.”

 

 

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help to solve numerous domestic problems. It was tempting and obvious to ascribe the difficulties of the new rdgime to the plots of emigres and foreign tyrants, and to divert popular discontents against these. More specifically, businessmen argued that the uncertain economic prospects, the devaluation of the currency and other troubles could only be remedied if the threat qf intervention were dispersed. They and their ideologist might reflect, with a glance at the record of Britain, that economic supremacy was the child of systematic aggressiveness. (The eighteenth century was not one in which the successful businessman was at all wedded to peace.) Moreover, as was soon to appear, war could be made to produce profit. For all these reasons the majority of the new Legislative Assembly, except for a small right wing and a small left wing under Robespierre, preached war. For these reasons also, when war came, the conquests of the revolution were to combine liberation, exploitation and political diversion.

 

War was declared in April 1792. Defeat, which the people (plausibly enough) ascribed to royal sabotage and treason, brought radicalization. In August-September the monarchy was overthrown, the Republic one and indivisible established, a new age in human history proclaimed with the institution of the Year I of the revolutionary calendar, by the armed action of the Sansculotte masses of Paris. The iron and heroic age of the French Revolution began among the massacres of the political prisoners, the elections to the National Convention—probably the most remarkable assembly in the history of parliamentarism—and the call for total resistance to the invaders. The king was imprisoned, the foreign invasion halted by an undramatic artillery duel at Valmy.

 

Revolutionary wars impose their own logic. The dominant party in the new Convention were the Girondins, bellicose abroad and moderate at home, a body of parliamentary orators of charm and brilliance repre-senting big business, the provincial bourgeoisie and much intellectual distinction. Their policy was utterly impossible. For only states waging limited campaigns with established regular forces could hope to keep war and domestic affairs in watertight compartments, as the ladies and gentlemen in Jane Austen’s novels were just then doing in Britain. The Revolution waged neither a limited campaign nor had it estab-lished forces: for its war oscillated between the maximum victory of world revolution and the maximum defeat which meant total counter-revolution, and its army—what was left of the old French army—was ineffective and unreliable. Dumouriez, the Republic’s leading general, was shortly to desert to the enemy. Only unprecedented and revolu-tionary methods could win in such a war, even if victory were to mean merely the defeat of foreign intervention. In fact, such methods were

 

 

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found. In the course of its crisis the young French Republic discovered or invented total war: the total mobilization of a nation’s resources through conscription, rationing and a rigidly controlled war economy, and virtual abolition, at home or abroad, of the distinction between soldiers and civilians. How appalling the implications of this discovery are has only become clear in our own historic epoch. Since the revo-lutionary war of 1792-4 remained an exceptional episode, most nine-teenth-century observers could make no sense of it, except to observe (until in the fatness of later Victorian times even this was forgotten) that wars lead to revolutions, and revolutions win otherwise unwin-nable wars. Only today can we see how much about the Jacobin Repub-lic and the ‘Terror’ of 1793-4 makes sense in no other terms than those of a modern total war effort.

 

The Sansculottes welcomed a revolutionary war government, not only because they rightly argued that counter-revolution and foreign intervention could only thus be defeated, but also because its methods mobilized the people and brought social justice nearer. (They over-looked the fact that no effective modern war effort is compatible with the decentralized voluntarist direct democracy which they cherished.) The Gironde, on the other hand, was afraid of the political consequences of the combination of mass revolution and war which they unleashed. Nor were they equipped for competition with the left. They did not want to try or execute the king, but had to compete with their rivals, ‘the Mountain’ (the Jacobins), for this symbol of revolutionary zeal; the Mountain gained prestige, not they. On the other hand, they did want to extend the war into a general ideological crusade of liberation and a direct challenge to the great economic rival, Britain. They suc-ceeded in this object. By March 1793 France was at war with most of Europe, and had begun foreign annexations (legitimized by the newly-invented doctrine of France’s right to her ‘natural frontiers’). But the expansion of the war, all the more as it went badly, only strengthened the hands of the left, which alone could win it. Retreating and out-manoeuvred, the Gironde was finally driven to ill-judged attacks against the left, which were soon to turn into organized provincial revolt against Paris. A rapid coup by the Sansculottes overthrew it on June 2, 1793. The Jacobin Republic had come.

 

Ill

 

When the educated layman thinks of the French Revolution it is the events of 1789 but especially the Jacobin Republic of the Year II which chiefly come to his mind. The prim Robespierre, the huge and whoring

 

 

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Danton, the icy revolutionary elegance of Saint-Just, the gross Marat, committee of public safety, revolutionary tribunal and guillotine are the images which we see most clearly. The very names of the moderate revolutionaries who come between Mirabeau and Lafayette in 1789 and the Jacobin leaders in 1793, have lapsed from all but the memory of historians. The Girondins are remembered only as a group, and perhaps for the politically negligible but romantic women attached to them—Mme Roland or Charlotte Corday. Who, outside the expert field, knows even the names of Brissot, Vergniaud, Guadet and the rest? Conservatives have created a lasting image of The Terror, dictatorship and hysterical bloodlust unchained, though by twentieth century stan-dards, and indeed by the standards of conservative repressions of social revolution such as the massacres after the Paris Commune of 1871, its mass killings were relatively modest, 17,000 official executions in fourteen months.⁷ Revolutionaries, especially in France, have seen it as the first people’s republic, the inspiration of all subsequent revolt. For all it was an era not to be measured by everyday human criteria.

 

That is true. But for the solid middle class Frenchman who stood behind The Terror, it was neither pathological nor apocalyptic, but first and foremost the only effective method of preserving their country. This the Jacobin Republic did, and its achievement was superhuman. In June 1793 sixty out of the eighty departments of France were in revolt against Paris; the armies of the German princes were invading France from the north and east; the British attacked from the south and west: the country was helpless and bankrupt. Fourteen months later all France was under firm control, the invaders had been expelled, the French armies in turn occupied Belgium and were about to enter on twenty years of almost unbroken and effortless military triumph. Yet by March 1794 an army three times as large as before was run at half the cost of March 1793, and the value of the French currency (or rather of the paper assignats which had largely replaced it) was kept approxi-mately stable, in marked contrast to both past and future. No wonder Jeanbon St Andre^ the Jacobin member of the Committee of Public Safety who, though a firm republican, later became one of Napoleon’s most efficient prefects, looked at imperial France with contempt as it staggered under the defeats of 1812-3. The Republic of the Year II had coped with worse crises, and with fewer resources.*

 

* ‘Do you know what kind of government (was victorious)? . . . A government of the Convention. A government of passionate Jacobins in red bonnets, wearing rough woollen cloth, wooden shoes, who lived on simple bread and bad beer and went to sleep on mattresses laid on the floor of their meeting-halls, when they were too tired to wake and deliberate further. That is the kind of men who saved France. I was one of them, gentlemen. And here, as in the apartments of the Emperor which I am about to enter, I glory in the fact.’ Quoted J. Savant, Les Prefets de Napolton (/oj5), 111-2.

 

 

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For such men, as indeed for the majority of the National Convention which at bottom retained control throughout this heroic period, the choice was simple: either The Terror with all its defects from the middle class point of view, or the destruction of the Revolution, the disinte-gration of the national state, and probably—was there not the example of Poland?—the disappearance of the country. Very likely, but for the desperate crisis of France, many among them would have preferred a less iron regime and certainly a less firmly controlled economy: the fall of Robespierre led to an epidemic of economic decontrol and corrupt racketeering which, incidentally, culminated in galloping inflation and the national bankruptcy of 1797. But even from the narrowest point of view, the prospects of the French middle class depended on those of a unified strong centralized national state. And anyway, could the Revo-lution which had virtually created the term ‘nation’ and ‘patriotism’ in their modern senses, abandon the ‘grande nation’?

 

The first task of the Jacobin regime was to mobilize mass support against the dissidence of the Gironde and the provincial notables, and to retain the already mobilized mass support of the Paris Sansculottes, some of whose demands for a revolutionary war-effort—general con-scription (the ‘levee en masse’), terror against the ‘traitors’ and general price-control (the ‘maximum’)—in any case coincided with Jacobin common sense, though their other demands were to prove troublesome. A somewhat radicalized new constitution, hitherto delayed by the Gironde, was proclaimed. According to this noble but academic docu-ment the people were offered universal suffrage, the right of insur-rection, work or maintenance, and—most significant of all—the official statement that the happiness of all was the aim of government and the people’s rights were to be not merely available but operative. It was the first genuinely democratic constitution proclaimed by a modern state. More concretely, the Jacobins abolished all remaining feudal rights without indemnity, improved the small buyer’s chance to purchase the forfeited land of emigres, and—some months later—abolished slavery in the French colonies, in order to encourage the Negroes of San Domingo to fight for the Republic against the English. These measures had the most far-reaching results. In America they helped to create the first independent revolutionary leader of stature in Toussaint-Louverture.* In France they established that impregnable citadel of small and middle peasant proprietors, small craftsmen and shopkeepers, economically retrogressive but passionately devoted to Revolution and

 

* The failure of Napoleonic France to recapture Haiti was one of the main reasons for liquidating the entire remaining American Empire, which was sold by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) to the USA. Thus a further consequence of spreading Jacobinism to America was to make the USA a continent-wide power.

 

 

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Republic, which has dominated the country’s life ever since. The capitalist transformation of agriculture and small enterprise, the essen-tial condition for rapid economic development, was slowed to a crawl; and with it the speed of urbanization, the expansion of the home market, the multiplication of the working-class and, incidentally, the ulterior advance of proletarian revolution. Both big business and the labour movement were long doomed to remain minority phenomena in France, islands surrounded by a sea of corner grocers, peasant small-holders and cafe proprietors (cf. below chapter IX).

 

The centre of the new government, representing as it did an alliance of Jacobin and Sansculotte, therefore shifted perceptibly to the left. This was reflected in the reconstructed Committee of Public Safety, which rapidly became the effective war-cabinet of France. It lost Danton, a powerful, dissolute, probably corrupt, but immensely tal-ented revolutionary more moderate than he looked (he had been a minister in the last royal administration) and gained Maximilien Robespierre, who became its most influential member. Few historians have been dispassionate about this dandyish, thin-blooded, fanatical lawyer with his somewhat excessive sense of private monopoly in virtue, because he still incarnates the terrible and glorious year II about which no man is neutral. He was not an agreeable individual; even those who think he was right nowadays tend to prefer the shining mathematical rigour of that architect of Spartan paradises, the young Saiat-Just. He was not a great man and often a narrow one. But he is the only individual thrown up by the Revolution (other than Napoleon) about whom a cult has grown up. This is because for him, as for history, the Jacobin Republic was not a war-winning device but an ideal: the terrible and glorious reign ofjustice and virtue when all good citizens were equal in the sight of the nation and the people smote the traitors. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (cf. below pp. 247-8) and the crystalline conviction of Tightness gave him his strength. He had no formal dicta-torial powers or even office, being merely one member of the Committee of Public Safety, which was in turn merely one sub-committee—the most powerful, though never all-powerful—of the Convention. His power was that of the people—the Paris masses; his terror theirs. When they abandoned him he fell.

 

The tragedy of Robespierre and the Jacobin Republic was that they were themselves obliged to alienate this support. The regime was an alliance between middle class and labouring masses; but for the middle class Jacobins, Sansculotte concessions were tolerable only because, and as far as, they attached the masses to the regime without terrifying property-owners; and within the alliance the middle class Jacobins were

 

 

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decisive. Moreover, the very needs of the war obliged any government to centralize and discipline, at the expense of the free, local, direct democracy of club and section, the casual voluntarist militia, the free argumentative elections on which the Sansculottes thrived. The process which, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, strengthened Com-munists at the expense of Anarchists, strengthened Jacobins of Saint-Just’s stamp at the expense of Sansculottes of Hubert’s. By 1794 govern-ment and politics were monolithic and run in harness by direct agents of Committee or Convention—through delegates en mission—and a large body of Jacobin officers and officials in conjunction with local party organizations. Lastly, the economic needs of the war alienated popular support. In the towns price-control and rationing benefited the masses; but the corresponding wage-freeze hurt them. In the countryside the systematic requisitioning of food (which the urban Sansculottes had been the first to advocate) alienated the peasantry.

 

The masses therefore retired into discontent or into a puzzled and resentful passivity, especially after the trial and execution of the H6ber-tists, the most vocal spokesmen of the Sansculotterie. Meanwhile more moderate supporters were alarmed by the attack on the right wing opposition, now headed by Danton. This faction had provided a refuge for numerous racketeers, speculators, black market operators and other corrupt though capital-accumulating elements, all the more readily as Danton himself embodied the a-moral, Falstaffian, free loving and free spending which always emerges initially in social revolutions until overpowered by the hard puritanism that invariably comes to dominate them. The Dantons of history are always defeated by the Robespierres (or by those who pretend to behave like Robespierres) because hard narrow dedication can succeed where bohemianism cannot. However, if Robespierre won moderate support for eliminating corruption, which was after all in the interests of the war-effort, the further restric-tions on freedom and money-making were more disconcerting to the businessman. Finally, no large body of opinion liked the somewhat fanciful ideological excursions of the period—the systematic dechris-tianization campaigns (due to Sansculotte zeal) and Robespierre’s new civic religion of the Supreme Being, complete with ceremonies, which attempted to counteract the atheists and carry out the precepts of the divine Jean-Jacques. And the steady hiss of the guillotine reminded all politicians that no one was really safe.

 

By April 1794, both right and left had gone to the guillotine and the Robespierrists were therefore politically isolated. Only the war-crisis maintained them in power. When, late in June 1794, the new armies of the Republic proved their firmness by decisively defeating the

 

 

7i

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

Austrians at Fleurus and occupying Belgium, the end was at hand. On the Ninth Thermidor by the revolutionary calender (July 27, 1794) the Convention overthrew Robespierre. The next day he, Saint-Just and Couthon were executed, and so a few days later were eighty-seven members of the revolutionary Paris Commune.

 

IV

 

Thermidor is the end of the heroic and remembered phase of the Revolution: the phase of ragged Sansculottes and correct red-bonneted citizens who saw themselves as Brutus and Cato, of the grandiloquent classical and generous, but also of the mortal phrases: ‘Lyon n’cst plus’, ‘Ten thousand soldiers lack shoes. You will take the shoes of all the aristocrats in Strasbourg and deliver them ready for transport to head-quarters by tomorrow ten a.m.’⁸ It was not a comfortable phase to live through, for most men were hungry and many afraid; but it was a phenomenon as awful and irreversible as the first nuclear explosion, and all history has been permanently changed by it. And the energy it generated was sufficient to sweep away the armies of the old regimes of Europe like straw.

 

The problem which faced the French middle class for the remainder of what is technically described as the revolutionary period (1794-9) was how to achieve political stability and economic advance on the basis of the original liberal programme of 1789-91. It has never solved this problem adequately from that day to this, though from 1870 on it was to discover a workable formula for most times in the parliamentary republic. The rapid alternations of regime—Directory (1795-9), Consulate (1799-1804), Empire (1804-14), restored Bourbon Mon-archy (1815-30), Constitutional Monarchy (1830-48), Republic (1848-51), and Empire (1852-70)—were all attempts to maintain a bourgeois society while avoiding the double danger of the Jacobin democratic republic and the old rdgime.

 

The great weakness of the Thermidorians was that they enjoyed no political support but at most toleration, squeezed as they were between a revived aristocratic reaction and the Jacobin-Sansculotte Paris poor who soon regretted the fall of Robespierre. In 1795 they devised an elaborate constitution of checks and balances to safeguard themselves against both, and periodic shifts to right and left maintained them pre-cariously in balance; but increasingly they had to rely on the army to disperse the opposition. It was a situation curiously similar to the Fourth Republic, and its conclusion was similar: the rule of a general. But the Directory depended on the army for more than the suppression

 

 

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of periodic coups and plots (various ones in 1795, Babeuf’s conspiracy in 1796, Fructidor in 1797, Floreal in 1798, Prairial in 1799).* Inac-tivity was the only safe guarantee of power for a weak and unpopular regime, but initiative and expansion was what the middle class needed. The army solved this apparently insoluble problem. It conquered; it paid for itself; more than this, its loot and conquests paid for the government. Was it surprising that eventually the most intelligent and able of the army leaders, Napoleon Bonaparte, should have decided that the army could dispense altogether with the feeble civilian regime?

 

This revolutionary army was the most formidable child of the Jacobin Republic. From a ‘levee en masse’ of revolutionary citizens it soon turned into a force of professional fighters, for there was no call-up between 1793 and 1798, and those who had no taste or talent for soldiering deserted en masse. It therefore retained the characteristics of the Revolution and acquired those of the vested interest; the typical Bonapartist mixture. The Revolution gave it its unprecedented military superiority, which Napoleon’s superb generalship was to exploit. It always remained something of an improvised levy, in which barely trained recruits picked up training and morale from old sweats, formal barrack-discipline was negligible, soldiers were treated as men and the absolute rule of promotion by merit (which meant distinction in battle) produced a simple hierarchy of courage. This and the sense of arrogant revolutionary mission made the French army independent of the resources on which more orthodox forces depended. It never acquired an effective supply rystem, for it lived off the country. It was never backed by an armaments industry faintly adequate to its nominal needs; but it won its battles so quickly that it needed few arms: in 1806 the great machine of the Prussian army crumbled before an army in which an entire corps fired a mere 1,400 cannon shot. Generals could rely on unlimited offensive courage and a fair amount of local initiative. Admittedly it also had the weakness of its origins. Apart from Napoleon and a very few others, its generalship and staff-work was poor, for the revolutionary general or Napoleonic marshal was most likely a tough sergeant-major or company-officer type promoted for bravery and leadership rather than brains: the heroic but very stupid Marshal Ney was only too typical. Napoleon won battles; his marshals alone tended to lose them. Its sketchy supply system sufficed in the rich and lootable countries where it had been developed: Belgium, North Italy, Germany. In the waste spaces of Poland and Russia, as we shall see, it collapsed. Its total absence of sanitary services multiplied casualties: between 1800 and 1815 Napoleon lost 40 per cent of his forces (though about

 

* The names are those of months in the revolutionary calendar.

 

 

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one-third of this through desertion); but between 90 and 98 per cent of these losses were men who died not in battle but of wounds, sickness, exhaustion and cold. In brief, it was an army which conquered all Europe in short sharp bursts not only because it could, but because it had to.

 

On the other hand the army was a career like any other of the many the bourgeois revolution had opened to talent; and those who suc-ceeded in it had a vested interest in internal stability like any other bourgeois. That is what made the army, in spite of its built-in Jacobin-ism, a pillar of the post-Thermidorian government, and its leader Bonaparte a suitable person to conclude the bourgeois revolution and begin the bourgeois regime. Napoleon Bonaparte himself, though of gentlemanly birth by the standards of his barbarous island-home of Corsica, was himself a typical careerist of this kind. Born in 1769 he made his way slowly in the artillery, one of the few branches of the royal army in which technical competence was indispensable, ambi-tious, discontented and revolutionary. Under the Revolution, and especially under the Jacobin dictatorship which he supported strongly, he was recognized by a local commissar on a crucial front—a fellow Corsican incidentally, which can hardly have harmed his prospects— as a soldier of splendid gifts and promise. The Year II made him a general. He survived the fall of Robespierre, and a gift for cultivating useful connections in Paris helped him forward after this difficult moment. He seized his opportunities in the Italian campaign of 1796 which made him the unchallenged first soldier of the Republic, who acted virtually in independence of the civilian authorities. Power was half-thrust upon him, half grasped by him when the foreign invasions of 1799 revealed the Directory’s feebleness and his own indispensability. He became First Consul; then Consul for life; then Emperor. And with his arrival, as by a miracle, the insoluble problems of the Directory became soluble. Within a few years France had a Civil Code, a con-cordat with the Church and even, most striking symbol of bourgeois stability, a National Bank. And the world had its first secular myth.

 

Older readers or those in old-fashioned countries will know the Napoleonic myth as it existed throughout the century when no middle-class cabinet was complete without his bust, and pamphleteering wits could argue, even for a joke, that he was not a man but a sun-god. The extraordinary power of this myth can be adequately explained neither by Napoleonic victories nor by Napoleonic propaganda, nor even by Napoleon’s own undoubted genius. As a man he was unquestionably very brilliant, versatile, intelligent and imaginative, though power made him rather nasty. As a general he had no equal; as a ruler he was

 

 

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a superbly efficient planner, chief and executive and sufficient of an all-round intellectual to understand and supervise what his subordinates were doing. As an individual he appears to have radiated a sense of greatness; but most of those who testify to this—like Goethe—saw him at the peak of his fame, when the myth already enveloped him. He was, without any question, a very great man, and—perhaps with the excep-tion of Lenin—his picture is the one which most reasonably educated men would, even today, recognize most readily in the portrait gallery of history, if only by the triple trade-mark of the small size, the hair brushed forward over the forehead and the hand pushed into the half-open waistcoat. It is perhaps pointless to measure him against twen-tieth-century candidates for greatness.

 

For the Napoleonic myth is based less on Napoleon’s merits than on the facts, then unique, of his career. The great known world-shakers of the past had begun as kings like Alexander or patricians like Julius Caesar; but Napoleon was the ‘little corporal’ who rose to rule a conti-nent by sheer personal talent. (This was not strictly true, but his rise was sufficiently meteoric and high to make the description reasonable.) Every young intellectual who devoured books, as the young Bonaparte had done, wrote bad poems and novels, and adored Rousseau could henceforth see the sky as his limit, laurels surrounding his monogram. Every businessman henceforth had a name for his ambition: to be—the cliches themselves say so—a ‘Napoleon of finance’ or industry. All common men were thrilled by the sight, then unique, of a common man who became greater than those born to wear crowns. Napoleon gave ambition a personal name at the moment when the double revo-lution had opened the world to men of ambition. Yet he was more. He was the civilized man of the eighteenth century, rationalist, inquisitive, enlightened, but with sufficient of the disciple of Rousseau about him to be also the romantic man of the nineteenth. He was the man of the Revolution, and the man who brought stability. In a word, he was the figure every man who broke with tradition could identify himself with in his dreams.

 

For the French he was also something much simpler: the most successful ruler in their long history. He triumphed gloriously abroad; but at home he also established or re-established the apparatus of French institutions as they exist to this day. Admittedly most—perhaps all—his ideas were anticipated by Revolution and Directory; his personal contribution was to make them rather more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian. But his predecessors anticipated: he carried out. The great lucid monuments of French law, the Codes which became models for the entire non-Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world,

 

 

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were Napoleonic. The hierarchy of officials, from the prefects down, of courts, of university and schools, was his. The great ‘careers’ of French public life, army, civil service, education, law still have their Napole-onic shapes. He brought stability and prosperity to all except the quarter-of-a-million Frenchmen who did not return from his wars; and even to their relatives he brought glory. No doubt the British saw them-selves fighting for liberty against tyranny; but in 1815 most Englishmen were probably poorer and worse off than they had been in 1800, while most Frenchmen were almost certainly better off; nor had any except the still negligible wage-labourers lost the substantial economic benefits of the Revolution. There is little mystery about the persistence of Bona-partism as an ideology of non-political Frenchmen, especially the richer peasantry, after his fall. It took a second and smaller Napoleon to dissipate it between 1851 and 1870.

 

He had destroyed only one thing: the Jacobin Revolution, the dream of equality, liberty and fraternity, and of the people rising in its majesty to shake off oppression. It was a more powerful myth than his, for after his fall it was this, and not his memory, which inspired the revolutions of the nineteenth century, even in his own country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER      4

 

WAR

 

In a time of innovation, all that is not new is pernicious. The military art of the monarchy no longer suits us, for we are different men and have different enemies. The power and conquests of peoples, the splendour of their politics and warfare, have always depended on a single principle, a single powerful institution. . , . Our nation has already a national character of its own. Its military system must be differentfrom its enemies’. Very well then: if the French nation is terrible because of our ardour and skill, and if our enemies are clumsy, cold and slow, then our military system must be impetuous.

 

Saint-Just, Rapport prisenti & la Convention Nationale au nom du Comite” de Salut Public, 19 du premier mois de Van II {October 10, iyg3)

 

It is not true that war is divinely ordained; 1/ is not true that the earth thirsts for blood. God himself curses war and so do the men who wage it, and who hold it in secret horror.

 

Alfred de Vigny, Servitude et grandeur militaires.

 

 

 

I

 

FROM 1792 until 1815 there was almost uninterrupted war in Europe, combined or coincident with occasional war outside: in the West Indies, the Levant and India in the 1790s and early 1800s, in occasional naval operations abroad thereafter, in the USA in 1812-14. The consequences ofvictory or defeat in these wars were considerable, for they transformed the map of the world. We must therefore consider them first. But we shall also have to consider a less tangible problem. What were the con-sequences of the actual process of warfare, the military mobilization and operations, the political and economic measures consequent upon them?

 

Two very different kinds of belligerents confronted one another during those twenty-odd years: powers and systems. France as a state, with its interests and aspirations confronted (or was in alliance with) other states of the same kind, but on the other hand France as the Revolution appealed to the peoples of the world to overthrow tyranny and embrace liberty, and the forces of conservatism and reaction opposed her. No doubt after the first apocalyptic years of revolutionary war the difference between these two strands of conflict diminished. By the end of Napoleon’s reign the element of imperial conquest and exploitation prevailed over the element of liberation, whenever French

 

 

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troops defeated, occupied or annexed some country, and international warfare was therefore much less mixed with international (and in each country domestic) civil war. Conversely, the anti-revolutionary powers were resigned to the irreversibility of much of the revolution’s achieve-ment in France, and consequently ready to negotiate (within certain reservations) peace-terms as between normally functioning powers rather than as between light and darkness. They were even, within a few weeks of Napoleon’s first defeat, prepared to readmit France as an equal player into the traditional game of alliance, counter-alliance, bluff, threat and war in which diplomacy regulated the relationships between the major states. Nevertheless, the dual nature of the wars as a conflict, both between states and between social systems, remained.

 

Socially speaking, the belligerents were very unevenly divided. Apart from France itself, there was only one state of importance whose revolutionary origins and sympathy with the Declarations of the Rights of Man might give it an ideological inclination to the French side: the United States of America. In fact, the USA did lean to the French side, and on at least one occasion (1812-14) fought a war, if not in alliance with the French, then at least against a common enemy, the British. However, the USA remained neutral for the most part and its friction with the British requires no ideological explanation. For the rest the ideological allies of France were parties and currents of opinion within other states rather than state powers in their own right.

 

In a very broad sense virtually every person of education, talent and enlightenment sympathized with the Revolution, at all events until the Jacobin dictatorship, and often for very much longer. (It was not until Napoleon had made himself emperor that Beethoven revoked the dedication of the Eroica Symphony to him.) The list of European talent and genius which supported the Revolution initially can only be compared with the similar and almost universal sympathy for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s. In Britain it included the poets— Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Robert Burns, Southey—scientists, the chemist Joseph Priestley and several members of the distinguished Birmingham Lunar Society,* technologists and industrialists like Wil-kinson the ironmaster and Thomas Telford the engineer, and Whig or Dissenting intellectuals in general. In Germany it included the philoso-phers Kant, Herder, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, the poets Schiller, Hoelderlin, Wieland and the aged Klopstock and the musician Beet-hoven, in Switzerland the educationalist Pestalozzi, the psychologist Lavater and the painter Fuessli (Fuseli), in Italy virtually all persons of anticlerical opinions. However, though the Revolution was charmed

 

* James Watt’s son actually went to France, to his father’s alarm.

 

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by such intellectual support, and honoured eminent foreign sym-pathizers and those whom it believed to stand for its principles by granting them honorary French citizenship,* neither a Beethoven nor a Robert Burns were of much political or military importance in themselves.

 

Serious political philo-Jacobinism or pro-French sentiment existed in the main in certain areas adjoining France, where social conditions were comparable or cultural contacts permanent (the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Switzerland and Savoy), in Italy; and for somewhat different reasons in Ireland and Poland. In Britain ‘Jacobinism’ would undoubtedly have been a phenomenon of greater political importance, even after The Terror, if it had not clashed with the traditional anti-French bias of popular English nationalism, compounded equally of John Bull’s beef-fed contempt for the starveling continentals (all French in the popular cartoons of the period are as thin as matchsticks) and of hostility to what was, after all, England’s ‘hereditary enemy’, though also Scotland’s hereditary ally.f British Jacobinism was unique in being primarily an artisan or working-class phenomenon, at least after the first general enthusiasm had passed. The Corresponding Societies can claim to be the first independent political organizations of the labouring class. But it found a voice of unique force in Tom Paine’s ‘Rights of Man’ (which may have sold a million copies), and some political backing from Whig interests, themselves immune to persecution by reason of their wealth and social position, who were prepared to defend the traditions of British civil liberty and the desirability of a negotiated peace with France. Nevertheless, the real weakness of British Jacobinism

 

is indicated by the fact that the very fleet at Spithead, which mutinied at a crucial stage of the war (1797), clamoured to be allowed to sail against the French once their economic demands had been met.

 

In the Iberian peninsula, in the Habsburg dominions, Central and Eastern Germany, Scandinavia, the Balkans and Russia, philo-Jacobinism was a negligible force. It attracted some ardent young men, some illuminist intellectuals and a few others who, like Ignatius Martinovics in Hungary or Rhigas in Greece, occupy the honoured places of precursors in the history of their countries’ struggle for national or social liberation. But the absence of any mass support for their views among the middle and upper classes, let alone their isolation

 

* To wit Priestley, Bentham, Wilberforce, Clarkson (the anti-slavery agitator), James Mackintosh, David Williams from “Britain, Klopstock, Schiller, Campe and Anarcharsis Cloots from Germany, Festalozzi from Switzerland, Kosziusko from Poland, Gorani from Italy, Cornelius de Pauw from the Netherlands, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Tom Paine and Joel Barlow from the USA. Not all of these were sympathizers with the Revolution.

 

t This may not be unconnected with the fact that Scottish Jacobinism was a very much more powerful popular force.

 

 

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THE  AGE  OF  REVOLUTION

 

from the bigoted illiterate peasantry, made Jacobinism easy to suppress even when, as in Austria, it ventured on a conspiracy. A generation would have to pass before the strong and militant Spanish liberal tradition was to emerge from the few tiny student conspiracies or Jacobin emissaries of 1792-5.

 

The truth was that for the most part Jacobinism abroad made its direct ideological appeal to the educated and middle classes and that its political force therefore depended on their effectiveness or willing-ness to use it. Thus in Poland the French Revolution made a profound impression. France had long been the chief foreign power in whom Poles hoped to find backing against the joint greed of the Prussians, Russians and Austrians, who had already annexed vast areas of the country and were soon to divide it among themselves entirely. France also provided a model of the kind of profound internal reform which, as all thinking Poles agreed, could alone enable their country to resist its butchers. Hence it is hardly surprising that the Reform constitution of 1791 was consciously and profoundly influenced by the French Revo-lution; it was the first of the modern constitutions to show this in-fluence.* But in Poland the reforming nobility and gentry had a free hand. In Hungary, where the endemic conflict between Vienna and the local autonomists provided an analogous incentive for country gentlemen to interest themselves in theories of resistance (the county of G6m6r demanded the abolition of censorship as being contrary to Rousseau’s Social Contract), they had not. Consequently ‘Jacobinism’ was both much weaker and much less effective. Again in Ireland, national and agrarian discontent gave ‘Jacobinism’ a political force far in excess of the actual support for the free-thinking, masonic ideology of the leaders of the ‘United Irishmen’. Church services were held in that most catholic country for the victory of the godless French, and Irishmen were prepared to welcome the invasion of their country by French forces, not because they sympathized with Robespierre but because they hated the English and looked for allies against them. In Spain, on the other hand, where both Catholicism and poverty were equally prominent, Jacobinism failed to gain a foothold for the opposite reason; no foreigners oppressed the Spaniards, and the onjy ones likely to do so were the French.

 

Neither Poland nor Ireland were typical examples of philo-Jacobin-ism, for the actual programme of the Revolution made little appeal there. It did in countries of similar social and political problems to

 

* As Poland was essentially a Republic of the nobility and gentry, the constitution was ‘jacobin’ only in the most superficial sense: the rule of the nobles was reinforced rather than abolished.

 

 

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those of France. These fall into two groups: states in which native ‘Jacobinism’ stood a reasonable chance of bidding for political power, and those in which only French conquest could push them forward. The Low Countries, parts of Switzerland, and possibly one or two Italian states belong to the first group, most of West Germany and Italy to the second. Belgium (the Austrian Netherlands) was already in revolt in 1789: it is often forgotten that Camille Desmoulins called his journal ‘Les Revolutions de France et de Brabant’. The pro-French element of the revolutionaries (the democratic Vonckists) was no doubt weaker than the conservative Statists, but strong enough to produce genuine revolutionary support for the French conquest of their country, which they favoured. In the United Provinces the ‘patriots’, seeking an alli-ance with France, were powerful enough to consider a revolution, though doubtful whether it could succeed without external aid. They represented the lesser middle class, and others rallied against the dominant oligarchies of big merchant patricians. In Switzerland the

 

left wing element in certain protestant cantons had always been strong, and the attraction of France had always been powerful. Here too French conquest supplemented rather than created the local revolutionary forces.

 

In West Germany and Italy this was not so. French invasion was welcomed by the German Jacobins, notably in Mainz and the south-west, but nobody would claim that they were within measurable distance of even causing their governments much trouble on their own.* In Italy the prevalence ofilluminism and Masonry made the Revolution immensely popular among the educated, but local Jacobinism was probably powerful only in the kingdom of Naples, where it captured virtually all the enlightened (i.e. anticlerical) middle class and a part of the gentry, and was well organized in the secret lodges and societies which flourish so well in the South Italian atmosphere. But even there it suffered from its total failure to make contact with the social-revolutionary masses. A Neapolitan republic was easily proclaimed as news of the French advance came, but equally easily overthrown by a social revolution of the right, under the banner of Pope and King; for the peasants and the Neapolitan lazzaroni, with some justification, defined a Jacobin as ‘a man with a coach’.

 

Broadly speaking, therefore, the military value of foreign philo-Jacobinism was chiefly that of an auxiliary to French conquest, and a source of politically reliable administrators of conquered territories. And indeed, the tendency was for the areas with local Jacobin strength to be turned into satellite republics and thereafter, where convenient,

 

* The French even failed to establish a satellite Rhineland Republic.

 

 

8l

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

to be annexed to France. Belgium was annexed in 1795; the Nether-lands became the Batavian Republic in the same year and eventually a family kingdom of the Bonapartes. The left bank of the Rhine was annexed, and under Napoleon satellite states (like the Grand Duchy of Berg—the present Ruhr area—and the kingdom of Westphalia) and direct annexation extended further across North-west Germany. Swit-zerland became the Helvetic Republic in 1798 and was eventually annexed. In Italy a string of republics were set up—the Cisalpine (1797), the Ligurian (1797), the Roman (1798), the Partenopean (1798) which eventually became partly French territory, but predominantly satellite states (the kingdom of Italy, the kingdom of Naples).

 

Foreign Jacobinism had some military importance, and foreign Jacobins within France played a significant part in the formation of Republican strategy, as notably the Saliceti group, which is incidentally more than a little responsible for the rise of the Italian Napoleon Bonaparte within the French army, and his subsequent fortunes in Italy. But few would claim that it or they were decisive. One foreign pro-French movement alone might have been decisive, had it been effectively exploited: the Irish. A combination of Irish revolution and French invasion, particularly in 1797-8 when Britain was temporarily the only belligerent left in the field against France, might well have forced Britain to make peace. But the technical problems of invasion across so wide a stretch of sea were difficult, the French efforts to do so hesitant and ill-conceived, and the Irish rising of 1798, though enjoying massive popular support, poorly organized and easily suppressed. To speculate about the theoretical possibilities of Franco-Irish operations is therefore idle.

 

But if the French enjoyed the support of revolutionary forces abroad, so did the anti-French. For the spontaneous movements of popular resistance against French conquest cannot be denied their social-revolutionary component, even when the peasants who waged them expressed it in terms of militant church-and-king conservatism. It is significant that the military tactic which in our century has become most completely identified with revolutionary warfare, the guerilla or partisan, was between 1792 and 1815 the almost exclusive preserve of the anti-French side. In France itself the Vendue and the chouans of Brit-tany carried on royalist guerilla war from 1793, with interruptions, until 1802. Abroad, the bandits of Southern Italy in 1798-9 probably pioneered anti-French popular guerilla action. The Tyrolese under the publican Andreas Hofer in 1809, ^{D u t} above all the Spaniards from 1808, and to some extent the Russians in 1812-13, practised it with considerable success. Paradoxically, the military importance of this

 

 

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revolutionary tactic for the anti-French was almost certainly greater than the military importance of foreign Jacobinism was for the French. No area beyond the borders of France itself maintained a pro-Jacobin government for a moment after the defeat or withdrawal of French troops; but Tyrol, Spain, and to some extent Southern Italy, presented a more serious military problem to the French after the defeat of their formal armies and rulers than before. The reason is obvious: these were peasant movements. Where anti-French nationalism was not based on the local peasantry, its military importance was negligible. Retro-spective patriotism has created a German ‘war of liberation’ in 1813-14, but it can safely be said that, insofar as this is supposed to have been based on popular resistance to the French, it is a pious fiction.¹ In Spain the people held the French in check when the armies had failed; in Germany orthodox armies defeated them in a wholly orthodox manner.

 

Socially speaking, then, it is not too much of a distortion to speak of the war as one of France and its border territories against the rest. In terms of old-fashioned power relations, the line-up was more complex. The fundamental conflict here was that between France and Britain, which had dominated European international relations for the best part of a century. From the British point of view this was almost wholly economic. They wished to eliminate their chief competitor on the way to achieving total predominance of their trade in the European markets, the total control of the colonial and overseas markets, which in turn implied the control of the high seas. In fact, they achieved something not much less than this as the result of the wars. In Europe this objective implied no territorial ambitions, except for the control of certain points of maritime importance, or the assurance that these would not fall into the hands of states strong enough to be dangerous. For the rest of Britain was content with any continental settlement in which any potential rival was held in check by other states. Abroad it implied the wholesale destruction of other people’s colonial empires and considerable annexations to the British.

 

This policy was in itself sufficient to provide the French with some potential allies, for all maritime, trading and colonial states regarded it with misgivings or hostility. In fact their normal posture was one of neutrality, for the benefits of trading freely in wartime are considerable; but the British tendency to treat neutral shipping (quite realistically) as a force helping the French rather than themselves, drove them into conflict from time to time, until the French blockade policy after 1806 pushed them in the opposite direction. Most maritime powers were too weak, or, being in Europe, too cut off, to cause the British much

 

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trouble; but the Anglo-American war of 1812-14 was the outcome of such a conflict.

 

The French hostility to Britain was somewhat more complex, but the element in it which, like the British, demanded a total victory was greatly strengthened by the Revolution, which brought to power a French bourgeoisie whose appetites were, in their way, as limitless as those of the British. At the very least victory over the British required the destruction of British commerce, on which Britain was correctly believed to be dependent; and a safeguard against future British recovery, its permanent destruction. (The parallel between the Franco-British and the Rome-Carthage conflict was much in the minds of the French, whose political imagery was largely classical.) In a more ambi-tious mood, the French bourgeoisie could hope to offset the evident economic superiority of the British only by its own political and military resources: e.g. by creating for itself a vast captive market from which its rivals were excluded. Both these considerations lent the Anglo-French conflict a persistence and stubbornness unlike any other. Neither side was really—a rare thing in those days, though a common one today— prepared to settle for less than total victory. The one brief spell of peace between the two (1802-3) was brought to an end by the reluc-tance of both to maintain it. This was all the more remarkable, since the purely military situation imposed a stalemate: it was clear from the later 1790s that the British could not effectively get at the continent and the French could not effectively break out of it.

 

The other anti-French powers were engaged in a less murderous kind of struggle. They all hoped to overthrow the French Revolution, though not at the expense of their own political ambitions, but after 1792—5 this was clearly no longer practicable. Austria, whose family links with the Bourbons were reinforced by the direct French threat to her possessions and areas of influence in Italy, and her leading position in Germany, was the most consistently anti-French, and took part in every major coalition against France. Russia was intermittently anti-French, entering the war,only in 1795-1800, 1805-7 and 1812. Prussia was torn between a sympathy for the counter-revolutionary side, a mistrust of Austria, and her own ambitions in Poland and Germany, which benefited from the French initiative. She therefore entered the war occasionally and in a semi-independent fashion: in 1792-5, 1806-7 (when she was pulverized) and 1813. The policy of the remainder of the states which from time to time entered anti-French coalitions, shows comparable fluctuations. They were against the Revolution but, politics being politics, they had other fish to fry also, and nothing in their state interests imposed a permanent unwavering hostility to

 

 

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France, especially to a victorious France which determined the periodic redistributions of European territory.

 

These permanent diplomatic ambitions and interests of the European states also supplied the French with a number of potential allies: for in every permanent system of states in rivalry and tension with one another, the enmity of A implies the sympathy of anti-A. The most reliable of these were those lesser German princes whose interest it had long been—normally in alliance with France—to weaken the power of the Emperor (i.e. Austria) over the principalities, or who suffered from the growth of Prussian power. The South-western German states— Baden, Wurtemberg, Bavaria, who became the nucleus of the Napo-leonic Confederation of the Rhine (1806)—and Prussia’s old rival and victim, Saxony, were the most important of these. Saxony, indeed, was the last and most loyal ally of Napoleon, a fact also partly explic-able by her economic interests, for as a highly developed manufac-turing centre she benefited from the Napoleonic ‘continental system’.

 

Still, even allowing for the divisions on the anti-French side and the potential of allies on which the French might draw, on paper the anti-French coalitions were invariably much stronger than the French, at any rate initially. Yet the military history of the wars is one of almost unbroken and breath-taking French victory. After the initial combina-tion of foreign attack and domestic counter-revolution had been beaten off (1793-4) there was only one short period, before the end, when the French armies were seriously on the defensive: in 1799 when the second coalition mobilized the formidable Russian army under Suvorov for its first operations in Western Europe. For all practical purposes the list of campaigns and land battles between 1794 and 1812 is one of virtually uninterrupted French triumph. The reason lies in the Revo-lution in France. Its political radiation abroad was not, as we have seen, decisive. At most we might claim that it prevented the population of the reactionary states from resisting the French, who brought them liberty; but in fact the military strategy and tactics of orthodox eighteenth-century states neither expected nor welcomed civilian participation in warfare: Frederick the Great had firmly told his loyal Berliners, who offered to resist the Russians, to leave war to the pro-fessionals to whom it belonged. But it transformed the warfare of the French and made them immeasurably superior to the armies of the old regime. Technically the old armies were better trained and disci-plined, and where these qualities were decisive, as in naval warfare, the French were markedly inferior. They were good privateers and hit-and-run raiders, but could not compensate for the lack of sufficient trained seamen and above all competent naval officers, a class deci-

 

 

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mated by the Revolution, for it came largely from the royalist Norman and Breton gentry, and which could not be rapidly improvised. In six major and eight minor naval engagements between the British and the French, the French losses in men were something like ten times those of the British.⁸ But where improvised organization, mobility, flexibility and above all sheer offensive courage and morale counted, the French had no rivals. These advantages did not depend on any man’s military genius, for the military record of the French before Napoleon took charge was striking enough, and the average quality of French general-ship was not exceptional. But it may well have depended in part on the rejuvenation of the French cadres at home or abroad, which is one of the chief consequences of any revolution. In 1806 out of 142 generals in the mighty Prussian army, seventy-nine were over sixty years of age, as were a quarter of all regimental commanders.⁸ But in 1806 Napoleon (who had been a general at the age of twenty-four), Murat (who had commanded a brigade at twenty-six), Ney (who did so at twenty-seven) and Davout, were all between twenty-six and thirty-seven years old.

 

II

 

The relative monotony of French success makes it unnecessary to discuss the military operations of the war on land in any great detail. In 1793-4 ^{t n e} French preserved the Revolution. In 1794-5 ^tney occupied the Low Countries, the Rhineland, parts of Spain, Switzerland and Savoy (and Liguria). In 1796 Napoleon’s celebrated Italian campaign gave them all Italy and broke the first coalition against France. Napoleon’s expedition to Malta, Egypt and Syria (1797-9) ^{w a s c u t} off from its base by the naval power of the British, and in his absence the second coalition expelled the French from Italy and threw them back to Germany. The defeat of the allied armies in Switzerland (battle of Zurich, 1799) saved France from invasion, and soon after Napoleon’s return and seizure of power the French were on the offensive again. By 1801 they had imposed peace on the remaining continental allies, by 1802 even on the British. Thereafter French supremacy in the regions conquered or controlled in 1794-8 remained unquestioned. A renewed attempt to launch war against them, in 1805-7, merely brought French influence to the borders of Russia. Austria was defeated in 1805 at the battle of Austerlitz in Moravia and peace was imposed on her. Prussia, which entered separately and late, was destroyed at the battles ofJena and Auerstaedt in 1806, and dismembered. Russia, though defeated at Austerlitz, mauled at Eylau (1807) and defeated

 

 

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again at Friedland (1807), remained intact as a military power. The Treaty of Tilsit (1807) treated her with justifiable respect, though establishing French hegemony over the rest of the continent, omitting Scandinavia and the Turkish Balkans. An Austrian attempt to shake free in 1809 was defeated at the battles of Aspern-Essling and Wagram. However, the revolt of the Spaniards in 1808, against the imposition of Napoleon’s brother Joseph as their king, opened up a field of operations for the British, and maintained constant military activity in the Peninsula, unaffected by the periodic defeats and retreats of the British (e.g. in 1809-10).

 

On the sea, however, the French were by this time completely defeated. After the battle of Trafalgar (1805) any chance, not merely of invading Britain across the channel but ofmaintaining contact overseas, disappeared. No way of defeating Britain appeared to exist except economic pressure, and this Napoleon attempted to exert effectively through the Continental System (1806). The difficulties of imposing this blockade effectively undermined the stability of the Tilsit settlement and led to the break with Russia, which was the turning-point of Napoleon’s fortunes. Russia was invaded and Moscow occupied. Had the Tsar made peace, as most of Napoleon’s enemies had done under similar circumstances, the gamble would have come off. But he did not, and Napoleon faced either endless further war without a clear prospect ofvictory, or retreat. Both were equally disastrous. The French army’s methods as we have seen assumed rapid campaigns in areas sufficiently wealthy and densely peopled for it to live off the land. But what worked in Lombardy or the Rhineland, where such procedures had been first developed, and was still feasible in central Europe, failed utterly in the vast, empty and impoverished spaces of Poland and Russia. Napoleon was defeated not so much by the Russian winter as by his failure to keep the Grand Army properly supplied. The retreat from Moscow destroyed the Army. Of the 610,000 men who had at one time or another crossed the Russian frontier, 100,000 or so recrossed it.

 

Under these circumstances the final coalition against the French was joined not only by her old enemies and victims, but by all those anxious to be on what was now clearly going to be the winning side; only the king of Saxony left his adhesion too late. A new, and largely raw, French army was defeated at Leipzig (1813), and the allies advanced inexorably into France, in spite of the dazzling manoeuvres of Napoleon, while the British advanced into it from the Peninsula. Paris was occupied and the Emperor resigned on the 6th of April 1814. He attempted to restore his power in 1815, but the battle of Waterloo (June 1815) ended it.

 

 

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III

 

In the course of these decades of war the political frontiers of Europe were redrawn several times. Here we need consider only those changes which, in one way or another, were sufficiently permanent to outlast the defeat of Napoleon.

 

The most important of these was a general rationalization of the European political map, especially in Germany and Italy. In terms of political geography, the French Revolution ended the European middle ages. The characteristic modern state, which had been evolving for several centuries, is a territorially coherent and unbroken area with sharply denned frontiers, governed by a single sovereign authority and according to a single fundamental system of administration and law. (Since the French Revolution it has also been assumed that it should represent a single ‘nation’ or linguistic group, but at this stage a sovereign territorial state did not yet imply this.) The characteristic European feudal state, though it could sometimes look like this, as for instance in medieval England, made no such requirements. It was patterned much more on the ‘estate’. Just as the term ‘the estates of the Duke of Bedford’ implies neither that they should all be in a single block, nor that they should all be directly managed by their owner, or held on the same tenancies or terms, nor that sub-tenancies should be excluded, so the feudal state of Western Europe did not exclude a complexity which would appear wholly intolerable today. By 1789 these complexities were already felt to be troublesome. Foreign enclaves found themselves deep in some state’s territory, like the papal city of Avignon in France. Territories within one state found them-selves, for historical reasons, also dependent on another lord who now happened to be part of another state and therefore, in modern terms, under dual sovereignty.* ‘Frontiers’ in the form of customs-barriers ran between different provinces of the same state. The empire of the Holy Roman Emperor contained his private principalities, accumulated over the centuries and never adequately standardized or unified—the head of the House of Habsburg did not even have a single title to describe his rule over all his territories until 1804!—and imperial authority over a variety of territories, ranging from great powers in their own right like the kingdom of Prussia (itself not fully unified as such until 1807), through principalities of all sizes, to independent city-state republics and ‘free imperial knights’ whose estates, often no bigger than a few

 

* A lone European survivor of this genus is the republic of Andorra, which is under the dual suzerainty of the Spanish Bishop of Urgel and the President of the French Republic.

 

• f He was merely, in his single person, Duke of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Count of Tyrol, etc.

 

 

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acres, happened to have no superior lord. Each of these in turn, if large enough, showed the same lack of territorial unity and standardization, depending on the vagaries of a long history of piece-meal acquisition and the divisions and reunifications of the family heritage. The complex of economic, administrative, ideological and power-considerations which tend to impose a minimum size of territory and population on the modern unit of government, and make us today vaguely uneasy at the thought of, say, UN membership for Liechtenstein, did not yet apply to any extent. Consequently, especially in Germany and Italy, small and dwarf states abounded.

 

The Revolution and the consequent wars abolished a good many of these relics, partly from revolutionary zeal for territorial unification and standardization, partly by exposing the small and weak states to the greed of their larger neighbours repeatedly and for an unusually long period. Such formal survivals of an earlier age as the Holy Roman Empire, and most city-states and city-empires, disappeared. The Empire died in 1806, the ancient Republics of Genoa and Venice went in 1797 and by the end of the war the German free cities had been reduced to the four. Another characteristic medieval survival, the independent ecclesiastical state, went the same way: the episcopal principalities, Cologne, Mainz, Treves, Salzburg and the rest, went; only the Papal states in central Italy survived until 1870. Annexation, peace-treaties, and the Congresses in which the French systematically attempted to reorganize the German political map (in 1797-8 and 1803) reduced the 234 territories of the Holy Roman Empire—not counting free imperial knights and the like—to forty; in Italy, where generations ofjungle war-fare had already simplified the political structure—dwarf states existed only at the confines of North and Central Italy—the changes were less drastic. Since most of these changes benefited some soundly monarchial state, Napoleon’s defeat merely perpetuated them. Austria would no more have thought of restoring the Venetian Republic, because she had originally acquired its territories through the operation of the French Revolutionary armies, than she would have thought of giving up Salz-burg (which she acquired in 1803) merely because she respected the Catholic Church.

 

Outside Europe, of course, the territorial changes of the wars were the consequence of the wholesale British annexation of other people’s colonies and the movements of colonial liberation inspired by the French Revolution (as in San Domingo) or made possible, or imposed, by the temporary separation of colonies from their metropolis (as in Spanish and Portuguese’America). The British domination of the seas ensured that most of these changes should be irreversible, whether they

 

 

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had taken place at the expense of the French or (more often) of the anti-French.

 

Equally important were the institutional changes introduced directly or indirectly by French conquest. At the peak of their power (1810), the French directly governed, as part of France, all Germany left of the Rhine, Belgium, the Netherlands and North Germany eastwards to Luebeck, Savoy, Piedmont, Liguria and Italy west of the Appenines down to the borders of Naples, and the Illyrian provinces from Carin-thia down to and including Dalmatia. French family or satellite king-doms and duchies covered Spain, the rest of Italy, the rest of Rhineland-Westphalia, and a large part of Poland. In all these territories (except perhaps the Grand Duchy of Warsaw) the institutions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire were automatically applied, or were the obvious models for local administration: feudalism was form-ally abolished, French legal codes applied and so on. These changes proved far less reversible than the shifting of frontiers. Thus the Civil Code of Napoleon remained, or became once again, the foundation of local law in Belgium, in the Rhineland (even after its return to Prussia) and in Italy. Feudalism, once officially abolished, was nowhere re-established.

 

Since it was evident to the intelligent adversaries of France that they had been defeated by the superiority of a new political system, or at any rate by their own failure to adopt equivalent reforms, the wars produced changes not only through French conquest but in reaction against it; in some instances—as in Spain—through both agencies.

 

Napoleon’s collaborators, the afrancesados on one side, the liberal leaders of the anti-French Junta of Cadiz on the other, envisaged sub-stantially the same type of Spain, modernized along the lines of the French Revolutionary reforms; and what the ones failed to achieve, the others attempted. A much clearer case of reform by reaction—for the Spanish liberals were reformers first and anti-French only as it were by historical accident—was Prussia. There a form of peasant liberation was instituted, an army with elements of the levie en masse organized, legal, economic and educational reforms carried through entirely under the impact of the collapse of the Frederician army and state at Jena and Auerstaedt, and with overwhelmingly predominant purpose of reversing that defeat.

 

In fact, it can be said with little exaggeration that no important continental state west of Russia and Turkey and south of Scandinavia emerged from these two decades of war with its domestic institutions wholly unaffected by the expansion or imitation of the French Revo-lution. Even the ultra-reactionary Kingdom of Naples did not actually

 

 

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re-establish legal feudalism once it had been abolished by the French.

 

But changes in frontiers, laws and government institutions were as nothing compared to a third effect of these decades of revolutionary war: the profound transformation of the political atmosphere. When the French Revolution broke out, the governments of Europe regarded it with relative sangfroid: the mere fact that institutions changed suddenly, that insurrections took place, that dynasties were deposed or kings assassinated and executed did not in itself shock eighteenth century rulers, who were used to it, and who considered such changes in other countries primarily from the point of view of their effect on the balance of power and the relative position of their own. ‘The insurgents I expel from Geneva,’ wrote Vergennes, the famous French foreign minister of the old regime, ‘are agents of England, whereas the insurgents in America hold out the prospects of long friendship. My policy towards each is determined not by their political systems, but by their attitude towards France. That is my reason of state.’⁴ But by 1815 a wholly different attitude towards revolution prevailed, and dominated the policy of the powers.

 

It was now known that revolution in a single country could be a European phenomenon; that its doctrines could spread across the frontiers and, what was worse, its crusading armies could blow away the political systems of a continent. It was now known that social revolution was possible; that nations existed as something independent of states, peoples as something independent of their rulers, and even that the poor existed as something independent of the ruling classes. ‘The French Revolution,’ De Bonald had observed in 1796, ‘is a unique event in history.’⁶ The phrase is misleading: it was a universal event. No country was immune from it. The French soldiers who campaigned from Andalusia to Moscow, from the Baltic to Syria—over a vaster area than any body of conquerors since the Mongols, and certainly a vaster area than any previous single military force in Europe except the Norse-men—pushed the universality of their revolution home more effectively than anything else could have done. And the doctrines and institutions they carried with them, even under Napoleon, from Spain to Illyria, were universal doctrines, as the governments knew, and as the peoples themselves were soon to know also. A Greek bandit and patriot expressed their feelings completely:

 

‘According to my judgment,’ said Kolokotrones, ‘the French Revolution and the doings of Napoleon opened the eyes of the world. The nations knew nothing before, and the people thought that kings

 

 

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were gods upon the earth and that they were bound to say that whatever they did was well done. Through this present change it is more difficult to rule the people.’⁶

 

IV

 

We have seen the effects of the twenty-odd years of war on the political structure of Europe. But what were the consequences of the actual process of warfare, the military mobilizations and operations, the political and economic measures consequent upon them?

 

Paradoxically these were greatest where least concerned with the actual shedding of blood; except for France itself which almost certainly suffered higher casualties and indirect population losses than any other country. The men of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period were lucky enough to live between two periods of barbaric warfare—that of the seventeenth century and that of our own—which had the capacity to lay countries waste in a really sensational manner. No area affected by the wars of 1792-1815, not even in the Iberian peninsula, where military operations were more prolonged than anywhere else and popular resistance and reprisal made them more savage, was devastated as parts of Central and Eastern Europe were in the Thirty Years’ and Northern Wars of the seventeenth century, Sweden and Poland in the early eighteenth, or large parts of the world in war and civil war in the twentieth. The long period of economic improvement which preceded 1789 meant that famine and its companion, plague and pestilence, did not add excessively to the ravages of battle and plunder; at any rate until after 18 n . (The major period of famine occurred after the wars, in 1816-17.) The military campaigns tended to be short and sharp, and the armaments used—relatively light and mobile artillery—not very destructive by modern standards. Sieges were uncommon. Fire was probably the greatest hazard to dwellings and the means of pro-duction, and small houses or farms were easily rebuilt. The only material destruction really difficult to make good quickly in a pre-industrial economy is that of timber, fruit- or olive-groves, which take many years to grow, and there does not seem to have been much of that.

 

Consequently the sheer human losses due to these two decades of war do not appear to have been, by modern standards, frighteningly high; though in fact no government made any attempt to calculate them, and all our modern estimates are vague to the point of guess-work, except those for the French and a few special cases. One million war dead for the entire period’ compares favourably with the losses of

 

 

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any single major belligerent in the four and a half years of World War I, or for that matter with the 600,000 or so dead of the American Civil War of 1861-5. Even two millions would not, for more than two decades of general warfare, appear particularly murderous, when we remember the extraordinary killing capacity of famines and epidemics in those days: as late as 1865 a cholera epidemic in Spain is reported as having claimed 236,744 victims.⁸ In fact, no country claims a signifi-cant slowing down of the rate of population growth during this period, except perhaps France.

 

For most inhabitants of Europe other than the combatants, the war probably did not mean more than an occasional direct interruption of the normal tenor of life, if it meant even that. Jane Austen’s country families went about their business as though it were not there. Fritz Reuter’s Mecklenburgers recalled the time of foreign occupation as one of small anecdote rather than drama; old Herr Kuegelgen, remember-ing his childhood in Saxony (one of the ‘cockpits of Europe’ whose geographical and political situation attracted armies and battles as only Belgium and Lombardy did besides), merely recalled the odd weeks of armies marching into or quartered in Dresden. Admittedly the number of armed men involved was much higher than had been common in earlier wars, though it was not extraordinary by modern standards. Even conscription did not imply the call-up of more than a fraction of the men affected: the Cote d’Or department of France in Napoleon’s reign supplied only 11,000 men out of its 350,000 inhabitants, or 3-15 per cent, and between 1800 and 1815 no more than 7 per cent of the total population of France were called up, as against 21 per cent in the much shorter period in the first world war.⁹ Still, in absolute figures this was a very large number. The levie en masse of 1793-4 P ^{u t} perhaps 630,000 men under arms (out of a theoretical call-up of 770,000); Napoleon’s peacetime strength in 1805 was 400,000 or so, and at the outset of the campaign against Russia in 1812 the Grande Armee com-prised 700,000 men (300,000 of them non-French), without counting the French troops in the rest of the continent, notably in Spain. The permanent mobilizations of the adversaries of France were very much smaller, if only because (with the exception of Britain) they were much less continuously in the field, as well as because financial troubles and organizational difficulties often made full mobilization difficult, e.g. for the Austrians who in 1813 were entitled under the peace treaty of 1809 to 150,000 men, but had only 60,000 actually ready for a campaign. The British, on the other hand, kept a surprisingly large number of men mobilized. At their peak (1813-14), with enough money voted for 300,000 in the regular army and 140,000 seamen and marines, they

 

 

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may well have carried a proportionately heavier load on their man-power than the French did for most of the war.*¹⁰

Losses were heavy, though once again not excessively so by the murderous standards of our century; but curiously few of them were actually due to the enemy. Only 6 or 7 per cent of the British sailors who died between 1793 and 1815 succumbed to the French; 80 per cent died from disease or accident. Death on the battlefield was a small risk; only 2 per cent of the casualties at Austerlitz, perhaps 8 or 9 per cent of those at Waterloo, were actually killed. The really frightening risk of war was neglect, filth, poor organization, defective medical services and hygienic ignorance, which massacred the wounded, the prisoners, and in suitable climatic conditions (as in the tropics) practically everybody.

 

Actual military operations killed people, directly and indirectly, and destroyed productive equipment, but, as we have seen, they did neither to an extent which seriously interfered with the normal tenor of a country’s life and development. The economic requirements of war, and economic warfare, had more far-reaching consequences.

 

By the standards of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were expensive beyond precedent; and indeed their cost in money impressed contemporaries perhaps even more than their cost in lives. Certainly the fall in the financial burden of war in the generation after Waterloo was far more striking than the fall in the human cost: it is estimated that while wars between 1821 and 1850 cost an average of less than 10 per cent per year of the equivalent figure for 1790-1820, the annual average of war-deaths remained at a little less than 25 per cent of the earlier period.¹¹ How was this cost to be paid? The traditional method had been a combination of monetary inflation (the issue of new currency to pay the government’s bills), loans, and the minimum of special taxation, for taxes created public discontent and (where they had to be granted by parliaments or estates) political trouble. But the extraordinary financial demands and conditions of the wars broke or transformed all these.

 

In the first place they familiarized-the world with unconvertible paper money.f On the continent the ease with which pieces of paper could be printed, to pay government obligations, proved irresistible. The French Assignats (1789) were at first simply French Treasury bonds [bans de trhor) with 5 per cent interest, designed to anticipate the proceeds of the eventual sale of church lands. Within a few months

 

* As thesefiguresare based on the money authorized by Parliament, the number of men raised was certainly smaller.

 

t In actual fact any kind of paper money, whether exchangeable upon demand for bullion or not, was relatively uncommon before the end of the eighteenth century.

 

 

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they had been transformed into currency, and each successive financial crisis caused them to be printed in greater quantity, and to depreciate more steeply, aided by the increasing lack of confidence of the public. By the outbreak of war they had depreciated about 40 per cent, by June 1793 about two-thirds. The Jacobin regime maintained them fairly well, but the orgy of economic decontrol after Thermidor reduced them progressively to about one three-hundredth of their face value, until official state bankruptcy in 1797 put an end to a monetary episode which prejudiced the French against any kind of banknote for the better part of a century. The paper currencies of other countries had less catastrophic careers, though by 1810 the Russian had fallen to 20 per cent of face value and the Austrian (twice devalued, in 1810 and 1815) to 10 per cent. The British avoided this particular form of financing war and were familiar enough with banknotes not to shy away from them, but even so the Bank of England could not resist the double pressure of the vast government demand—largely sent abroad as loans and subsidies—the private run on its bullion and the special strain of a famine year. In 1797 gold payments to private clients were suspended and the inconvertible banknote became, defacto, the effective currency: the £1 note was one result. The ‘paper pound’ never depre-ciated as seriously as continental currencies—its lowest mark was 71 per cent of face value and by 1817 it was back to 98 per cent—but it did last very much longer than had been anticipated. Not until 1821 were cash payments fully resumed.

 

The other alternative to taxation was loans, but the dizzying rise in the public debt produced by the unexpectedly heavy and prolonged expenditure of war frightened even the most prosperous, wealthy and financially sophisticated countries. After five years of financing the war essentially by loans, the British Government was forced into the unprecedented and portentous step of paying for the war out of direct taxation, introducing an income tax for this purpose (1799-1816). The rapidly increasing wealth of the country made this perfectly feasible, and the cost of the war henceforth was essentially met out of current income. Had adequate taxation been imposed from the beginning, the National Debt would not have risen from £228 millions in 1793 to £876 millions in 1816, and the annual debt charge from £10 millions

 

in 1792 to £30 millions in 1815, which was greater than the total govern-ment outlay in the last pre-waryear. The social consequences of such indebt-edness were very great, for in effect it acted as a funnel for diverting increasingly large amounts of the tax revenue paid by the population

 

at large into the pockets of the small class of rich ‘fund-holders’ against whom spokesmen of the poor and the small businessmen and farmers,

 

 

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like William Cobbett, launched their journalistic thunderbolts. Abroad loans were mainly raised (at least on the anti-French side) from the British Government, which had long followed a policy of subsidizing military allies: between 1794 and 1804 it raised £80 millions for this purpose. The main direct beneficiaries were the international financial houses—British or foreign, but operating increasingly through London, which became the main centre of international financing—like the Barings and the House of Rothschild, who acted as intermediaries in these transactions. (Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the founder, sent his son Nathan from Frankfurt to London in 1798.) The great age of these international financiers came after the wars, when they financed the major loans designed to help old regimes recover from war and new ones to stabilize themselves. But the foundation of the era when the Barings and the Rothschilds dominated world finance, as nobody since the great German banks of the sixteenth century had done, was constructed during the wars.

 

However, the technicalities of wartime finance are less important than the general economic effect of the great diversion of resources from peacetime to military uses, which a major war entails. It is clearly wrong to regard the war-effort as entirely drawn from, or at the expense of, the civilian economy. The armed forces may to some extent mobilize only men who would otherwise be unemployed, or even unemployable within the limits of the economy.* War industry, though in the short run diverting men and materials from the civilian market, may in the long run stimulate developments which ordinary considerations of profit in peacetime would have neglected. This was proverbially the case with the iron and steel industries which, as we have seen (see chapter 2), enjoyed no possibilities of rapid expansion comparable to the cotton textiles, and therefore traditionally relied for their stimulus on government and war. ‘During the eighteenth century,’ Dionysius Lardner wrote in 1831, ‘iron foundery became almost identified with the casting of cannon.’¹² We may well therefore regard part of the diversion of capital resources from peacetime uses as in the nature of long-term investment in capital goods industries and technical develop-ment. Among the technological innovations thus created by tiie revo-lutionary and Napoleonic wars were the beet-sugar industry on tjie continent (as a replacement for imported cane-sugar from the West Indies), and the canned food industry (which arose from the British navy’s search for foodstuffs which could be indefinitely preserved on shipboard). Nevertheless, making all allowances, a major war does

 

* This was the basis of the strong tradition of emigration for mercenary military service in overpopulated mountain regions like Switzerland.

 

 

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mean a major diversion of resources, and might even, under conditions of mutual blockade, mean that the wartime and peacetime sector of the economy competed directly for the same scarce resources.

An obvious consequence of such competition is inflation, and we know that in fact the period of war pushed the slope of the slowly rising eighteenth-century price-level steeply upwards in all countries though some of this was due to monetary devaluation. This in itself implies, or reflects, a certain redistribution of incomes, which has economic consequences; for instance, towards businessmen and away from wage-earners (since wages normally lag behind prices), and towards agriculture, which proverbially welcomes the high prices of wartime, and away from manufactures. Conversely, the end of the war-time demand, which releases a mass of resources—including men— hitherto employed by war, on to the peacetime market, brought, as always, correspondingly more intense problems of readjustment. To take an obvious example: between 1814 and 1818 the strength of the British army was cut by about 150,000 men, or more than the con-temporary population of Manchester, and the level of wheat prices fell from 108 -5 shillings a quarter in 1813 to 64.-2 shillings in 1815. In fact we know the period of post-war adjustment to have been one of abnormal economic difficulties all over Europe; intensified moreover by the disastrous harvests of 1816-17.

 

We ought, however, to ask a more general question. How far did the diversion of resources due to the war impede or slow down the economic development of different countries? Clearly this question is of particular importance for France and Britain, the two major economic powers, and the two carrying the heaviest economic burden. The French burden was due not so much to the war in its later stages, for this was designed largely to pay for itself at the expense of the foreigners whose territories the conquering armies looted or requisitioned, and on whom they imposed levies of men, materials and money. About half the Italian tax revenue went to the French in 1805-12.¹³ It probably did not do so, but it was also clearly much cheaper—in real as well as monetary terms—than it would otherwise have been. The real dis-ruption of the French economy was due to the decade of revolution, civil war and chaos, which, for instance, reduced the turnover of the Seine-Inferieure (Rouen) manufactures from 41 to 15 millions between 1790 and 1795, and the number of their workers from 246,000 to 86,000. To this must be added the loss of overseas commerce due to the British control of the seas. The British burden was due to the cost of carrying not only the country’s own war effort but, through the traditional subsidies to continental allies, some of that for other states. In monetary

 

 

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terms the British carried by far the heaviest load during the war: it cost them between three and four times as much as it did the French.

 

The answer to the general question is easier for France than for Britain, for there is little doubt that the French economy remained relatively stagnant, and the French industry and commerce would almost certainly have expanded further and faster but for the revolution and the wars. Though the country’s economy advanced very substan-tially under Napoleon, it could not compensate for the regression and the lost impetus of the 1790s. For the British the answer is less obvious, for their expansion was meteoric, and the only question is whether, but for the war, it would have been more rapid still. The generally accepted answer today is that it would.¹⁴ For the other countries the question is generally of less importance where economic development was slow, or fluctuating as in much of the Habsburg Empire, and where the quantitative impact of the war-effort was relatively small.

 

Of course such bald statements beg the question. Even the frankly economic wars of the British in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-turies were not supposed to advance economic development by them-selves or by stimulating the economy, but by victory: by eliminating competitors and capturing new markets. Their ‘cost’ in disrupted business, diversion of resources and the like was measured against their ‘profit’, which was expressed in the relative position of the belligerent competitors after the war. By these standards the wars of 1793-1815 clearly more than paid for themselves. At the cost of a slight slowing down of an economic expansion which nevertheless remained gigantic, Britain decisively eliminated her nearest possible competitor and be-came the ‘workshop of the world’ for two generations. In terms of every industrial or commercial index, Britain was very much further ahead of all other states (with the possible exception of the USA) than she had been in 1789. If we believe that the temporary elimination of her rivals and the virtual monopoly of maritime and colonial markets were an essential precondition of Britain’s further industrialization, the price of achieving it was modest. If we argue that by 1789 her head start was already sufficient to ensure British economic supremacy without a long war, we may still hold that the cost of defending it against the French threat to recover by political and military means the ground lost in economic competition was not excessive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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PEACE

 

The existing concert (of the Powers) is their only perfect security against the reac-tionary embers more or less existing in every state of Europe; and… true wisdom is to keep down the petty contentions of ordinary times, and to stand together in support of the established principles of social order.

 

Castlcrcagh¹

 

Vempereur de Russie est de plus Ie seul souverain parfaitement en Hat de se porter des a prisent aux plus vastes entreprises. Il est a la tite de la seuls armie vraiment disponible qui soil aujourd’huiforme’e in Europe.

 

Gentz, March 14,1818*

 

 

 

A F T E R more than twenty years of almost unbroken war and revolution, the victorious old regimes faced problems of peace-making and peace-preservation which were particularly difficult and dangerous. The debris of two decades had to be cleared away, the territorial loot redistributed. What was more, it was evident to all intelligent statesmen that no major European war was henceforth tolerable; for such a war would almost certainly mean a new revolution, and consequently the destruction of the old regimes. ‘In Europe’s present state of social illness,’ said King Leopold of the Belgians (Queen Victoria’s wise if somewhat boring uncle), a propos of a later crisis, ‘it would be unheard-of to let loose . . . a general war. Such a war . . . would certainly bring a conflict of principles, (and) from what I know of Europe, I think that such a conflict would change her form and overthrow her whole structure.’³ Kings and statesmen were neither wiser nor more pacific than before. But they were unquestionably more frightened.

 

They were also unusually successful. There was, in fact, no general European war, nor any conflict in which one great power opposed another on the battlefield, between the defeat of Napoleon and the Crimean War of 1854-6. Indeed, apart from the Crimean War, there was no war involving more than two great powers between 1815 and 1914. The citizen of the twentieth century ought to appreciate the magnitude of this achievement. It was all the more impressive, because the international scene was far from tranquil, the occasions for conflict abundant. The revolutionary movements (which we shall consider in chapter 6) destroyed the hard-won international stability time and

 

 

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again: in the 1820s, notably in Southern Europe, the Balkans and Latin America, after 1830 in Western Europe (notably Belgium), and again on the eve of the 1848 Revolution. The decline of the Turkish Empire, threatened both by internal dissolution and the ambitions of rival great powers—mainly Britain, Russia and to a lesser extent France—made the so-called ‘Eastern Question’ a permanent cause of crisis: in the 1820s it cropped up over Greece, in the 1830s over Egypt, and though it calmed down after a particularly acute conflict in 1839-41, it remained as potentially explosive as before. Britain and Russia were on the worst of terms over the Near East and the no-man’s land between the two empires in Asia. France was far from reconciled to a position so much more modest than the one she had occupied before 1815. Yet in spite of all these shoals and whirlpools, the diplomatic vessels navigated a difficult stretch of water without collision.

 

Our generation, which has failed so much more spectacularly in the fundamental task of international diplomacy, that of avoiding general wars, has therefore tended to look back upon the statesmen and methods of 1815-48 with a respect that their immediate successors did not always feel. Talleyrand, who presided over French foreign policy from 1814 to 1835, remains the model for the French diplomat to this day. Castlereagh, George Canning and Viscount Palmerston, who were Britain’s foreign secretaries respectively in 1812-22, 1822-7 ^{a n} d ^aU non-Tory administrations from 1830 to 1852* have acquired a mis-leading and retrospective stature of diplomatic giants. Prince Metter-nich, the chief minister of Austria throughout the entire period from Napoleon’s defeat to his own overthrow in 1848, is today seen less often as a mere rigid enemy of all change and more often as a wise maintainer of stability than used to be the case. However, even the eye

 

of faith has been unable to detect foreign ministers worth idealizing in the Russia of Alexander I (1801-25) ^{a n} d Nicholas I (1825-55) ^an(* ^m

the relatively unimportant Prussia of our period.

 

In a sense the praise is justified. The settlement of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars was no more just and moral than any other, but given the entirely anti-liberal and anti-national (i.e. anti-revolutionary) purpose of its makers, it was realistic and sensible. No attempt was made to exploit the total victory over the French, who must not be provoked into a new bout of Jacobinism. The frontiers of the defeated country were left a shade better than they had been in 1789, the financial indemnity was not unreasonable, the occupation by foreign troops short-lived, and by 1818 France was readmitted as a full member

 

* i.e. throughout the period except for a few months in 1834-5 ^anc* ‘ⁿ 1841-6.

 

IOO

PEACE

 

of the ‘concert of Europe’. (But for Napoleon’s unsuccessful return in 1815 these terms would have been even more moderate.) The Bourbons were restored, but it was understood that they had to make concessions to the dangerous spirit of their subjects. The major changes of the Revolution were accepted, and that inflammatory device, a constitu-tion, was granted to them—though of course in an extremely moderate form—under the guise of a Charter ‘freely conceded’ by the returned absolute monarch, Louis XVIII.

The map of Europe was redrawn without concern for either the aspirations of the peoples or the rights of the numerous princes dis-possessed at one time or another by the French, but with considerable concern for the balance of the five great powers which emerged from the wars: Russia, Britain, France, Austria and Prussia. Only the first three of these really counted. Britain had no territorial ambitions on the continent, though she preferred to keep control or a protective hand over points of maritime and commercial importance. She retained Malta, the Ionian Islands and Heligoland, maintained a careful eye on Sicily, and benefited most evidently by the transfer of Norway from Denmark to Sweden, which prevented a single state from controlling the entry to the Baltic Sea, and the union of Holland and Belgium (the former Austrian Netherlands) which put the mouth of the Rhine and Scheldt in the hands of a harmless state, but one strong enough— especially when assisted by the barrier fortresses in the south—to resist the well-known French appetite for Belgium. Both arrangements were deeply unpopular with Belgians and Norwegians, and the latter only lasted until the 1830 Revolution. It was then replaced, after some Franco-British friction, by a small permanently neutralized kingdom under a prince of British choice. Outside Europe, of course, British territorial ambitions were much greater, though the total control of all seas by the British navy made it largely irrelevant whether any territory was actually under the British flag or not, except on the north-western confines of India, where only weak or chaotic principalities or regions separated the British and the Russian Empires. But the rivalry between Britain and Russia hardly affected the area which had to be resettled in 1814-15. In Europe British interests merely required no power to be too strong.

 

Russia, the decisive military power on land, satisfied her limited territorial ambitions by the acquisition of Finland (at the expense of Sweden), Bessarabia (at the expense of Turkey), and of the greater part of Poland, which was granted a degree of autonomy under the local faction that had always favoured a Russian alliance. (After the rising of 1830-1 this autonomy was abolished.) The remainder of

 

 

1 01

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

Poland was distributed between Prussia and Austria, with the exception of the city republic of Cracow, which in turn did not survive the rising of 1846. For the rest Russia was content to exercise a remote, but far from ineffectual, hegemony over all absolute principalities east of France, her main interest being that revolution should be avoided. Tsar Alexander sponsored a Holy Alliance for this purpose, which Austria and Prussia joined, but Britain did not. From the British point of view this virtual Russian hegemony over most of Europe was perhaps a less than ideal arrangement, but it reflected the military realities, and could not be prevented except by allowing France a rather greater degree of power than any of her former adversaries were prepared for or at the intolerable cost of war. France’s status as a great power was clearly recognized, but that was as far as anyone was as yet prepared to go.

 

Austria and Prussia were really great powers by courtesy only; or so it was believed—rightly—in view of Austria’s well-known weakness in times of international crisis and—wrongly—in view of Prussia’s col-lapse in 1806. Their chief function was to act as European stabilizers. Austria received back her Italian provinces plus the former Venetian territories in Italy and Dalmatia, and the protectorate over the lesser principalities of North and Central Italy, mostly ruled by Habsburg relatives (except for Piedmont-Sardinia, which swallowed the former Genoese Republic to act as a more efficient buffer between Austria and France). If ‘order’ was to be kept anywhere in Italy, Austria was the policeman on duty. Since her only interest was stability—anything else risked her disintegration—she could be relied upon to act as a permanent safeguard against any attempts to unsettle the continent. Prussia benefited by the British desire to have a reasonably strong power in Western Germany, a region whose principalities had long tended to fall in with France, or which could be dominated by France, and received the Rhineland, whose immense economic potentialities aristocratic diplomats failed to allow for. She also benefited by the conflict between Britain and Russia over what the British considered excessive Russian expansion in Poland. The net result of complex negotiations punctuated with threats of war was that she yielded part of her former Polish territories to Russia, but received instead half of wealthy and industrial Saxony. In territorial and economic terms Prussia gained relatively more from the 1815 settlement than any other power, and in fact became for the first time a European great power in terms of real resources; though this did not become evident to the politicians until the 1860s. Austria, Prussia and the herd of lesser German states, whose main international function was to provide

 

 

1 02

PEACE

 

good breeding-stock for the royal houses of Europe, watched each other within the German Confederation, though Austrian seniority was not challenged. The main international function of the Con-federation was to keep the lesser states outside the French orbit into which they traditionally tended to gravitate. In spite of nationalist disclaimers, they had been far from unhappy as Napoleonic satellites.

 

The statesmen of 1815 were wise enough to know that no settlement, however carefully carpentered, would in the long run withstand the strain of state rivalries and changing circumstance. Consequently they set out to provide a mechanism for maintaining peace—i.e. settling all outstanding problems as they arose—by means of regular congresses. It was of course understood that the crucial decisions in these were played by the ‘great powers’ (the term itself is an invention of this period). The ‘concert of Europe’—another term which came into use then—did not correspond to a United Nations, but rather to the permanent members of the UN’s Security Council. However, regular congresses were only held for a few years—from 1818, when France was officially readmitted to the concert, to 1822.

 

The congress system broke down, because it could not outlast the years immediately following the Napoleonic wars, when the famine of 1816-17 and business depressions maintained a lively but unjustified fear of social revolution everywhere, including Britain. After the return of economic stability about 1820 every disturbance of the 1815 settle-ment merely revealed the divergences between the interests of the powers. Faced with a first bout of unrest and insurrection in 1820-22 only Austria stuck to the principle that all such movements must be immediately and automatically put down in the interests of the social order (and of Austrian territorial integrity). Over Germany, Italy and Spain the three monarchies of the ‘Holy Alliance’ and France agreed, though the latter, exercising the job of international policeman with gusto in Spain (1823), was less interested in European stability than in widening the scope of her diplomatic and military activities, particu-larly in Spain, Belgium and Italy where the bulk of her foreign invest-ments lay.⁴ Britain stood out. This was partly because—especially after the flexible Canning replaced the rigid reactionary Castlereagh (1822) —it was convinced that political reforms in absolutist Europe were sooner or later inevitable, and because British politicians had no sym-pathy for absolutism, but also because the application of the policing-principle would merely have brought rival powers (notably France) into Latin America, which was, as we have seen, a British economic colony and a very vital one at that. Hence the British supported the independence of the Latin American states, as also did the USA in the

 

 

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Monroe Declaration of 1823, a manifesto which had no practical value —if anything protected Latin American independence it was the British navy—but considerable prophetic interest. Over Greece the powers were even more divided. Russia, with all its dislike of revolu-tions, could not but benefit from the movement of an Orthodox people, which weakened the Turks and must rely largely on Russian help. (Moreover, she had a treaty right to intervene in Turkey in defence of Orthodox Christians.) Fear of unilateral Russian inter-vention, philhellene pressure, economic interests and the general conviction that the distintegration of Turkey could not be prevented, but could at best be organized, eventually led the British from hostility through neutrality to an informal pro-hellenic intervention. Greece thus (1829) won her independence through both Russian and British help. The international damage was minimized by turning the country into a kingdom under one of the many available small German princes, which would not be a mere Russian satellite. But the perman-ence of the 1815 settlement, the congress system, and the principle of suppressing all revolutions lay in ruins.

 

The revolutions of 1830 destroyed it utterly, for they affected not merely small states but a great power itself, France. In effect they removed all Europe west of the Rhine from the the police-operations of the Holy Alliance. Meanwhile the ‘Eastern Question’—the problem of what to do about the inevitable disintegration of Turkey—turned the Balkans and the Levant into a battlefield of the powers, notably of Russia and Britain. The ‘Eastern Question’ disturbed the balance of forces, because everything conspired to strengthen the Russians, whose main diplomatic object, then as later, was to win control of the straits between Europe and Asia Minor which controlled her access to the Mediterranean. This was a matter not merely of diplomatic and mili-tary importance, but with the growth of Ukrainian grain exports, of economic urgency. also. Britain, concerned as usual about the ap-proaches to India, was deeply worried about the southward march of the one great power which could reasonably threaten it. The obvious policy was to shore up Turkey..against Russian expansion at all costs. (This had the additional advantage of benefiting British trade in the Levant, which increased in a very satisfactory manner in this period.) Unfortunately such a policy was wholly impracticable. The Turkish Empire was by no means a helpless hulk, at least in military terms, but it was at best capable of fighting delaying actions against internal rebellion (which it could still beat fairly easily) and the com-bined force of Russia and an unfavourable international situation (which it could not). Nor was it yet capable of modernizing itself, or

 

 

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showed much readiness to do so; though the beginnings of moderniza-tion were made under Mahmoud II (1809-39) in the 1830s. Conse-quently only the direct diplomatic and military support of Britain (i.e. the threat of war) could prevent the steady increase in Russian influence and the collapse of Turkey under her various troubles. This made the ‘Eastern Question’ the most explosive issue in international affairs after the Napoleonic Wars, the only one likely to lead to a general war and the only one which in fact did so in 1854-6. However, the very situation which loaded the international dice in favour of Russia and against Britain, also made Russia inclined to compromise. She could achieve her diplomatic objectives in two ways: either by the

defeat and partition of Turkey and an	eventual Russian occupation
of Constantinople and the Straits, or by	a virtual protectorate over

a weak and subservient Turkey. But one or the other would always be open. In other words, Constantinople was never worth a major war to the Tsar. Thus in the 1820s the Greek war fitted in with the policy of partition and occupation. Russia failed to get as much out of this as she might have hoped, but was unwilling to press her advantage too far. Instead, she negotiated an extraordinarily favourable treaty at Unkiar Skelessi (1833) with a hard-pressed Turkey, which was now keenly aware of the need for a powerful protector. Britain was out-raged: the 1830s saw the genesis of a mass Russophobia which created the image of Russia as a sort of hereditary enemy of Britain.* Faced with British pressure, the Russians in turn retreated, and in the 1840s reverted to proposals for the partition of Turkey.

 

Russo-British rivalry in the East was therefore in practice much less dangerous than the public sabre-rattling (especially in Britain) sug-gested. Moreover, the much greater British fear of a revival of France reduced its importance in any case. In fact the phrase ‘the great game’, which later came to be used for the cloak-and-dagger activities of the adventurers and secret agents of both powers who operated in the oriental no-man’s land between the two empires, expresses it rather well. What made the situation really dangerous was the unpredictable course of the liberation movements within Turkey and the intervention of other powers. Of these Austria had a considerable passive interest in the matter, being itself a ramshackle multinational empire, threat-ened by the movements of the very same peoples who also undermined Turkish stability—the Balkan Slavs, and notably the Serbs. However, their threat was not immediate, though it was later to provide the immediate occasion for World War I. France was more troublesome,

 

* In fact Anglo-Russian relations, basdd on economic complementarity, had been tradi-tionally most amiable, and only began to deteriorate seriously after the Napoleonic wars.

 

IO5

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

having a long record of diplomatic and economic influence in the Levant, which it periodically attempted to restore and extend. In par-ticular, since Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, French influence was powerful in that country, whose Pasha, Mohammed AIi, a virtually independent ruler, could more or less disrupt or hold together the Turkish Empire at will. Indeed, the crises of the Eastern Question in the 1830s (1831-3 and 1839-41) were essentially crises in Mohammed Ali’s relations with his nominal sovereign, complicated in the latter case by French support for Egypt. However, if Russia was unwilling to make war over Constantinople, France neither could nor wanted to. There were diplomatic crises. But in the end, apart from the Crimean episode, there was no war over Turkey at any time in the nineteenth century.

 

It is thus clear from the course of international disputes in this period that the inflammable material in international relations was simply not explosive enough to set off a major war. Of the great powers the Austrians and the Prussians were too weak to count for much. The British were satisfied. They had by 1815 gained the most complete victory of any power in the entire history of the world, having emerged from the twenty years of war against France as the only industrialized economy, the only naval power—the British navy in 1840 had almost as many ships as all other navies put together—and virtually the only colonial power in the world. Nothing appeared to stand in the way of the only major expansionist interest of British foreign policy, the expansion of British trade and investment. Russia, while not as satiated, had only limited territorial ambitions, and nothing which could for long—or so it appeared—stand in the way of her advance. At least nothing which justified a socially dangerous general war. France alone was a ‘dissatisfied’ power, and had the capacity to disrupt the stable international order. But France could do so only under one condition: that she once again mobilized the revolutionary energies of Jacobinism at home and of liberalism and nationalism abroad. For in terms of orthodox great-power rivalry she had been fatally weakened. She would never again be able, as under Louis XIV or the Revolution, to fight a coalition of two or more great powers on equal terms, relying merely on her domestic population and resources. In 1780 there were 2-5 Frenchmen to every Englishman, but in 1830 less than three to every two. In 1780 there had been almost as many Frenchmen as Russians, but in 1830 there were almost half as many Russians again as French. And the pace of French economic evolution lagged fatally behind the British, the American, and very soon the German.

 

But Jacobinism was too high a price for any French government to pay for its international ambitions. In 1830 and again in 1848 when

 

 

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France overthrew its regime and absolutism was shaken or destroyed elsewhere, the powers trembled. They could have saved themselves sleepless nights. In 1830-1 the French moderates were unprepared even to lift a finger for the rebellious Poles, with whom all French (as well as European liberal) opinion sympathized. ‘And Poland?’ wrote the old but enthusiastic Lafayette to Pahnerston in 1831. ‘What will you do, what shall we do for her?’⁵ The answer was nothing. France could have readily reinforced her own resources with those of the European revolution; as indeed all revolutionaries hoped she would. But the implications of such a leap into revolutionary war frightened moderate liberal French governments as much as Mettemich. No French government between 1815 and 1848 would jeopardize general peace in its own state interests.

 

Outside the range of the European balance, of course, nothing stood in the way of expansion and bellicosity. In fact, though extremely large, the actual territorial acquisitions of white powers were limited. The British were content to oceupy points crucial to the naval ‘control of the world and to their world-wide trading interests, such as the southern tip of Africa (taken from the Dutch during the Napoleonic wars), Ceylon, Singapore (which was founded at this period) and Hong Kong, and the exigencies of the campaign against the slave-trade—which satisfied both humanitarian opinion at home and the strategic interests of the British navy, which used it to reinforce its global monopoly— led them to maintain footholds along the African coasts. But on the whole, with one crucial exception, their view was that a world lying open to British trade and safeguarded by the British navy from unwel-come intrusion was more cheaply exploited without the administrative costs of occupation. The crucial exception was India and all that pertained to its control. India had to be held at all costs, as the most anti-colonialist free traders never doubted. Its market was of growing importance (cf. above pp. 34-35), and would certainly, it was held, suffer if India were left to herself. It was the key to the opening-up of the Far East, to the drug traffic and such other profitable activities as European businessmen wished to undertake. China was thus opened up in the Opium War of 1839-42. Consequently between 1814 and 1849 the size of the British Indian empire increased by two-thirds of the subcontinent, as the result of a series of wars against Mahrattas, Nepalese, Burmans, Rajputs, Afghans, Sindis and Sikhs, and the net of British influence was drawn more closely round the Middle East, which controlled the direct route to India, organized from 1840 by the steamers of the P and O line, supplemented by a land-crossing of the Suez Isthmus.

 

 

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Though the reputation of the Russians for expansionism was far greater (at least among the British), their actual conquests were more modest. The Tsar in this period merely managed to acquire some large and empty stretches of Kirghiz steppe east of the Urals and some bitterly-contested mountain areas in the Caucasus. The USA on the other hand acquired virtually its entire west, south of the Oregon border, by insurrection and war against the hapless Mexicans. The French, on the other hand, had to confine their expansionist ambitions to Algeria, which they invaded on a trumped-up excuse in 1830 and attempted to conquer in the next seventeen years. By 1847 they had broken the back of its resistance.

 

One provision of the international peace settlement must, however, be mentioned separately: the abolition of the international slave-trade. The reasons for this were both humanitarian and economic: slavery was horrifying, and extremely inefficient. Moreover, from the point of view of the British who were the chief international champions of this admirable movement among the powers, the economy of 1815-48 no longer rested, like that of the eighteenth century, on the sale of men and of sugar, but on that of cotton goods. The actual abolition of slavery came more slowly (except, of course, where the French Revolution had already swept it away). The British abolished it in their colonies— mainly the West Indies—in 1834, though soon tending to replace it, where large-scale plantation agriculture survived, by the import of indentured labourers from Asia. The French did not officially abolish it again until the revolution of 1848. In 1848 there was still a very great deal of slavery, and consequently of (illegal) slave-trading left in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER      6

 

REVOLUTIONS

 

Liberty, that nightingale with the voice of a giant, muses the most profound sleepers.

 

. . . How is it possible to think of anything today except tofightfor or againstfreedom?

 

Those who cannot love humanity can still be great as tyrants. But how can one be indifferent?

Ludwig Boerne, February 14, 1831*

 

The governments, having lost their balance, are frightened, intimidated and thrown into confusion by the cries of the intermediary class of society, which, placed between the Kings and their subjects, breaks the sceptre of the monarchs and usurps the cry of the people.

Mettemich to the Tsar, 1820″

 

 

 

I

 

R A R E L Y has the incapacity of governments to hold up the course of history been more conclusively demonstrated than in the generation after 1815. To prevent a second French Revolution, or the even worse catastrophe of a general European revolution on the French model, was the supreme object of all the powers which had just spent more than twenty years in defeating the first; even of the British, who were not in sympathy with the reactionary absolutisms which re-established themselves all over Europe and knew quite well that reforms neither could nor ought to be avoided, but who feared a new Franco-Jacobin expansion more than any other international con-tingency. And yet, never in European history and rarely anywhere else, has revolutionism been so endemic, so general, so likely to spread by spontaneous contagion as well as by deliberate propaganda.

 

There were three main waves of revolution in the western world between 1815 and 1848. (Asia and Africa as yet remained immune: Asia’s first major revolutions, the ‘Indian Mutiny’ and the ‘Taiping Rebellion’, only occurred in the 1850s.) The first occurred in 1820-4. In Europe it was confined mainly to the Mediterranean, with Spain (1820), Naples (1820) and Greece (1821) as its epicentres. Except for the Greek, all these risings were suppressed. The Spanish Revolution revived the liberation movement in Latin America, which had been defeated after an initial effort occasioned by Napoleon’s conquest of

 

 

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Spain in 1808 and reduced to a few remote refugees and bands. The three great liberators of Spanish South America, Simon Bolivar, San Martin and Bernardo O’Higgins, established the independence respec-tively of ‘Great Colombia’ (which included the present republics of Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador), of the Argentine but minus the inland areas of what is now Paraguay and Bolivia and the pampas across the River Plate where the cowboys of the Banda Oriental (now Uruguay) fought Argentines and Brazilians, and of Chile. San Martin, aided by the Chilean fleet under the British radical nobleman—the original of C. S. Forester’s Captain Hornblower—Cochrane, liberated the last stronghold of Spanish power, the viceroyalty of Peru. By 1822 Spanish South America was free, and San Martin, a moderate and far-seeing man of rare self-abnegation, left it to Bolivar and republicanism and retired to Europe, living out his noble life in what was normally a refuge for debt-harried Englishmen, Boulogne-sur-Mer, on a pension from O’Higgins. Meanwhile the Spanish general sent against the sur-viving peasant guerillas in Mexico, Iturbide, made common cause with them under the impact of the Spanish Revolution and in 1821 permanently established Mexican independence. In 1822 Brazil quietly separated from Portugal under the regent left behind by the Portuguese royal family on its return from Napoleonic exile to Europe. The USA recognized the most important of the new states almost immediately; the British soon after, taking care to conclude commercial treaties with them, the French in effect before the 1820s were out.

 

The second wave of revolutionism occurred in 1829-34, and affected all Europe west of Russia and the North American continent; for the great reforming age of President Andrew Jackson (1829-37), though not directly connected with the European upheavals, must count as part of it. In Europe the overthrow of the Bourbons in France stimu-lated various other risings. Belgium (1830) won independence from Holland, Poland (1830-1) was suppressed only after considerable military operations, various parts of Italy and Germany were agitated, liberalism prevailed in Switzerland—a much less pacific country then than now—while a period of civil war between liberals and cleri-cals opened in Spain and Portugal. Even Britain was affected, thanks in part to the threatened eruption of its local volcano, Ireland, which secured Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the re-opening of the reform agitation. The Reform Act of 1832 corresponds to the July Revolution of 1830 in France, and had indeed been powerfully stimu-lated by the news from Paris. This period is probably the only one in modern history when political events in Britain ran parallel with those on the continent, to the point where something not unlike a revolu-

 

 

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tionary situation might have developed in 1831-2 but for the restraint of both Whig and Tory parties. It is the only period in the nineteenth century when the analysis of British politics in such terms is not wholly artificial.

 

The revolutionary wave of 1830 was therefore a much more serious affair than that of 1820. In effect, it marks the definitive defeat of aristocratic by bourgeois power in Western Europe. The ruling class of the next fifty years was to be the ‘grande bourgeoisie’ of bankers; big industrialists and sometimes top civil servants, accepted by an aris-tocracy which effaced itself or agreed to promote primarily bourgeois policies, unchallenged as yet by universal suffrage, though harassed from outside by the agitations of the lesser or unsatisfied businessmen, the petty-bourgeoisie and the early labour movements. Its political system, in Britain, France and Belgium, was fundamentally the same: liberal institutions safeguarded against democracy by property or edu-cational qualifications for the voters—there were, initially, only 168,000 of them in France—under a constitutional monarch; in fact, something very like the institutions of the first and most moderately bourgeois phase of the French Revolution, the constitution of 1791.* In the USA, however, Jacksonian democracy marks a step beyond this: the defeat of the non-democratic propertied oligarchs whose role corres-ponded to what was now triumphing in Western Europe, by the unlimited political democracy swept into power with the votes of the frontiersmen, the small farmers, the urban poor. It was a portentous innovation, and those thinkers of moderate liberalism, realistic enough to know that extensions of the franchise would probably be inevitable sooner or later, scrutinized it closely and anxiously; notably Alexis de Toqueville, whose Democracy in America (1835) came to gloomy con-clusions about it. But as we shall see, 1830 marks an even more

radical	innovation	in  politics: the emergence of the working-class
as an	independent	and  self-conscious force in politics  in  Britain

and France, and of nationalist movements in a great many European countries.

 

Behind these major changes in politics lay major changes in economic and social development. Whichever aspect of social life we survey, 1830 marks a turning-point in it; of all the dates between 1789 and 1848 it is the most obviously memorable. In the history of industrializa-tion and urbanization on the continent and in the USA, in the history of human migrations, social and geographical, in that of the arts and of ideology, it appears with equal prominence. And in Britain and Western Europe in general it dates the beginning of those decades of

 

* Only in practice with a much more restricted franchise than in 1791.

 

I l l

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

crisis in the development of the new society which conclude with the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and the gigantic economic leap forward after 1851.

The third and biggest of the revolutionary waves, that of 1848, was the product of this crisis. Almost simultaneously revolution broke out and (temporarily) won in France, the whole of Italy, the German states, most of the Habsburg Empire and Switzerland (1847). In a less acute form the unrest also affected Spain, Denmark and Rumania, in a sporadic form Ireland, Greece and Britain. There has never been anything closer to the world-revolution of which the insurrectionaries of the period dreamed than this spontaneous and general conflagration, which concludes the era discussed in this volume. What had been in 1789 the rising of a single nation was now, it seemed, ‘the springtime of peoples’ of an entire continent.

 

II

 

Unlike the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, those of the post-Napoleonic period were intended or even planned. For the most formidable legacy of the French Revolution itself was the set of models and patterns of political upheaval which it established for the general use of rebels anywhere. This is not to say that the revolutions of 1815-48 were the mere work of a few disaffected agitators, as the spies and policemen of the period—a very fully employed species—purported to tell their superiors. They occurred because the political systems reim-posed on Europe were profoundly, and in a period of rapid social change increasingly inadequate for the political conditions of the continent, and because economic and social discontents were so acute as to make a series of outbreaks virtually inevitable. But the political models created by. the Revolution of 1789 served to give discontent a specific object, to turn unrest into revolution, and above all to link all Europe in a single movement—or perhaps it would be better to say current—of subversion.

 

There were several such models, though all stemmed from the experience of France between 1789 and 1797. They corresponded to the three main trends of post-1815 opposition: the moderate liberal (or, in social terms, that of the upper middle classes and liberal aris-tocracy), the radical-democratic (or, in social terms, that of the lower middle class, part of the new manufacturers, the intellectuals and the discontented gentry) and the socialist (or, in social terms, the ‘labouring poor’ or the new industrial working classes). Etymologically, by the

 

 

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way, all of them reflect the internationalism of the period: ‘liberal’ is Franco-Spanish in origin, ‘radical’ British, ‘socialist’ Anglo-French. ‘Conservative’ is also partly French in origin; another proof of the uniquely close correlation of British and continental politics in the Reform Bill period. The inspiration of the first was the Revolution of 1789-91, its political ideal the sort of quasi-British constitutional monarchy with a property-qualified, and therefore oligarchic, parlia-mentary system which the Constitution of 1791 introduced, and which, as we have seen, became the standard type of constitution in France, Britain and Belgium after 1830-32. The inspiration of the second could best be described as the Revolution of 1792-3, and its political ideal, a democratic republic with a bias towards a ‘welfare state’ and some animus against the rich, corresponds to the ideal Jacobin constitution of 1793. But just as the social groups which stood for radical democracy were a confused and oddly assorted collection, so also it is hard to attach a precise label to its, French Revolutionary model. Elements of what would in 1792-3 have been called Girondism, Jacobinism and even Sansculottism were combined in it, though perhaps the Jacobinism of the constitution of 1793 represented it best. The inspiration of the third was the Revolution of the Year II and the post-Thermidorian risings, above all Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals, that significant rising of extreme Jacobins and early communists which marks the birth of the modern communist tradition in politics. It was the child of Sansculottism and the left wing ofRobespierrism, though deriving little but its strong hatred of the middle classes and the rich from the former. Politically the Babouvist revolutionary model was in the tradition of Robespierre and Saint-Just.

 

From the point of view of the absolutist governments all these movements were equally subversive of stability and good order, though some seemed more consciously devoted to the propagation of chaos than others, and some more dangerous than others, because more likely to inflame the ignorant and impoverished masses. (Metternich’s secret police in the 1830s therefore paid what seems to us a dispro-portionate amount of attention to the circulation of Lamennais’ Paroles d’un Croyant (1834), for, in speaking the Catholic language of the unpolitical, it might appeal to subjects unaffected by frankly atheistic propaganda.)³ In fact, however, the opposition movements were united by little more than their common detestation of the regimes of 1815 and the traditional common front of all opposed, for whatever

reason, to absolute	monarchy, church and aristocracy. The	history
of the period from	1815-48 is that of the disintegration of that	united
front.

 

 

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III

 

During the Restoration period (1815-30) the blanket ofreaction covered all who dissented equally, and in the darkness under it the differences between Bonapartists and Republicans, moderates and radicals, could hardly be seen. There were as yet no self-conscious working-class revolutionaries or socialists, at any rate in politics, except in Britain, where an independent proletarian trend in politics and ideology emerged under the aegis of Owenite ‘co-operation’ towards 1830. Most non-British mass discontent was as yet non-political, or ostensibly legitimist and clerical, a dumb protest against the new society which appeared to bring nothing but evil and chaos. With few exceptions, therefore, political opposition on the continent was confined to tiny groups of the rich or the educated, which still meant very much the same thing, for even in so powerful a stronghold of the left as the Ecole Polytechnique only one-third of the students—a notably subversive group—came from the’ petty-bourgeoisie (mostly via the lower eche-lons of the army and civil service) and only 0-3 per cent from the ‘popular classes’. Such of the poor as were consciously on the left accepted the classical slogans of middle class revolution, though in the radical-democratic rather than the moderate version, but as yet without much more than a certain overtone of social challenge. The classical programme around which the British labouring poor rallied time and again was one of simple parliamentary reform as expressed in the ‘Six Points’ of the People’s Charter.* In substance this programme was no different from the ‘Jacobinism’ of Paine’s generation, and entirely compatible (but for its association with an increasingly self-conscious working class) with the political radicalism of the Benthamite middle class reformers, as put forward say by James Mill. The only difference in the Restoration period was that the labouring radicals already preferred to hear it preached by men who spoke to them in their own terms—rhetorical windbags like Orator Hunt (1773-1835), or brilliant and energetic stylists like William Cobbett (1762-1835) and, of course, Tom Paine (1737-1809)—rather than by the middle class reformers themselves.

 

Consequently in this period neither social nor even national dis-tinctions as yet significantly divided the European opposition into mutually incomprehensible camps. If we omit Britain and the USA, where a regular form of mass politics was already established (though

 

* (1) Manhood Suffrage, (2) Vote by Ballot, (3) Equal Electoral Districts, (4) Payment of Members of Parliament, (5) Annual Parliament!, (C) Abolition of property qualification for candidates.

 

 

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in Britain it was inhibited by anti-Jacobin hysteria until the early 1820s), the political prospects looked very much alike to oppositionists in all European countries, and the methods of’achieving revolution— the united front of absolutism virtually excluded peaceful reform over most of Europe—were very much the same. All revolutionaries regarded themselves, with some justification, as small elites of the emanci-pated and progressive operating among, and for the eventual benefit of, a vast and inert mass of the ignorant and misled common people, which would no doubt welcome liberation when it came, but could not be expected to take much part in preparing it. All of them (at any rate west of the Balkans) saw themselves fighting against a single enemy, the union of absolutist princes under the leadership of the Tsar. All of them therefore conceived of revolution as unified and indivisible: a single European phenomenon rather than an aggregate of national or local liberations. All of them tended to adopt the same type of revolutionary organization, .or even the same organization: the secret insurrectionary brotherhood.

 

Such brotherhoods, each with a highly-coloured ritual and hierarchy derived or copied from masonic models, sprang up towards the end of the Napoleonic period. The best-known, because the most international, were the ‘good cousins’ or Carbonari. They appear to descend from masonic or similar lodges in Eastern France via anti-Bonapartist French officers in Italy, took shape in Southern Italy after 1806 and, with other similar groups, spread north and across the Mediterranean world after 1815. They, or their derivatives or parallels, are found as far afield as Russia, where such bodies bound together the Decembrists, who made the first insurrection of modern Russian history in 1825, but especially in Greece. The carbonarist era reached its climax in 1820-1, most of the brotherhoods being virtually destroyed by 1823. However, car-bonarism (in the generic sense) persisted as the main stem of revolu-tionary organization, perhaps held together by the congenial task of assisting Greek freedom (philhellenism), and after the failure of the 1830 revolutions the political emigrants from Poland and Italy spread it still further afield.

 

Ideologically the Carbonari and their like were a mixed lot, united only by a common detestation of reaction. For obvious reasons the radicals, among them the left wing Jacobins and Babouvists, being the most determined of revolutionaries, increasingly influenced the brotherhoods. Filippo Buonarroti, Babeuf’s old comrade in arms, was their ablest and most indefatigable conspirator, though his doctrines were probably very much to the left of most brethren or cousins.

Whether  their efforts  were ever co-ordinated  to produce simul-

 

 

“5

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

taneous international revolution is still a matter for debate, though persistent attempts to link all secret brotherhoods, at least at their highest and most initiated levels, into international super-conspiracies were made. Whatever the truth of the matter, a crop of insurrections of the Carbonarist type occurred in 1820-1. They failed utterly in France, where the political conditions for revolution were quite absent and the conspirators had no access to the only effective levers of insur-rection in a situation not otherwise ripe for it, a disaffected army. The French army, then and throughout the nineteenth century, was a part of the civil service, that is to say it carried out the orders of whatever government was the official one. They succeeded completely, but temporarily in some Italian states and especially in Spain, where the ‘pure’ insurrection discovered its most effective formula, the military pronunciamento. Liberal colonels organized in their own secret officers’ brotherhoods ordered their regiments to follow them into insurrection, and they did so. (The Decembrist conspirators in Russia tried to do the same with their guards regiments in 1825 ^{D u t} failed owing to fear of going too far.) The officers’ brotherhood—often of a liberal tendency, since the new armies provided careers for non-aristocratic young men —and the pronunciamento henceforth became regular features of the Iberian and Latin American political scenes, and one of the most lasting and doubtful political acquisitions of the Carbonarist period. It may be observed in passing that the ritualized and hierarchical secret society, like Freemasonry, appealed very strongly to military men, for understandable reasons. The new Spanish liberal regime was overthrown by a French invasion backed by European reaction in 1823.

 

Only one of the 1820-2 revolutions maintained itself, thanks partly to its success in launching a genuine people’s insurrection and partly to a favourable diplomatic situation: the Greek rising of 1821.* Greece therefore became the inspiration of international liberalism, and ‘philhellenism’, which included organized support for the Greeks and the departure of numerous volunteer fighters, played an analogous part in rallying the European left wing in the 1820s as the support for the Spanish Republic was-to play in the later 1930s.

 

The revolutions of 1830 changed the situation entirely. As we have seen they were the first products of a very general period of acute and widespread economic and social unrest and rapidly quickening social change. Two chief results followed from this. The first was that mass politics and mass revolution on the 1789 model once again became possible and the exclusive reliance on secret brotherhoods therefore less

 

* For Greece see also chapter 7.

 

I l 6

 

REVOLUTIONS

 

necessary. The Bourbons were overthrown in Paris by a characteristic combination of crisis in what passed for the politics of the Restoration monarchy, and popular unrest induced by economic depression. So far from mass inactivity, the Paris of July 1830 showed the barricades springing up in greater number and in more places than ever before or after. (In fact 1830 made the barricade into the symbol of popular insurrection. Though its revolutionary history in Paris goes back to at least 1588, it played no important part in 1789-94.) The second result was that, with the progress of capitalism, ‘the people’ and ‘the labour-ing poor’—i.e. the men who built barricades—could be increasingly identified with the new industrial proletariat as ‘the working class’. A proletarian-socialist revolutionary movement therefore came into existence.

 

The 1830 revolutions also introduced two further modifications of left wing politics. They split moderates from radicals and they created a new international situation. In doing so they helped to split the movement not only into different social but into different national segments.

 

Internationally, the revolutions split Europe into two major regions. West of the Rhine they broke the hold of the united reactionary powers for good. Moderate liberalism triumphed in France, Britain and Belgium. Liberalism (of a more radical type) did not entirely triumph in Switzerland and the Iberian Peninsula, where popularly based liberal and anti-liberal catholic movements confronted each other, but the Holy Alliance could no longer intervene in these regions, as it still did everywhere east of the Rhine. In the Portuguese and Spanish civil wars of the 1830s the absolutist and moderate liberal powers each backed their side, though the liberal ones slightly more energetically, and with the assistance of some foreign radical volunteers and sym-pathizers, which faintly foreshadowed the philo-hispanism of the 1930s.* But at bottom the issue in these countries was left to be decided by the local balance of forces. That is to say it remained undecided, fluctuating between short periods of liberal victory (1833-7, 1840-3) and conservative recovery.

 

East of the Rhine the situation remained superficially as before 1830, for all the revolutions were suppressed, the German and Italian risings by or with the support of the Austrians, the Polish rising, much the most serious, by the Russians. Moreover, in this region the national problem continued to take precedence over all others. AU peoples

 

* Englishmen had been interested in Spain by the liberal Spanish refugees with whom they came into contact in the 1820s. British anti-catholicism also played a certain part in turning the striking vogue for Spain—immortalized in George Borrow’s Bible in Spain and Murray’s famous Handbook of Spain—into an anti-Carlist direction.

 

 

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lived under states which were either too small or too large by national criteria: as members of disunited nations split into small principalities or none (Germany, Italy, Poland), as members of multi-national empires (the Habsburg, the Russian and the Turkish), or in both capacities. We need not trouble about the Dutch and Scandinavians who, though belonging broadly to the non-absolutist zone, lived a relatively tranquil life outside the dramatic events of the rest of Europe.

 

A great deal remained in common between the revolutionaries of both regions, as witness the fact that the 1848 revolutions occurred in both, though not in all sections of both. However within each a marked difference in revolutionary ardour emerged. In the west Britain and Belgium ceased to follow the general revolutionary rhythm, while Spain, Portugal, and to a lesser extent Switzerland, were now involved in their endemic civil struggles, whose crises no longer coincided with those elsewhere except by accident (as in the Swiss civil war of 1847). In the rest of Europe a sharp difference between the actively ‘revolu-tionary’ nations and the’ passive or unenthusiastic ones emerged. Thus the secret services of the Habsburgs were constantly troubled by the problem of the Poles, the Italians and the (non-Austrian) Germans, as well as by the perennially obstreperous Hungarians, while reporting no dangers from the alpine lands or the other Slav ones. The Russians had as yet only the Poles to worry about, while the Turks could still rely on most of the Balkan Slavs to remain tranquil.

 

These differences reflected the variations in the tempo of evolution and in the social conditions in different countries which became increasingly evident in the 1830s and 1840s, and increasingly important for politics. Thus the advanced industrialization of Britain changed the rhythm of British politics: while most of the continent had its most acute period of social crises in 1846-8, Britain had its equivalent, a purely industrial depression, in 1841-2. (See also chapter 9.) Con-versely, while in the 1820s groups of young idealists might plausibly hope that a military puUch could ensure the victory of freedom in Russia as in Spain or France, after 1830 the fact that the social and political conditions in Russia were far less ripe for revolution than in Spain could hardly be overlooked.

 

Nevertheless the problems of revolution were comparable in East and West, though not of the same kind: they led to increased tension between the moderates and the radicals. In the west the moderate liberals moved out of the common Restoration front of opposition (or out of close sympathy with it) into the world of government or potential government. Moreover, having gained power by the efforts of the radicals—for who else fought on the barricades?—they immediately

 

 

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betrayed them. There was to be no truck with anything as dangerous as democracy or the republic. ‘There is no longer legitimate cause,’ said Guizot, opposition liberal under the Restoration, Prime Minister under the July Monarchy, ‘nor specious pretext for the maxims and the passions so long placed under the banner of democracy. What was formerly democracy, would now be anarchy; the democratic spirit is now and long will be nothing but the revolutionary spirit.’⁴

 

More than this: after a short interval of toleration and zeal, the liberals tended to moderate their enthusiasm for further reform and to suppress the radical left, and especially the working-class revolu-tionaries. In Britain the Owenite ‘General Union’ of 1834-5 ^an0 – ^e Chartists faced the hostility both of the men who had opposed the Reform Act and of many who had advocated it. The commander of the armed forces deployed against the Chartists in 1839 sympathized with many of their demands as a middle class radical, but he held them in check nevertheless. In France the suppression of the republican rising of 1834 marked the turning-point; in the same year the terror-ization of six honest Wesleyan labourers who had tried to form an agricultural workers union (the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’) marked the equivalent offensive against the working class movement in Britain. Radicals, republicans and the new proletarian movements therefore moved out of alignment with the liberals; the moderates, when still in opposition, were haunted by the ‘democratic and social republic’ which now became the slogan of the left.

 

In the rest of Europe no revolutions had won. The split between moderates and radicals and the emergence of the new social-revolu-tionary trend arose out of the inquest on defeat and the analysis of the prospects of victory. The moderates—whiggish landowners and such of the middle class as existed—placed their hopes in reform by suitably impressionable governments and in the diplomatic support of the new liberal powers. Suitably impressionable governments were rare. Savoy in Italy remained sympathetic to liberalism and increasingly attracted a body of moderate support which looked toward it for help in the country’s eventual unification. A group of liberal catholics, encouraged by the curious and short-lived phenomenon of a ‘liberal papacy’ under the new Pope Pius IX (1846), dreamed, quite fruitlessly, of mobilizing the force of the Church for the same purpose. In Germany no state of importance was other than hostile to liberalism. This did not prevent some moderates—fewer than Prussian historical propaganda has sug-gested—from looking towards Prussia, which had at least a German Customs Union (1834) to its credit, and all to dream of suitably con-verted princes rather than barricades. In Poland, where the prospect of

 

” 9

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

moderate reform with the support of the Tsar no longer encouraged the magnate faction which had always pinned its hopes to it (the Czartoryskis), moderates could at least hope against hope for Western diplomatic intervention. None of these prospects were in the least realistic, as things stood between 1830 and 1848.

 

The radicals were equally disappointed by the failure of the French to play the part of international liberators assigned to them by the Great Revolution and by revolutionary theory. Indeed, this disap-pointment, together with the growing nationalism of the 1830s (cf. chap-ter 7) and the new awareness of the differences in the revolutionary prospects of each country, shattered the unified internationalism the revolutionaries had aspired to during the Restoration. The strategic prospects remained the same. A neo-Jacobin France, and perhaps (as Marx thought) a radically interventionist Britain, still remained almost indispensable for European liberation, short of the unlikely prospect of a Russian revolution.⁶ Nevertheless, a nationalist reaction against the Franco-centric internationalism of the Garbonarist period gained ground, an emotion which fitted well into the new fashion of roman-ticism (cf. chapter 14) which captured much of the left after 1830: there is no sharper contrast than that between the reserved eighteenth-century music-master and rationalist Buonarroti and the woolly and ineffective self-dramatizer Joseph Mazzini (1805-72) who became the apostle of this anti-Carbonarist reaction, forming various national conspiracies (‘Young Italy’, ‘Young Germany’, ‘Young Poland’, etc.) linked together as ‘Young Europe’. In one sense this decentralization of the revolutionary movement was realistic, for in 1848 the nations did indeed rise separately, spontaneously, and simultaneously. In another it was not: the stimulus for their simultaneous eruption still came from France, and French reluctance to play the role of liberator wrecked them.

 

Romantic or not, the radicals rejected the moderates’ trust in princes and powers for practical as well as ideological reasons. The peoples must be prepared to win their liberation themselves for nobody else would do it for them; a sentiment also adapted for use by the prole-tarian-socialist movements at the same time. They must do so by direct action. This was still largely conceived in the Carbonarist fashion, at all events while the masses remained passive. It was consequently not very effective, though there was a world of difference between ridicu-lous efforts like Mazzini’s attempted invasion of Savoy and the serious and continued attempts by the Polish democrats to maintain or revive partisan warfare in their country after the defeat of 1831. But the very determination of the radicals to take power without or against the

 

 

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established forces introduced yet another split in their ranks. Were they or were they not prepared to do so at the price of social revolution?

 

IV

 

The question was inflammatory everywhere except in the USA, where nobody could any longer take or refrain from the decision to mobilize the common people in politics, because Jacksonian democracy had already done so.* But, in spite of the appearance of a Workingtruris Party in the USA in 1828-9, social revolution of the European kind was not a serious issue in that vast and rapidly expanding country, though sectional discontents were. Nor was it inflammatory in Latin America, where nobody in politics, except perhaps in Mexico, dreamed of mobilizing the Indians (i.e. peasants or rural labourers), the Negro slaves, or even the ‘mixed breeds’ (i.e. small farmers, craftsmen and urban poor) for any purpose whatever. But in Western Europe where social revolution by the urban poor was a real possibility, and in the large European zone of agrarian revolution, the question whether or not to appeal to the masses was urgent and unavoidable.

 

The growing disaffection of the poor—especially the urban poor— in Western Europe was visible everywhere. Even in imperial Vienna it was reflected in that faithful mirror of plebeian and petty-bourgeois attitudes, the popular suburban theatre. In the Napoleonic period its plays had combined Gemuetlichkeit with a naive Habsburg loyalty. Its greatest writer in the 1820s, Ferdinand Raimund, filled the stage with fairy-tales, sadness, and nostalgia for the lost innocence of the simple, traditional, uncapitalist community. But from 1835 ^{li w a s} dominated by a star (Johann Nestroy) who was primarily a social and political satirist, a bitter and dialectical wit, a destroyer who, characteristically, became an enthusiastic revolutionary in 1848. Even German emigrants, passing through Le Havre, gave as their reason for going to the USA, which in the 1830s began to be the poor European’s dream country, that ‘there’s no king there’.⁸

 

Urban discontent was universal in the West. A proletarian and socialist movement was chiefly visible in the countries of the dual revolution, Britain and France. (Cf. also chapter 11.) In Britain it emerged round 1830 and took the extremely mature form of a mass movement of the labouring poor which regarded the whigs and liberals as its probable betrayers and the capitalists as its certain enemies. The vast movement for the People’s Charter, which reached its peak in 1839-42 but retained great influence until after 1848, was its

 

* Except, of course, for the slaves of the South.

 

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most formidable achievement. British socialism or ‘co-operation’ was very much weaker. It began impressively in 1829-34 by recruiting perhaps the bulk of working-class militants to its doctrines (which had been propagated, mainly among artisans and skilled workers, since the early 1820s), and by ambitious attempts to set up national ‘general unions’ of the working class which, under Owenite influence, even made attempts to establish a general co-operative economy bypassing the capitalist. Disappointment after the Reform Act of 1832 caused the bulk of the labour movement to look towards these Owenites, co-operators, primitive revolutionary syndicalists, etc., for leadership, but their failure to develop an effective political strategy and leadership, and systematic offensives by employers and government, destroyed the movement in 1834-6. This failure reduced the socialists to propa-gandist and educational groups standing somewhat outside the main stream of labour agitation or to pioneers of the more modest consumer’s co-operation, in the form of the co-operative shop, pioneered in Roch-dale, Lancashire, from 1844. Hence the paradox that the peak of the revolutionary mass movement of the British labouring poor, Chartism, was ideologically somewhat less advanced, though politically more mature, than the movement of 1829-34. But this did not save it from defeat through the political incapacity of its leaders, local and sectional differences, and an inability for concerted national action other than the preparation of monster petitions.

 

In France no comparable mass movement of the industrial labouring poor existed: the militants of the French ‘working-class movement’ in 1830-48 were in the main old-fashioned urban craftsmen and journey-men, mostly in the skilled trades, and centres of traditional domestic and putting-out industry such as the Lyons silk trade. (The arch-revolutionary canuts of Lyons were not even wage-workers but a form of small masters.) Moreover, the various brands of the new ‘utopian’ socialism—the followers of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet and the rest were uninterested in political agitation, though in fact their little conventicles and groups—notably the Fourierists—were to act as nuclei of working-class leadership and mobilizers of mass action at the outset of the 1848 revolution. On the other hand France possessed the powerful and politically highly developed tradition of left wing Jacobinism and Babouvism, a crucial part of which after 1830 became communist. Its most formidable leader was Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881), a pupil of Buonarroti.

 

In terms of social analysis and theory Blanquism had little to con-tribute to socialism except the assertion of its necessity, and the decisive observation that the proletariat of exploited wage-workers was to be its

 

 

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architect and the middle class (no longer the upper) its main enemy. In terms of political strategy and organization, it adapted the tradi-tional organ of revolutionism, the secret conspiratorial brotherhood to proletarian conditions—incidentally stripping it of much of its Restora-tion ritualism and fancy dress—and the traditional method of Jacobin revolution, insurrection and centralized popular dictatorship to the cause of the workers. From the Blanquists (who in turn derived it from Saint-Just, Babeuf and Buonarroti) the modern socialist revolutionary movement acquired the conviction that its object must be the seizure of political power, followed by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’; the term is of Blanquist coinage. The weakness of Blanquism was in part that of the French working class. In the absence of a large mass move-ment it remained, like its Carbonarist predecessors, an elite which planned its insurrections somewhat in the void, and therefore often failed—as in the attempted rising of 1839.

 

Working class or urban revolution and socialism therefore appeared very real dangers in Western Europe, though in fact in the most industrialized countries like Britain and Belgium, government and employing classes regarded them with relative—and justified—placi-dity: there is no evidence that the British Government was seriously troubled by the threat to public order of the huge, but divided, ill-organized, and abysmally led Chartists.⁷ On the other hand, the rural population offered little to encourage the revolutionaries or frighten the rulers. In Britain the government had a moment’s panic when a wave of rioting and machine-breaking rapidly propagated itself among the starving farm-labourers of Southern and Eastern England at the end of 1830. The influence of the French Revolution of July 1830 was detected in this spontaneous, widespread, but rapidly sub-siding ‘last labourers’ revolt’,⁸ which was punished with far greater savagery than the Chartist agitations; as was perhaps to be expected in view of the much tenser political situation during the Reform Bill period. However, agrarian unrest soon relapsed into politically less frightening forms. In the rest of the economically advanced areas, except to some extent in Western Germany, no serious agrarian revolu-tionism was expected or envisaged; and the entirely urban outlook of most revolutionaries held little attraction for the peasantry. In all Western Europe (leaving aside the Iberian peninsula) only Ireland contained a large and endemic movement of agrarian revolution, organized in secret and widespread terrorist societies such as the Ribbonmen and Whitebqys. But socially and politically Ireland belonged to a different world from its neighbour.

 

The issue of social revolution therefore split the middle class radicals,

 

 

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i.e. those groups of discontented businessmen, intellectuals and others who still found themselves in opposition to the moderate liberal governments of 1830. In Britain it divided the ‘middle class radicals’ into those who were prepared to support Chartism, or to make common cause with it (as in Birmingham or in the Quaker Joseph Sturge’s Complete Suffrage Union) and those who insisted, like the Manchester Anti-Corn-Law Leaguers, in fighting both aristocracy and Chartism. The intransigents prevailed, confident in the greater homogeneity of their class consciousness, in their money, which they spent in vast quantities, and in the effectiveness of the propagandist and advertising organization which they set up. In France the weakness of the official opposition to Louis Philippe and the initiative of the revolutionary Paris masses swung the decision the other way. ‘So we have become republicans again,’ wrote the radical poet Bdranger after the February Revolution of 1848. ‘Perhaps it has been a little too soon and a little too fast. . . . I should have preferred a more cautious procedure, but we have chosen neither the hour, nor marshalled the forces, nor deter-mined the route of the march.’⁹ The break of the middle class radicals with the extreme left here was to occur only after the revolution.

 

For the discontented petty-bourgeoisie of independent artisans, shop-keepers, farmers and the like who (together with a mass of skilled workers) probably formed the main corps of Radicalism in Western Europe, the problem was less taxing. As little men they sympathized with the poor against the rich, as men of small property with the rich against the poor. But the division of their sympathies led them into hesitation and doubt rather than into a major change of political allegiance. When it came to the point they were, however feebly, Jacobins, republicans and democrats. A hesitant component of all popular fronts, they were nevertheless an invariable component, until potential expropriators were actually in power.

 

V

 

In the rest of revolutionary Europe,- where the discontented lesser country gentry and the intellectuals formed the core of radicalism, the problem was far more serious. For the masses were the peasantry; often a peasantry belonging to a different nation from its landlords and townsmen—Slavonic and Rumanian in Hungary, Ukrainian in Eastern Poland, Slavonic in parts of Austria. And the poorest and least efficient landlords, who could least afford to abandon the status which gave them their income, were often the most radically nationalist. Admit-tedly while the bulk of the peasantry remained sunk in ignorance and

 

 

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political passivity, the question of its support for the revolution was less immediate than it might have been; but not less burning. And in the 1840s even this passivity could no longer be taken for granted. The serf rising in Galicia in 1846 was the greatest jacquerie since the days of the French Revolution of 1789.

 

Burning as the question was, it was also to some extent rhetorical. Economically, the modernization of backward areas, such as those of Eastern Europe, demanded agrarian reform; or at the very least the abolition of serfdom which still persisted in the Austrian, Russian and Turkish empires. Politically, once the peasantry reached the threshold of activity, nothing was more certain than that something would have to be done to meet its demands, at any rate in countries where revolutionaries fought against foreign rule. For if they did not attract the peasants to their side, the reactionaries would; legitimate kings, emperors and churches in any case held the tactical advantage that traditionalist peasants trusted them more than lords and were still in principle prepared to expect justice from them. And monarchs were perfectly prepared to play peasants against gentry, if necessary: the Bourbons of Naples had done so without hesitation against the Nea-politan Jacobins in 1799. ‘Long live Radetzky,’ the Lombard peasants were to shout in 1848, cheering the Austrian general who overthrew the nationalist rising: ‘death to the lords’.¹⁰ The question before the radicals in under-developed countries was not whether to seek alliance with the peasantry, but whether they would succeed in obtaining it.

 

The radicals in such countries therefore fell into two groups: the democrats and the extreme left. The former (represented in Poland by the Polish Democratic Society, in Hungary by Kossuth’s followers, in Italy by the Mazzinians) recognized the need to attract the peasantry to the revolutionary cause, where necessary by the abolition of serfdom and the grant of property rights to Small cultivators, but hoped for some sort of peaceful coexistence between a nobility voluntarily renouncing its feudal rights—not without compensation—and a national peasantry. However, where the wind of peasant rebellion had not reached gale force or the fear of its exploitation by princes was not great (as in much of Italy) the democrats in practice neglected to provide themselves with a concrete agrarian, or indeed with any social programme, preferring to preach the generalities of political democracy and national liberation.

 

The extreme left frankly conceived of the revolutionary struggle as one of the masses against both foreign rulers and domestic exploiters. Anticipating the national-cum-social revolutionaries of our century,

 

 

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they doubted the capacity of the nobility and of the weak middle class, with its frequent vested interest in imperial rule, to lead the new nation into independence and modernization. Their own programme was thus powerfully influenced by the nascent socialism of the west, though, unlike most pre-Marxist ‘utopian’ socialists, they were political revolu-tionaries as well as social critics. The short-lived Republic of Cracow in 1846 thus abolished all peasant burdens and promised its urban poor ‘national workshops’. The most advanced of the south Italian Carbo-nari adopted the Babouvist-Blanquist platform. Except perhaps in Poland this current of thought was relatively weak, and its influence was further diminished by the failure of movements substantially com-posed of schoolboys, students, declassed intellectuals of gentry or plebeian origins and a few idealists to mobilize the peasantry which they so earnestly sought to recruit.*

 

The radicals of under-developed Europe therefore never effectively solved their problem, partly through the reluctance of their supporters to make adequate or timely concessions to the peasantry, partly through the political immaturity of the peasants. In Italy the revolu-tions of 1848 were conducted substantially over the heads of an inactive rural population, in Poland (where the rising of 1846 had rapidly developed into a peasant rebellion against the Polish gentry, encour-aged by the Austrian government) no revolution took place at all in »848, except in Prussian Poznania. Even in the most advanced of revolutionary nations, Hungary, the qualifications of a gentry-operated land reform was to make it impossible fully to mobilize the peasantry for the war of national liberation. And over most of Eastern Europe the Slav peasants in imperial soldiers’ uniforms were the effective suppressors of German and Magyar revolutionaries.

 

VI

 

Nevertheless, though now divided by differences in local conditions, by nationality, and by class, the revolutionary movements of 1830-48 maintained a good deal in common. In the first place, as we have seen, they remained to a great extent minority organizations of middle class and intellectual conspirators, often in exile, or confined to the relatively small world of the literate. (When revolutions broke out, of course, the common people came into its own. Of the 350 dead in the Milan

 

* However, in a few areas of small peasant property, tenancy or share-cropping such as the Romagna, or parts of South-western Germany, radicalism of the Mazzinian type succeeded in establishing a fair degree of mass support in and after 1848.

 

 

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insurrection of 1848 only a dozen or so were students, clerks or from landowning families. Seventy-four were women and children and the rest artisans or workmen.)¹¹ In the second place, they retained a com-mon pattern of political procedure, strategic and tactical ideas, etc. derived from the experience and heritage of the Revolution of 1789, and a strong sense of international unity.

 

The first factor is easily explicable. A long-established tradition of mass agitation and organization as part of normal (and not immedi-ately pre- or post-revolutionary) social life hardly existed except in the USA and Britain, or perhaps Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia; nor were the conditions for it present outside Britain and the USA. For a newspaper to have a weekly circulation of over 60,000 and a much vaster number of readers, like the Chartist Nortlurn Star in April 1839,^{12 w a s} altogether unthinkable elsewhere; 5,000 seems to have been a more common circulation for newspapers, though semi-official ones or—from the 1830s—entertainment journals could prob-ably exceed 20,000 in a country like France.¹³ Even in constitutional countries like Belgium and France, the legal agitation of the extreme left was only intermittently allowed, and its organizations were often illegal. Consequently, while a simulacrum of democratic politics existed among the restricted classes who formed the pays legal, some of which had its repercussions among the unprivileged, the fundamental devices of mass politics—public campaigns to put pressure on govern-ments, mass organizations, petitions, itinerant oratory addressed to the common people and the like—were only rarely possible. Outside Britain nobody would have seriously thought of achieving universal parliamen-tary franchise by a mass campaign of signatures and public demonstra-tions or to abolish an unpopular law by a mass advertising and pressure campaign, as Chartism and the Anti-Corn-Law League tried respec-tively to do. Major constitutional changes mean a break with legality, and so a fortiori did major social changes.

 

Illegal organizations are naturally smaller than legal ones, and their social composition is far from representative. Admittedly the evolution of general Carbonarist secret societies into proletarian-revolutionary ones, such as the Blanquist, brought about a relative decline in their middle class and a rise in their working-class membership, i.e. in the number of craftsmen and skilled journeymen. The Blanquist organiza-tions of the later 1830s and 1840s were said to be strongly lower class.¹⁴ So was the German League of the Outlaws (which in turn became the League of the Just and the Communist League of Marx and Engels), whose backbone consisted of expatriate German journeymen. But this was a rather exceptional case. The bulk of the conspirators consisted,

 

 

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as before, of men from the professional classes or the lesser gentry, students and schoolboys, journalists and the like; though perhaps with a smaller component (outside the Iberian countries) of young officers than in the Carbonarist heyday.

 

Moreover, up to a point the entire European and American left continued to fight the same enemies, to share common aspirations and a common programme. ‘We renounce, repudiate and condemn all hereditary inequalities and distinctions of “caste”,’ wrote the Fraternal Democrats (composed of ‘natives of Great Britain, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary and other countries’) in their Declaration of Principles, ‘consequently we regard kings, aristocracies and classes monopolizing privileges in virtue of their possession of property, as usurpers. Governments elected by and responsible to the entire people is our political creed.’¹⁵ What radical or revolutionary would have disagreed with them? If bourgeois, he would favour a state in which property, while not enjoying political privilege as such (as in the constitutions of 1830-2 which made the vote dependent on a property qualification), would have economic elbow-room; if socialist or communist, that it must be socialized. No doubt the point would be reached—in Britain it already had by the time of Chartism—when the former allies against king, aristocracy and privi-lege would turn against each other and the fundamental conflict would be that between bourgeois and workers. But before 1848 that point had not yet been reached anywhere else. Only the grande bour-geoisie of a few countries was as yet officially in the government camp. Even the most conscious proletarian communists still saw themselves and acted as the extreme left wing of the general radical and demo-cratic movement; and normally regarded the achievement of the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ republic as the indispensable preliminary for the further advance of socialism. Marx and Engels’s Communist Mani-festo is a declaration of future war against the bourgeoisie but—at least for Germany—of present alliance. The most advanced German middle class, the Rhineland industrialists, not merely asked Marx to edit their radical organ the Neue Rheinische Z^e^^uni ^m 1848; he accepted and edited it not simply as a communist organ, but as the spokesman and leader of German radicalism.

 

More than a merely common outlook, the European left shared a common picture of what the revolution would be like, derived from 1789 with touches of 1830. There would be a crisis in the political affairs of the state, leading to insurrection. (The Carbonarist idea of an elite putsch or rising organized without reference to the general political or economic climate was increasingly discredited, except in

 

 

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Iberian countries, notably by the abject failure of various attempts of the kind in Italy—e.g. in 1833-4, !841-5—^an(i of putsches such as that attempted by Napoleon’s nephew Louis Napoleon in 1836.) Barricades would go up in the capital; the revolutionaries would make for the palace, parliament or (among extremists who recalled 1792) the city hall, hoist whichever tricolour was theirs and proclaim the republic and a Provisional Government. The country would then accept the new regime. The decisive importance of the capitals was universally accepted, though it was not until after 1848 that governments began to replan them in order to facilitate the operation of troops against revolutionaries.

 

A National Guard of armed citizens would be organized, democratic elections for a Constitutent Assembly would be held, the provisional government would become a definitive government and the new Constitution would come into force. The new regime would then give brotherly aid to the other revolutions which, almost certainly, would have also occurred. What happened thereafter belonged to the post-revolutionary era, for which the events of France in 1792-9 also pro-vided fairly concrete models of what to do and what to avoid. The minds of the most Jacobin among the revolutionaries would naturally turn readily to the problems of safeguarding the revolution against overthrow by foreign or domestic counter-revolutionaries. On the whole it can also be said that the more left wing the politician, the more he was likely to favour the (Jacobin) principle of centralization and a strong executive against the (Girondin) principles of federalism, decen-tralization or the division of powers.

 

This common outlook was strongly reinforced by the strong tradition of internationalism, which survived even among those separatist nationalists who refused to accept the automatic leadership of any country—i.e. of France, or rather Paris. The cause of all nations was the same, even without considering the obvious fact that the liberation of most European ones appeared to imply the defeat of Tsarism. National prejudices (which had, as the Fraternal Democrats held, ‘been, in all ages, taken advantage of by the people’s oppressors’) would disappear in the world of fraternity. Attempts to set up inter-national revolutionary bodies never ceased, from Mazzini’s Young Europe—designed as a counter to the old Carbonarist-masonic inter-

 

nationals—to the Democratic Association for the Unification of All Countries

 

of 1847. Among the nationalist movements such internationalism tended to decline in importance, as countries won their independence and the relations between peoples proved to be less fraternal than had been supposed. Among the social-revolutionary ones, increasingly

 

 

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accepting the proletarian orientation, it grew in strength. The Inter-national, as an organization and as a song, was to become an integral part of socialist movements later in the century.

 

One accidental factor which reinforced the internationalism of 1830-48 was exile. Most political militants of the continental left were expatriates for some time, many for decades, congregating in the relatively few zones of refuge or asylum: France, Switzerland, to a lesser extent Britain and Belgium. (The Americas were too far for temporary political emigration, though they attracted some.) The largest contingent of such exiles was that of the great Polish emigration of between five and six thousand,¹⁸ driven from their country by the defeat of 1831, the next largest the Italian and German (both reinforced by the important non-political emigre or locally settled communities of their nationalities in other countries). By the 1840s a small colony of Russian intellectuals of wealth had also absorbed Western revolu-tionary ideas on study tours abroad or sought an atmosphere more congenial than that of Nicholas Fs combination of the dungeon and the drill-square. Students and wealthy residents from small or backward countries were also to be found in the two cities which formed the cultural suns of Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Levant: Paris and, a long way after, Vienna.

 

In the centres of refuge the emigres organized, argued, quarrelled, frequented and denounced one another, and planned the liberation of their countries, or in the meantime that of other countries. The Poles and to a lesser extent the Italians (Garibaldi in exile fought for the liberty of various Latin American countries) became in effect interna-tional corps of revolutionary militants. No rising or war of liberation anywhere in Europe between 1831 and 1871 was to be complete with-out its contingent of Polish military experts or fighters; not even (it has been held) the only armed rising in Britain during the Chartist period, in 1839. However, they were not the only ones. A fairly typical expatriate liberator of peoples, Harro Harring of (as he claimed) Denmark, successively fought for Greece (in 1821), for Poland (in 1830-1), as member of Maz^ini’s Young Germany, Toung Italy and the somewhat more shadowy Young Scandinavia, across the oceans in the struggle for a projected United States of Latin America and in New York, before returning for the 1848 Revolution; meanwhile publishing works with such titles as ‘The Peoples’, ‘Drops of Blood’, ‘Words of

a Man’ and ‘Poetry of a Scandinavian’.*

 

* He was unlucky enough to attract the hostility of Marx, who spared some of his formid-able gifts of satirical invective to preserve him for posterity in his Die Grossen Manner des Exits (Marx-Engels Werke, Berlin i960, vol. 8, 292-8).

 

 

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A common fate and a common ideal bound these expatriates and travellers together. Most of them faced the same problems of poverty and police surveillance, of illegal correspondence, espionage and the ubiquitous agent-provocateur. Like fascism in the 1930s, absolutism in the 1830s and 1840s bound its common enemies together. Then as a century later communism, which purported to explain and provide solutions for the social crisis of the world, attracted the militant and the mere intellectually curious to its capital—Paris—thus adding a serious attraction to the lighter charms of the city. (‘If it were not for the French women, life would not be worth living. Mais tant qu’ily a des grisettes, vaP)¹¹ In these centres of refuge the emigres formed that provisional, but so often permanent community of exile while they planned the liberation of mankind. They did not always like or approve of each other, but they knew each other, and that their fate was the same. Together they prepared for and awaited the European revolution which came—and failed—in 1848.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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N A T I O N A L I S M

 

Every people has its special mission, which will co-operate towards the fulfilment

 

of the general mission of humanity. That mission constitutes its nationality. Nation-ality is sacred.

 

Act of Brotherhood of Toung Europe, 1834

 

The day will come . . . when sublime Germania shall stand on the bronze pedestal of liberty andjustice, bearing in one hand the torch of enlightenment, which shall throw the beam of civilization into the remotest corners of the earth, and in the other the arbiter’s balance. The people will beg her to settle their disputes; those very people who now show us that might is right, and kick us with the jackboot of scornful contempt.

From SiebenpfeifFer’s speech at the Hambach Festival, 1832

 

 

 

I

 

A F T ER 1830, as we have seen, the general movement in favour of revolution split. One product of this split deserves special attention: the self-consciously nationalist movements.

The movements which best symbolize this development are the ‘Youth’ movements founded or inspired by Giuseppe Mazzini shortly after the 1830 revolution: Young Italy, Young Poland, Young Switzer-land, Young Germany and Young France (1831-6) and the analogous Young Ireland of the 1840s, the ancestor of the only lasting and successful revolutionary organization On the model of the early nine-teenth century conspiratory brotherhoods, the Fenians or Irish Repub-lican Brotherhood, better known through its executive arm of the Irish Republican Army. In themselves these movements were of no great importance; the mere presence of Mazzini would have been enough to ensure their total ineffectiveness. Symbolically they are of extreme importance, as is indicated by the adoption in subsequent nationalist movements of such labels as ‘Young Czechs’ or ‘Young Turks’. They mark the distintegration of the European revolutionary movement into national segments. Doubtless each of these segments had much the same political programme, strategy and tactics as the others, and even much the same flag—almost invariably a tricolour of some kind. Its members saw no contradiction between their own demands and those of other nations, and indeed envisaged a brotherhood of all, simultaneously liberating themselves. On the other hand each now tended to justify

 

 

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its primary concern with its own nation by adopting the role of a Messiah for all. Through Italy (according to Mazzini), through Poland (according to Mickiewicz) the suffering peoples of the world were to be led to freedom; an attitude readily adaptable to conservative or indeed imperialist policies, as witness the Russian Slavophils with their cham-pionship of Holy Russia, the Third Rome, and the Germans who were subsequently to tell the world at some length that it would be healed by the German spirit. Admittedly this ambiguity of nationalism went back to the French Revolution. But in those days there had been only one great and revolutionary nation and it made sense (as indeed it still did) to regard it as the headquarters of all revolutions, and the neces-sary prime mover in the liberation of the world. To look to Paris was rational; to look to a vague ‘Italy’, ‘Poland’ or ‘Germany’ (represented in practice by a handful of conspirators and emigres) made sense only for Italians, Poles and Germans.

 

If the new nationalism had been confined only to the membership of the national-revolutionary brotherhoods, it would not be worth much more attention. However, it also reflected much more powerful forces, which were emerging into political consciousness in the 1830s as the result of the double revolution. The most immediately powerful of these were the discontent of the lesser landowners or gentry and the emergence of a national middle and even lower middle class in num-erous countries; the spokesmen for both being largely professional intellectuals.

 

The revolutionary role of the lesser gentry is perhaps best illustrated in Poland and Hungary. There, on the whole, the large landed mag-nates had long found it possible and desirable to make terms with absolutism and foreign rule. The Hungarian magnates were in general Catholic and had long been accepted as pillars of Viennese court society; very few of them were to join the revolution of 1848. The memory of the old Rzeczpospolita made even Polish magnates nationally minded; but the most influential of their quasi-national parties, the Czartoryski connection, now operating from the luxurious emigration of the Hotel Lambert in Paris, had always favoured the alliance with Russia and continued to prefer diplomacy to revolt. Economically they were wealthy enough to afford what they needed, short of really titanic dissipation, and even to invest enough in the improvement of their estates to benefit from the economic expansion of the age, if they chose to. Count Szechenyi, one of the few moderate liberals from this class and a champion of economic improvement, gave a year’s income for the new Hungarian Academy of Sciences—some 60,000 florins. There is no evidence that his standard of life suffered from such disinterested

 

 

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generosity. On the other hand the numerous gentlemen who had little but their birth to distinguish them from other impoverished far-mers—one in eight of the Hungarian population claimed gentlemanly status—had neither the money to make their holdings profitable nor the inclination to compete with Germans and Jews for middle class wealth. If they could not live decently on their rents, and a degenerate age deprived them of a soldier’s chances, then they might, if not too ignorant, consider the law, administration or some intellectual position; but no bourgeois activity. Such gentlemen had long been the stronghold of opposition to absolutism, foreigners and magnate rule in their respective countries, sheltering (as in Hungary) behind the dual but-tress of Calvinism and county organization. It was natural that their opposition, discontent, and aspiration for more jobs for local gentlemen should now fuse with nationalism.

 

The national business classes which emerged in this period were, paradoxically, a rather less nationalist element. Admittedly in dis-united Germany and Italy the advantages of a large unified national market made sense. The author of Deutschland fiber Alles apostrophized

 

Ham and scissors, boots and garters,

 

Wool and soap and yam and beer,¹

 

because they had achieved, what the spirit of nationality had been unable to, a genuine sense of national unity through customs union. However there is little evidence that, say, the shippers of Genoa (who were later to provide much of the financial backing for Garibaldi) preferred the possibilities of a national Italian market to the larger prosperity of trading all over the Mediterranean. And in the large multinational empires the industrial or trading nuclei which grew up in particular provinces might grumble about discrimination, but at bottom clearly preferred the great markets open to them now to the little ones of future national independence. The Polish industrialists, with all Russia at their feet, took little part as yet in Polish nationalism. When Palacky claimed on behalf of the Czechs that ‘if Austria did not exist, it would have to be invented’, he was not merely calling on the monarchy’s support against the Germans, but also expressing the sound economic reasoning of the economically most advanced sector of a large and otherwise backward empire. Business interests were some-times at the head of nationalism, as in Belgium, where a strong pioneer industrial community regarded itself, with doubtful reason, as disadvan-taged under the rule of the powerful Dutch merchant community, to which it had been hitched in 1815. But this was an exceptional case.

 

 

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The great proponents of middle class nationalism at this stage were the lower and middle professional, administrative and intellectual strata, in other words the educated classes. (These are not, of course, distinct from the business classes, especially in backward countries where estate administrators, notaries, lawyers and the like are among the key accumulators of rural wealth.) To be precise, the advance guard of middle class nationalism fought its battle along the line which marked the educational progress of large numbers of ‘new men’ into areas hitherto occupied by a small elite. The progress of schools and universities measures that of nationalism, just as schools and especially universities became its most conscious champions: the conflict of Germany and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein in 1848 and again in 1864 was anticipated by the conflict of the universities of Kiel and Copenhagen on this issue in the middle 1840s.

 

That progress was striking, though the total number of the ‘educated’ remained small. The number of pupils in the French state lycies doubled between 1809 and 1842, and increased with particular rapidity under the July monarchy, but even so in 1842 it was only just under 19,000. (The total of all children receiving secondary education² then was about 70,000.) Russia, around 1850, had some 20,000 secondary pupils out of a total population of sixty-eight millions.³ The number of uni-versity students was naturally even smaller, though it was rising. It is difficult to realize that the Prussian academic youth which was so stirred by the idea of liberation after 1806 consisted in 1805 of not much more than 1,500 young men all told; that the Polytechnique, the bane of the post-1815 Bourbons, trained a total of 1,581 young men in the entire period from 1815 to 1830, i.e. an annual intake of about one hundred. The revolutionary prominence of the students in the 1848 period makes us forget that in the whole continent of Europe, including the unrevolutionary British Isles, there were probably not more than 40,000 university students in all.* Still their numbers rose. In Russia it rose from 1,700 in 1825 to 4,600 in 1848. And even if they did not, the transformation of society and the universities (cf. chapter 15) gave them a new consciousness of themselves as a social group. Nobody remembers that in 1789 there were something like 6,000 students in the University of Paris, because they played no independent part in the Revolution.⁶ But by 1830 nobody could possibly overlook such a number of young academics.

 

Small elites can operate in foreign languages; once the cadre of the educated becomes large enough, the national language imposes itself (as witness the struggle for linguistic recognition in the Indian states since the 1940s). Hence the moment when textbooks or newspapers in

 

 

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the national language are first written, or when that language is first used for some official purpose, measures a crucial step in national evo-lution. The 1830s saw this step taken over large areas of Europe. Thus the first major Czech works on astronomy, chemistry, anthropology, mineralogy and botany were written or completed in this decade; and so, in Rumania, were the first school textbooks substituting Rumanian for the previously current Greek. Hungarian was adopted instead of Latin as the official language of the Hungarian Diet in 1840, though Budapest University, controlled from Vienna, did not abandon Latin lectures until 1844. (However, the struggle for the use of Hungarian as an official language had gone on intermittently since 1790.) In Zagreb Gai published his Croatian Gazette (later: Illyrian National Gazette) from 1835 in the first literary version of what had hitherto been merely a complex of dialects. In countries which had long possessed an official national language, the change cannot be so easily measured, though it

 

is interesting that after 1830 the number of German books published in Germany (as against Latin and French titles) for the first time con-sistently exceeded 90 per cent, the number of French ones after 1820 fell below 4 per cent.*⁶ More generally the expansion of publishing gives us a comparable indication. Thus in Germany the number of books published remained much the same in 1821 as in 1800—about 4,000 titles a year; but by 1841 it had risen to 12,000 titles.⁷

 

Of course the great mass of Europeans, and of non-Europeans, remained uneducated. Indeed, with the exception of the Germans, the Dutch, Scandinavians, Swiss and the citizens of the USA, no people can in 1840 be described as literate. Several can be described as totally illiterate, like the Southern Slavs, who had less than one-half per cent literacy in 1827 (even much later only one per cent of Dalmatian recruits to the Austrian army could read and write) or the Russians who had two per cent (1840), and a great many as almost illiterate, like the Spaniards, the Portuguese (who appear to have had barely 8,000 children in all at school after the Peninsular War) and, except for the Lombards and Piedmontese, the Italians. Even Britain, France and Belgium were 40 to 50 per cent illiterate in the 1840s.⁸ Illiteracy is no bar to political consciousness, but there is, in fact, no evidence that nationalism of the modern kind was a powerful mass force except in countries already transformed by the dual revolution: in France,-in Britain, in the USA and—because it was an economic and political dependency of Britain—in Ireland.

 

To equate nationalism with the literate class is not to claim that the

 

* In thi early eighteenth century only about 60 per cent of all titles published in Germany were in the German language; since then the proportion had risen fairly steadily.

 

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mass of, say, Russians, did not consider themselves ‘Russian’ when confronted with somebody or something that was not. However, for the masses in general the test of nationality was still religion: the Spaniard was defined by being Catholic, the Russian by being Ortho-dox. However, though such confrontations were becoming rather more frequent, they were still rare, and certain kinds of national feeling such as the Italian, were as yet wholly alien to the great mass of the people, which did not even speak the national literary language but mutually almost incomprehensible patois. Even in Germany patriotic mythology has greatly exaggerated the degree of national feeling against Napoleon. France was extremely popular in Western Germany, especially among soldiers, whom it employed freely.⁹ Populations attached to the Pope or the Emperor might express resentment against their enemies, who happened to be the French, but this hardly implied any feelings of national consciousness, let alone any desire for a national state. More-over, the very fact that nationalism was represented by middle class and gentry was enough to make the poor man suspicious. The Polish radical-democratic revolutionaries tried earnestly—as did the more advanced of the South Italian Carbonari and other conspirators—to mobilize the peasantry even to the point of offering agrarian reform. Their failure was almost total. The Galician peasants in 1846 opposed the Polish revolutionaries even though these actually proclaimed the abolition of serfdom, preferring to massacre gentlemen and trust to the Emperor’s officials.

 

The uprooting of peoples, which is perhaps the most important single phenomenon of the nineteenth century, was to break down this deep, age-old and localized traditionalism. Yet over most of the world up to the 1820s hardly anybody as yet migrated or emigrated, except under the compulsion of armies and hunger, or in the traditionally migratory groups such as the peasants from Central France who did seasonal building jobs in the north, or the travelling German artisans. Uprooting still meant, not the mild form of homesickness which was to become the characteristic psychological disease of the nineteenth cen-tury (reflected in innumerable sentimental popular songs), but the acute, killing mal de pays or mal de coeur which had first been clinically described by doctors among the old Swiss mercenaries in foreign lands. The conscription of the Revolutionary Wars revealed it, notably among the Bretons. The pull of the remote northern forests was so strong, that it could lead an Estonian servant-girl to leave her excellent employers the Kugelgens in Saxony, where she was free, and return home to serfdom. Migration and emigration, of which the migration to the USA is the most convenient index, increased notably from the 1820s,

 

 

137

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

though it did not reach anything like major proportions until the 1840s, when one and three-quarter millions crossed the North Atlantic (a little less than three times the figure for the 1830s). Even so, the only major migratory nation outside the British Isles was as yet the German, long used to sending its sons as peasant settlers to Eastern Europe and America, as travelling artisans across the continent and as mercenaries everywhere.

 

We can in fact speak of only one western national movement organ-ized in a coherent form before 1848 which was genuinely based on the masses, and even this enjoyed the immense advantage of identification with the strongest carrier of tradition, the Church. This was the Irish Repeal movement under Daniel O’Connell (1785-1847), a golden-voiced lawyer-demagogue of peasant stock, the first—and up to 1848 the only one—of those charismatic popular leaders who mark the awakening of political consciousness in hitherto backward masses. (The only comparable figures before 1848 were Feargus O’Connor (1794-1855), another Irishman, who symbolized Chartism in Britain, and perhaps Louis Kossuth (1802-1894), who may have acquired some-thing of his subsequent mass prestige before the 1848 revolution, though in fact his reputation in the 1840s was made as a champion of the gentry, and his later canonization by nationalist historians makes it difficult to see his early career at all clearly.) O’Connell’s Catholic Association, which won its mass support and the not wholly justified confidence of the clergy in the successful struggle for Catholic Emanci-pation (1829) was in no sense tied to the gentry, who were in any case Protestant and Anglo-Irish. It was a movement of peasants, and such elements of a native Irish lower-middle class as existed in that pauper-ized island. ‘The Liberator’ was borne into leadership by successive waves of a mass movement of agrarian revolt, the chief motive force of Irish politics throughout that appalling century. This was organized in secret terrorist societies which themselves helped to break down the parochialism of Irish life. However, his aim was neither revolution or national independence, but a moderate middle class Irish autonomy by agreement or negotiation with the British Whigs. Hc was, in fact, not a nationalist and still less a peasant revolutionary but a moderate middle class autonomist. Indeed, the chief criticism which has been not unjusti-fiably raised against him by later Irish nationalists (much as’ the more radical Indian nationalists have criticised Gandhi, who occupied an analogous position in his country’s history) was that he could have raised all Ireland against the British, and deliberately refused to do so. But this does not alter the fact that the movement he led was genuinely supported by the mass of the Irish nation.

 

 

138

 

NATIONALISM

 

II

 

Outside the zone of the modern bourgeois world there were, however, movements of popular revolt against alien rule (i.e. normally under-stood as meaning rule by a different religion rather than a different nationality) which sometimes appear to anticipate later national move-ments. Such were the rebellions against the Turkish Empire, against the Russians in the Caucasus, and the fight against the encroaching British raj in and on the confines of India. It is unwise to read too much modern nationalism into these, though in backward areas popu-lated by armed and combative peasants and herdsmen, organized in clan groups and inspired by tribal chieftains, bandit-heroes and prophets, resistance to the foreign (or better, the unbelieving) ruler could take the form of veritable people’s wars quite unlike the eUite nationalist movements in less Homeric countries. In fact, however, the

resistance of	Mahrattas  (a feudal-military  Hindu group) and Sikhs
(a  militant	religious sect) to  the British in  1803-18 and  1845-49

respectively have little connection with subsequent Indian nationalism and produced none of their own.* The Caucasian tribes, savage, heroic and feud-ridden, found in the puritan Islamic sect of Muridism a temporary bond of unity against the invading Russians and in Shamyl (1797-1871) a leader of major stature; but there is not to this day a Caucasian nation, but merely a congeries of small mountain peoples in small Soviet republics. (The Georgians and Armenians, who have formed nations in the modern sense, were not involved in the Shamyl movement.) The Bedouin, swept by puritan religious sects like the Wahhabi in Arabia and the Senussi in what is today Libya, fought for the simple faith of Allah and the simple life of the herdsman and raider against the corruption of taxes, pashas and cities; but what we now know as Arab nationalism—a product of the twentieth century— has come out of the cities, not the nomadic encampments.

 

Even the rebellions against the Turks in the Balkans, especially among the rarely subdued mountain peoples of the south and west, should not be too readily interpreted in modern nationalist terms though the bards and braves of several—the two were often the same, as among the poet-warrior-bishops of Montenegro—recalled the glories of quasi-national heroes like the Albanian Skanderbeg and the tragedies like

 

* The Sikh movement has remained largely mi generis to this day. The tradition of comba-tive Hindu resistance in Maharashtra made that area an early centre of Indian nationalism, and provided some of its earliest—and highly traditionalist—leaders, notably B. G. Tilak; but this was at best a regional, and far from dominant strain in the movement. Something like Mahratta nationalism may exist today, but its social basis is the resistance of large Mahratta working-class and underprivileged lower middle class to the economically and until recently linguistically dominant Gujeratis.

 

 

139

 

THE  AGE  OF    REVOLUTION

 

the Serbian defeat at Kossovo in the remote battles against the Turks. Nothing was more natural than to revolt, where necessary or desirable, against a local administration or a weakening Turkish Empire. How-ever, little but a common economic backwardness united what we now know as the Yugoslavs, even those in the Turkish Empire, and the very concept of Yugoslavia was the product of intellectuals in Austro-Hungary rather than of those who actually fought for liberty.* The Orthodox Montenegrins, never subdued, fought the Turks; but with equal zest they fought the unbelieving Catholic Albanians and the unbelieving, but solidly Slav, Moslem Bosnians. The Bosnians revolted against the Turks, whose religion many of them shared, with as much readiness as the orthodox Serbs of the wooded Danube plain, and with more zest than the orthodox ‘old Serbs’ of the Albanian frontier-area. The first of the Balkan peoples to rise in the nineteenth century were the Serbs under a heroic pig-dealer and brigand Black George (1760-1817) but the initial phase of his rising (1804-7) did not even claim to be against Turkish rule, but on the contrary for the Sultan against the abuses of the local rulers. There is little in the early history of mountain rebellion in the Western Balkans to suggest that the local Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and others would not in the early nineteenth century have been satisfied with the sort of non-national autonomous principality which a powerful satrap, AIi Pasha ‘the Lion of Jannina’ (1741-1822), for a time set up in Epirus.

 

In one and only one case did the perennial fight of the sheep-herding clansmen and bandit-heroes against any real government fuse with the ideas of middle class nationalism and the French Revolution: in the Greek struggle for independence (1821-30). Not unnaturally Greece therefore became the myth and inspiration of nationalists and liberals everywhere. For in Greece alone did an entire people rise against the oppressor in a manner which could be plausibly identified with the cause of the European left; and in turn the support of the European left, headed by the poet Byron who died there, was of very considerable help in the winning of Greek independence.

 

Most Greeks were much like the other forgotten warrior-peasantries and clans of the Balkan peninsula. A part, however, formed an inter-national merchant and administrative class also settled in colonies or minority communities throughout the Turkish Empire and beyond,

 

* It is significant that the present Yugoslav regime has broken up what used to be classed as the Serb nation into the much more realistic sub-national republics and units of Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kossovo-Metohidja. By the linguistic standards of nineteenth century nationalism most of these belonged to a single ‘Serb’ people, except the Macedonians, who are closer to the Bulgarians, and the Albanian minority in Kosmet. But in fact they have never developed a single Serb nationalism.

 

 

I40

 

NATIONALISM

 

and the language and higher ranks of the entire Orthodox Church, to which most Balkan peoples belonged, were Greek, headed by the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople. Greek civil servants, transmuted into vassal princes, governed the Danubian principalities (the present Rumania). In a sense the entire educated and mercantile classes of the Balkans, the Black Sea area and the Levant, whatever their national origins, were hellenized by the very nature of their activities. During the eighteenth century this hellenization proceeded more powerfully than before, largely because of the marked economic expansion which also extended the range and contacts of the Greek diaspora. The new and thriving Black Sea grain trade took it into Italian, French and British business centres and strengthened its links with Russia; the expansion of Balkan trade brought Greek or Grecized merchants into Central Europe. The first Greek language newspapers were published in Vienna (1784-1812). Periodic emigration and resettlement of peasant rebels further reinforced the exile communities. It was among this cosmopolitan diaspora that the ideas of the French Revolution— liberalism, nationalism and the methods of political organization by masonic secret societies—took root. Rhigas (1760-98), the leader of an early obscure and possibly pan-Balkanist revolutionary movement, spoke French and adapted the Marseillaise to Hellenic conditions. The Philiki Hetairla, the secret patriotic society mainly responsible for the revolt of 1821, was founded in the great new Russian grain port of Odessa in 1814.

 

Their nationalism was to some extent comparable to the elite move-ments of the West. Nothing else explains the project of raising a rebellion for Greek independence in the Danube principalities under the leader-ship oflocal Greek magnates; for the only people who could be described as Greeks in these miserable serf-lands were lords, bishops, merchants and intellectuals. Naturally enough that rising failed miserably (1821). Fortunately, however, the Ffetairia had also set out to enrol the anarchy of local brigand-heroes, outlaws and clan chieftains in the Greek mountains (especially in the Peloponnese), and with considerably greater success—at any rate after 1818—than the South Italian gentle-men Carbonari, who attempted a similar proselytization of their local banditti. It is doubtful whether anything like modern nationalism meant much to these ‘klephts’, though many of them had their ‘clerks’— a respect for and interest in book-learning was a surviving relic of ancient Hellenism—who composed manifestoes in the Jacobin termin-ology. If they stood for anything it was for the age-old ethos of a penin-sula in which the role of man was to become a hero, and the outlaw who took to the mountains to resist any government and to right the

 

 

141

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

peasant’s wrongs was the universal political ideal. To the rebellions of men like Kolokotrones, brigand and cattle-dealer, the nationalists of the Western type gave leadership and a pan-hellenic rather than a purely local scale. In turn they got from them that unique and awe-inspiring thing, the mass rising of an armed people.

 

The new Greek nationalism was enough to win independence, though the combination of middle class leadership, klephtic disorganization and great power intervention produced one of those petty caricatures of the Western liberal ideal which were to become so familiar in areas like Latin America. But it also had the paradoxical result of narrowing Hellenism to Hellas, and thus creating or intensifying the latent nation-alism of the other Balkan peoples. While being Greek had been little more than the professional requirement of the literate Orthodox Balkan Christian, hellenization had made progress. Once it meant the political support for Hellas, it receded, even among the assimilated Balkan literate classes. In this sense Greek independence was the essential pre-liminary condition for the evolution of the other Balkan nationalisms.

 

Outside Europe it is difficult to speak of nationalism at all. The numerous Latin American republics which replaced the broken Spanish and Portuguese Empires (to be accurate, Brazil became and remained an independent monarchy from 1816 to 1889), their frontiers often reflecting little more than the distribution of the estates of the grandees who had backed one rather than another of the local rebel-lions, began to acquire vested political interests and territorial aspira-tions. The original pan-American ideal of Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) of Venezuela and San Martin (1778-1850) of the Argentine was impossible to realize, though it has persisted as a powerful revolutionary current throughout all the areas united by the Spanish language, just as pan-Balkanism, the heir of Orthodox unity against Islam, persisted and may still persist today. The vast extent and variety of the continent, the existence of independent foci of rebellion in Mexico (which deter-mined Central America), Venezuela and Buenos Aires, and the special problem of the centre of Spanish colonialism in Peru, which was liberated from without, imposed automatic fragmentation. But the Latin American revolutions were the work of small groups of patricians, soldiers and gallicized eVolue\ leaving the mass of the Catholic poor white population passive and the Indians indifferent or hostile. Only in Mexico was independence won by the initiative of a popular agrarian, i.e. Indian movement marching under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Mexico has consequently ever since followed a dif-ferent and politically more advanced road from the remainder of continental Latin America. However, even among the tiny layer of the

 

 

142

NATIONALISM

 

politically decisive Latin Americans it would be anachronistic in our period to speak of anything more than the embryo of Colombian, Venezuelan, Ecuadorian, etc. ‘national consciousness’.

 

Something like a proto-nationalism, however, existed in various countries of Eastern Europe, but paradoxically it took the direction of conservatism rather than national rebellion. The Slavs were oppressed everywhere, except in Russia and in a few wild Balkan strongholds; but in their immediate perspective the oppressors were, as we have seen, not the absolute monarchs, but the German or Magyar landlords and urban exploiters. Nor did the nationalism of these allow any place for Slav national existence: even so radical a programme as that of the German United States proposed by the republicans and democrats of Baden (in South-west Germany) envisaged the inclusion of an Illyrian (i.e. Croat and Slovene) republic with its capital in Italian Trieste, a Moravian one with its capital in Olomouc, and a Bohemian one led by Prague.¹⁰ Hence the immediate hope of the Slav nationalists lay in the emperors of Austria and Russia. Various versions of Slav solidarity expressed the Russian orientation, and attracted Slav rebels—even the anti-Russian Poles—especially in times of defeat and hopelessness as after the failure of the risings in 1846. ‘Ulyrianism’ in Croatia and a moderate Czech nationalism expressed the Austrian trend, and both received deliberate support from the Habsburg rulers, two of whose leading ministers—Kolowrat and the chief of the police system, Sedlnitzky—were themselves Czechs. Croatian cultural aspirations were protected in the 1830s, and by 1840 Kolowrat actually proposed what was later to prove so useful in the 1848 revolution, the appointment of a Croat military ban as chief of Croatia, and with control over the military frontier with Hungary, as a counterweight to the obstreperous Magyars.¹¹ To be a revolutionary in 1848 therefore came to be virtually identical with opposition to Slav national aspirations; and the tacit conflict between the ‘progressive’ and the ‘reactionary’ nations did much to doom the revolutions of 1848 to failure.

 

Nothing like nationalism is discoverable elsewhere, for the social conditions for it did not exist. In fact, if anything the forces which were later to produce nationalism were at this stage opposed to the alliance of tradition, religion and mass poverty which produced the most powerful resistance to the encroachment of western conquerors and exploiters. The elements of a local bourgeoisie which grew up in Asian countries did so in the shelter of the foreign exploiters whose agents, intermediaries and dependants they largely were: the Parsee com-munity of Bombay is an example. Even if the educated and ‘enlight-ened’ Asian was not a cotnpradore or a lesser official of some foreign ruler

 

 

143

 

T HE  AGE  OF      R E V O L U T I O N

 

or firm (a situation not dissimilar to that of the Greek diaspora in Turkey), his first political task was to Westernize—i.e. to introduce the ideas of the French Revolution and of scientific and technical modern-ization among his people against the united resistance of traditional rulers and traditional ruled (a situation not dissimilar to that of the gentlemen-Jacobins of Southern Italy). He was therefore doubly cut off from his people. Nationalist mythology has often obscured this divorce, partly by suppressing the link between colonialism and the early native middle classes, partly lending to earlier anti-foreign resis-tance the colours of a later nationalist movement. But in Asia, in the Islamic countries, and even more in Africa, the junction between the £volu& and nationalism, and between both and the masses, was not made until the twentieth century.

 

Nationalism in the East was thus the eventual product of Western influence and Western conquest. This link is perhaps most evident in the one plainly oriental country in which the foundations of what was to become the first modern colonial nationalist movement* were laid: in Egypt. Napoleon’s conquest introduced Western ideas, methods and techniques, whose value an able and ambitious local soldier, Mohammed AIi (Mehemet AIi), soon recognized. Having seized power and virtual independence from Turkey in the confused period which followed the withdrawal of the French, and with French support, Mohammed AIi set out to establish an efficient and Westernizing despotism with foreign (mainly French) technical aid. European leftwingers in the 1820s and 30s hailed this enlightened autocrat, and put their services at his disposal, when reaction in their own countries looked too dispiriting. The extraordinary sect of the Saint-Simonians, equally suspended between the advocacy of socialism and of industrial development by investment bankers and engineers, temporarily gave him their collective aid and prepared his plans of economic development. (For them, see p. 241.) They thus also laid the foundation for the Suez Canal (built by the Saint-Simonian de Lesseps) and the fatal dependence of Egyptian rulers on vast loans negotiated by competing groups of European swindlers, which turned Egypt into a centre of imperialist rivalry and anti-imperialist rebellion later on. But Mohammed AIi was no more a nationalist than any other oriental despot. His Westernization, not his or his people’s aspirations, laid the foundations for later nationalism. If Egypt acquired the first nationalist movement in the Islamic world and Morocco one of the last, it was because Mohammed AIi (for perfectly comprehensible geopolitical reasons) was in the main paths of Westernization and the isolated self-sealed Sherifian Empire of the

 

* Other than the Irish.

 

^I 4 4

NATIONALISM

 

Moslem far west was not, and made no attempts to be. Nationalism, like so many other characteristics of the modern world, is the child of the dual revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

145

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part II

 

RESULTS

 

 

 

CHAPTER      8

 

L A N D

 

/ am your lord and my lord is the Tsar. The Tsar has a right to give me orders and I must obey, but not to give them to you. On my estate I am the Tsar, I am your god on earth, and 1 must be responsible for you to God in heaven.. . . First a horse must be curried ten times with the iron curry-comb, then only canyou brush it with the soft brush.

 

I shall have to curry you pretty roughly, and who knows whetlier I shall ever get down to the brush. God cleanses the air with thunder and lightning, and in my village I shall cleanse with thunder and fire, whenever I think it necessary.

 

A Russian estate owner to his serfs.¹

 

The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant, in his own conception, above his brothers in the same rank of society. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. . . . Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion increases by indulgence; and at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness. The sale of the cow frequently succeeds, and its wretched and disappointed possessor, unwilling to resume the daily and regular course of labour, from whence he drew hisformer subsistence .. .

 

extracts from the poor’s rate the relief to which he is in no degree entitled.

 

Survey of the Board of Agriculture for Somerset, 1798′

 

 

 

I

 

W H A T happened to the land determined the life and death of most human beings in the years from 1789 to 1848. Consequently the impact of the dual revolution on landed property, land tenure and agriculture was the most catastrophic phenomenon of our period. For neither the political nor the economic revolution could neglect land, which the first school of economists, the Physiocrats, considered the sole source of wealth, and whose revolutionary transformation all agreed to be the necessary precondition and consequence of bourgeois society, if not of all rapid economic development. The great frozen ice-cap of the world’s traditional agrarian systems and rural social relations lay above the fertile soil of economic growth. It had at all costs to be melted, so that that soil could be ploughed by the forces of profit-pursuing private enterprise. This implied three kinds of changes. In the first place land had to be turned into a commodity, possessed by private owners and freely purchasable and saleable by them. In the second place it had to pass into the ownership of a class of men willing to develop its productive resources for the market and impelled by

 

 

149

 

THE AOE OF  REVOLUTION

 

reason, i.e. enlightened self-interest and profit. In the third place the great mass of the rural population had in some way to be transformed, at least in part, into freely mobile wage-workers for the growing non-agricultural sector of the economy. Some of the more thoughtful or radical economists were also aware of a fourth desirable change, though one difficult if not impossible to achieve. For in an economy which assumed the perfect mobility of all factors of production land, a ‘natural monopoly’ did not quite fit. Since the size of the earth was limited, and its various pieces differed in fertility and accessibility, those who owned its more fertile parts must inevitably enjoy a special advantage and levy a rent on the rest. How this burden was to be removed or mitigated—e.g. by suitable taxation, by laws against the concentration of landownership or even by nationalization—was the subject of acute debate, especially in industrial England. (Such argu-ments also affected other ‘natural monopolies’ like railways whose nationalization was for this reason never considered incompatible with a private enterprise economy, and widely practised.*) However, these were problems of land in a bourgeois society. The immediate task was to install it.

 

Two major obstacles stood in the way of such an imposition, and both required a combination of political and economic action: pre-capitalist landlords and the traditional peasantry. On the other hand the task could be fulfilled in a variety of ways. The most radical were the British and the American, for both eliminated the peasantry and one the landlord altogether. The classical British solution produced a country in which perhaps 4,000 proprietors owned perhaps four-sevenths of the land* which was cultivated—I take the 1851 figures— by a quarter of a million farmers (three-quarters of the acreage being in farms of from 50 to 500 acres) who employed about one and a quarter million of hired labourers and servants. Pockets of smallholders per-sisted, but outside of the Scots highlands and parts of Wales only the pedant can speak of a British peasantry in the continental sense. The classical American solution was that of the owner-occupying com-mercial farmer who made up for the shortage of a hired labour force by intensive mechanization. Obed Hussey’s (1833) and Cyrus Mc-Gormick’s (1834) mechanical reapers were the complement to the purely commercial-minded farmers or land-speculating entrepreneurs who extended the American way of life westwards from the New England states, seizing their land or later by buying it at the most nominal prices from the government. The classical Prussian solution was socially the least revolutionary. It consisted in turning feudal land-

 

* Even in England it was seriously proposed in the 1840s.

 

150

LAND

 

lords themselves into capitalist farmers and serfs into hired labourers. The Junkers retained control of their lean estates which they had long cultivated for the export market with servile labour; but they now operated with peasants ‘liberated’ from serfdom—and from land. The Pomeranian example, where later in the century some 2,000 large estates covered 61 per cent of the land, some 60,000 middle and small holdings the rest and the remainder of the population was landless, is doubtless extreme;* but it is a fact that a rural labouring class was too unimportant for the word ‘labourer’ even to be mentioned

 

in Kriiniz’ Encyclopaedia of Domestic and Agricultural Economy of 1773, while

in 1849 the number of landless or substantially wage-employed rural labourers in Prussia was estimated at almost two millions.* The only other systematic solution of the agrarian problem in a capitalist sense was the Danish, which also created a large body of small and medium commercial farmers. However, it was due in the main to the reforms of the period of enlightened despotism in the 1780s, and therefore falls somewhat outside the range of this volume.

The Northern American solution depended on the unique fact of a virtually uiifimited supply of free land, and the absence of all relics of feudal relations or traditional peasant collectivism. Virtually the only obstacle to the extension of pure individualist farming was the slight one of the Red Indian tribes, whose lands—normally guaranteed by treaties with the British, French and American governments—were held in collectivity, often as hunting grounds. The total conflict between a view of society which regarded individual perfectly alienable property not merely as the only rational but the only natural arrange-ment and one which did not is perhaps most evident in the confronta-tion between Yankees and Indians. ‘Amongst the most mischievous and fatal [of the causes which prevented the Indians from learning the benefits of civilization],’ argued the Commissioner for Indian Affairs,*

 

‘were their possession of too great an extent of country held in common, and the

right to large money annuities; the one giving them ample scope for their indulgence in their unsettled and vagrant habits, and preventing

 

their acquiring a knowledge of individuality in property and the advantage of

settled homes; the other fostering idleness and want of thrift, and giving them means of gratifying their depraved tastes and appetites.’ To deprive them of their lands by fraud, robbery and any other suitable kind of pressure was therefore as moral as it was profitable.

 

Nomadic and primitive Indians were not the only people who neither understood bourgeois-individualist rationalism on the land nor wished for it. In fact, with the exception of minorities of the enlightened, the acquisitive and the ‘strong and sober’ among the peasantry, the

 

 

151

THE  AGE  OF   REVOLUTION

 

vast bulk of the rural population from the largest feudal lord down to the most poverty-stricken shepherd united in abominating it. Only a politico-legal revolution directed against both lords and traditional peasants could create the conditions in which the rational minority might become the rational majority. The history of agrarian relations over most of Western Europe and its colonies in our period is the history of this revolution though its full consequences were not felt until the second half of the century.

As we have seen, its first object was to turn land into a commodity. Entails and other prohibitions of sale or dispersal which rested on noble estates had to be broken and the landowner therefore subjected to the salutary penalty of bankruptcy for economic incompetence, which would allow economically more competent purchasers to take over. Above all in Catholic and Moslem countries (Protestant ones had long since done so), the great bloc of ecclesiastical land had to be taken out of the Gothic realm of non-economic superstition and opened to the market and rational exploitation. Secularization and sale awaited them. The equally vast blocks of collectively owned—and therefore badly utilized—lands of village and town communities, common fields, common pastures, woodlands, etc., had to be made accessible to indi-vidual enterprise. Division into individual lots and ‘enclosure’ awaited them. That the new purchasers would be the enterprising, strong and sober could hardly be doubted; and thus the second of the objects of the agrarian revolution would be achieved.

 

But only on condition that the peasantry, from whose ranks many of them would doubtless arise, was itself turned into a class freely capable of disposing of its resources; a step which would also automatically achieve the third object, the creation of a large ‘free’ labour force composed from those who failed to become bourgeois. The liberation of the peasant from non-economic bonds and duties (villeinage, serfdom, payments to lords, forced labour, slavery, etc.) was therefore also essential. This would have an additional and crucial advantage. For the free wage-labourer, open to the incentive of higher rewards, or the free farmer, could be shown, it was thought, to be a more efficient worker than the forced labourer, whether serf, peon or slave. Only one further condition had to be fulfilled. The very large number of those who now vegetated on the land to which all human history tied them, but who, if it were productively exploited, would be a mere surplus population,* had to be torn away from their roots and allowed to move

 

* Thus it was estimated in the early 1830s that the pool of surplus employable labour was I in 6 of the total population in urban and industrial England, 1 in 20 in France and Ger-many, I in 25 in Austria and Italy, 1 in 30 in Spain and 1 in 100 in Russia.’

 

 

’52

LAND

 

freely. Only thus would they migrate into the towns and factories where their muscles were increasingly needed. In other words, the peasants had to lose their land together with their other bonds.

Over most of Europe this meant that the complex of traditional legal and political arrangements commonly known as ‘feudalism’ had to be abolished, where it was not already absent. Broadly speaking, in the

period	from	1789	to	1848 this was achieved—mostly by direct or
indirect	agency of		the	French Revolution—from  Gibraltar to East
Prussia,	and	from	the	Baltic to Sicily. The equivalent changes in

Central Europe only took place in 1848, in Russia and Rumania in the 1860s. Outside Europe something nominally like them was achieved in the Americas, with the major exceptions of Brazil, Cuba and the Southern USA where slavery persisted until 1862-88. In a few colonial areas directly administered by European states, notably in parts of India and Algeria, similar legal revolutions were also introduced. So they were in Turkey and, for a brief period, in Egypt.⁸

 

Except for Britain and a few other countries in which feudalism in this sense had either been abolished already or had never really existed (though traditional peasant collectivities had), the actual methods of achieving this revolution were very similar. In Britain no legislation to expropriate large property was necessary or politically feasible, for the large landowners or their farmers were already attuned to a bourgeois society. Their resistance to the final triumph of bourgeois relations in the countryside—between 1795 and 1846—was bitter. However, though it contained, in an inarticulate form, a sort of tradi-tionalist protest against the destructive sweep of the pure individualist profit-principle, the cause of their most obvious discontents was much simpler: the desire to maintain the high prices and high rents of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in a period of post-war depression. Theirs was an agrarian pressure-group rather than a feudal reaction. The main cutting edge of the law was therefore turned against the relics of the peasantry, the cottagers and labourers. Some 5,000 ‘enclosures’ under private and general Enclosure Acts broke up some six million acres of common fields and common lands from 1760 onwards, transformed them into private holdings, and numerous less formal arrangements supplemented them. The Poor Law of 1834 was designed to make life so intolerable for the rural paupers as to force them to migrate to any jobs that offered. And indeed they soon began to do so. In the 1840s several counties were already on the verge of an absolute loss of population, and from 1850 land-flight became general.

 

The reforms of the 1780s abolished feudalism in Denmark though their main beneficiaries there were not landlords but peasant tenants and

 

 

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owners who were encouraged after the abolition of the open fields to consolidate their strips into individual holdings; a process analogous to ‘enclosure’ which was largely complete by 1800. Estates tended to be parcelled out and sold to their former tenants, though the post-Napoleonic depression, which small owners found harder to survive than tenants, slowed this process down between 1816 and about 1830. By 1865 Denmark was mainly a country of independent peasant owners. In Sweden similar but less drastic reforms had similar effects, so that by the second half of the nineteenth century traditional communal cultivation, the strip system had virtually disappeared. The formerly feudal areas of this country were assimilated to the rest of the country, in which the free peasantry had always been predominant, as it was overwhelmingly in Norway (after 1815 a part of Sweden, formerly of Denmark). A tendency to subdivide larger enterprises, in some regions, offet set by one to consolidate holdings, made itself felt. The net result was that agriculture improved its productivity rapidly—in Denmark the number of cattle doubled in the last quarter of the eighteenth century⁹—but with the rapid rise in population a growing number of the rural poor found no employment. After the middle of the nineteenth century their hardship led to what was proportionately the most massive of all the century’s movements of emigration (mostly to the American Midwest) from infertile Norway and a little later from Sweden, though less so from Denmark.

 

II

 

In France, as we have seen, the abolition of feudalism was the work of the revolution. Peasant pressure and. Jacobinism pushed agrarian reform beyond the point where champions of capitalist development would have wished it to stop (cf. above pp. 49, 69-70). France as a whole therefore became neither a country of landlords and farm-labourers nor of commercial farmers, but largely of various types of peasant proprietors, who became the chief prop of all subsequent political regimes which did not threaten to take away their land. That the number of peasant owners increased by over 50 per cent—from four to six and a half millions—is an old, plausible, but not readily verifiable guess. AU we know for certain is that the number of such proprietors did not diminish and in some areas increased more than in others; but whether the Moselle department, where it increased by 40 per cent between 1789 and 1801, is more typical than the Norman Eure department, where it remained unchanged,¹⁰ must await further study. Conditions on the land were, on the whole, good. Even in 1847-8

 

 

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there was no real hardship except among a section of the wage-labourers.¹¹ The flow of surplus labour from the village to town was therefore small, a fact which helped to retard French industrial development.

 

Over most of Latin Europe, the Low Countries, Switzerland and Western Germany the abolition of feudalism was the work of the French conquering armies, determined to ‘proclaim immediately in the name of the French nation . . . the abolition of tithes, feudality and seigneurial rights’,¹² or of native liberals who co-operated with them or were inspired by them. By 1799 the legal revolution had thus con-quered in the countries adjoining Eastern France and in Northern and Central Italy, often merely completing an evolution already far ad-vanced. The return of the Bourbons after the abortive Neapolitan revolution of 1798-9 postponed it in continental Southern Italy until 1808; the British occupation kept it out of Sicily, though feudalism was formally abolished in that island between 1812 and 1843. In Spain the anti-French liberal Cortes of Cadiz in 1811 abolished feudalism and in 1813 certain entails, though, as usual outside the areas pro-foundly transformed by long incorporation into France, the return of the old regimes delayed the practical application of these principles. The French reforms therefore began or continued, rather than com-pleted, the legal revolution in such areas as North-western Germany east of the Rhine and in the Tllyrian Provinces’ (Istria, Dalmatia, Ragusa, later also Slovenia and part of Croatia), which did not come under French rule or domination until after 1805.

 

The French Revolution was not, however, the only force making for a thorough revolution of agrarian relations. The sheer economic argument in favour of a rational utilization of the land had greatly impressed the enlightened despots of the pre-revolutionary period, and produced very similar answers. In the Habsburg Empire Joseph II had actually abolished serfdom and secularized much church land in the 1780s. For comparable reasons, and because of their persistent rebellions the serfs of Russian Livonia were formally restored to the status of peasant proprietors which they had enjoyed rather earlier under Swedish administration. It did not help them in the slightest, for the greed of the all-powerful landlords soon turned emancipation into a mere instrument of peasant expropriation. After the Napoleonic wars the peasants’ few legal safeguards were swept away and between 1819 and 1850 they lost at least one-fifth of their land while the noble demesnes grew between 60 and 180 per cent.¹³ A class of landless labourers now cultivated them.

These three factors—the influence of the French Revolution, the

 

 

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rational economic argument of civil servants, and the greed of the nobility, determined the emancipation of the peasants in Prussia between 1807 and 1816. The influence of the Revolution was clearly decisive; for its armies had just pulverized Prussia and thus demonstrated with dramatic force the helplessness of old regimes which did not adopt modern methods, i.e. those patterned on the French. As in Livonia, emancipation was combined with the abolition of the modest legal protection which the peasantry had previously enjoyed. In return for the abolition of forced labour and feudal dues and for his new property-rights the peasant was obliged, among other losses, to give his former lord one-third or one-half of his old holding or an equivalent and crippling sum of money. The long and complex legal process of transi-tion was far from complete by 1848, but it was already evident that while the estate owners had benefited greatly and a smaller number of comfortable peasants somewhat, thanks to their new property-rights, the bulk of the peasantry were distinctly worse off and the landless labourers were increasing fast.*

 

Economically the result was beneficial in the long run, though the losses in the short run were—as often in major agrarian changes— serious. By 1830-31 Prussia had only just got back to the numbers of cattle and sheep of the beginning of the century, the landlords now owning a larger and the peasants a smaller share. On the other hand the area under tillage rose by well over a third and productivity by half in, roughly, the first half of the century.¹⁶ The surplus rural population clearly grew rapidly; and since rural conditions were dis-tinctly bad—the famine of 1846-8 was probably worse in Germany than anywhere else except Ireland and Belgium—it had plenty of incen-tive to migrate. And indeed of all peoples before the Irish Famine, the Germans provided the largest body of emigrants.

 

The actual legal steps to secure bourgeois systems of landed property were thus, as we have seen, taken mostly between 1789 and 1812. Their consequences, outside France and a few adjoining areas, made them-selves felt much more slowly, mostly because of the strength of social and economic reaction after Napoleon’s defeat. In general every further advance of liberalism pushed the legal revolutions a step further from theory to practice, every recovery of the old regimes- delayed

 

* The creation of large estates and landless labourers was encouraged by the lack of local industrial development and the production of one or two main export crops (chiefly grain). This lends itself easily to such organization. (In Russia at this time 90 per cent of commercial grain sales came from estates, only 10 per cent from peasant holdings.) On the other hand where local industrial development created a growing and varied market for town food near by, the peasant or small farmer had the advantage. Hence, while in Prussia the peasant emancipation expropriated the serf, in Bohemia the peasant emerged from liberation after 1848 into independence.”

 

 

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them, notably in Catholic countries where the secularization and sale of Church lands were among the most urgent of the liberal demands. Thus in Spain the temporary triumph of a liberal revolution in 1820 brought a new law of’unfettering’ (Desvinculacion) which allowed nobles to sell their lands freely; the restoration of absolutism abrogated it in 1823; the renewed victory of liberalism reaffirmed it in 1836 and so on. The actual volume of land transfers in our period, insofar as we can measure it, was therefore as yet modest, except in areas where an active body of middle class buyers and land-speculators stood ready to use their opportunities: on the plain of Bologna (North Italy) noble lands fell from 78 per cent of total value in 1789 through 66 per cent in 1804 to 51 per cent in 1835.¹⁶ On the other hand in Sicily 90 per cent of all land continued to remain in noble hands until much later.¹⁷*

 

There was one exception to this: the lands of the church. These vast and almost invariably ill-utilised and ramshackle estates—it has been claimed that two-thirds of the land in the Kingdom of Naples around 1760 was ecclesiastical¹⁹—had few defenders and only too many wolves hovering round them. Even in the absolutist reaction in Catholic Austria after the collapse of Joseph II’s enlightened despotism nobody suggested the return of the secularized and dissipated monastery lands. Thus in one commune in the Romagna (Italy) church lands fell from 42 • 5 per cent of the area in 1783 to 11 • 5 per cent in 1812; but the lost lands passed not only to bourgeois owners (who rose from 24 to 47 per cent) but also to nobles (who rose from 34 to 41 per cent).²⁰ Conse-quently it is not surprising that even in Catholic Spain the intermittent liberal governments managed by 1845 ^{t 0 S£}M off over half the church estates, most notably in the provinces in which ecclesiastical property was most concentrated or economic development was most advanced

 

(in fifteen provinces over three-quarters of all church estates had been sold).²¹

 

Unfortunately for liberal economic theory this large scale redistri-bution of land did not produce that class of enterprising and progressive landlords or farmers which had been confidently expected. Why should even a middle class purchaser—a city lawyer, merchant or speculator—in economically undeveloped and inaccessible areas saddle himself with the investment and trouble of transforming landed pro-perty into a soundly run business enterprise, instead of merely taking the place, from which he had been hitherto debarred, of the former noble or clerical landlord, whose powers he could now exercise with

 

* It has been plausibly suggested that this powerful rural bourgeoisie which ‘is in substance the social class guiding and regulating the march toward Italian unity’, by its very agrarian orientation, tended towards doctrinaire free trade, which gained Italian unity much goodwill from Britain, but also held back Italian industrialization.¹⁸

 

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more regard for cash and less for tradition and custom? Throughout vast areas of Southern Europe a new and harsher set of ‘barons’ thus reinforced the old. The great latifundist concentrations were slightly diminished, as in continental Southern Italy, left untouched, as in Sicily, or even reinforced, as in Spain. In such regimes the legal revolution thus reinforced the old feudality by a new; all the more so as the small purchaser, and especially the peasant, hardly benefited at all from the land-sales. However, in most of Southern Europe the age-old social structure remained strong enough to make even the thought of mass migration impossible. Men and women lived where their ancestors had done, and, if they had to, starved there. The mass exodus from Southern Italy for instance was a half-century away.

 

But even where the peasantry actually received the land, or were confirmed in its possession, as in France, parts of Germany, or Scandi-navia, they did not automatically, as hoped for, turn into the enter-prising class of small farmers. And this for the simple reason that while the peasantry wanted land, it rarely wanted a bourgeois agrarian economy.

 

Ill

 

For the old traditional system, inefficient and oppressive as it had been, was also a system of considerable social certainty and, at a most miserable level, of some economic security; not to mention that it was hallowed by custom and tradition. The periodic famines, the burden of labour which made men old at forty and women at thirty, were acts of God; they only became acts for which men were held responsible in times of abnormal hardship or revolution. The legal revolution, from the peasant’s point of view, gave nothing except some legal rights, but it took away much. Thus in Prussia emancipation gave him two-thirds or half the land he already tilled and freedom from forced labour and other dues; but it formally took away: his claim to assistance from the lord in times of bad harvest or cattle plague; his right to collect or buy cheap fuel from the lord’s forest; his right to the lord’s assistance in repairing or rebuilding his house; his right in extreme poverty to ask the lord’s help in paying taxes; his right to pasture animals in the lord’s forest. For the poor peasant it seemed a distinctly hard bargain. Church property might have been inefficient, but this very fact recommended it to the peasants, for on it their custom tended to become prescriptive right. The division and enclosure of common field, pasture and forest merely withdrew from the poor peasant or cottager resources and reserves to which he felt he (or rather he as part of the community) had a right. The free land market meant that he probably had to sell his

 

 

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land; the creation of a rural class of entrepreneurs, that the most hard-hearted and hard-headed exploited him instead of, or in addition to, the old lords. Altogether the introduction of liberalism on the land was like some sort of silent bombardment which shattered the social struc-ture he had always inhabited and left nothing in its place but the rich: a solitude called freedom.

 

Nothing was more natural than that the peasant poor or the entire rural population should resist as best it could, and nothing was more natural than that it should resist in the name of the age-old customary ideal of a stable and just society, i.e. in the name of church and legiti-mate king. If we except the peasant revolution of France (and even this was in 1789 neither generally anti-clerical nor anti-monarchical) virtually all important peasant movements in our period which were not directed against the foreign king or church, were ostensibly made for priest and ruler. The South Italian peasantry joined with the urban sub-proletariat to make a social counter-revolution against the Nea-politan Jacobins and the French in 1799 in the name of the Holy Faith and the Bourbons; and these also were the slogans of the Calabrian and Apulian brigand-guerrillas against the French occupation, as later against Italian unity. Priests and brigand-heroes led the Spanish peasantry in their guerrilla war against Napoleon. Church, king and a traditionalism so extreme as to be odd even in the early nineteenth century, inspired the Carlist guerrillas of the Basque country, Navarre, Castile, Leon and Aragon in their implacable warfare against the Spanish Liberals in the 1830s and 1840s. The Virgin of Guadalupe led the Mexican peasants in 1810. Church and Emperor fought the Bavarians and French under the lead of the publican Andreas Hofer in Tyrol in 1809. The Tsar and Holy Orthodoxy were what the Russians fought for in 1812-13. The Polish revolutionaries in Galicia knew that their only chance of raising the Ukrainian peasantry was through the Greek-Orthodox or Uniate priests; they failed, for the peasants pre-ferred Emperor to gentleman. Outside France, where Republicanism or Bonapartism captured an important section of the peasantry between 1791 and 1815, and where the Church had in many regions withered away even before the Revolution, there were few areas—perhaps most obviously those in which the Church was a foreign and long-resented ruler, as in the Papal Romagna and Emilia—of what we would today call left wing peasant agitation. And even in France Brittany and the Vendue remained fortresses of popular Bourbonism. The failure of the European peasantries to rise with Jacobin or Liberal, that is to say with lawyer, shopkeeper, estate administrator, official and landlord, doomed the revolutions of 1848 in those countries in which the French Revolu-

 

 

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tion had not given them the land; and where it had, their conservative fear of losing it, or their contentment, kept them equally inactive.

 

Of course the peasants did not rise for the real king, whom they hardly knew, but for the ideal of the just king who, if only he knew, would punish the transgressions of his underlings and lords; though often they did rise for the real church. For the village priest was one of them, the saints were certainly theirs and nobody else’s, and even the tumbledown ecclesiastical estates were sometimes more tolerable land-lords than the grasping laymen. Where the peasantry had land and was free, as in Tyrol, Navarre, or (without a king) in the Catholic cantons of the original William Tell Switzerland, its traditionalism was a defence of relative liberty against the encroachment of liberalism. Where it had not, it was more revolutionary. Any call to resist the conquest of foreigner and bourgeois, whether launched by priest, king or anyone else, was likely to produce not only the sack of the houses of gentry and lawyers in the city, but the ceremonial march with drums and saints’ banners to occupy and divide the land, the murder of landlords and the rape of their women, the burning of legal documents. For surely it was against the real wish of Christ and king that the peasant was poor and landless. It is this firm foundation of social revolutionary unrest which made peasant movements in the areas of serfdom and large estates, or in the areas of excessively small and sub-divided property, so unreliable an ally of reaction. All they needed to switch from a formally legitimist revolutionism to a formally left-wing one was the consciousness that king and church had gone over to the side of the local rich, and a revolutionary movement of men like themselves, speaking in their own terms. Garibaldi’s populist radicalism was perhaps the first of such movements, and the Neapolitan brigands hailed him with enthusiasm, while continuing to hail Holy Church and the Bourbons. Marxism and Bakuninism were to be even more effective. But the transfer of peasant rebellion from the political right to the political left wing had hardly begun to occur before 1848, for the massive impact of the bour-geois economy on the land, which was to turn endemic peasant rebelli-ousness into an epidemic, only really began to make itself felt after the middle of the century, and especially during and after the great agrarian depression of the 1880s.

 

IV

 

For large parts of Europe, as we have seen, the legal revolution came as something imposed from outside and above, a sort of artificial earth-quake rather than as the slide of long-loosened land. This was even

 

 

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more obviously the case where it was imposed on a wholly non-bourgeois economy conquered by a bourgeois one, as in Africa and Asia.

 

Thus in Algeria the conquering French came upon a characteris-tically medieval society with a firmly established and reasonably flourishing system of religious schools—it has been said that the French peasant soldiers were less literate than the people they conquered²²— financed by the numerous pious foundations.* The schools, being regarded merely as nurseries of superstition were closed; the religious lands were allowed to be bought by Europeans who understood neither their purpose nor their legal inalienability; and the school-masters, normally members of the powerful religious fraternities, emi-grated to the unconquered areas there to strengthen the forces of revolt under Abd-el-Kader. The systematic transfer of the land to simple alienable private property began, though its full effects were only to be felt much later. How indeed was the European liberal to understand the complex web of private and collective right and obligation which prevented, in a region like Kabylia, the land collapsing into an anarchy of minute patches and fragments of individually owned fig-trees?

 

Algeria had hardly been conquered by 1848. Vast areas of India had by then been directly administered by the British for more than a generation. Since no body of European settlers wished to acquire Indian land, no problem of simple expropriation arose. The impact of liberal-ism on Indian agrarian life was in the first instance a consequence of the British rulers’ search for a convenient and effective method of land-taxation. It was their combination of greed and legal individualism which produced catastrophe. The land tenures of pre-British India were as complex as any in traditional but not unchanging societies periodically overrun by foreign conquest, but rested, speaking broadly, on two firm pillars; the land belonged—de jure or de facto—to self-governing collectivities (tribes, clans, village communes, brotherhoods etc.), and the government received a proportion of its produce. Though some land was in some sense alienable, and some agrarian relations could be construed as tenancies, some rural payments as rent, there were in fact neither landlords, tenants, individual landed property or rent in the English sense. It was a situation wholly distasteful and incomprehensible to the British administrators and rulers, who pro-ceeded to invent the rural arrangement with which they were familiar. In Bengal, the first large area under direct British rule, the Mughal land tax had been collected by a species of tax-farmer or commission agent, the Zemindar. Surely these must be the equivalent of the

 

* These lands correspond to the lands given to the church for charitable or ritual purposes in medieval Christian countries.

 

I 6 l

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

British landlord, paying a tax assessed (as in the contemporary English land tax) on the whole of his estates, the class through which tax-collection ought to be organized, whose beneficent interest in the land must improve it, and whose political support of a foreign regime must give it stability? ‘I consider,’ wrote the subsequent Lord Teignmouth in the Minute ofJune 18, 1789, which outlined the ‘Permanent Settle-ment’ of Bengal land revenue, ‘the Zemindars as the proprietors of the soil, to the property of which they succeed by right of inheritance. . . .

 

The privilege of disposing of the land by sale or mortgage is derived from this fundamental right… .’^2S Varieties of this so-called Zemindari system were applied to about 19 per cent of the later area of British India.

 

Greed rather than convenience dictated the second type of revenue system, which eventually covered just over half of the area of British India, the Ryotwari. Here the British rulers, considering themselves the successors to an oriental despotism which in their not wholly ingenuous view was the supreme landlord of alt the land, attempted the herculean task of making individual tax assessments of every peasant, considering him as a small landed proprietor or rather tenant. The principle behind this, expressed with the habitual clarity of the able official, was agrarian liberalism at its purest. It demanded, in the words of Goldsmid and Wingate, ‘limitation of joint responsibility to a few cases where fields are held in common, or have been subdivided by coparceners; recog-nition of property in the soil; perfect freedom of management with regard to rent from sub-tenants, and sale, secured to its owners; facilities for effecting sales or transfers of land afforded, by the appor-tionment of the assessment on fields’.²⁴ The village community was entirely by-passed, in spite of the strong objections of the Madras Board of Revenue (1808-18), which rightly considered collective tax settlements with the village communities to be far more realistic, while also (and very typically) defending them as the best guarantee of private property. Doctrinairism and greed won, and ‘the boon of private property’ was conferred on the Indian peasantry.

 

Its disadvantages were so obvious that the land settlements of the subsequently conquered or occupied parts of North India (which covered about 30 per cent of the later area of British India) returned to a modified Zemindari system, but with some attempts to recognize the existing collectivities, most notably in the Punjab.

 

Liberal doctrine combined with disinterested rapacity to give another turn to the screw compressing the peasantry: they sharply increased the weight of taxation. (The land revenue of Bombay was more than doubled within four years of the conquest of the province in 1817-18.)

 

 

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Malthus’s and Ricardo’s doctrine of Rent became the basis of Indian revenue theory, through the influence of the utilitarian chieftain James Mill. This doctrine regarded the revenue from landed property as a pure surplus, which had nothing to do with value. It simply arose because some lands were more fertile than others and was appropriated, with increasingly baneful results for the whole economy, by landlords. To confiscate all of it therefore had no effect on a country’s wealth, except perhaps to prevent the growth of a landed aristocracy capable of hold-ing sound businessmen to ransom. In a country such as Britain the political strength of the agrarian interest would have made so radical a solution—which amounted to a virtual nationalization of the land— impossible; but in India the despotic power of an ideological conqueror could impose it. Admittedly at this point two liberal lines of argument crossed. The whiggish administrators of the eighteenth century and the older business interests took the common-sense view that ignorant smallholders on the verge of subsistence would never accumulate agrarian capital and thus improve the economy. They therefore fav-oured ‘Permanent Settlements’ of the Bengal type, which encouraged a class of landlords, fixed tax-rates for ever (i.e. at a diminishing rate) and thus encouraged savings and improvement. The utilitarian admin-istrators, headed by the redoubtable Mill, preferred land nationaliza-tion and a mass of small peasant-tenants to the danger of yet another landed aristocracy. Had India been in the least like Britain, the whig case would certainly have been overwhelmingly more persuasive, and after the Indian mutiny of 1857 it became so for political reasons. As it was, both views were equally irrelevant to Indian agriculture. More-over, with the development of the Industrial Revolution at home the sectional interests of the old East India Company (which were, among other things, to have a reasonably flourishing colony to milk) were increasingly subordinated to the general interests of British industry (which was, above all things, to have India as a market, a source of income, but not as a competitor). Consequently the utilitarian policy, which ensured strict British control and a markedly higher tax-yield, was preferred. The traditional pre-British limit of taxation was one-third of revenue; the standard basis for British assessment was one-half. Only after the doctrinaire utilitarianism had led to obvious impoverish-ment and the Revolt of 1857 was taxation reduced to a less extor-tionate rate.

 

The application of economic liberalism to the Indian land created neither a body of enlightened estate-owners nor a sturdy yeoman peasantry. It merely introduced another element of uncertainty, another complex web of parasites and exploiters of the village (e.g. the

 

 

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new officials of the British raj),^SB a considerable shift and concentration of ownership, a growth of peasant debt and poverty. In Cawnpore district (Uttar Pradesh) over 84 per cent of estates were owned by hereditary landowners at the time the East India Company took over. By 1840, 40 per cent of all estates had been purchased by their owners, by 1872, 62-6 per cent. Moreover, of the more than 3,000 estates or villages—roughly three-fifths of the total—transformed from the original owners in three districts of the North-west Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) by 1846-7, over 750 had been transferred to moneylenders.²⁸

 

There is much to be said for the enlightened and systematic despotism of the utilitarian bureaucrats who built the British raj in this period. They brought peace, much development of public services, adminis-trative efficiency, reliable law, and incorrupt government at the higher levels. But economically they failed in the most sensational manner. Of all the territories under the administration of European govern-ments, or governments of the European type, even including Tsarist Russia, India continued to be haunted by the most gigantic and murderous famines; perhaps—though statistics are lacking for the earlier period—increasingly so as the century wore on.

 

The only other large colonial (or ex-colonial) area where attempts to apply liberal land law were made, was Latin America. Here the old feudal colonization of the Spaniards had never shown any prejudice against the fundamental collective and communal land-tenures of the Indians, so long as the white colonists got what land they wanted. The independent governments, however, proceeded to liberalize in the spirit of the French Revolutionary and Benthamite doctrines which inspired them. Thus Bolivar decreed the individualization of community land in Peru (1824) ^{a n} d most of the new republics abolished entails in the manner of the Spanish liberals. Th* liberation of noble lands may have led to some reshuffling and dispersion of estates, though the vast hacienda {estancia,finca,fundo) remained the dominant unit of landowner-ship in most ofthe republics. The attack on communal property remained quite ineffective. Indeed, it was not really pressed seriously until after 1850. In fact, the liberalization of its political economy remained as artificial as the liberalization of its political system. In substance, parliaments, elections, land laws, etc., notwithstanding, the continent went on very much as before.

 

V

 

The revolution in land-tenure was the political aspect of the disruption of traditional agrarian society; its invasion by the new rural economy

 

 

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and the world market, its economic aspect. In the period from 1787 to 1848 this economic transformation was as yet imperfect, as can be measured by the very modest rates of migration. Railways and steam-ships had hardly yet begun to create a single agricultural world market until the great farming depression of the later nineteenth century. Local agriculture was therefore largely sheltered from international or even inter-provincial competition. Industrial competition had hardly as yet impinged much on the numerous village crafts and domestic manufactures, except perhaps to turn some of them to production for rather wider markets. New agricultural methods—outside the areas of successful capitalist agriculture—were slow to penetrate the village, though new industrial crops, notably sugar-beet, which spread in consequence of the Napoleonic discrimination against (British) cane-sugar and new food-crops, notably maize and potatoes, made striking advances. It took an extraordinary economic conjuncture, such as the immediate proximity of a highly industrial economy and the inhibition of normal development, to produce a real cataclysm in an agrarian society by purely economic means.

 

Such a conjuncture did exist, and such a cataclysm did occur in Ireland, and to a lesser extent, in India. What happened in India was simply the virtual destruction, within a few decades, of what had been a nourishing domestic and village industry which supplemented the rural incomes; in other words the deindustrialization of India. Between 1815 and 1832 the value of Indian cotton goods exported from the country fell from £1 • 3 millions to less than £100,000, while the import of British cotton goods increased sixteen times over. By 1840 an observer already warned against the disastrous effects of turning India into ‘the agricultural farm of England; she is a manufacturing country, her manufactures of various descriptions have existed for ages, and have never been able to be competed with by any nation wherever fair play has been given to them. . . . To reduce her now to an agricultural country would be an injustice to India.’*’ The description was mis-leading; for a leavening of manufacture had been, in India as in many other countries, an integral part of the agricultural economy in many regions. Consequently deindustrialization made the peasant village itself more dependent on the single, fluctuating fortune of the harvest.

 

The situation in Ireland was more dramatic. Here a population of small, economically backward, highly insecure tenants practising sub-sistence farming paid the maximum rent to a smallish body of foreign, non-cultivating, generally absentee landlords. Except in the north-east (Ulster) the country had long been deindustrialized by the mercantilist policy of the British government whose colony it was, and more

 

 

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recently by the competition of British industry. A single technical innovation—the substitution of the potato for the previously prevalent types of farming—had made a large increase in population possible; for an acre of land under potatoes can feed far more people than one under grass, or indeed under most other crops. The landlords’ demand for the maximum number of rent-paying tenants, and later also for a labour-force to cultivate the new farms which exported food to the expanding British market, encouraged the multiplication of tiny holdings: by 1841 in Connacht 64 per cent of all larger holdings were under five acres, without counting the unknown number of dwarf holdings under one acre. Thus during the eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries the population multiplied on such patches, living on little except 10-12 lb. of potatoes a day per person and—at least until the 1820s—some milk and an occasional taste of herring; a population unparalleled in Western Europe for its poverty.²⁸

 

Since there was no alternative employment—for industrialization was excluded—the end of this evolution was mathematically predic-table. Once the population had grown to the limits of the last potato patch carved out of the last piece ofjust cultivable bog, there would be catastrophe. Soon after the end of the French wars its advance signs appeared. Food shortage and epidemic disease began once again to decimate a people whose mass agrarian discontent is only too easily explained. The bad harvests and crop diseases of the middle forties merely provided the firing squad for an already condemned people. Nobody knows, or will ever precisely know, the human cost of the Great Irish Famine of 1847, which was by far the largest human catastrophe in European history during our period. Rough estimates suggest that something like one million people died of and through hunger and another million emigrated from the stricken island between 1846 and 1851. In 1820 Ireland had just under seven million inhabi-tants. In 1846 she had perhaps eight and a half. In 1851 she was reduced to six and a half and her population has gone down steadily through emigration since. ‘Heu dira fames!’ wrote a parish priest, re-verting to the tones of chroniclers in the dark ages, ‘Heu saeva hujus memorabilis anni pestilential’™ in those months when no children came to be christened in the parishes of Galway and Mayo, because none were born.

 

India and Ireland were perhaps the worst countries to be a peasant in between 1789 and 1848; but nobody who had the choice would have wished to be a farm-labourer in England either. It is generally agreed that the situation of this unhappy class deteriorated markedly after the middle 1790s, partly through economic forces, partly through the

 

 

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pauperizing ‘Speenhamland System’ (1795), a well-meant but mis-taken attempt to guarantee the labourer a minimum wage by subsi-dizing wages out of poor rates. Its chief effect was to encourage farmers to lower wages, and to demoralize the labourers. Their feeble and ignorant stirrings of revolt can be measured by the increase in offences against the game laws in the 1820s, by arson and offences against property in the 1830s and 1840s, but above all by the desperate, helpless ‘last labourers rising’, an epidemic of riot which spread spontaneously from Kent through numerous counties at the end of 1830 and was savagely repressed. Economic liberalism proposed to solve the labourers’ problem in its usual brisk and ruthless manner by forcing him to find work at an economic wage or to migrate. The New Poor Law of 1834, a statute of quite uncommon callousness, gave him poor relief only within the new workhouses (where he had to separate from wife and child in order to discourage the sentimental and unmalthusian habit of thoughtless procreation) and withdrawing the parish guarantee of a minimum livelihood. The cost of the poor law went down drastically (though at least a million Britons remained paupers up to the end of our period), and the labourers slowly began to move. Since agriculture was depressed their situation continued to be very miserable. It did not substantially improve until the 1850s.

 

Farm-labourers were indeed badly off everywhere, though perhaps in the most backward and isolated areas no worse off than usual. The unhappy discovery of the potato made it easy to depress their standard of life in large parts of Northern Europe, and substantial improvement in their situation did not occur, e.g. in Prussia, until the 1850s or 1860s. The situation of the self-sufficient peasant was probably rather better, though that of the smallholder was desperate enough in times of famine. A peasant country like France was probably less affected by the general agricultural depression after the boom of the Napoleonic wars than any other. Indeed a French peasant who looked across the Channel in 1840 and compared his situation and that of the English labourer with things in 1788 could hardly doubt which of the two had made the better bargain.* Meanwhile, from across the Atlantic, the American farmers observed the peasantry of the old world and congratulated themselves on their good fortune in not belonging to it.

 

* ‘Having been much among the peasantry and labouring class both at home and abroad, I must in truth s£y that a more civil, cleanly, industrious, frugal, sober or better-dressed people than the French peasantry, for persons in their condition . . . I have never known. In these respects they furnish a striking contrast with a considerable portion of the Scotch agricultural labourers, who are dirty and squalid So an excess; with many of the English, who are servile, broken-spirited and severely straitened in their means of living; with the poor Irish, who are half-clad and in a savage condition. . . .’ H. Colman, TAe Agricultural and Rural Economy of France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland (1848), 25-6.

 

 

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That  are indeed glorious times for the Engineers.

 

James Nasmyth, inventor of the steam-hammer¹

Decant de tels Umoins, o secte progressive,

 

Vanlez-nous Ie pouvoir de la locomotive,

 

Vantez-nous Ie vapeur et les chemins defer.

 

1. Pommier²

 

 

I

 

ONLY one economy was effectively industrialized by 1848, the British, and consequently dominated the world. Probably by the 1840s the USA and a good part of Western and Central Europe had stepped across, or were on, the threshold of industrial revolution. It was already reasonably certain that the USA would eventually be considered— within twenty years, thought Richard Cobden in the middle 1830s³—a serious competitor to the British, and by the 1840s Germans, though perhaps no one else, already pointed to the rapid industrial advance of their countrymen. But prospects are not achievements, and by the 1840s the actual industrial transformations of the non-English-speaking world were still modest. There were, for instance, by 1850 a total of little more than a hundred miles of railway line in the whole of Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Switzerland and the entire Balkan peninsula, and (omitting the USA) less than this in all the non-European conti-nents put together. If we omit Britain and a few patches elsewhere, the economic and social world of the 1840s can easily be made to look not so very different from that of 1788. Most of the population of the world, then as earlier, were peasants. In 1830 there was, after all, still only one western city of more than a million inhabitants (London), one of more than half a million (Paris) and—omitting Britain—only nineteen European cities of more than a hundred thousand.

 

This slowness of change in the non-British world meant that its economic movements continued, until the end of our period, to be controlled by the age-old-rhythm of good and bad harvests rather than by the new one of alternating industrial booms and slumps. The crisis of 1857 was probably the first that was both world-wide and caused by

 

 

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events other than agrarian catastrophe. This fact, incidentally, had the most far-reaching political consequences. The rhythm of change in industrial and non-industrial areas diverged between 1780 and 1848*.

 

The economic crisis which set fire to so much of Europe in 1846-8 was an old-style agrarian-dominated depression. It was in a sense the last, and perhaps worst, economic breakdown of the ancien rigime in economics. Not so in Britain, where the worst breakdown of the period of early industrialism occurred between 1839 ^anc* ^42 for purely ‘modern’ reasons, and indeed coincided with fairly low .corn-prices. The point of spontaneous social combustion in Britain was reached in the unplanned Chartist general strike of the summer of 1842 (the so-called ‘plug riots’). By the time it was reached on the continent in 1848, Britain was merely suffering the first cyclical depression of the long era of Victorian expansion, as also was Belgium, the other more or less industrial economy of Europe. A continental revolution without a corresponding British movement, as Marx foresaw, was doomed. What he did not foresee was that the unevenness of British and Continental development made it inevitable that the continent should rise alone.

 

Nevertheless, what counts about the period from 1789 to 1848 is not that by later standards its economic changes were small, but that fundamental changes were plainly taking place. The first of these was demographic. World population—and especially the population of the world within the orbit of the dual revolution—had begun that un-precedented ‘explosion’ which has in the course of 150 years or so multiplied its numbers. Since few countries before the nineteenth century kept anything corresponding to censuses, and these in general far from reliable,! we do not know accurately how rapidly population rose in this period; it was certainly unparalleled, and greatest (except perhaps in underpopulated countries filling empty and hitherto under-utilized spaces such as Russia) in the economically most advanced areas. The population of the USA (swollen by immigration, encouraged by the unlimited spaces and resources of a continent) increased almost six times over from 1790 to 1850, from four to twenty-three millions. The population of the United Kingdom almost doubled between 1800 and 1850, almost trebled between 1750 and 1850. The population of Prussia (1846 boundaries) almost doubled from 1800 to 1846, as did that of European Russia (without Finland). The populations of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, and large parts of Italy almost doubled between 1750 and 1850, but increased at a less extraordinary rate

 

* The world triumph of the industrial sector once more tended to make it converge, though in a different manner.

t The first British census was that of 1801; thefir&treasonably adequate one, that of 1831.

 

 

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during our period; that of Spain and Portugal increased by a third. Outside Europe we are less well-informed, though it would seem that the population of China increased at a rapid rate in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, until European intervention and the tradi-tional cyclical movement of Chinese political history produced the breakdown of the flourishing administration of the Manchu dynasty, which was at the peak of its effectiveness in this period.* In Latin America it probably increased at a rate comparable to Spain’s.⁴ There is no sign of any population explosion in other parts of Asia. Africa’s population probably remained stable. Only certain empty spaces popu-lated by white settlers increased at a really extraordinary rate, like Australia which in 1790 had virtually no white inhabitants but by 1851

had a half-million.

This remarkable increase in population naturally stimulated the economy immensely, though we ought to regard it as a consequence rather than as exogenous cause of the economic revolution; for without it so rapid a population growth could not have been maintained for more than a limited period. (Indeed, in Ireland, where it was not supple-mented by constant economic revolution, it was not maintained.) It produced more labour, above all more young labour and more con-sumers. The world or our period was a far younger world than any previous one: filled with children, and with young couples or people in the prime of their lives.

 

The second major change was in communications. Railways were admittedly only in their infancy in 1848, though already of considerable practical importance in Britain, the USA, Belgium, France and Ger-many, but even before their introduction the improvement was, by former standards, breathtaking. The Austrian empire, for instance (omitting Hungary) added over 30,000 miles of road between 1830 and 1847, ^{t n u s} multiplying its highway mileage by two-and-a-third.⁵ Belgium almost doubled its road network between 1830 and 1850, and even Spain, thanks largely to French occupation, almost doubled its tiny highway length. The USA, as usual more gigantic in its enterprises than any other country, multiplied its network of mail-coach roads more than eight times—from 21,000 miles in 1800 to 170,000 in 1850.⁶ While Britain acquired her system of canals, France built 2,000 miles of them (1800-47), ^{a n c} * ^{t n e} USA opened such crucial waterways as the Erie and the Chesapeake and Ohio. The total shipping tonnage of the western world more than doubled between 1800 and the early 1840s, and already steamships linked Britain and France (1822) and plied up and down the

 

* The usual dynastic cycle in China lasted about 300 years; the Manchu came to power in the mid seventeenth century.

 

 

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Danube. (There were in 1840 about 370,000 tons of steam shipping compared to nine million of sail, though in fact this may have already represented about one sixth of carrying capacity.) Here again the Americans outdid the rest of the world, racing even the British for the possession of the largest merchant fleet.*

 

Nor would we underestimate the sheer improvement in speed and carrying capacity thus achieved. No doubt the coach-service which drove the Tsar of all the Russias from St Petersburg to Berlin in four days (1834) was not available to lesser humans; but the new rapid mail (copied from the French and English), which after 1824 drove from Berlin to Magdeburg in fifteen hours instead of two and half days, was. The railway and Rowland Hill’s brilliant invention of the standardized charge for postal matter in 1839 (supplemented by the invention of the adhesive stamp in 1841) multiplied the mails; but even before both, and in countries less advanced than Britain, it increased rapidly: between 1830 and 1840 the number of letters annually sent in France rose from 64 to 94 millions. Sailing ships were not merely faster and more reliable: they were on average also bigger.⁷

Technically, no doubt, these improvements were not as deeply inspiring as the railways, though the ravishing bridges, curving freshly across the rivers, the great artificial waterways and docks, the splendid clipper-ships gliding like swans in full sail, and the elegant new mail-coaches were and remain some of the most beautiful products of industrial design. But as means of facilitating travel and transport, of linking town and country, poor and rich regions, they were admirably effective. The growth of population owed much to them; for what in pre-industrial times holds it back is not so much the high normal mortality of men, but the periodic catastrophes of—often very localized —famine and food shortage. If famine became less menacing in the western world in this period (except in years of almost universal harvest failure such as 1816-7 and 1846-8), it was primarily because of such improvements in transport, as well as, of course, the general im-provement in the efficiency of government and administration (cf chapter 10).

 

The third major change was, naturally enough, in the sheer bulk of commerce and migration. No doubt not everywhere. There is, for instance, no sign that Calabrian or Apulian peasants were yet prepared to migrate, nor that the amount of goods annually brought to the great fair of Nijniy Novgorod increased to any startling extent.⁸ But taking the world of the dual revolution as a whole, the movement of men and

 

* They almost achieved their object by i860, before the iron ship once again gave the British supremacy.

 

 

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THE  AGE  OF  REVOLUTION

 

goods already had the momentum of a landslide. Between 1816 and 1850 something like five million Europeans left their native countries (almost four-fifths of them for the Americas), and within countries the currents of internal migration were far vaster. Between 1780 and 1840 the total international trade of the western world more than trebled; between 1780 and 1850 it multiplied more than fourfold. By later standards all this was no doubt very modest,* but by earlier ones—and these after all were what contemporaries compared their age with—they were beyond the wildest dreams.

 

II

 

What was more to the point, after about 1830—the turning-point which the historian of our period cannot miss, whatever his particular field of interest—the rate of economic and social change accelerated visibly and rapidly. Outside Britain the period of the French Revolution and its wars brought relatively little immediate advance, except in the USA which leaped ahead after its own war of independence, doubling its cultivated area by 1810, multiplying its shipping sevenfold, and in general demonstrating its future capacities. (Not only the cotton-gin, but the steam-ship, the early development of assembly-line production —Oliver Evans’ flour-mill on a conveyor-belt—are American advances of this period.) The foundations of a good deal of later industry, especially heavy industry, were laid in Napoleonic Europe, but not much survived the end of the wars, which brought crisis everywhere. On the whole the period from 1815 to 1830 was one of setbacks, or at the best of slow recovery. States put their finances in order— normally by rigorous deflation (the Russians were the last to do so in 1841). Industries tottered under the blows of crisis and foreign com-petition; the American cotton industry was very badly hit. Urbanization was slow: until 182& the French rural population grew as fast as that of the cities. Agriculture languished, especially in Germany. Nobody observing the economic growth of this period, even outside the for-midably expanding British economy, would be inclined to pessimism; but few would judge that any country other than Britain and perhaps the USA was on the immediate threshold of industrial revolution. To take an obvious index of the new industry: outside Britain, the USA and France the number of steam engines and the amount of steam power in the rest of the world in the 1820s was scarcely worth the attention of the statistician.

 

* Thus between 1850 and 1888 twenty-two million Europeans emigrated, and in 1889 total international trade amounted to nearly £3,400 million compared to less than £600 million in 1840.

 

 

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After 1830 (or thereabouts) the situation changed swiftly and dras-tically; so much so that by 1840 the characteristic social problems of industrialism—the new proletariat, the horrors of uncontrolled break-neck urbanization—were the commonplace of serious discussion in Western Europe and the nightmare of the politician and administrator. The number of steam engines in Belgium doubled, their horsepower almost trebled, between 1830 and 1838: from 354 (with 11,000 hp) to 712 (with 36,000). By 1850 the small, but by now very heavily indus-trialized, country had almost 2,300 engines of 66,000 horse-power,⁹ and almost 6 million tons of coal production (nearly three times as much as in 1830). In 1830 there had been no joint-stock companies in Belgian mining; by 1841 almost half the coal output came from such companies.

 

It would be monotonous to quote analogous data for France, for German states, Austria or any other countries and areas in which the foundations of modern industry were laid in these twenty years: Krupps of Germany, for instance, installed their first steam engine in, 1835, the first shafts of the great Ruhr coalfield were sunk in 1837, and the first coke-fired furnace was set up in the great Czech iron centre of Vit-kovice in 1836, Falck’s first rolling-mill in Lombardy in 1839-40. All the more monotonous as—with the exception of Belgium, and perhaps France—the period of really massive industrialization did not occur until after 1848. 1830-48 marks the birth of industrial areas, of famous industrial centres and firms whose names have become familiar from that day to this; but hardly even their adolescence, let alone their maturity. Looking back on the 1830s we know what that atmosphere of excited technical experiment, of discontented and innovating enterprise meant. It meant the opening of the American Middle West; but Gyrus McCormick’s first mechanical reaper (1834) and the first 78 bushels of wheat sent eastwards from Chicago in 1838 only take their place in history because of what they led to after 1850. In 1846 the factory which risked manufacturing a hundred reapers was still to be congratulated on its daring: ‘it was difficult indeed to find parties with sufficient boldness or pluck and energy, to undertake the hazardous enterprise of building reapers, and quite as difficult to prevail upon farmers to take their chances of cutting their grain with them, or to look favourably upon such innovation.’¹⁰ It meant the systematic building of the railways and heavy industries of Europe, and incidentally, a revolution in the tech-niques of investment; but if the brothers Pereire had not become the great adventurers of industrial finance after 1851, we should pay little attention to the project of ‘a lending and borrowing office where industry will borrow from all capitalists on the most favourable terms through

 

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

the intermediary of the richest bankers acting as guarantors’, which they vainly submitted to the new French government in 1830.¹¹

 

As in Britain, consumer goods—generally textiles, but also sometimes foodstuffs—led these bursts ofindustrialization; but capital goods—iron, steel, coal, etc.—were already more important than in the first British industrial revolution: in 1846 17 per cent of Belgian industrial em-ployment was in capital goods industries as against between 8 and 9 per cent in Britain. By 1850 three-quarters of all Belgian industrial steam-power was in mining and metallurgy.¹² As in Britain, the average new industrial establishment—factory, forge or mine—was rather small, surrounded by a great undergrowth of cheap, technically unrevolu-tionized domestic, putting-out or sub-contracted labour, which grew with the demands of the factories and the market and would eventually be destroyed by the further advances of both. In Belgium (1846) the average number in a woollen, linen and cotton factory establishment were a mere 30, 35 and 43 workers, in Sweden (1838) the average per textile ‘factory’ was a mere 6 to 7.¹⁸ On the other hand there are signs of rather heavier concentration than in Britain, as indeed one might expect where industry developed later, sometimes as an enclave in agrarian environments, using the experience of the earlier pioneers, based on a more highly developed technology, and often enjoying greater planned support from governments. In Bohemia (1841) three-quarters of all cotton-spinners were employed in mills with over 100 workers each, and almost half in fifteen mills with over 200 each.¹⁴ (On the other hand virtually all weaving until the 1850s was done on handlooms.) This was naturally even more so in the heavy industries which now came to the fore: the average Belgian foundry (1838) had 80 workers, the average Belgian coal-mine (1846) something like 150;¹⁶ not to mention the industrial giants like CockerilFs of Seraing, which employed 2,000.

 

The industrial landscape was thus rather like a series of lakes studded with islands. If we take the country in general as the lake, the islands represent industrial cities, rural complexes (such as the networks of manufacturing villages so common in the central German and Bohe-mian mountains) or industrial areas: textile towns like Mulhouse, Lille or Rouen in France, Elberfeld-Barmen (the home of Frederick Engels’ pious cotton-master family) or Krefeld in Prussia, southern Belgium or Saxony. If we take the broad mass of independent artisans, peasants turning out goods for sale in the winter season, and domestic or putting-out workers as the lake, the islands represent the mills, factories, mines and foundries of various sizes. The bulk of the landscape was still very much water; or—to adapt the metaphor a little more closely to reality

 

 

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—the reed-beds of small scale or dependent production which formed round the industrial and commercial centres. Domestic and other industries founded earlier as appendages of feudalism, also existed. Most of these—e.g. the Silesian linen-industry—were in rapid and tragic decline.¹⁶ The great cities were hardly industrialized at all, though they maintained a vast population of labourers and craftsmen to serve the needs of consumption, transport and general services. Of the world’s towns with over 100,000 inhabitants, apart from Lyon, only the British and American ones included obviously industrial centres: Milan, for instance, in 1841 had a mere two small steam engines. In fact the typical industrial centre—in Britain as well as on the continent—was a small or medium-sized provincial town or a complex of villages.

 

In one important respect, however, continental—and also to some extent American—industrialization, differed from the British. The pre-conditions for its spontaneous development by private enterprise were far less favourable. As we have seen, in Britain there was, after some 200 years of slow preparation, no real shortage of any of the factors of production and no really crippling institutional obstacle to full capitalist development. Elsewhere this was not so. In Germany, for instance, there was a distinct capital shortage; the very modesty of the standard of life among the German middle classes (beautifully transformed though it was into the charming austerities of Biedermayer interior decoration) demonstrates it. It is often forgotten that by contemporary Germany standards Goethe, whose house in Weimar corresponds to rather more —but not much more—than the standard of comfort of the modest bankers of the British Clapham sect, was a very wealthy man indeed. In the 1820s Court ladies and even princesses in Berlin wore simple percale dresses throughout the year; if they owned a silk dress, they saved it for special occasions.¹⁷ The traditional gild system of master, journey-man and apprentice, still stood in the way of business enterprise, of the mobility of skilled labour, and indeed of all economic change: the obligation for a craftsman to belong to a gild was abolished in Prussia in 1811, though not the gilds themselves, whose members were, more-over, politically strengthened by the municipal legislation of the period. Guild production remained almost intact until the 1830s and 40s. Else-where the full introduction of Gewerbefreiheit had to wait until the 1850s.

 

A multiplicity of petty states, each with their controls and vested interests, still inhibited rational development. Merely to construct a general customs union (excluding Austria), as Prussia succeeded in doing in its own interest and by the pressure of its strategic position be-tween 1818 and 1834, was a triumph. Each government, mercantilist

 

 

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and paternal, showered its regulations and administrative supervisions on the humble subject; to the benefit of social stability, but to the irrita-tion of the private entrepreneur. The Prussian State controlled the qual-ity and fair price of handicraft production, the activities of the Silesian domestic linen-weaving industry, and the operations of mine-owners on the right bank of the Rhine. Government permission was required before a man could open a mine, and could be withdrawn after he was in business.

Clearly under such circumstances (which can be paralleled in numerous other states), industrial development had to operate rather differently from the British way. Thus throughout the continent government took a much greater hand in it, not merely because it was already accustomed to, but because it had to. William I, King of the United Netherlands, in 1822 founded the Soctiti Ginkale pour favoriser I’Industrie Rationale des Pays Bas, endowed with State land, with 40 per cent or so of its shares subscribed by the King and 5 per cent guaranteed to all other subscribers. The Prussian State continued to operate a large proportion of the country’s mines. Without exception the new railway systems were planned by Governments and, if not actually built by them, encouraged by the grant of favourable con-cessions and the guarantee of investments. Indeed, to this day Britain is the only country whose railway system was built entirely by risk-bearing and profit-making private enterprise, unencouraged by bonuses and guarantees to investors and entrepreneurs. The earliest and best-planned of these networks was the Belgian, projected in the early ‘thirties, in order to detach the newly independent country from the (primarily waterborne) communication system based on Holland. Political difficulties and the reluctance of the conservative grande bourgeoisie to exchange safe for speculative investments postponed the systematic construction of the French network, which the Chamber had decided on in 1833; poverty of resources that of the Austrian, which the State decided to build in 1842, and the Prussian plans.

 

For similar reasons continental enterprise depended far more than the British on an adequately modernized business, commercial and banking legislation and financial apparatus. The French Revolution in fact provided both: Napoleon’s legal codes, with their stress of legally guaranteed freedom of contract, their recognition of bills of ex-change and other commerical paper, and their arrangements for joint-stock enterprise (such as the sociiti anonym and the commandite, adopted all over Europe except in Britain and Scandinavia) became the general model for the world for this reason. Moreover, the devices for financing industry which sprang from the fertile brain of those revolutionary

 

 

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young Saint-Simonians, the brothers Pereire, were welcomed abroad. Their greatest triumph had to await the world boom era of the 1850s; but already in the 1830s the Belgian Societe Ginerale began to practise investment banking of the kind the Pereires envisaged and financiers in Holland (though not yet listened to by the bulk of businessmen) adopted the Saint-Simonian ideas. In essence these ideas aimed at mobilizing a variety of domestic capital resources which would not spontaneously have gone into industrial development, and whose owners would not have known where to invest them had they wanted to, through banks and investment trusts. After 1850 it produced the characteristic continental (especially German) phenomenon of the large bank acting as investor as much as banker, and thereby dominat-ing industry and facilitating its early concentration.

 

Ill

 

However, the economic development of this period contains one gigantic paradox: France. On paper no country should have ad-vanced more rapidly. It possessed, as we have seen, institutions ideally suited to capitalist development. The ingenuity and inventiveness of its entrepreneurs was without parallel in Europe. Frenchmen invented or first developed the department store, advertising, and, guided by the supremacy of French science, all manner of technical innovations and achievements—photography (with Nicephore Niepce and Daguerre), the Leblanc soda process, the Berthollet chlorine bleach, electro-plating, galvanization. French financiers were the most inventive of the world. The country possessed large capital reserves which it exported, aided by its technical expertise, all over the continent—and even, after 1850, with such things as the London General Omnibus Company, to Britain. By 1847 about 2,250 million francs had gone abroad¹⁸— a quantity second only to the British and astronomically bigger than any one else’s. Paris was a centre of international finance lagging only a little behind London; indeed, in times of crisis such as 1847, stronger. French enterprise in the 1840s founded the gas companies of Europe— in Florence, Venice, Padua, Verona—and obtained charters to found them all over Spain, Algeria, Cairo and Alexandria. French enterprise was about to finance the railways of the European continent (except those of Germany and Scandinavia).

 

Yet in fact French economic development at the base was distinctly slower than that of other countries. Her population grew quietly, but it did not leap upwards. Her cities (with the exception of Paris) ex-panded only modestly; indeed in the early 1830s some contracted. Her

 

 

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industrial power in the late 1840s was no doubt larger than that of all other continental European countries—she possessed as much steam-power as the rest of the continent put together—but she had lost ground relatively to Britain and was about to lose it relatively to Germany. Indeed, in spite of her advantages and early start, France never became a major industrial power comparable to Britain, Germany and the USA.

 

The explanation of this paradox is, as we have seen (see above pp. 69-70), the French Revolution itself, which took away with the hand of Robespierre much of what it gave with the hand of the Constituent Assembly. The capitalist part of the French economy was a super-structure erected on the immovable base of the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie. The landless free labourers merely trickled into the cities; the standardized cheap goods which made the fortunes of the pro-gressive industrialist elsewhere lacked a sufficiently large and expanding market. Plenty of capital was saved, but why should it be invested in home industy?¹⁹ The wise French entrepreneur made luxury goods and not goods for mass consumption; the wise financier promoted foreign rather than home industries. Private enterprise and economic growth go together only when the latter provides higher profits for the former than other forms of business. In France it did not, though through France it fertilized the economic growth of other countries.

 

At the opposite extreme from France stood the USA. The country suffered from a shortage of capital, but it was ready to import it in any quantities, and Britain stood ready to export it. It suffered from an acute shortage of manpower, but the British Isles and Germany ex-ported their surplus population, after the great hunger of the middle forties, in millions. It lacked sufficient men of technical skill; but even these—Lancashire cotton workers, Welsh miners and iron-men—could be imported from the already industrialized sector of the world, and the characteristic American knack of inventing labour-saving and above all labour-simplifying machinery was already fully deployed. The USA lacked merely settlement and transport to open up its apparently endless territories and resources. The mere process of internal expansion was enough to keep its economy in almost unlimited growth, though American settlers, Governments, missionaries and traders already ex-panded overland to the Pacific or pushed their trade—backed by the most dynamic and second largest merchant fleet of the world—across the oceans, from Zanzibar to Hawaii. Already the Pacific and the Carribbean were the chosen fields of American empire.

 

Every institution of the new republic encouraged accumulation, ingenuity and private enterprise. A vast new population, settled in the

 

 

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seaboard cities and the newly occupied inland states, demanded the same standardized personal, household and farm goods and equipment and provided an ideally homogeneous market. The rewards of invention and enterprise were ample: and the inventors of the steamship (1807-13), the humble tack (1807), the screw-cutting machine (1809), the artificial denture (1822), insulated wire (1827-31), the revolver (1835), the idea of the typewriter and sewing machine (1843-6) the rotary printing press (1846) and a host of pieces of farm machinery pursued them. No economy expanded more rapidly in this period than the American, even though its really headlong rush was only to occur after i860.

 

Only one major obstacle stood in the way of the conversion of the USA into the world economic power which it was soon to become: the conflict between an industrial and farming north and a semi-colonial south. For while the North benefited from the capital, labour and skills of Europe—and notably Britain—as an independent economy, the South (which imported few of these resources) was a typical dependent economy of Britain. Its very success in supplying the booming factories of Lancashire with almost all their cotton perpetuated its dependence, comparable to that which Australia was about to develop on wool, the Argentine on meat. The South was for free trade, which enabled it to sell to Britain and in return to buy cheap British goods; the North, almost from the beginning (1816), protected the home industrialist heavily against any foreigner—i.e. the British—who would then have undersold him. North and South competed for the territories of the West—the one for slave plantations and backward self-sufficient hill squatters, the other for mechanical reapers and”mass slaughterhouses; and until the age of the trans-continental railroad the South, which controlled the Mississippi delta through which the Middle West found its chief outlet, held some strong economic cards. Not until the Civil War of 1861-5—which was in effect the unification of America by and under Northern capitalism—was the future of the American economy settled.

 

The other future giant of the world economy, Russia, was as yet economically negligible, though forward-looking observers already predicted that its vast size, population and resources must sooner or later come into their own. The mines and manufactures created by eighteenth-century Tsars with landlords or feudal merchants as em-ployers, serfs as labourers, were slowly declining. The new industries— domestic and small-scale textile works—only began a really noticeable expansion in the 1860s. Even the export of corn to the west from the fertile black earth belt of the Ukraine made only moderate progress.

 

 

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Russian Poland was rather more advanced, but, like the rest of Eastern Europe, from Scandinavia in the north to the Balkan peninsula in the south, the age of major economic transformation was not yet at hand. Nor was it in Southern Italy and Spain, except for small patches of Catalonia and the Basque country. And even in Northern Italy, where economic changes were very much larger, they were far more obvious as yet in agriculture (always, in this region, a major outlet for capital investment and business enterprise) and in trade and shipping than in manufactures. But the development of these was handicapped all over Southern Europe by the acute shortage of what was then still the only important source of industrial power, coal.

 

One part of the world thus swept forward towards industrial power; another lagged. But the two phenomena are not unconnected with each other. Economic stagnation, sluggishness, or even regression was the product of economic advance. For how could the relatively backward economies resist the force—or in certain instances the attraction—of the new centres of wealth, industry and commerce? The English and certain other European areas could plainly undersell all competitors. To be the workshop of the world suited them. Nothing seemed more ‘natural’ than that the less advanced should produce food and perhaps minerals, exchanging these non-competitive goods for British (or other West-European) manufactures. The sun,’ Richard Cobden told the Italians ‘is your coal’.²⁰ Where local power was in the hands of large landowners or even progressive farmers or ranchers, the exchange suited both sides. Cuban plantation owners were quite happy to make their money by sugar, and to import the foreign goods which allowed the foreigners to buy sugar. Where local manufacturers could make their voice heard, or local governments appreciated the advantages of balanced economic development or merely the disadvantages of dependence, the dis-position was less sunny. Frederick List, the German economist—as usual wearing the congenial costume of philosophic abstraction—rejected an international economy which in effect made Britain the chief or only industrial power and demanded protectionism; and so, as we have seen—minus the philosophy—did the Americans.

 

All this assumed that an economy’was politically independent and strong enough to accept or reject the role for which the pioneer in-dustrialization of one small sector of the world had cast it. Where it was not independent, as in colonies, it had no choice. India, as we have seen, was in the process of de-industrialization, Egypt provided an even more vivid illustration of the process. For there the local ruler, Mohammed AIi, had in fact systematically set out to turn his country into a modern, i.e. among other things an industrial, economy. Not only

 

 

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did he encourage the growing of cotton for the world market (from 1821), but by 1838 he had invested the very considerable sum of £12 millions in industry, which employed perhaps thirty to forty thousand workers. What would have happened had Egypt been left to herself, we do not know. For what did happen was that the Anglo-Turkish Convention of 1838 forced foreign traders on to the country, thus under-mining the foreign trade monopoly through which Mohammed AIi had operated; and the defeat of Egypt by the West in 1839-41 forced him to reduce his army, and therefore removed most of the incentive which had led him to industrialize.²¹ Not for the first or last time in the nineteenth century the gunboats of the west ‘opened’ a country to trade, i.e. to the superior competition of the industrialized sector of the world. Who, looking at Egypt in the time of the British protectorate at the end of the century, would have recognized the country which had, fifty years earlier—and to the disgust of Richard Cobden*—been the first non-white state to seek the modern way out of economic backwardness?

 

Of all the economic consequences of the age of dual revolution this division between the ‘advanced’ and the ‘underdeveloped’ countries proved to be the most profound and the most lasting. Roughly speaking by 1848 it was clear which countries were to belong to the first group, i.e. Western Europe (minus the Iberian peninsula), Germany, Northern Italy and parts of central Europe, Scandinavia, the USA and perhaps the colonies settled by English-speaking migrants. But it was equally clear that the rest of the world was, apart from small patches, lagging, or turning—under the informal pressure of western exports and imports or the military pressure of western gunboats and military-expeditions— into economic dependencies of the west. Until the Russians in the 1930s developed means of leaping this chasm between the ‘backward’ and the ‘advanced’, it would remain immovable, untraversed, and in-deed growing wider, between the minority and the majority of the world’s inhabitants. No fact has determined the history of the twentieth century more firmly than this.

 

* ‘All this waste is going on with the best raw cotton, which ought to be sold to us. . . .

This is not all the mischief, for the very hands that are driven into such manufactures are torn from the cultivation of the soil.’ Morley, Life of Cobden, Chapter 3.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

l 8 l

 

ts

 

CHAPTERlO

 

THE CAREER OPEN TO TALENT

 

One day I walked with one oft/use middle-class gentlemen into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of town in which the factory workers lined. I declared that I had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company, he remarked: ‘Andyet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sirl’

 

1. Engela, Condition of the Working Class in England¹

 

L’habitude prttialut parmi les nouveauxfinanciersdtfairt publier dans Usjournaux Ie menu des diners et les nomsjdes convives.

 

M . Capefigue*

 

 

I

 

T H E formal institutions overthrown or founded by a revolution are easily discernible, but they do not measure its effects. The chief result of the Revolution in France was to put an end to aristocratic society. Not to ‘aristocracy’ in the sense of hierarchy of social status distinguished by titles or other visible marks of exclusiveness, and often modelling itself on the prototype of such hierarchies, nobility ‘of blood’. Societies built on individual careerism welcome such visible and established marks of success. Napoleon even recreated a formal nobility of sorts, which joined the surviving old aristocrats after 1815. Nor did the end of aristocratic society mean the end of aristocratic influence. Rising classes naturally tend to see the symbols of their wealth and power in terms of what their former superior groups have established as the standards of comfort, luxury or pomp. The wives of enriched Cheshire drapers would become ‘ladies’, instructed by the numerous books of etiquette and gracious living which multiplied for this purpose from the 1840s, for the same reason as Napoleonic war-profiteers ap-preciated a baron’s title, or that bourgeois salons were filled with ‘velvet, gold, mirrors, some poor imitations of Louis XV chairs and other furniture . . . English styles for the servants and horses, but with-out the aristocratic spirit’. What could be prouder than the boast of some banker, sprung from who knows where, that ‘When I appear in my box at the theatre, all lorgnettes are turned on me, and I receive an almost royal ovation?’³

 

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Moreover, a culture as profoundly formed by court and aristocracy as the French would not lose the imprint. Thus the marked preoccupa-tion of French prose literature with subtle psychological analyses of personal relationships (which can be traced back to the seventeenth-century aristocratic writers), or the formalized eighteenth-century pattern of sexual campaigning and advertised lovers or mistresses, be-came an integral part of ‘Parisian’ bourgeois civilization. Formerly kings had official mistresses; now successful stock-jobbers joined them. Courtesans granted their well-paid favours to advertise the success of bankers, who could pay for them as well as of young bloods who ruined their estates by them. Indeed in many ways the Revolution preserved aristocratic characteristics of French culture in an exceptionally pure form, for the same reason as the Russian Revolution has preserved classical ballet and the typical nineteenth-century bourgeois attitude-to ‘good literature’ with exceptional fidelity. They were taken over by it, assimilated to it, as a desirable heritage from the past, and henceforth protected against the normal evolutionary erosion by it.

 

And yet the old regime was dead, even though the fishermen of Brest in 1832 regarded the cholera as a punishment by God for the deposition of the legitimate king. Formal republicanism among the peasantry was slow to spread beyond the Jacobin Midi and some long dechristianized areas, but in the first genuine universal election, that of May 1848, legitimism was already confined to the West and the poorer central departments. The political geography of modern rural France was already substantially recognizable. Higher up the social scale, the Bourbon Restoration did not restore the old rdgime; or, rather, when Charles X tried to do so he was thrown out. Restoration society was that of Balzac’s capitalists and careerists, of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, rather than that of the returned emigre dukes. A geological epoch separates it from the ‘sweetness of life’ of the 1780s to which Talleyrand looked back. Balzac’s Rastignac is far nearer to Maupas-sant’s Bel-Ami, the typical figure of the 1880s, or even to Sammy Ghck, the typical one of Hollywood in the 1940s, than to Figaro, the non-aristocratic success of the 1780s.

 

In a word the society of post-revolutionary France was bourgeois in its structure and values. It was the society of the parvenu, i.e. the self-made man, though this was not completely obvious except when the country was itself governed by parvenus, i.e. when it was republican or bonapartist. It may not seem excessively revolutionary to us, that half the French peerage in 1840 belonged to families of the old nobility, but to contemporary French bourgeois the fact that half had been commoners in 1789 was very much more striking; especially when they

 

 

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looked at the exclusive social hierarchies of the rest of continental Europe. The phrase ‘when good Americans die they go to Paris’ ex-presses what Paris became in the nineteenth century, though it did not fully become the parvenu’s paradise until the Second Empire. London, or even more Vienna, St Petersburg or Berlin, were capitals in which money could not yet buy everything, at any rate in the first generation. In Paris, there was very little worth buying that was beyond its reach.

 

This domination of the new society was not peculiar to France; but if we except the democratic USA it was in certain superficial respects both more obvious and more official in France, though not in fact more profound than in Britain or the Low Countries. In Britain the great chefs were still those who worked for noblemen, like Careme for the Duke of Wellington (he had previously served Talleyrand), or for the oligarchic clubs, like Alexis Soyer of the Reform Club. In France the expensive public restaurant, started by cooks of the nobility who lost their jobs during the Revolution, was already established. A change of world is implied in the title-page of the manual of classical French cookery which read ‘by A. Beauvilliers, ancien officier de MONSIEUR, Comte de Provence . . . et actuellement Restaurateur, rue de Richelieu no. 26, la Grande Taverne de Londres’.⁴ The gourmand—a species invented during the Restoration and propagated by Brillat-Savarin’s Almanack des Gourmands from 1817—already went to the Cafe Anglais or the Cafe de Paris to eat dinners not presided over by hostesses. In Britain the press was still a vehicle of instruction, invective and political pressure. It was in France that Emile Girardin (1836) founded the modern newspaper—La Presse—political but cheap, aimed at the accumulation of advertising revenue, and made attractive to its readers by gossip, serial novels, and various other stunts.* (French pioneering in these dubious fields is still recalled by the very words ‘journalism’ and ‘publicity’ in English, ‘Reklame’ and ‘Annonce’ in German.) Fashion, the department store, the public shop-window which Balzac hymnedf were French inventions, the product of the 1820s. The Revolution brought that obvious career open to talents, the theatre, into ‘good society’ at a time when its social status in aristocratic Britain remained analogous to that of boxers and jockeys: at Maisons-Lafitte (named after a banker who made the suburb fashionable), Lablache, Talma and other theatrical people established themselves by the side of the Prince de la Moskowa’s splendid house.

 

* In 1835 the Journal des Dtbats (about 10,000 circulation) got about 20,000 francs per year from advertisements. In 1838 the fourth page of La Presse was rented at 150,000 francs a year, in 1845 at 300,000.*

 

t ‘Le grand poeme de l’etalage chante ses strophes de couleur dcpuis la Madeleine jusqu’a la Porte Saint-Denis.’

 

 

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The effect of the Industrial Revolution on the structure of bourgeois society was superficially less drastic, but in fact far more profound. For it created new blocs of bourgeois which coexisted with the official society, too large to be absorbed by it except by a little assimilation at the very top, and too self-confident and dynamic to wish for absorption except on their own terms. In 1820 these great armies of solid business-men were as yet hardly visible from Westminster, where peers and theii relatives still dominated the unreformcd Parliament or from Hyde Park, where wholly unpuritan ladies like Harriete Wilson (unpuritan even in her refusal to pretend to being a broken blossom) drove their phaetons surrounded by dashing admirers from the armed forces, diplomacy and the peerage, not excluding the Iron and unbourgeois Duke of Wellington himself. The merchants, bankers and even the industrialists of the eighteenth century had been few enough to be assimilated into official society; indeed the first generation of cotton-millionaires, headed by Sir Robert Peel the elder, whose son was being trained for premiership, were fairly solidly Tory, though of a moderate kind. However, the iron plough of industrialization multiplied its hardfaced crops of businessmen under the rainy clouds of the North. Manchester no longer came to terms with London. Under the battle-cry ‘What Manchester thinks today London will think tomorrow’ it prepared to impose terms on the capital.

 

The new men from the provinces were a formidable army, all the more so as they became increasingly conscious of themselves as a class rather than a ‘middle rank’ bridging the gap between the upper and lower orders. (The actual term ‘middle class’ first appears around 1812.) By 1834 John Stuart Mill could already complain that social commentators ‘revolved in their eternal circle of landlords, capitalists and labourers, until they seemed to think of the distinction ofsociety into these three classes as though it were one of God’s ordinances’.⁶ More-over, they were not merely a class, but a class army ofcombat, organized at first in conjunction with the ‘labouring poor’ (who must, they as-sumed, follow their lead*) against the aristocratic society, and later against both proletariat and landlords, most notably in that most class-conscious body the Anti-Corn-Law League. They were self-made men, or at least men of modest origins who owed little to birth, family or formal higher education. (Like Mr Bounderby in Dickens’ Hard Times, they were not reluctant to advertise the fact.) They were rich and getting richer by the year. They were above all imbued with the

 

* ‘The opinions of that class of people who are below the middle rank are formed and their minds directed by that intelligent and virtuous rank, who come the most immediately into contact with them.’James Mill, An Essay on Government, 1823.

 

 

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ferocious and dynamic self-confidence of those whose own careers prove to them that divine providence, science and history have combined to present the earth to them on a platter.

‘Political economy’, translated into a few simple dogmatic propo-sitions by self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism—Edward Baines of the Leeds Mercury (i 774-1848), John Edward Taylor of the Manchester Guardian (1791-1844), Archibald Prentice of the Manchester Times (1792-1857), Samuel Smiles (1812-1904)—gave them intellectual certainty. Protestant dissent of the hard Independent, Unitarian, Baptist and Quaker rather than the emotional Methodist type gave them spiritual certainty and a contempt for useless aristocrats. Neither fear, anger, nor even pity moved the em-ployer who told his workers:

 

‘The God of Nature has established a just and equitable law which man has no right to disturb; when he ventures to do so it is always certain that he, sooner or later, meets with corresponding punishment… Thus when masters audaciously combine that by an union of power they may more effectually oppress their servants; by such an act, they insult the majesty of Heaven, and bring down the curse of God upon themselves, while on the other hand, when servants unite to extort from their employers that share of the profit which of right belongs to the master, they equally violate the laws of equity.’⁷

 

There was an order in the universe, but it was no longer the order of the past. There was only one God, whose name was steam and spoke in the voice of Malthus, McCulloch, and anyone who employed machinery.

The fringe of agnostic eighteenth-century intellectuals and self-made scholars and writers who spoke for them should not obscure the fact that most of them were far too busy making money to bother about anything unconnected with this pursuit. They appreciated their intel-lectuals, even when, like Richard Cobden (1804-1865) they were not particularly successful businessmen, so long as they avoided unpractical and excessively sophisticated ideas, for they were practical men whose own lack of education made them suspect anything that went much beyond empiricism. Charles Babbage the scientist (1792-1871) pro-posed his scientific methods to them in vain. Sir Henry Cole, the pioneer of industrial design, technical education and transport rationalization, gave them (with the inestimable help of the German Prince Consort) the most brilliant monument of their endeavours, the Great Exhibition of 1851. But he was forced out of public life nevertheless as a meddling busybody with a taste for bureaucracy, which, like all government interference, they detested, when it did not directly assist their profits.

 

 

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George Stephenson, the self-made colliery mechanic, dominated the new railways, imposing the gauge of the old horse and cart on them— he had never thought of anything else—rather than the imaginative, sophisticated and daring engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunei, who has no monument in the pantheon of engineers constructed by Samuel Smiles, except the damning phrase: ‘measured by practical and profitable results the Stephensons were unquestionably the safer men to follow’.⁸ The philosophic radicals did their best to construct a net-work of ‘Mechanics’ Institutes’—purged of the politically disastrous errors which the operatives insisted, against nature, on hearing in such places—in order to train the technicians of the new and scientifically based industries. By 1848 most of them were moribund, for want of any general recognition that such technological education could teach the Englishman (as distinct from the German or Frenchman) anything useful. There were intelligent, experimentally minded, and even cul-tured manufacturers in plenty, thronging to the meetings of the new British Association for the Advancement of Science; but it would be an error to suppose that they represented the norm of their class.

 

A generation of such men grew up in the years between Trafalgar and the Great Exhibition. Their predecessors, brought up in the social framework of cultured and rationalist provincial merchants and dis-senting ministers and the intellectual framework of the whig century, were perhaps a less barbarous lot: Josiah Wedgwood the potter (1730-1795) was an FRS, a Fellow of the Society ofAntiquaries, and a member of the Lunar Society with Matthew Boulton, his partner James Watt and the chemist and revolutionary Priestley. (His son Thomas experi-mented with photography, published scientific papers and subsidized the poet Coleridge.) The manufacturer of the eighteenth century naturally built his factories to the design of Georgian builders’ books. Their successors, if not more cultured, were at least more prodigal, for by the 1840s they had made enough money to spend freely on pseudo-baronial residences, pseudo-gothic and pseudo-renaissance town-halls, and to rebuild their modest and utilitarian or classic chapels in the perpendicular style. But between the Georgian and the Victorian era there came what has been rightly called the bleak age of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working classes, whose lineaments Charles Dickens has forever caught in his Hard Times.

 

A pietistic protestantism, rigid, self-righteous, unintellectual, ob-sessed with puritan morality to the point where hypocrisy was its automatic companion, dominated this desolate epoch. ‘Virtue’, as G. M. Young said, ‘advanced on a broad invincible front’; and it trod the unvirtuous, the weak, the sinful (i.e. those who neither made money nor

 

 

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controlled their emotional or financial expenditures) into the mud where they so plainly belonged, deserving at best only of their betters’ charity. There was some capitalist economic sense in this. Small entre-preneurs had to plough back much of their profits into the business if they were to become big entrepreneurs. The masses of new proletarians had to be broken into the industrial rhythm of labour by the most draconic labour discipline, or left to rot if they would not accept it. And yet even today the heart contracts at the sight of the landscape constructed by that generation:⁹

 

You saw nothinginCoketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a bird-cage on the top of it. . . . All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, every-where in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. . . . Everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not and never should be, world without end, Amen.*

 

This gaunt devotion to bourgeois utilitarianism, which the evan-gelicals and puritans shared with the agnostic eighteenth-century ‘philosophic radicals’ who put it into logical words for them, produced its own functional beauty in railway lines, bridges and warehouses, and its romantic horror in the smoke-drenched endless grey-black or reddish files of small houses overlooked by the fortresses of the mills. Outside it the new bourgeoisie lived (if it had accumulated enough money to move), dispensing command, moral education and assistance to mis-sionary endeavour among the black heathen abroad. Its men personi-fied the money which proved their right to rule the world; its women, deprived by their husbands’ money even of the satisfaction of actually doing household work, personified the virtue of their class: stupid (‘be good sweet maid, and let who will be clever’), uneducated, impractical, theoretically unsexual, propertyless and protected. They were the only luxury which the age of thrift and self-help allowed itself.

 

* Cf. Lion Faucher, Manchester in 1844 (1844) p.	24-5: ‘The town realises in	a measure
the Utopia of Bentham. Everything is measured in its	results by the standards of	utility;

and if the BEAUTIFUL, the GREAT, and the NOBLE ever take root in Manchester, they will be developed in accordance with this standard.’

 

 

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The British manufacturing bourgeoisie was the most extreme example of its class, but all over the continent there were smaller groups of the same kind: Catholic in the textile districts of the French North or Catalonia, Calvinist in Alsace, Lutheran pietist in the Rhineland, Jewish all over central and eastern Europe. They were rarely quite as hard as in Britain, for they were rarely quite as divorced from older traditions of urban life and paternalism. Leon Faucher was painfully struck, in spite of his doctrinaire liberalism, by the sight of Manchester in the 1840s, as which continental observer was not?¹⁰ But they shared with the English the confidence which came from steady enrichment— between 1830 and 1856 the marriage portions of the Dansette family in Lille increased from 15,000 to 50,000 francs¹¹—the absolute faith in economic liberalism, and the rejection of non-economic activities. The spinners’ dynasties of Lille maintained their total contempt for the career of arms until the first world war. The Dollfus of Mulhouse dissuaded their young Frederic Engel from entering the famous Poly-technique, because they feared it might lead him into a military rather than a business career. Aristocracy and its pedigrees did not to begin with tempt them excessively: like Napoleon’s marshals they were themselves ancestors.

 

II

 

The crucial achievement of the two revolutions was thus that they opened careers to talent, or at any rate to energy, shrewdness, hard work and greed. Not all careers, and not to the top rungs of the ladder, except perhaps in the USA. And yet, how extraordinary were the opportunities, how remote from the nineteenth century the static hierarchical ideal of the past! Kabinettsrat von Scheie of the Kingdom of Hanover, who refused the application of a poor young lawyer for a government post on the grounds that his father was a bookbinder, and he ought to have stuck to that trade, now appeared both vicious and ridiculous.¹² Yet he was doing no more than repeat the age-old pro-verbial wisdom of the stable pre-capitalist society, and in 1750 the son of a bookbinder would, in all probability, have stuck to his father’s trade. Now he no longer had to. Four roads to the stars opened before him: business, education (which in turn led to the three goals of govern-ment service, politics and the free professions), the arts and war. The last, important enough in France during the revolutionary and Napo-leonic period, ceased to be of much significance during the long generations of peace which succeeded, and perhaps for this reason also ceased to be very attractive. The third was new only insofar as the

 

 

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public rewards of an exceptional capacity to entertain or move the public were now much greater than ever before, as is shown by the rising social status of the stage, which was eventually to produce, in Edwardian Britain, the linked phenomena of the knighted actor and the nobleman marrying the chorus-girl. Even in the post-Napoleonic period they already produced the characteristic phenomena of the idolized singer (e.g. Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish Nightingale’) or dancer (e.g. Fanny Elssler) and the deified concert artist (e.g. Paganini and Franz Liszt).

 

Neither business nor education were high roads open to everybody even among those who were sufficiently emancipated from the grip of custom and tradition to believe that ‘people like us’ would be admitted to them, to know how to operate in an individualist society, or to accept the desirability of ‘bettering themselves’. A toll had to be paid by intending travellers: without some initial resources, however minimal, it was difficult to get started on the highway to success. This admission toll was unquestionably higher for those entering upon the education road than upon the business road, for even in the countries which had acquired a public educational system primary education was in general grossly neglected; and, even where it existed, was confined for political reasons to a minimum of literacy, arithmetic and moral obedience. However, at first sight paradoxically, the educational highway seemed more attractive than the business highway.

 

This was no doubt because it required a much smaller revolution in men’s habits and ways of life. Learning, if only in the form of clerical learning, had its accepted and socially valued place in the traditional society; indeed a more eminent place than in the fully bourgeois society. To have a priest, minister or rabbi in the family was perhaps the greatest honour to which poor men could aspire, and well worth making titanic sacrifices for. This social admiration could be readily transferred, once such careers were open, to the secular intellectual, the official or teacher or, in the most marvellous cases, the lawyer and doctor. Moreover, learning was not anti-social as business so clearly seemed to be. The educated man did not automatically turn and rend his like as the shameless and selfish trader or employer would. Often indeed, especially as a teacher, he plainly helped to raise his fellows out of that ignorance and darkness which seemed responsible for their miseries. A general thirst for education was much easier to create than a general thirst for individual business success, and schooling more easily acquired than the strange arts of money-making. Communities almost wholly composed of small peasants, small traders and prole-tarians, like Wales, could simultaneously develop a hunger to push

 

 

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their sons into teaching and the ministry and a bitter social resentment against wealth and business as such.

 

Nevertheless in a sense education represented individualist com-petition, the ‘career open to talent’ and the triumph of merit over birth and connection quite as effectively as business, and this through the device of the competitive examination. As usual, the French Revolution produced its most logical expression, the parallel hier-archies of examinations which still progressively select from among the national body of scholarship winners the intellectual elite that ad-ministers and instructs the French people. Scholarship and competitive examination were also the ideal of the most self-consciously bourgeois school of British thinkers, the Benthamite philosophic radicals, who eventually—but not before the end of our period—imposed it in an extremely pure form on the higher British Home and Indian Civil Service, against the bitter resistance of aristocracy. Selection by merit, as determined in examination or other educational tests, became the generally accepted ideal of all except the most archaic European public services (such as the Papal or the British Foreign), or the most demo-cratic, which tended—as in the USA—to prefer election to examination as a criterion of fitness for public posts. For, like other forms of indi-vidualist competition, examination-passing was a liberal, but not a democratic or egalitarian device.

 

The chief social result of opening education to talent was thus paradoxical. It produced not the ‘open society’ of free business com-petition but the ‘closed society’ of bureaucracy; but both, in their various ways, were characteristic institutions of the bourgeois-liberal era. The ethos of the nineteenth-century higher civil services was fundamentally that of the eighteenth-century enlightenment: Masonic and ‘Josephinian’ in Central and Eastern Europe, Napoleonic in France, liberal and anti-clerical in the other Latin countries, Benthamite in Britain. Admittedly competition was transformed into automatic pro-motion once the man of merit had actually won his place in the service; though how fast and how far a man was promoted would still depend (in theory) on his merits, unless corporate egalitarianism imposed pure promotion by seniority. At first sight therefore bureaucracy looked very unlike the ideal of the liberal society. And yet, the public services were bound together by the consciousness of being selected by merit, by a prevailing atmosphere of incorruptibility, practical efficiency, and education, and by non-aristocratic origins. Even the rigid insistence on automatic promotion (which reached absurd length in that very middle-class organization, the British Navy) had at least the advantage of excluding the typically aristocratic or monarchical habit of favour-

 

 

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itism. In societies where economic development lagged, the public service therefore provided an alternative focus for the rising middle

classes.* It is no accident that in the Frankfurt	Parliament of 1848,
68 per cent of all deputies were civil servants	or other officials  (as
against only 12 per cent of the ‘free professions’	and 2 • 5 per cent of
businessmen).13

It was thus fortunate for the intending careerist that the post-Napoleonic period was almost everywhere one of marked expansion in the apparatus and activity of governments, though hardly large enough to absorb the growing supply of literate citizens. Between 1830 and 1850 public expenditure per capita increased by 25 per cent

in Spain, by 40 per cent in France,	by 44 per cent in Russia, by
50 per cent in Belgium, by 70 per	cent in Austria,  75 per cent

in the USA and by over 90 per cent in the Netherlands. (Only in Britain, the British colonies, Scandinavia and a few backward states did government expenditure per head of the population remain stable or fall during this period, the heyday of economic liberalism.)¹* This was due not only to the obvious consumer of taxes, the armed forces, which remained much larger after the Napoleonic Wars than before, in spite of the absence of any major international wars: of the major states only Britain and France in 1851 had an army which was very much smaller than at the height of Napoleon’s power in 1810 and several—e.g. Russia, various German and Italian states and Spain— were actually larger. It was due also to the development of old and the acquisition of new functions by states. For it is an elementary error (and one not shared by those logical protagonists of capitalism, the Bentha-mite ‘philosophic radicals’) to believe that liberalism was hostile to bureaucracy. It was merely hostile to inefficient bureaucracy, to public interference in matters better left to private enterprise and to excessive taxation. The vulgar-liberal slogan of a state reduced to the vestigial functions of the nightwatchman obscures the fact that the state shorn of its inefficient and interfering functions was a much more powerful and ambitious state than before. For instance, by 1848 it was a state which had acquired modern, -often national, police-forces: in France from 1798, in Ireland from 1823, in England from 1829, and in Spain (the Guardia Civil) from 1844. Outside Britain it was normally a state which had a public educational system; outside Britain and the USA one which had or was about to have a public railway service; everywhere, one which had an increasingly large postal service to supply the rapidly expanding needs of business and private communi-

 

* Allfonctionnaires in Balzac’s novels appear to come from, or to be associated with, familie of small entrepreneurs.

 

 

192

 

THE CAREER OPEN TO TALENT

 

cation. The growth of population obliged it to maintain a larger judicial system; the growth of cities and urban social problems a larger system of municipal administration. Whether the government functions were old or new, they were increasingly conducted by a single national civil service of fulltime career officials, the higher echelons of whom were freely transferred and promoted by central authority throughout each state. However, while an efficient service of this kind might well reduce the number of officials and the unit cost of administration by eliminating corruption and part-time service, it created a much more formidable government machine. The most elementary functions of the liberal state, such as the efficient assessment and collection of taxes by a body of salaried officials or the maintenance of a regular nationally organized rural constabulary, would have seemed beyond the wildest dreams of most pre-revolutionary absolutisms. So would the level of taxation, now actually sometimes a graduated income tax,* which the subject of the liberal state tolerated: in 1840 government expenditure in liberal Britain was four times as high as in autocratic Russia.

 

Few of these new bureaucratic posts were really the equivalent of the officer’s epaulette which the proverbial Napoleonic soldier carried in his knapsack as a first instalment towards his eventual marshal’s baton. Of the 130,000 civil servants estimated for France in i839^ls the great bulk were postmen, teachers, lesser tax-collecting and legal officials and the like; and even the 450 officials of the Ministry of the Interior, the 350 of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisted mainly of clerks; a brand of humanity which, as the literature from Dickens to Gogol makes only too clear, was hardly to be envied except perhaps for the privilege of public service, the security which allowed them to starve at an even rhythm all their lives. Officials who were really the social equivalent of a good middle-class career—financially no honest official could ever hope for more than decent comfort—were few. Even today the ‘administrative class’ of the entire British civil service, which was devised by the mid-nineteenth-century reformers as the equivalent of the middle classes in the bureaucratic hierarchy, consists of no more than 3,500 persons in all.

 

Yet, modest though the situation of the petty official or whitecollar worker was, it was a mountain-range above the labouring poor. He did no physical work. Clean hands and the white collar put him, however symbolically, on the side of the rich. He normally carried with him the magic of public authority. Before him men and women had to queue for the documents which registered their lives; he waved them

 

* In Britain this was temporarily imposed during the Napoleonic Wars and permanently from 1842; no other country of importance had followed this lead before 1848.

 

 

193

 

THE AOE OF  REVOLUTION

 

on or held them back; he told them what they could not do. In the more backward countries (as well as in the democratic USA) through him cousins and nephews might conceivably find jobs; in many not so backward countries he had to be bribed. For innumerable peasant or labouring families, for whom all other prospects of social ascent were dim, petty bureaucracy, teaching and the priesthood were at least theoretically within reach, Himalayas which their sons might conceivably climb.

The free professions were hardly within their purview; for to become a doctor, a lawyer, a professor (which on die continent meant a secondary schoolmaster as well as a university teacher) or an ‘other educated person following miscellaneous pursuits’¹⁴ required long years of education or exceptional talent and opportunity. Britain in 1851 contained some 16,000 lawyers (not counting judges) and a mere

1700	law  students;*		some	17,000 physicians  and  surgeons  and
3,500	medical	students	and	assistants,  less	than	3,000	architects,
about	1,300	‘editors	and	writers’.  (The	French	term	Journalist

had not yet entered official cognisance.) Law and medicine were two of the great traditional professions. The third, the clergy, provided less of an opening than might have been expected if only because (except for the preachers of protestant sects) it was probably expanding rather more slowly than population. Indeed, thanks to the anti-clerical zeal of governments—Joseph II suppressed 359 abbeys and convents, the Spaniards in their liberal intervals did their best to suppress them all— certain parts of the profession were contracting rather than expanding.

 

Only one real opening existed: elementary school teaching by laymen and religious. The numbers of the teaching profession, which was in the main recruited from the sons of peasants, artisans, and other modest families, were by no means negligible in western states: in Britain some 76,000 men and women in 1851 described themselves as schoolmasters/ mistresses or general teachers, not to mention the 20,000 or so gover-nesses, the well-known last resource of penniless educated girls unable or unwilling to earn their living in less, respectable ways. Moreover, teaching was not merely a large but an expanding profession. It was poorly paid; but outside the most philistine countries such as Britain and the USA, the elementary school teacher was a rightly popular figure. For if anyone represented the ideal of an age when for the first time common men and women looked above their heads and saw that ignorance could be dissipated, it was surely the man or the woman whose life and calling was to give children the opportunities which

 

* On the continent the number and proportion of lawyers was often greater.

 

194

 

THE CAREER OPEN TO TALENT

 

their parents had never had; to open the world to them; to imbue them with truth and morality.

 

Business, of course, was the most obvious career open to talent, and in a rapidly expanding economy business opportunities were naturally great. The small-scale nature of much enterprise, the prevalence of sub-contract, of modest buying and selling, made them relatively easy to take. Yet neither the material nor the social and cultural conditions were propitious for the poor. In the first place—a fact frequently over-looked by the successful—the evolution of the industrial economy depended on creating wage-labourers faster than employers or the self-employed. For every man who moved up into the business classes, a greater number necessarily moved down. In the second place economic independence required technical qualifications, attitudes of mind, or financial resources (however modest) which were simply not in the possession of most men and women. Those who were lucky enough to possess them—for instance, members of religious minorities and sects, whose aptitude for such activities is well-known to the sociologist—might do well: the majority of those serfs of Ivanovo—the ‘Russian Manchester’—who became textile manufacturers, belonged to the sect of the ‘Old Believers’.¹⁷ But it would have been entirely unrealistic to expect those who did not possess these advantages—for instance the majority of Russian peasants—to do the same, or even at this stage to think of emulating them.

 

Ill

 

No groups of the population welcomed the opening of the career to talent to whatever kind more passionately than those minorities who had hitherto been debarred from eminence not merely because they were not well-born, but because they suffered official and collective discrimination. The enthusiasm with which French protestants threw themselves into public life in and after the Revolution was exceeded only by the volcanic eruption of talent among the western Jews. Before the emancipation which eighteenth-century rationalism prepared and the French Revolution brought, only two roads to eminence were available to a Jew, commerce or finance and the interpretation of the sacred law; and both confined him to his own narrowly segregated ghetto community, from which only a handful of ‘court Jews’ or other men of wealth half-emerged, careful—even in Britain and Holland— not to step too far into the dangerous and unpopular light of celebrity. Nor was such emergence unpopular only among the brutal and

 

 

»95

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

drunken unbelievers who, on the whole, signally failed to welcome Jewish emancipation. Centuries of social compression had closed the ghetto in upon itself, rejecting any step outside its tight orthodoxies as unbelief and treason. The eighteenth-century pioneers of Jewish liberali-zation in Germany and Austria, notably Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), were reviled as deserters and atheists.

 

The great bulk of Judaism, which inhabited the rapidly growing ghettoes in the eastern part of the old kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, continued to live their self-contained and suspicious lives among the hostile peasantry, divided only in their allegiance between the learned intellectualist rabbis of the Lithuanian orthodoxy and the ecstatic and poverty-striken Chassidim. It is characteristic that of forty-six Galician revolutionaries arrested by the Austrian authorities in 1834 only one was a Jew.¹⁸ But in the smaller communities of the west the Jews seized their new opportunities with both hands, even when the price they had to pay for them was a nominal baptism, as in semi-emancipated countries it often still was, at any rate for official posts. The businessman did not even require this. The Rothschilds, kings ofinternational Jewry, were not only rich. This they could also have been earlier, though the political and military changes of the period provided unprecedented opportunities for international finance. They could also now be seen to be rich, occupy a social position roughly commensurate to their wealth, and even aspire to the nobility which European princes actually began to grant them in 1816. (They became hereditary Habsburg barons in 1823.)

 

More striking than Jewish wealth was the flowering ofJewish talent in the secular arts, sciences and professions. By twentieth century standards it was as yet modest, though by 1848 the greatest Jewish mind of the nineteenth century and the most successful Jewish politician had both reached maturity: Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881). There were no major Jewish scientists and only a few Jewish mathematicians of high but not supreme eminence. Meyerbeer (1791-1864) and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847) are not composers of the highest contemporary class, though among poets Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) survives rather better. There was as yet no Jewish painters of importance, no great Jewish executant musicians or conductors, and only one major theatrical figure, the actress Rachel (1821-1858). But in fact the production of genius is not the criterion of a people’s emancipation, which is measured rather by the sudden abundance of less eminent Jewish participants in West European culture and public life, especially in France and above all in the German states, which provided the language and ideology that gradually bridged the

 

 

196

 

THE CAREER OPEN TO TALENT

 

gap between medievalism and the nineteenth century for the immigrant Jews from the hinterland.

 

The dual revolution had given the Jews the nearest thing to equality they had ever enjoyed under Christianity. Those who seized their opportunity wished for nothing better than to ‘assimilate’ to the new society, and their sympathies were, for obvious reasons, overwhelmingly liberal. Yet the situation of the Jews was uncertain and uneasy, even though the endemic anti-semitism of the exploited masses, which could now often readily identify Jew and ‘bourgeois’,* was not seriously exploited by demagogic politicians. In France and Western Germany (but not yet elsewhere), some young Jews found themselves dreaming of an even more perfect society: there was a marked Jewish element in French Saint-Simonianism (Olinde Rodrigues, the brothers Pereire, Ldon HaIeVy, d’Eichthal) and to a lesser extent in German communism (Moses Hess, the poet Heine, and of course Marx who, however, showed a total indifference to his Jewish origins and connections).

 

The situation of the Jews made them exceptionally ready to assimi-late to bourgeois society. They were a minority. They were already overwhelmingly urban, to the point of being largely immunized against the diseases of urbanization. In the cities their lower mortality and morbidity was already noted by the statisticians. They were over-whelmingly literate and outside agriculture. A very large proportion of them were already in commerce or the professions. Their very position constantly obliged them to consider new situations and ideas, if only to detect the latent threat which they held. The great mass of the world’s peoples, on the other hand, found it much harder to adjust to the new society.

 

This was partly because the rock-ribbed armour of custom made it almost impossible for them to understand what they were expected to do in it; like the young Algerian gentlemen, transported to Paris to gain a European education in the 1840s, who were shocked at the discovery that they had been invited to the royal capital for anything but the social commerce with king and nobility, which they knew to be their due. Moreover, the new society did not make adjustment easy. Those who accepted the evident blessings of middle class civilization and middle class manners could enjoy its benefits freely; those who refused or were unable to, simply did not count. There was more than mere political bias in the insistence on a property franchise which characterized the moderate liberal governments of 1830; the man who

 

• T he German brigand Schinderhannes (Johannes Bueckler 1777-1803) gained much popularity by concentrating on Jewish victims, and in Prague industrial unrest in the 1840s also took on an anti-Jewish note. (Vienna, Verwaltungsarchiv, Polizeihofstelle 1186-1845.)

 

 

197

 

THE AOE OF REVOLUTION

 

had not shown the ability to accumulate property was not a full man, and could therefore hardly be a full citizen. The extremes of this attitude occurred where the European middle class came into contact with the unbelieving heathen, seeking to convert him through intellec-tually unsophisticated missionaries to the truths of Christianity, commerce and the wearing of trousers (between which no sharp distinctions were drawn), or imposing on him the truths of liberal legislation. If he accepted these, liberalism (at all events among the revolutionary French) was perfectly prepared to grant him full citizen-ship with all its rights, or the hope of being one day almost as good as an Englishman, as among the British. The attitude is perfectly reflected in the senatus-consulte of Napoleon III which, a few years after the end of our period but well within its spirit, opened citizenship to the native

 

Algerian: ‘Il pent, sur sa demande, ltre admis a jouir des droits de citqyen francais; dans ce cos il est rigi par Us lots civiles et politiques de la France.’™

 

All he had to give up, in effect, was Islam; if he did not want to do so—and few did—then he remained a subject and not a citizen.

 

The massive contempt of the ‘civilized’ for the ‘barbarians’ (who included the bulk of labouring poor at home)²⁰ rested on this feeling of demonstrated superiority. The middle-class world was freely open to all. Those who failed to enter its gates therefore demonstrated a lack of personal intelligence, moral force or energy which automatically condemned them; or at best a historic or racial heritage which must permanently cripple them, or else they would already have made use of their opportunities. The period which culminated about the middle of the century was therefore one of unexampled callousness, not merely because the poverty which surrounded middle class respectability was so shocking that the native rich learned not to see it, leaving its horrors to make their full impact only on visiting foreigners (as the horrors of Indian slums today do), but because the poor, like the outer barbarians, were talked of as though they were not properly human at all. If their fate was to become industrial labourers, they were merely a mass to be forced into die proper disciplinary mould by sheer coercion, the draconic factory discipline being supplemented by the aid of the state. (It is characteristic that contemporary middle class opinion saw no incom-patibility between the principle of equality before the law and the deliberately discriminatory labour codes, which, as in the British Master and Servant code of 1823, punished the workers by prison for breaches of contract and the employers merely by modest fines, if at all.)²¹ They ought to be constantly on the verge of starvation, because otherwise they would not work, being inaccessible to ‘human’ motives. ‘It is to the interest of the worker himself/ ViUei-me” was told in the late

 

 

198

 

THE CAREER OPEN TO TALENT

 

1830s by employers ‘that he should be constantly harassed by need, for then he will not set his children a bad example, and his poverty will be a guarantee of good behaviour.’²² There were nevertheless too many poor for their own good, but it was to be hoped that the opera-tions of Malthus’ law would starve off enough of them to establish a viable maximum; unless of course per absurdum the poor established their own rational checks on population by refraining from an excessive indulgence in procreation.

 

It was but a small step from such an attitude to the formal recog-nition of inequality which, as Henri Baudrillart argued in his inaugural lecture at the College de France in 1853, was one of the three pillars of human society, the other two being property and inheritance.²* The hierarchical society was thus reconstructed on the foundations of formal equality. It had merely lost what made it tolerable in the old days, the general social conviction that men had duties and rights, that virtue was not simply the equivalent of money, and that the lower order, though low, had a right to their modest lives in the station to which God had called them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

199

 

CHAPTER  11

 

THE  LABOURING       POOR

 

Every manufacturer lives in his factory like the colonial planters in the midst of their slaves, one against a hundred, and the subversion of Lyon is a sort of insurrection of San Domingo. . . . The barbarians who menace society are neither in the Caucasus nor in the steppes of Tartaty; they are in the suburbs of our industrial cities. . . .

 

The middle class must clearly recognize the nature of the situation; it must know where it stands.

 

Saint-Marc Girardin in Journal des Dlbats, December 8, 1931

 

Pour gouvemer ilfaut avoir Manteaux ou rubans en sautoir (bis).

 

Nous en Assorts pour vous, grands de la terre,

 

Et nous, pauvres canuts, sans drap on nous enterre.

 

C’est nous les canuts

 

Nous sommes tout nus (bis).

 

Mais quand notre rigne arrive

 

Quand voire rigne finira.

 

Alms nous tisserons Ie linceul du vieux monde Car on intend diji la revolte qui gronde.

 

C’est nous les canuts Nous n’irons plus tout nus.

 

Lyons silkweavers’ song

 

 

 

I

 

T H R E E possibilities were therefore open to such of the poor as found themselves in the path of bourgeois society, and no longer effectively sheltered in still inaccessible regions of traditional society. They could strive to become bourgeois; they could allow themselves to be ground down; or they could rebel.

 

The first course, as we have seen, was not merely technically difficult for those who lacked the minimum entrance fee of property or educa-tion, but profoundly distasteful. The introduction of a purely utili-tarian individualist system of social behaviour, the theoretically justi-fied jungle anarchy of bourgeois society with its motto ‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost’, appeared to men brought up in traditional societies as little better than wanton evil. Tn our times,’ said one of the desperate Silesian handloom linen-weavers who rioted

 

aoo

 

THE LABOURING  POOR

 

vainly against their fate in I844,¹ ‘men have invented excellent arts to weaken and undermine one another’s livelihood. But alas, nobody thinks any longer of the Seventh Commandment, which commands and forbids as follows: Thou shalt not steal. Nor do they bear in mind Luther’s commentary upon it, in which he says: We shall love and fear the Lord, so that we may not take away our neighbour’s property nor money, nor acquire it by false goods and trading, but on the contrary we should help him guard and increase his livelihood and property.’ Such a man spoke for all who found themselves dragged into an abyss by what were plainly the forces of hell. They did not ask for much. (‘The rich used to treat the poor with charity, and the poor lived simply, for in those days the lower orders needed much less for outward show in clothes and other expenses than they do today.’) But even that modest place in the social order was now, it seemed, to be taken from them.

 

Hence their resistance against even the most rational proposals of bourgeois society, married as they were to inhumanity. Country squires introduced and labourers clung to the Speenhamland system, though the economic arguments against it were conclusive. As a means of alleviating poverty, Christian charity was worse than useless, as could be seen in the Papal states, which abounded in it. But it was popular not only among the traditionalist rich, who cherished it as a safeguard against the evil of equal rights (proposed by ‘those dreamers who maintain that nature has created men with equal rights and that social distinctions should be founded purely on communal utility’²) but also among the traditionalist poor, who were profoundly convinced that they had a right to crumbs from the rich man’s table. In Britain a chasm divided the middle class champions of Friendly Societies, who saw them entirely as a form of individual self-help and the poor, who treated them also, and often primarily, as societies, with convivial meetings, ceremonies, rituals and festivities; to the detriment of their actuarial soundness.

 

That resistance was only strengthened by the opposition of even the bourgeois to such aspects of pure individual free competition as did not actually benefit him. Nobody was more devoted to individualism than the sturdy American farmer and manufacturer, no Constitution more opposed than theirs—or so their lawyers believed until our own century —to such interferences with freedom as federal child labour legis-lation. But nobody was more firmly committed, as we have seen, to ‘artificial’ protection for their businesses. New machinery was one of the chief benefits to be expected from private enterprise and free com-petition. But not only the labouring Luddites arose to smash it: the smaller businessmen and farmers in their regions sympathized with

 

 

2 01

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

them, because they also regarded innovators as destroyers of men’s livelihood. Farmers actually sometimes left their machines out for rioters to destroy, and die government had to send a sharply worded circular in 1830 to point out that ‘machines are as entitled to the pro-tection of the law as any other description of property’.⁸ The very hesitation and doubt with which, outside the strongholds of bourgeois-liberal confidence, the new entrepreneur entered upon his historic task of destroying the social and moral order, strengthened die poor man’s conviction.

 

There were of course labouring men who did their best to join the middle classes, or at least to follow the precepts of thrift, self-help and self-betterment. The moral and didactic literature of middle class radicalism, temperance movements and protestant endeavour is full of the sort of men whose Homer was Samuel Smiles. And indeed such bodies attracted and perhaps encouraged the ambitious young man. The Royton Temperance Seminary, started in 1843 (confined to boys —mostly, cotton operatives—who had taken the pledge of abstinence, refused to gamble and were of good moral character), had within twenty years produced five master cotton spinners, one clergyman, two man-agers of cotton mills in Russia ‘and many others had obtained respect-able positions as managers, overlookers, head mechanics, certified schoolmasters, or had become respectable shopkeepers’.* Clearly such phenomena were less common outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where the road out of the working class (except by migration) was very much narrower—it was not exceptionally broad even in Britain—and the moral and intellectual influence of the Radical middle class on the skilled worker was less.

 

On the other hand there were clearly far more who, faced with a social catastrophe they did not understand, impoverished, exploited, herded intotslums that combined bleakness and squalor, or into the expanding complexes of small-scale industrial villages, sank into demoralization. Deprived of the traditional institutions and guides to behaviour, how could many fail to sink into an abyss of hand-to-mouth expedients, where families pawned their blankets each week until pay-day* and where alcohol was ‘the quickest way out of Manchester’ (or Lille or the Borinage). Mass alcoholism, an almost invariable com-panion of headlong and uncontrolled industrialization and urbaniza-tion, spread ‘a pestilence of hard liquor’⁶ across Europe. Perhaps the numerous contemporaries who deplored the growth of drunkenness, as of prostitution and other forms of sexual promiscuity, were exag-

 

• In 1855 60 per cent of all pledges with Liverpool pawnbrokers were 51. or less in value, 37 per cent as. 6rf. or less.

 

2 02

THE LABOURING  POOR

 

gcrating. Nevertheless, the sudden upsurge of systematic temperance agitations, both of a middle and working class character, in England, Ireland and Germany around 1840, shows that the worry about demoralization was neither academic nor confined to any single class. Its immediate success was shortlived, but for the rest of the century the hostility to hard liquor remained something which both enlightened employers and labour movements had in common.*

 

But of course the contemporaries who deplored the demoralization of the new urban and industrialized poor were not exaggerating. Everything combined to maximize it. Towns and industrial areas grew rapidly, without plan or supervision, and the most elementary services of city life utterly failed to keep pace with it: street-cleaning, water-supply, sanitation, not to mention working-class housing.* The most obvious consequence of this urban deterioration was the re-appearance of mass epidemics of contagious (mainly waterborne) disease, notably of the cholera, which reconquered Europe from 1831 and swept the continent from Marseilles to St Petersburg in 1832 and again later. To take a single example: typhus in Glasgow ‘did not arrest attention by any epidemic prevalence until 1818’.⁷ Thereafter it increased. There were two major epidemics (typhus and cholera) in the city in the 1830s, three (typhus, cholera and relapsing fever) in the 1840s, two in the first half of the 1850s, until urban improvement caught up with a generation of neglect. The terrible effects of this neglect were all the greater, because the middle and ruling-classes did not feel it. Urban development in our period was a gigantic process of class segregation, which pushed the new labouring poor into great morasses of misery outside the centres of government and business and the newly specialized residential areas of the bourgeoisie. The almost universal European division into a ‘good’ west end and a ‘poor’ east end of large cities developed in this period.f And what social institutions except the tavern and perhaps the chapel were provided in these new labourers’ agglomerations except by the labourers’ own initiative? Only after 1848, when the new epidemics sprung from the slums began to kill the rich also, and the desperate masses who grew up in them had frightened

 

* This is not true of hostility to beer, wine or other drinks forming part of men’s habitual everyday diet. This was largely confined to Anglo-Saxon protestant sectarians.

 

t ‘The circumstances which oblige the workers to move out of the centre of Paris have generally, it is pointed out, had deplorable effects on their behaviour and morality. In the old days they used to live on the higher floors of buildings whose lowerfloorswere occupied by businessmen and other members of the relatively comfortable classes. A sort of solidarity grew up between the tenants of a single building. Neighbours helped each other in little ways. When sick or unemployed the workers might find much assistance within the house, while on the other hand a sort of feeling of human respect imbued working-class habits with a certain regularity.’ The complacency is that of the Chamber of Commerce and the Police Prefecture from whose Report this is quoted; but the novelty of segregation is well brought out.’

 

203

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

the powers-that-be by social revolution, was systematic urban rebuild-ing and improvement undertaken.

 

Drink was not the only sign of this demoralization. Infanticide, prostitution, suicide, and mental derangement have all been brought into relation with this social and economic cataclysm, thanks largely to the contemporary pioneering work of what we would today call social medicine.* And so has both the increase in crime and that growing and often purposeless violence which was a sort of blind personal assertion against the forces threatening to engulf the passive. The spread of apocalyptic, mystical or other sects and cults in this period (cf. chapter 12) indicates a similar incapacity to deal with the earthquakes of society which were breaking down men’s lives. The cholera epidemics, for instance, provoked religious revivals in Catholic Marseilles as well as in Protestant Wales.

 

AU these forms of distortions of social behaviour had one thing in common with one another, and incidentally with ‘self-help’. They were attempts to escape the fate of being a poor labouring man, or at best to accept or forget poverty and humiliation. The believer in the second coming, the drunkard, the petty gangster, the lunatic, the tramp or the ambitious small entrepreneur, all averted their eyes from the collective condition and (with the exception of the last) were apathetic about the capacity of collective action. In the history of our period this massive apathy plays a much larger part than is often supposed. It is no accident that the least skilled, least educated, least organized and therefore least hopeful of the poor, then as later, were the most apathetic: at the 1848 elections in the Prussian town of Halle 81 per cent of the independent crafts masters and 71 per cent of the masons, carpenters and other skilled builders voted; but only 46 per cent of the factory and railway workers, the labourers, the domestic workers, etc.⁸

 

II

 

The alternative to escape or defeat was rebellion. And such was the situation of the labouring poor, and especially the industrial prole-tariat which became their nucleus, that rebellion was not merely possible, but virtually compulsory. Nothing was more inevitable in the first half of the nineteenth century than the appearance of labour and socialist movements, and indeed of mass social revolutionary unrest. The revolution of 1848 was its direct consequence.

 

* The long list of doctors to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the times—and of subsequent improvement—contrast vividly with the general complacency and hardness of bourgeois opinion. Villermi and the contributors to the Annates d’Hygiine Publiqut, which he founded in 1829, Kay, Thackrah, Simon, Gaskell and Farr in Britain, and several in Germany, deserve to be remembered more widely than in fact they are.

 

204

THE LABOURING  POOR

 

That the condition of the labouring poor was appalling between 1815 and 1848 was not denied by any reasonable observer, and by 1840 there were a good many of these. That it was actually deteriorating was widely assumed. In Britain the Malthusian population theory, which held that the growth of population must inevitably outrun that of the means of subsistence, was based on such an assumption, and reinforced by the arguments of Ricardian economists. Those who took a rosier view of working-class prospects were less numerous and less talented than those who took the gloomy view. In Germany in the 1830s the increasing pauperization of the people was the specific subject of at least fourteen different publications, and the question whether ‘the complaints about increasing pauperization and food shortage’ were justified was set for academic prize essays. (Ten of sixteen competitors thought they were and only two that they were not.)¹⁰ The very prevalence of such opinions is itself evidence of the universal and apparently hopeless misery of the poor.

 

No doubt actual poverty was worst in the countryside, and especially among landless wage-labourers, rural domestic workers, and, of course, land-poor peasants, or those who lived on infertile land. A bad harvest, such as in 1789, 1795, 1817, 1832, 1847, still brought actual famine, even without the intervention of additional catastrophes such as the competition of British cotton goods, which destroyed the foundation of the Silesian cottage linen industry. After the ruined crop of 1813 in Lombardy many kept alive only by eating manure and hay, bread made from the leaves of bean plants and wild berries.¹¹ A bad year such as 1817 could, even in tranquil Switzerland, produce an actual excess of deaths over births.¹² The European hunger of 1846-8 pales beside the cataclysm of the Irish famine (cf. above pp. 165-6), but it was real enough. In East and West Prussia (1847) one-third of the popula-tion had ceased to eat bread, and relied only on potatoes.¹³ In the austere, respectable, pauperized manufacturing villages of the middle German mountains, where men and women sat on logs and benches, owned few curtains or house-linen, and drank from earthenware or tin mugs for want of glass, the population had sometimes become so used to a diet of potatoes and thin coffee, that during famine-times the relief-workers had to teach it to eat the peas and porridge they supplied.¹⁴ Hunger-typhus ravaged the countrysides of Flanders and Silesia, where the village linen-weaver fought his doomed battle against modern industry.

 

But in fact the misery—the increasing misery as so many thought— which attracted most attention, short of total catastrophe such as the Irish, was that of the cities and industrial areas where the poor starved

 

 

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less passively and less unseen. Whether their real incomes fell is still a matter of historical debate, though, as we have seen, there can be no doubt that the general situation of the poor in cities deteriorated. Variations between one region and another, between different types of workers and between different economic periods, as well as the deficiency of statistics, make such questions difficult to answer deci-sively, though any significant absolute general improvement can be excluded before 1848 (or in Britain perhaps 1844), and the gap between the rich and the poor certainly grew wider and more visible. The time when Baroness Rothschild wore one and a half million francs worth of jewellery at the Duke of Orleans’ masked ball (1842) was the time when John Bright described the women of Rochdale: ‘2,000 women and girls passed through the streets singing hymns—it was a very singular and striking spectacle—approaching the sublime—they are dreadfully hungry—a loaf is devoured with greediness indescribable and if the bread is nearly covered with mud it is eagerly devoured’.¹⁵

 

It is in fact probable that there was some general deterioration over wide areas of Europe, for not only (as we have seen) urban institutions and social services failed to keep pace with headlong and unplanned expansion, and money (and often real) wages tended to fall after 1815, the production and transport of foodstuffs probably also fell behind in many large cities until the railway age.¹⁸ It was on lags such as this that the contemporary Malthusians based their pessimism. But quite apart from such a lag, the mere change from the traditional diet of the pre-industrial man to the ignorant as well as impoverished free purchase of the urbanized and industrial one was likely to lead to worse feeding, just as the conditions of urban life and work were likely to lead to worse health. The extraordinary difference in health and physical fitness between the industrial and agricultural population (and of course between the upper, middle and working classes), on which the French and English statisticians fixed their attention, was clearly due to this. The average expectation of life at birth in the 1840s was twice as high for die labourers of rural Wiltshire and Rutland (hardly a pampered class) than for those of Manchester or Liverpool. But then—to take merely one example—’till steam-power was introduced into the trade, towards the end of the last century, the grinder’s disease was scarcely known in the Sheffield cutlery trades’. But in 1842 50 per cent of all razor-grinders in their thirties, 79 per cent of all in dieir forties, and 100 per cent of all razor-grinders over the age of fifty retched out their lungs with it.¹⁷

 

Moreover, die change in die economy shifted and displaced vast strata of labourers, sometimes to their benefit, but more often to dieir

 

 

206

T HE  LABOURING    POOR

 

sorrow. Great masses of the population remained as yet unabsorbed by the new industries or cities as a permanent substratum of the pau-perized and helpless, and even great masses were periodically hurled into unemployment by crises which were barely yet recognized as being temporary as well as recurrent. Two-thirds of the textile workers in Bolton (1842) or Roubaix (1847) would be thrown totally out of work by such a slump.¹⁸ Twenty per cent of Nottingham, one-third of Paisley might be actually destitute.” A movement like Chartism in Britain would collapse, time and again, under its political weakness. Time and again sheer hunger—the intolerable burden which rested on millions of the labouring poor—would revive it.

 

In addition to these general storms, special catastrophes burst over the heads of particular kinds of the labouring poor. The initial phase of industrial revolution did not, as we have seen, push all labourers into mechanized factories. On the contrary, round the few mechanized and large-scale sectors of production, it multiplied the numbers of pre-industrial artisans, of certain types of skilled workers, and of the army of domestic and cottage labour, and often improved their condition, especially during the long years of labour shortage in the wars. In the 1820s and 1830s the iron and impersonal advance of machine and market began to throw them aside. At its mildest this turned inde-pendent men into dependent ones, persons into mere ‘hands’. At its frequent harshest, it produced those multitudes of the declassed, the pauperized and the famished—handloom weavers, framework knitters etc.—whose condition froze the blood of even the most flinty economist. These were not unskilled and igorant riff-raff. Such communities as those of the Norwich and the Dunfermline weavers which were broken and scattered in the 1830s, die London furniture-makers whose old-established negotiated ‘price-lists’ became scraps of paper as they sank into the morass of sweatshops, the continental journeymen who became itinerant proletarians, the artisans who lost their independence: these had been the most skilled, the most educated, the most self-reliant, the flower of the labouring people.* They did not know what was happen-ing to them. It was natural that they should seek to find out, even more natural that they should protest.f

 

* Of 195 Gloucestershire adult weavers in 1840 only fifteen could neither read nor write; but of the rioters arrested in the manufacturing areas of Lancashire, Cheshire and Stafford-shire in 1842 only 13 per cent could read and write well, 32 per cent imperfectly.”⁰

 

t ‘About one-third of our working population . . . consists of weavers and labourers, whose average earnings do not amount to a sum sufficient to bring up and maintain their families without parochial assistance. It is this portion of the community, for the most part decent and respectable in their lives, which is suffering most from the depression of wages, and the hardships of the times. It is to this class of my poor fellow-creatures in particular, that I desire to recommend the system of co-operation.’ (F. Baker, First Lecture on Co-operation, Bolton 1830.)

 

 

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Materially the new factory proletariat was likely to be somewhat better off. On the other hand it was unfree; under the strict control and the even stricter discipline imposed by the master or his super-visors, against whom they had virtually no legal recourse and only the very beginnings of public protection. They had to work his hours or shifts; to accept his punishments and the fines with which he imposed his rules or increased his profits. In isolated areas or industries they had to buy in his shop, as often as not receiving their wages in truck (thus allowing the unscrupulous employer to swell his profits yet further), or live in the houses the master provided. No doubt the village boy might find such a life no more dependent and less impoverished than his parents’; and in continental industries with a strong paternalist tradi-tion, the despotism of the master was at least partly balanced by the security, education and welfare services which he sometimes provided. But for the free man entry into the factory as a mere ‘hand’ was entry into something little better than slavery, and all but the most famished tended to avoid it, and even when in it to resist the draconic discipline much more persistently than the women and children, whom factory owners therefore tended to prefer. And, of course, in the 1830s and part of the 1840s even the material situation of the factory proletariat tended to deteriorate.

 

Whatever the actual situation of the labouring poor, there can be absolutely no doubt that every one of them who thought at all— i.e. who did not accept the tribulations of the poor as part of fate and die eternal design of tilings—considered the labourer to be exploited and impoverished by the rich, who were getting richer while the poor became poorer. And the poor suffered because the rich benefited. The social mechanism of bourgeois society was in the profoundest manner cruel, unjust and inhuman. ‘There can be no wealth without labour’ wrote the Lancashire Co-operator. ‘The workman is the source of all wealth. Who has raised all the food? The half-fed and impoverished labourer. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich, who never labour or produce anything? The workman. Who spins all the yarn and makes all the cloth? The spinner and weaver.’ Yet ‘the labourer remains poor and destitute, while those who do not work are rich, and possess abundance to surfeiting’.^M And the despairing rural labourer (echoed literally even today by the Negro gospel-singer) put it less clearly, but perhaps even more profoundly:

 

If life was a thing that money could buy

 

The rich would live and the poor might die.*¹

 

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III

 

The labour movement provided an answer to the poor man’s cry. It must not be confused with the mere collective revulsion against intoler-able hardship, which occurs throughout recorded history, or even with the practice of striking and other forms of militancy which have since become characteristic of labour. These also have a history which goes back beyond the industrial revolution. What was new in the labour movement of the early nineteenth century was class consciousness and class ambition. The ‘poor’ no longer faced the ‘rich’. A specific class, the labouring class, workers, or proletariat, faced another, the employers or capitalists. The French Revolution gave this new class confidence, the industrial revolution impressed on it the need for permanent mobilization. A decent livelihood could not be achieved merely by the occasional protest which served to restore the stable but tempor-arily disturbed balance of society. It required the eternal vigilance, organization and activity of the ‘movement’—the trade union, the mutual or co-operative society, the working-class institute, newspaper or agitation. But the very novelty and rapidity of the social change which engulfed them encouraged the labourers to think in terms of an entirely changed society, based on their experience and ideas as opposed to their oppressors’. It would be co-operative and not com-petitive, collectivist and not individualist. It would be ‘socialist’. And it would represent not the eternal dream of the free society, which poor men always have at the backs of their minds but think about only on the rare occasions of general social revolution, but a permanent, practicable alternative to the present system.

 

Working-class consciousness in this sense did not yet exist in 1789, or indeed during the French Revolution. Outside Britain and France it existed barely if at all even in 1848. But in the two countries which embody the dual revolution, it certainly came into existence between 1815 and 1848, more especially around 1830. The very word’working-class’ (as distinct from the less specific ‘the working classes’) occurs in English labour writings shortly after Waterloo, and perhaps even earlier, and in French working-class writing the equivalent phrase becomes frequent after 1830.²² In Britain the attempts to link all labouring men together in ‘general trades’ unions’, i.e. to break through the sectional and local isolation of particular groups of workers to the national, perhaps even the universal solidarity of the labouring class, began in 1818 and were pursued with feverish intensity between 1829 and 1834. The pendant to the ‘general union’ was the general strike; and this too was formulated as a concept and a systematic tactic of the

 

 

2 09

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

working class at  this period, notably in William Benbow’s Grand

 

National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes (1832), and  was

seriously discussed as a political method by the Chartists. Meanwhile, in both Britain and France intellectual discussion had produced both the concept and the word ‘socialism’ in the 1820s. It was immediately adopted by the workers, on a small scale in France (as by the Paris gilders of 1832) and on a much vaster scale by the British, who were soon to push Robert Owen into the leadership of a vast mass movement, for which he was singularly ill-suited. In brief, by the early 1830s proletarian class consciousness and social aspirations already existed. They were almost certainly feebler and much less effective than the middle class consciousness which their employers were acquiring or displaying at about the same time. But they were present.

 

Proletarian consciousness was powerfully combined with, and rein-forced by, what may best be called Jacobin consciousness—the set of aspirations, experiences, methods and moral attitudes with which the French (and also before it the American) Revolution had imbued the thinking and confident poor. Just as the practical expression of the situation of the new working class was ‘the labour movement’ and its ideology ‘the co-operative commonwealth’, so that of the common people, proletarian or otherwise, whom the French Revolution pushed on to the stage of history as actors rather than merely as sufferers, was the democratic movement. ‘Citizens of poor outward appearance and who in former times would not have dared show themselves in these places reserved for more elegant company, were going for walks along with the rich and holding their heads as high.’²⁸ They wanted respect, recognition and equality. They knew they could achieve it, for in ¹793-4 they had done so. Not all such citizens were workers, but all conscious workers belonged to their sort.

 

Proletarian and Jacobin consciousness supplemented each other. Working-class experience gave the labouring poor the major institu-tions of everyday self-defence, the trade union and mutual aid society, and the major weapons of such collective struggle, solidarity and the strike (which in turn implied organization and discipline).* However, even where these were not as feeble, unstable and localized as they still usually were on the continent, their scope was strictly limited. The attempt to use a purely trade unionist or mutualist model not merely to win higher wages for organized sections of the workers, but to defeat the entire existing society and establish a new one, was made

 

* The strike a so spontaneous and logical a consequence of working-class existence that most European languages have quite independent native words for it (e.g. greve, huelga, •ciopero, zabastovka), whereas words for other institutions are often borrowed.

 

2IO

THE LABOURING  POOR

 

in Britain between 1829 ^an<^ ‘834, and again partly under Chartism. It failed, and this failure wrecked a remarkably mature and early proletarian socialist movement for a half-century. The attempts to turn trade unions into national unions of co-operative producers (as in the Operative Builders’ Union with its ‘builders’ parliament’ and ‘builders’ guild’—1831-4) failed, and so did the attempt to set up national co-operative production and ‘equitable labour exchanges’ in other ways. The great all-embracing ‘general unions’, so far from proving stronger than the local and sectional societies, proved unwieldy and weak, though this was due less to the inherent drawbacks of general union than to the lack of discipline, organization and experience in leadership. The general strike proved inapplicable under Chartism, except (in 1842) as a spontaneously spreading hunger-riot.

 

Conversely the methods of political agitation which belonged to Jacobinism and radicalism in general, but not specifically to the working class, proved both their effectiveness and their flexibility: political campaigns, by means of newspapers and pamphlets^ public meetings and demonstrations, and where necessary riot and insurrec-tion. It is true that where such campaigns aimed too high, or frightened the ruling classes too much, they too failed. In the hysterical 1810s the tendency was to call out the armed forces against any serious demonstra-tion (as at Spa Fields, London, in 1816, or ‘Peterloo’, Manchester, in 1819, when ten demonstrators were killed and several hundred injured). In 1838-48 the millions of signatures on the petitions did not bring the People’s Charter any nearer. Nevertheless political campaigning on a narrower front was effective. Without it, there would have been no Catholic Emancipation in 1829, no Reform Act in 1832, and certainly no even modestly effective legislative control of factory conditions and working hours. Thus time and again we find a weakly organized work-ing class compensating for its weakness by the agitational methods of political radicalism. The ‘Factories Agitation’ of the 1830s in the North of England compensated for the weakness of the local unions, just as the mass protest campaign against the exile of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ (cf. above p. 119) tried to save something from the wreck of the collapsing ‘general unions’ after 1834.

 

However, the Jacobin tradition in turn drew strength and an unpre-cedented continuity and massiveness from the cohesive solidarity and loyalty which were so characteristic of the new proletariat. They were not held together by the mere fact of being poor in the same place, but by the fact that working together in large numbers, co-operating in work, relying on each other, was their very life. Unbroken solidarity was their only weapon, for only thus could they demonstrate their

 

 

2 1 1

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

single but decisive asset, collective indispensability. ‘No strike-breaking’ (or words to similar effect) was—and has remained—the first com-mandment in their moral code; the breaker of solidarity (described by the morally loaded adjective ‘black’ as in ‘blackleg’) was the Judas of their community. Once they had acquired even a flickering of political consciousness, their demonstrations were not the mere occasional eruptions of an exasperated ‘mob’, which easily relapsed into apathy. They were the stirrings of an army. Thus in a city like Sheffield, once the class struggle between middle and working class had become the main issue in local politics (in the early 1840s), a strong and stable proletarian bloc immediately appeared. By the end of 1847 there were eight Chartists on the town council, and the national collapse of Chartism in 1848 barely affected it in a city where between ten and twelve thousand hailed the Paris Revolution of that year: by 1849 Chartists held almost half the seats on the council.²*

 

Below the working class and the Jacobin tradition there lay the substratum of an even older tradition which reinforced both: that of riot, or the occasional public protest by desperate men. The direct action or rioting, the smashing of machines, shops or the houses of the rich, had a long history. In general it expressed sheer hunger or the feelings of men at the end of their tether, as in the waves of machine-breaking which periodically engulfed declining hand-industries threat-ened by the machine (British textiles in 1810-11 and again in 1826, continental textiles in the mid-1830s and mid-1840s). Sometimes, as in England, it was a recognized form of collective pressure by organized workers, and implied no hostility to machines, as among miners, certain skilled textile operatives or the cutlers, who combined political moderation with systematic terrorism against non-unionist colleagues. Or else it expressed the discontent of the unemployed or the starving. At a time of ripening revolution such direct action by otherwise politically immature men and women could turn into a decisive force, especially if it occurred in capital cities or other politically sensitive spots. Both in 1830 and in 1848 such movements threw a gigantic weight behind otherwise quite minor expressions of discontent, turning protest into insurrection.

 

IV

 

The labour movement ofthis period was, therefore, neither in composition nor in its ideology and programme a strictly ‘proletarian’ movement, i.e. one of industrial and factory workers or even one confined to wage-earners. It was rather a common front of all forces and tendencies

 

 

2 1 2

THE LABOURING  POOR

 

representing the (mainly urban) labouring poor. Such a common front had long existed, but even as late as the French Revolution its leader-ship and inspiration had come from the liberal and radical middle classes. As we have seen, ‘Jacobinism’ and not ‘Sansculottism’ (let alone the aspirations of the immature proletarians) had given such unity as it possessed to the Parisian popular tradition. The novelty of the situation after 1815 was, that the common front was increasingly directed against the liberal middle class as well as the kings and aristo-crats, and that what gave it unity was the programme and ideology of the proletariat, even though the industrial and factory working class as yet barely existed, and was on the whole politically very much less mature than other sections of the labouring poor. Both the poor and the rich tended to assimilate the entire ‘urban mass existing below the middle order of society’²⁵ politically to the ‘proletariat’ or ‘the working class’. All who were troubled by the ‘increasingly vivid and general sentiment that there is an internal disharmony in the present state of affairs, and that this state cannot last’²⁶ inclined to turn to socialism as the only considered and intellectually valid critique and alternative.

 

The leadership of the new movement reflected a similar state of affairs. The most active, militant and politically conscious of the labouring poor were not the new factory proletarians but the skilled craftsmen, independent artisans, small-scale domestic workers and others who lived and worked substantially as they had done before the Industrial Revolution, but under, far greater pressure. The earliest trade unions were almost invariably those of printers, hatters, tailors and the like. The nucleus of leadership of Chartism in a city like Leeds —and this was typical—consisted of a joiner turned handloom weaver, a couple ofjourneymen printers, a bookseller, a woolcomber. The men who adopted Mr Owen’s co-operative doctrines were in their majority such ‘artisans’, ‘mechanics’ and handworkers. The earliest German working-class communists were travelling journeymen craftsmen— tailors, joiners, printers. The men who rose against the bourgeoisie in the Paris of 1848 were still the inhabitants of the old artisan Fau-bourg Saint-Antoine, and not yet (as in the Commune of 1871) those of proletarian Belleville. Insofar as the advance of industry destroyed these very fortresses of ‘working-class’ consciousness, it fatally under-mined the strength of these early labour movements, Between 1820 and 1850, for instance, the British movement created a dense network of institutions for working-class self-education and political education, the ‘mechanics’ institutes’, Owenite ‘Halls of Science’ and others. By 1850 there were (not counting the more obviously political of these) 700 of them in Britain—151 merely in the county of Yorkshire—with

 

 

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THE  AGE OF     REVOLUTION

 

400 newsrooms.²⁷ But they were already declining and within a few decades most would be either dead or somnolent.

There was only one exception. In Britain alone the new proletarians had already begun to organize and even to produce their own leaders: John Doherty, the Irish Owenite cotton spinner, Tommy Hepburn and Martin Jude, the miners. Not only the skilled artisans and the de-pressed domestic workers formed the battalions of Chartism; the factory workers were its fighters, and sometimes its leaders, too. But outside Britain the factory operatives and the miners were still in the main sufferers rather than agents. Not until the latter part of the century were they to take a hand themselves in the shaping of their fate.

 

The labour movement was an organization of self-defence, of protest, of revolution. But for the labouring poor it was more than a tool of struggle: it was also a way of life. The liberal bourgeoisie offered them nothing; history took them away from the traditional life which con-servatives offered vainly to maintain or to restore. Neither had much to do with the sort of life into which they were increasingly drawn. But the movement had, or rather, the way of life which they hammered out for themselves, collective, communal, combative, idealist and iso-lated, implied the movement, for struggle was its very essence. And in return the movement gave it coherence and purpose. The liberal myth supposed that unions were composed of feckless labourers instigated by conscienceless agitators; but in reality the feckless were generally the least unionized, the most intelligent and competent workers the most firm in their support for union.

 

The most highly developed examples of such ‘worlds of labour’ in this period were probably still those of the old domestic industries. There was the community of the Lyons silk-workers, the ever-rebellious canuts—who rose in 1831 and again in 1834, and who, in Michelet’s phrase, ‘because this world would not do, made themselves another in the humid obscurity of their alleys, a moral paradise of sweet dreams and visions’.²⁸ There were communities such as those of the Scottish linenweavers with their republican and Jacobin puritanism, their Swedenborgian heresies, their Tradesman’s Library, savings’ bank, Mechanics Institute, Library and Scientific Club, their Drawing Academy, missionary meetings, temperance leagues and infant schools, their Florists’ Society and literary magazine (the Dunfermline Gas-ometer)*—and of course their Chartism. Class consciousness, militancy, hatred and contempt for the oppressor belonged to this life as much as

 

* Cf. T. L. Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (1818): ‘You are a philosopher,’ said the lady, ‘and a lover of liberty. You are the author of a treatise called Philosophical Gas; or a Project for the General Illumination of the Human Mind”.’

 

 

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THE  LABOURING  POOR

 

the looms on which men wove. They owed nothing to the rich except their wages. What they had in life was their own collective creation.

 

But this silent process ofself-organization was not confined to workers of this older type. It is reflected in the ‘union’, often based On the local Primitive Methodist community, in the Northumberland and Durham mines. It is reflected in the dense concentration of workers’ mutual and friendly societies in the new industrial areas, especially Lancashire.* Above all it is reflected in the serried thousands of men, women and children who streamed with torches on to the moors for Chartist demonstrations from the smaller industrial towns of Lancashire, in the rapidity with which the new Rochdale co-operative shops spread in the latter 1840s.

 

V

 

And yet, as we look back upon this period, there is a great and evident discrepancy between the force of the labouring poor, which the rich feared, the ‘spectre of communism’ which haunted them, and their actual organized force, let alone that of the new industrial proletariat. The public expression of their protest was, in the literal sense, a ‘movement’ rather than an organization. What linked even the most massive and comprehensive of their political manifestations—Chartism (1838-48)—together was little more than a handful of traditional and radical slogans, a few powerful orators and journalists who became the voices of the poor, like Feargus O’Connor (1794-1855), a few newspapers like the Northern Star. It was the common fate of being against the rich and the great which the old militants have recalled:

 

‘We had a dog called Rodney. My grandmother disliked the name because she had a curious sort of notion that Admiral Rodney, having been elevated to the peerage, had been hostile to the people. The old lady, too, was careful to explain to me that Cobbett and Cobden were two different persons—that Cobbett was the hero, and that Cobden was just a middle class advocate. One of the pictures that I longest remember—it stood alongside samplers and stencilled drawings not far from a china statuette of George Washington— was a portrait ofJohn Frost.f A line at the top of the picture indicated that it belonged to a series called the Portrait Gallery of People’s Friends. Above the head was a laurel wreath, while below was a representation of Mr Frost appealing to Justice on behalf ofragged and wretched outcasts. . . . The most

 

* In 1821 Lancashire had by far the highest proportion of friendly societies’ members to total population in the country (17 per cent); in 1845 almost half the lodges of the Odd-fellows were in Lancashire and Yorkshire.”

f Leader of the unsuccessful Chartist insurrection at Newport, 1839.

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

constant of our visitors was a crippled shoemaker . . . (who) made his appearance every Sunday morning as regular as clockwork, with a copy of the Northern Star, damp from the press, for the purpose of hearing some member of our household read out to him and others ‘Feargus’ letter’. The paper had first to be dried before the fire, and then carefully and evenly cut, so as not to damage a single line of the almost sacred production. This done, Larry, placidly smoking a cutty pipe, which he occasionally thrust into the grate, settled himself to listen with all the rapture of a devotee in a tabernacle to the message of the great Feargus.’³⁰

 

There was little leadership or co-ordination. The most ambitious attempt to turn a movement into an organization, the ‘general union’ of 1834-5, broke down miserably and rapidly. At most—in Britain as on the continent—there was the spontaneous solidarity of the local labouring community, the men who, like the Lyons silkworkers, died as hard as they lived. What held this movement together was hunger, wretchedness, hatred and hope. And what defeated it, in Chartist Britain as on the revolutionary continent of 1848, was that the poor were hungry, numerous and desperate enough to rise, but lacked the organization and maturity which could have made their rebellion more than a momentary danger to the social order. By 1848 the movement of the labouring poor had yet to develop its equivalent to the Jacobinism of the revolutionary middle class of 1789-94.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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CHAPTER      12

 

IDEOLOGY:  RELIGION

 

Give me a people where boiling passions and worldly greed are calmed by faith, hope and charity; a people which sees this earth as a pilgrimage and the other life as its

true farmland;  a people taught to admire and revere in Christian heroism its very

 

poverty and its very sufferings; a people that loves and adores in Jesus Christ the first-bom of all the oppressed, and in his cross the instrument of universal salvation. Give me, 1 say, a peopleformed in this mould and socialism will not merely be easily defeated, but impossible to be thought of. . .

 

CWiUk Cattolica¹

 

‘But  when Napoleon began his advance, they {the Molokan heretic peasants)

 

believed that he was that lion of the valley of Jehoshaphat, who, as their old hymns tell, is destined to overthrow the false Tsar and to restore the throne of the true White

 

Tsar. And so the Molokans of Tambov province chose a deputation among themselves, which was to go to meet him and greet him, dressed in white raiment.’

 

Haxthausen, Studien ueber . . . Russland*

 

 

 

I

 

W H A T men think about the world is one thing; the terms in which they think about it, another. For most of history and over most of the world (China being perhaps the main exception) the terms in which all but a handful of educated and emancipated men thought about the world were those of traditional religion, so much so that there are countries in which the word ‘Christian’ is simply a synonym for’peasant’ or even ‘man’. At some stage before 1848 this ceased to be so in parts of Europe, though not yet outside the area transformed by the two revolutions. Religion, from being something like the sky, from which no man can escape and which contains all that is above the earth, became something like a bank of clouds, a large but limited and changing feature of the human firmament. Of all the ideological changes this is by far the most profound, though its practical consequences were more ambiguous and undetermined than was then supposed. At all events, it is the most unprecedented.

 

What was unprecedented, of course, was the secularization of the masses. A gentlemanly religious indifference combined with the punc-tilious exercise of ritual duties (to set an example to the lower orders) had long been familiar among emancipated noblemen,³ though ladies..

 

 

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like all their sex, remained far more pious. Polite and educated men might be technically believers in a supreme being, though one which had no function except existing and certainly did not interfere with human activities or require any form of worship except a gracious acknowledgement. But their views on traditional religion were con-temptuous and often frankly hostile, and their views would have been no different had they been ready to declare themselves frank atheists. ‘Sire,’ the great mathematician Laplace is reported to have told Napoleon, when asked where God fitted into his celestial mechanics, ‘I have no need of such an hypothesis.’ Frank atheism was still com-paratively rare, but among the enlightened scholars, writers and gentle-men who set the intellectual fashions of the later eighteenth century, frank Christianity was even rarer. If there was a flourishing religion among the late eighteenth century elite, it was rationalist, illuminist and anti-clerical Freemasonry.

 

This widespread dechristianization of males in the polite and educated classes dated back to the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, and its public effects had been startling and beneficial: the mere fact that trials for witchcraft, which had plagued western and Central Europe for several centuries, now followed trials for heresy and autos-da-fi into limbo, would be enough to justify it. However, in the earlier eighteenth century it hardly affected the lower or even the middle ranks. The peasantry remained totally beyond the range of any ideo-logical language which did not speak with the tongues of the Virgin, the Saints, and Holy Writ, not to mention the more ancient gods and spirits which still hid beneath a slightly christianized facade. There were stirrings of irreligious thought among those craftsmen who would formerly have been drawn to heresy. The cobblers, most persistent of working-class intellectuals, who had produced mystics like Jacob Boehme, seem to have begun to have their doubts about any deity. At all events in Vienna they were the only group of craftsmen to sympa-thize with the Jacobins, because it was said that these did not believe in God. However, these were as yet tiny ripples. The great mass of unskilled and miscellaneous poverty in the cities remained (except perhaps for a few North European towns like Paris and London) pro-foundly pious or superstitious.

 

But even among the middle ranks overt hostility to religion was not popular, though the ideology of a rationalist progressive-minded, anti-traditional enlightenment fitted excellently into the scheme of things of a rising middle class. Its associations were with aristocracy and immorality, which itself belonged to a noble society. And indeed the earliest really ‘free thinkers’, the libertins of the mid-seventeenth century,

 

 

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lived up to the popular connotation of their name: Moliere’s Don Juan portrays not merely their combination of atheism and sexual freedom, but the respectable bourgeois horror of it. There were good reasons for the paradox (particularly obvious in the seventeenth century) that the intellectually most daring thinkers, who thereby anticipated much of later middle class ideology, e.g. Bacon and Hobbes, were as individuals associated with the old and corrupt society. The armies of the rising middle class needed the discipline and organization of a strong and single-minded morality for their battles. Theoretically agnosticism or atheism is perfectly compatible with this, and certainly Christianity unnecessary for it; and the philosophes of the eighteenth century were never tired of demonstrating that a ‘natural’ morality (of which they found illustrations among the noble savages) and the high personal standards of the individual free-thinker were better than Christianity. But in practice the tried advantages of the old type of religion and the terrible risks of abandoning any supernatural sanction of morality were immense; not only for the labouring poor, who were generally held to be too ignorant and stupid to do without some sort of socially useful superstition, but for the middle class itself.

 

The post-revolutionary generations in France are full of attempts to create a bourgeois non-Christian morality equivalent to the Christian; by a Rousseauist ‘cult of the supreme being’ (Robespierre in 1794), by various pseudo-religious constructed on rationalist non-Christian foun-dations, but still maintaining the apparatus of ritual and cults (the Saint-Simonians, and Comte’s ‘religion of humanity’). Eventually the attempt to maintain the externals of old religious cults was abandoned, but not the attempt to establish a formal lay morality (based on various moral concepts such as ‘solidarity’) and above all on a lay counterpart to the priesthood, the schoolteachers. The French instituteur, poor, selfless, imbuing his pupils in each village with the Roman morality of Revolution and Republic, the official antagonist to the village cure, did not triumph until the Third Republic, which also solved the poli-tical problems of establishing bourgeois stability on the foundations of social revolution, at all events for seventy years. But he is already implicit in Condorcet’s law of 1792 which established that ‘the persons in charge of instruction in primary classes shall be called instituteurs’ echoing Cicero and Sallust who spoke of’founding the commonwealth’

(instituere civitatem) and ‘founding morality of commonwealths’ (instituere

 

civitatum mores).*

 

The bourgeoisie thus remained divided in its ideology between a minority of increasingly frank freethinkers and a majority of the pious, Protestant, Jewish and Catholic. However, the new historic fact was

 

 

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that of the two the free-thinking sector was immeasurably more dynamic and effective. Though in purely quantitative terms religion remained immensely strong and, as we shall see, grew stronger, it was no longer (to use a biological analogy) dominant but recessive, and has remained so to this day within the world transformed by the dual revolution. There is little doubt that the great bulk of the citizens of the new USA were believers of one sort or another, mostly Protestant, but the Con-stitution of the Republic is, and in spite of all efforts to change it has remained, one of agnosticism. There is no doubt whatever that among the British middle classes of our period the Protestant pietists greatly and increasingly outnumbered the minority of agnostic radicals. But a Bentham moulded the actual institutions of their age far more than a Wilberforce.

 

The most obvious proof of this decisive victory of secular over religious ideology is also its most important result. With the American and French Revolutions major political and social transformations were secularized. The issues of the Dutch and English Revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had still been discussed and fought out in the traditional language of Christianity, orthodox, schis-matic or heretical. In the ideologies of the American and French, for the first time in European history, Christianity is irrelevant. The language, the symbolism, the costume of 1789 are purely non-Christian, if we leave aside a few popular-archaic efforts to create cults of saints and martyrs, analogous to the old ones, out of dead Sansculotte heroes. It was, in fact, Roman. At the same time this secularism of the revo-lution demonstrates the remarkable political hegemony of the liberal middle class, which imposed its particular ideological forms on a much vaster movement of the masses. If the intellectual leadership of the French Revolution had come only very slightly from the masses who actually made it, it is inconceivable that its ideology should not have shown more signs of traditionalism than it did.*

 

Bourgeois triumph thus imbued the French Revolution with the agnostic or secular-moral ideology of the eighteenth century enlighten-ment, and since the idiom of that revolution became the general lan-guage of all subsequent social revolutionary movements, it transmitted this secularism to them also. With a few unimportant exceptions, notably among intellectuals like the Saint-Simonians and among a few archaic Christian-communist sectarians like the tailor Weitling (1808-1871), the ideology of the new working class and socialist movements of the nineteenth century was secularist from the start. Thomas Paine,

 

* In fact only popular songs of the period do sometimes echo Catholic terminology, like the Qa Ira.

 

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whose ideas expressed the radical-democratic aspirations of small artisans and pauperized craftsmen, is as famous for having written the first book to demonstrate in popular language that the Bible is not the word of God (The Age of Reason, i794), as for his Rights of Man (1791). The mechanics of the 1820s followed Robert Owen not only for his analysis of capitalism, but for his unbelief, and, long after the collapse of Owenism, their Halls ofScience spread rationalist propaganda through the cities. There have been and are religious socialists, and a very large number of men who, while religious, are also socialists. But the predominant ideology of modern labour and socialist movements, insofar as they claim one, is based on eighteenth century rationalism.

 

This is all the more surprising as we have seen the masses to have remained predominantly religious, and as the natural revolutionary idiom of masses brought up in a traditional Christian society is one of rebellion (social heresy, millennialism and the like), the Bible being a highly incendiary document. However, the prevalent secularism of the new labour and socialist movements was based on the equally novel and more fundamental fact of the prevalent religious indifference of the new proletariat. By modern standards the working-classes and urban masses which grew up in the period of the Industrial Revolution were no doubt rather strongly influenced by religion; by the standards of the first half of the nineteenth century there was no precedent for their remoteness from, ignorance of, and indifference to, organized religion. Observers of all political tendencies agreed about this. The British Religious Census of 1851 demonstrated it to the horror of contem-poraries. Much of this remoteness was due to the utter failure of the traditional established churches to cope with agglomerations—the great cities and the new industrial settlements—and with social classes —the proletariat—which were foreign to their routines and experience. By 1851 there were church places available for only 34 per cent of the inhabitants of Sheffield, only 31-2 per cent of those in Liverpool and Manchester, only 29 per cent of those in Birmingham. The problems of being a parish priest in an agricultural village were no guide to the cure of souls in an industrial town or urban slum.

 

The established churches therefore neglected these new communities and classes, thus leaving them (especially in Catholic and Lutheran countries) almost entirely to the secular faith of the new labour move-ments, which were eventually—towards the end of the nineteenth century—to capture them. (Where they had not by 1848 done so to any great extent, the incentive to recapture them from infidelity was not strong.) The protestant sects were more successful, at all events in the countries such as Britain, in which such sectarianism was a well-

 

 

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established religio-political phenomenon. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that even the sects succeeded best where the social environ-ment was nearest to that of the traditional small town or village community, as among the farm-labourers, miners, and fishermen. Moreover, among the industrial labouring classes the sects were never more than a minority. The working class as a group was undoubtedly less touched by organized religion than any previous body of the poor in world history.

 

The general trend of the period from 1789 to 1848 was therefore one of emphatic secularization. Science found itself in increasingly open conflict with the Scriptures, as it ventured into evolutionary fields (cf Chapter 15). Historical scholarship, applied to the Bible in unprece-dented doses—particularly from the 1830s by the professors of Tue-bingen—dissolved the single text inspired, if not written, by the Lord into a collection of historical documents from various periods, with all the defects of human documentation. Lachmann’s Novum Testamentum (1842-1852) denied that the Gospels were eyewitness accounts and doubted whether Jesus Christ had intended to found a new religion. David Strauss’s controversial Life of Jesus (1835) eliminated the super-natural element from his subject’s biography. By 1848 educated Europe was almost ripe for the shock of Charles Darwin. The trend was rein-forced by the direct attack ofnumerous political rdgimes on the property and legal privileges of the established churches and their clergy or other ritual persons, and the increasing tendency for governments or other secular agencies to take over functions hitherto left largely to religious ones; especially—in Roman Catholic countries—education and social welfare. Between 1789 and 1848 monasteries were dissolved and their property sold from Naples to Nicaragua. Outside Europe, of course, conquering whites launched direct attacks upon the religion of their subjects or victims, either—like the British administrators in India who stamped out the burning of widows {suttee) and the ritual murder sect of the thugs in the 1830s—as convinced champions of enlightenment against superstition, or merely because they hardly knew what effect their measures would have on their victims.

 

II

 

In purely numerical terms it is evident that all religions, unless actually contracting, were likely to expand with the rise in population. Yet two types showed a particular aptitude for expansion in our period: Islam and sectarian Protestantism. This expansionism was all the more striking as it contrasted with the marked failure of other Christian religions—

 

 

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both Catholic and Protestant—to expand, in spite of a sharp increase in missionary activity outside Europe, increasingly backed by the military, political and economic force of European penetration. In fact, the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades saw the beginning of systematic Protestant missionary activity mostly by Anglo-Saxons. The Baptist Missionary Society (1792), the interdenominational London Missionary Society (1795), the evangelical Church Missionary Society (1799), the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) were followed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (1810), by the American Baptists (1814), Wesleyans (1813-18), the American Bible Society (1816), the Church of Scotland (1824), the United Presbyterians (1835), the American Methodist Episcopalians (1819) and the rest. Continental Protestants, in spite of some pioneering by the Netherlands Missionary Society (1797) and the Basel Missionaries (1815), developed somewhat later: the Berlin and Rhenish societies in the 1820s, the Swedish, Leipzig and Bremen societies in the thirties, the Norwegian in 1842. Roman Catholicism, whose missions were stagnant and neglected, revived even later. The reasons for this outpouring of bibles and trade over the heathen belong both to the religious, social and economic histories of Europe and America. Here we need merely note that by 1848 its results were still negligible, except in some Pacific Islands like Hawaii. A few footholds had been gained on the coast in Sierra Leone (whither anti-slavery agitation attracted attention in the 1790s) and in Liberia, formed as a state of liberated American slaves in the 1820s. Around the fringes of European settlement in South Africa foreign missionaries (but not the established local Church of England and Dutch Reformed Church) had begun to convert Africans in some quantities. But when David Livingstone, the famous missionary and explorer, sailed for Africa in 1840, the original inhabitants of that continent were still virtually untouched by Christianity in any shape.

 

As against this Islam was continuing that silent, piecemeal and irreversible expansion unbacked by organized missionary endeavour or forcible conversion, which is so characteristic of that religion. It expanded both eastwards, in Indonesia and North-western China, and westwards from the Sudan towards Senegal and, to a much smaller extent, from the shores of the Indian ocean inland. When traditional societies change something so fundamental as their religion, it is clear that they must be facing major new problems. The Moslem traders, who virtually monopolized the commerce of inner Africa with the out-side world and multiplied with it, helped to bring Islam to the notice of new peoples. The slave-trade, which broke down communal life, made it attractive, for Islam is a powerful means of reintegrating social struc-

 

 

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tures.⁴” At the same time the Mohammedan religion appealed to the semi-feudal and military societies of the Sudan, and its sense of indepen-dence, militancy and superiority made it a useful counterweight to slavery. Moslem Negroes made bad slaves: the Haussa (and other Sudanese) who had been imported into Bahia (Brazil) revolted nine times between 1807 and the great rising of 1835 until, in effect, they were mostly killed or deported back to Africa. The slavers learned to avoid imports from these areas, which had only recently been opened to the trade.⁵

 

While the element of resistance to the whites was clearly very small in African Islam (where there were as yet hardly any), it was by tradi-tion crucial in South-east Asia. There Islam—once again pioneered by traders—had long advanced against local cults and the declining Hinduism of the spice islands, largely as a means of more effective resistance against the Portuguese and the Dutch, as ‘a kind of pre-nationalism’, though also as a popular counterweight to the Hinduized princes.⁶ As these princes increasingly turned into narrowly circum-scribed dependents or agents of the Dutch, Islam sunk its roots more deeply into the population. In turn, the Dutch learned that the Indo-nesian princes could, by allying with the religious teachers, unleash a general popular rising, as in the Java War of the Prince of Djogjakarta (1825-1830). They were consequently time and again driven back to a policy of close alliance with the local rulers, or indirect rule. Mean-wlr’le the growth of trade and shipping forged closer links between South-east Asian Muslim and Mecca, served to increase the number of pilgrims, to make Indonesian Islam more orthodox, and even to open it to the militant and revivalist influence of Arabian Wahhabism.

 

Within Islam the movements of reform and revival, which in this period gave the religion much of its penetrative power, can also be seen as reflecting the impact of European expansion and the crisis of the old Mohammedan societies (notably of the Turkish and Persian em-pires) and perhaps also of the growing crisis of the Chinese empire. The puritanical Wahhabites had arisen in Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century. By 1814 they had conquered Arabia and were ready to conquer Syria, until halted by the combined force of the westernizing Moham-med AIi of Egypt and Western arms; though their teachings spread eastwards into Persia, Afghanistan and India. Inspired by Wahhabism an Algerian holy man, Sidi Mohammed ben AIi el Senussi, developed a similar movement which from the 1840s spread from Tripoli into the Sahara desert. In Algeria Abd-el-Kader, in the Caucasus Shamyl, developed religio-political movements of resistance to the French and Russians respectively (see chapter 7) and anticipated a pan-Islamism

 

 

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which sought not merely a return to the original purity of the Prophet but also to absorb Western innovations. In Persia an even more obviously nationalist and revolutionary heterodoxy, the bab movement of AH Mohammed, arose in the 1840s. It tended, among other things, to return to certain ancient practices of Persian Zoroastrianism and demanded the unveiling of women.

 

The ferment and expansion of Islam was such that in terms of purely religious history, we can perhaps best describe the period from 1789 to 1848 as that of a world Islamic revival. No equivalent mass move-ments developed in any other non-Christian religion, though by the end of the period we are on the verge of a great Chinese Taiping rebellion, which has many characteristics of such a one. Small religious reform movements of the evolues were founded in British India, notably

Ram Mohan Roy’s	(1772-1833) Brahmo Samaj. In the United States
the defeated Indian	tribes began to develop religio-social prophetic

movements of resistance to the whites, such as that which inspired the war of the largest recorded confederation of the Plains Indians under Tecumseh in the first decade of the century, and Handsome Lake’s religion (1799), designed to preserve the Iroquois way of life against disruption by white American society. It is to the credit of Thomas Jefferson, a man of rare enlightenment, that he gave this prophet, who adopted some Christian and especially Quaker elements, his official blessing. However, the direct contact between an advanced capitalist civilization and animist peoples was still too rare to produce many of those prophetic and millenial movements which have become so typical of the twentieth century.

 

The expansionist movement of Protestant sectarianism differs from that of Islam in that it was almost entirely confined to the countries of developed capitalist civilization. Its extent cannot be measured, for some movements of this kind (for instance German pietism or English evangelicalism) remained within the framework of their respective established State churches. However, its size is not in doubt. In 1851 roughly half the Protestant worshippers in England and Wales at-tended religious services other than those of the Established Church. This extraordinary triumph of the sects was the result, in the main, of religious developments since 1790, or more precisely since the last years of the Napoleonic Wars. Thus in 1790 the Wesleyan Methodists had only 59,000 communicant members in the UK; in 1850 they and their various offshoots had something like ten times that number.⁷ In the United States a very similar process of mass conversion multiplied the number of Baptists, Methodists and to a lesser extent Presbyterians at the relative expense of the formerly dominant churches; by 1850 al-

 

 

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most three-quarters of all churches in the USA belonged to these three denominations.⁸ The disruption of established churches, the secession and rise of sects, also marks the religious history of this period in Scotland (the ‘Great Disruption⁵ of 1843), the Netherlands, Norway and other countries.

 

The reasons for the geographical and social limits of Protestant sectarianism are evident. Roman Catholic countries provided no scope for and tradition of public sects. There the equivalent break with the established church or the dominant religion was more likely to take the form of mass dechristianization (especially among the men) than of schism.* (Conversely, the Protestant anticlericalism of the Anglo-Saxon countries was often the exact counterpart of the atheist anti-clericalism of continental ones.) Religious revivalism was likely to take the form of some new emotional cult, some miracle-working saint or pilgrimage within the accepted framework of the Roman Catholic religion. One or two such saints of our period have come to wider notice, e.g. the Cure d’Ars (1786-1859) in France. The Orthodox Christianity of Eastern Europe lent itself more readily to sectarianism, and in Russia the growing disruption of a backward society had since the later seventeenth century produced a crop of sects. Several, in par-ticular the self-castrating Skoptsi, the Doukhobors of the Ukraine and the Molokans, were the products of the later eighteenth century and the Napoleonic period; ‘Old Believers’ dated from the seventeenth century. However, in general the classes to which such sectarianism made the greatest appeal—small craftsmen, traders, commercial farmers and other precursors of the bourgeoisie, or conscious peasant revolutionaries —were still not numerous enough to produce a sectarian movement of vast size.

 

In the Protestant countries the situation was different. Here the impact of the commercial and individualist society was strongest (at all events in Britain and the USA) while the sectarian tradition was already well-established. Its exclusiveness and insistence on the indi-vidual communication between man and God, as well as its moral austerity, made it attractive to, or a schpol for, rising entrepreneurs and small businessmen. Its gaunt, implacable, theology of hell and damna-tion and of an austere personal salvation made it attractive to men who lived harsh lives in a harsh environment: to frontiersmen and seamen, to small individual cultivators and miners, to exploited craftsmen. The sect could easily turn into a democratic, egalitarian assembly of the faithful without social or religious hierarchy, and thus appealed to the

 

* The sects and breakaways to Protestantism which occurred—not as yet very frequently— remained, and have since remained, numerically tiny.

 

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common man. Its hostility to elaborate ritual and learned doctrine encouraged amateur prophecy and preaching. The persistent tradition of millenarianism lent itself to a primitive expression of social rebellion. Finally, its association with emotionally overpowering personal ‘con-version’ opened the way for a mass religious ‘revivalism’ of hysterical intensity, in which men and women could find a welcome release from the stresses of a society which provided no equivalent outlets for mass emotion, and destroyed those which had existed in the past.

 

‘Revivalism’ did more than anything else to propagate the sects. Thus it was the intensely emotional, irrationalist, personal salvationism of John Wesley (i 703-1791) and his Methodists which provided the im-petus for the renaissance and expansion of Protestant dissent, at any rate in Britain. For this reason the new sects and trends were initially a-political or even (like the Wesleyans) strongly conservative, for they turned away from the evil outside world to personal salvation or to the life of the self-contained group, which often meant that they re-jected the possibility of any collective alteration of its secular arrange-ments. Their ‘political⁵ energies generally went into moral and religious campaigns like those which multiplied foreign missions, anti-slavery and temperance agitations. The politically active and radical sectarians in the period of the American and French Revolutions belonged rather to the older, drier, and more tranquil dissenting and puritan com-munities which had survived from the seventeenth century, stagnant or even evolving towards an intellectualist deism under the influence of eighteenth century rationalism: Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians, Quakers. The new Methodist type of sectarianism was anti-revolutionary, and the immunity of Britain to revolution in our period has even—mistakenly—been ascribed to their growing influence.

 

However, the social character of the new sects militated against their theological withdrawal from the world. They spread most readily among those who stood between the rich and powerful on one side, the masses of the traditional society on the other: i.e. among those who were about to rise into the middle class, those about to decline into a new proletariat, and the indiscriminate mass of small and independent men in between. The fundamental political orientation of all these inclined them towards a Jacobinical or Jeffersonian radicalism, or at least, a moderate middle class liberalism. ‘Nonconformism’ in Britain, the prevalent Protestant churches in the USA, therefore tended to take their place as political forces on the left; though among the British Methodists the Toryism of their founder was overcome only in the course of the half-century of secessions and internal crises which ended in 1848.

 

 

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Only among the very poor, or the very shaken, did the original re-jection of the existing world continue. But there was often a primitive revolutionary rejection, taking the form of the millenarian prediction of the end of the world, which the tribulations of the post-Napoleonic period appeared (in line with the Apocalypse) to foreshadow. The Irvingites in Britain announced it for 1835 and 1838; William Miller, the founder of the Seventh Day Adventists in the USA, predicted it for 1843 and 1844, by which time 50,000 were said to follow him and 3,000 preachers to back him. In the areas where small stable indi-vidualist farming and petty trading were under the immediate impact of the growth of a dynamic capitalist economy, such as in upstate New York, this millenarian ferment was particularly powerful. Its most dramatic product was the sect of the Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), founded by the prophet Joseph Smith who received his revelation near Palmyra, N.Y., in the 1820s, and led his people in an exodus towards some remote Zion which eventually brought them into the deserts of Utah.

 

These were also the groups among whom the collective hysteria of the mass revival meeting made the greatest appeal; whether because it relieved the harshness and drabness of their lives (‘when no other entertainment offers, religious revivals will sometimes take its place’ a lady observed of the girls in the Essex mills)⁹ or whether its collective religious union created a temporary community of disparate indi-viduals. In its modern form revivalism was the product of the American frontier. The ‘Great Awakening’ began around 1800 in the Appalach-ians with gigantic, ‘camp meetings’—the one at Kane Ridge, Kentucky (1801) united between ten and twenty thousand people under forty preachers—and a degree of sustained orgiastic hysteria difficult to con-ceive: men and women ‘jerked’, danced to exhaustion, fell into trances by the thousands, ‘spoke with tongues’ or barked like dogs. Remoteness, a harsh natural or social environment, or a combination of all these, encouraged such revivalism, which travelling preachers imported into Europe, thus producing a proletarian-democratic secession from the Wesleyans (the so-called Primitive Methodists) after 1808, who spread particularly among British Northcountry miners and small hill farmers, among North Sea fishermen, farm-labourers and the depressed domestic workers of the sweated industries in the Midlands. Such bouts of religious hysteria occurred periodically ,throughout our period—in South Wales they broke out in 1807-9, 1828-30, 1839-42, 1849 and

 

1859¹⁰ and account for the major increases in the numerical strength of the sects. They cannot be ascribed to any single precipitating cause. Some coincided with periods of acute tension and unrest (all but one

 

 

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of the periods of ultra-rapid Wesleyan expansion in our period did so), but sometimes also with rapid recovery after a depression, and occasionally they were precipitated by social calamities like the cholera epidemics, which produced analogous religious phenomena in other Christian countries.

 

Ill

 

In purely religious terms we must therefore see our period as one in which increasing secularization and (in Europe) religious indifference battled with revivals ofreligion in its most uncompromising, irrationalist, and emotionally compulsive forms. If Tom Paine stands at one extreme, William Miller the Adventist stands at the other. The frankly atheist mechanical materialism of the German philosopher Feuerbach (1804-1872) in the 1830s confronted the anti-intellectualist young men of the ‘Oxford Movement’ who defended the literal ac-iracy of the early medieval lives of the saints.

 

But this return to militant, literal, old-fashioned religion had three aspects. For the masses it was, in the main, a method of coping with the increasingly bleak and inhuman oppressive society of middle-class liberalism: in Marx’s phrase (but he was not the only one to use such words) it was the ‘heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions… the opium of the people’.¹¹ More than this: it attempted to create social and sometimes educational and political institutions in an environment which provided none, and among politically undeveloped people it gave primitive expression to their discontents and aspirations. Its literalism, emotionalism and superstition protested both against the entire society in which rational calculation dominated and against the upper classes who deformed religion in their own image.

 

For the middle classes rising out of such masses, religion could be a powerful moral prop, a justification of their social existence against the united contempt and hatred of traditional society, and an engine of their expansion. It liberated them from the fetters of that society, if they were sectarians. It gave their profits a moral title greater than that of mere rational self-interest; it legitimized their harshness towards the oppressed; it united with trade to bring civilization to the heathen and sales to business.

For the monarchies and aristocracies, and indeed for all who rested on top of the social pyramid, it provided social stability. They had learned from the French Revolution that the Church was the strongest prop of the throne. Pious and illiterate peoples like the South Italians,

 

 

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the Spaniards, the Tyrolese and the Russians had leaped to arms to defend their church and ruler against foreigners, infidels and revolution-aries, blessed and in some instances led by their priests. Pious and illiterate peoples would live content in the poverty to which God had called them under the rulers which Providence had given them, simple, moral, orderly and immune from the subversive effects of reason. For conservative governments after 1815—and what conti-nental European governments were not?—the encouragement of religious sentiments and churches was as indispensable a part of policy as the organization of police-offices, and censorships, for the priest, the policemen and the censor were now the three main props of reaction against revolution.

 

For most established governments it was enough that Jacobinism threatened thrones and the churches preserved them. However, for a group of romantic intellectuals and ideologists the alliance between throne and altar had a more profound significance: it preserved an old, organic, living society against the corrosion of reason and liberalism, and the individual found it a more adequate expression of his tragic predicament than any provided by the rationalists. In France and England such justifications of the alliance between throne and altar had no great political importance. Neither did the romantic search for a tragic and personal religion. (The most important explorer of these profundities ofthe human heart, the Dane Soren Kierkegaard, 1813-1855, came from a small country and attracted very little contemporary attention: his fame is entirely posthumous.) However, in the German States and in Russia, the strongholds of monarchist reaction, romantic-reactionary intellectuals played some part in politics as civil servants, drafters of manifestoes and programmes, and where monarchs were themselves inclined to mental imbalance (like Alexander I of Russia and Frederick William IV of Prussia) as private advisers. On the whole, however, the Friedrich Gentzes and Adam Muellers were minor figures, and their religious medievalism (which Metternich himself distrusted) was merely a slight traditionalist flourish to announce the policemen and the censors on whom their kings relied. The force of the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria and Prussia which was to keep Europe in order after 1815 rested not on its titular crusading mysticism, but on the simple decision to put down any and every subversive movement by Russian, Prussian or Austrian arms. Moreover, genuinely con-servative governments were inclined to distrust all intellectuals and ideologists, even reactionary ones, for, once the principle of thinking rather than obeying was accepted, the end was in sight. As Friedrich Gentz (Metternich’s secretary) wrote in 1819 to Adam Mueller:

 

 

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‘I continue to defend the proposition: “In order that the press may not be abused, nothing whatever shall be printed in the next . . . years. Period.” If this principle were to be applied as a binding rule, a very few rare exceptions being authorized by a very clearly superior Tribunal, we should within a brief time find our way back to God and Truth.’¹²

 

And yet, if the anti-liberal ideologists were of small political import-ance, their flight from the horrors of liberalism into a truly godly and organic past was of considerable religious interest, for it produced a marked revival of Roman Catholicism among sensitive young men of the upper classes. For was not Protestantism itself the direct precursor of individualism, rationalism and liberalism? If a truly religious society alone would heal the sickness of the nineteenth century, was it not the only truly Christian society of the Catholic middle ages?* As usual, Gentz expressed the attraction of Catholicism with a clarity unsuited to the subject:

 

‘Protestantism is the first, the true, the only source of all the vast evils under which we groan today. Had it merely confined itself to reasoning, we might have been able and obliged to tolerate it, for a tendency to argue is rooted in human nature. However, once governments agreed to accept Protestantism as a permitted form of religion, an expression of Christianity, a right of man; once they . .. granted it a place in the State besides, or even on the ruins of, the only true church, the religious, moral and political order of the world was immediately dissolved…. The entire French Revolution, and the even worse revolution which is about to break over Germany, have sprung from this same source.’¹³

 

Groups of exalted young men thus flung themselves from the horrors of the intellect into the welcoming arms of Rome; embracing celibacy, the self-torture of ascetism, the writings of the Fathers, or merely the warm and aesthetically satisfying ritual of the Church with a passionate abandon. They came, as was to be expected, mostly from Protestant countries: the German Romantics were in general Prussians. The ‘Oxford Movement’ of the 1830s is the most familiar phenomenon of this kind to the Anglo-Saxon reader, though it is characteristically British inasmuch as only some of the young zealots who thus expressed the spirit of the most obscurantist and reactionary of universities, actually joined the Roman Church, notably the talented J. H. Newman

 

* In Russia, where the truly Christian society of the Orthodox Church was still flourishing, the equivalent tendency was less one of a return to the unsullied godliness of the past, than one of a retreat into the limitless profundities of mysticism available in the Orthodoxy of the present.

 

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

(1801-1890). The rest found a compromise resting-place as ‘ritualists’ within the Anglican Church, which they claimed to be a true Catholic Church, and attempted, to the horror of ‘low’ and ‘broad’ churchmen, to garnish with vestments, incense and other popish abominations. The new converts were a puzzle to the traditionally Catholic noble and gentle families, who took their religion as a family badge, and to the mass of Irish immigrant labourers who increasingly formed the bulk of British Catholicism; nor was their noble zeal wholly appreciated by the careful and realistic ecclesiastical officials of the Vatican. But since they came from excellent families, and the conversion of the upper classes might well herald the conversion of the lower, they were wel-comed as a heartening sign of the Church’s power to conquer.

 

Yet even within organized religion—at least within the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Jewish kind—the sappers and miners of liberalism were at work. In the Roman Church their chief field of action was France, and their most important figure, Hugues-Felicit£-Robert de Lamennais (1782-1854), who moved successively from romantic conservatism, to a revolutionary idealization of the people which brought him close to socialism. Lamennais’s Paroles d’un Crqyant (1834) created uproar among governments, who scarcely expected to be stabbed in the back with so reliable a weapon of the status quo defence as Catholicism, and he was soon condemned by Rome. Liberal Catholicism, however, survived in France, always a country receptive to trends in the Church slightly at variance with those in Rome. In Italy also the powerful revolutionary current of the 1830s and 1840s pulled some Catholic thinkers into its eddies, such as Rosmini and Gioberti (1801-52), the champion of the liberal Italy united by the Pope. However, the main body of the Church was militantly and in-creasingly anti-liberal.

 

Protestant minorities and sects naturally stood far closer to liberalism, at any rate in politics: to be a French Huguenot virtually meant to be at the very least a moderate liberal. (Guizot, Louis Philippe’s Prime Minister, was one.) Protestant State churches like the Anglican and the Lutheran were politically more conservative, but their theologies were rather less resistant to the corrosion of biblical scholarship and rationalist enquiry. The Jews, of course, were exposed to the full force of the liberal current. After all, they owed their political and social emancipation entirely to it. Cultural assimilation was the goal of all emancipated Jews. The most extreme among the evolu^s abandoned their old religion for Christian conformity or agnosticism, like the father of Karl Marx or the poet Heinrich Heine (who discovered, how-ever, that Jews do not cease to be Jews at least for the outside world

 

 

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when they stop going to the synagogue). The less extreme developed an attenuated liberal form of Judaism. Only in the small towns did the Torah- and Talmud-dominated life of the ghetto continue virtually un-changed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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IDEOLOGY:  SECULAR

 

{Mr Bentham) turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, andfancies he can turn men in the same manner. He has no great fondness for poetry, and can hardly extract a moral out of Shakespeare. His house is warmed and lighted by steam. He is one of those who prefer the artificial to the natural in most things, and think the mind of man omnipotent. He has a great contemptfor out-of-door prospects, for greenfieldsand trees, and is for ever referring everything to Utility.

 

1. Hazlitt, TZw Spirit of the Age (1825)

 

TAe Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

 

1. Marx and F. Engejs, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

 

 

 

I

 

Q.UANTITY must still make us give pride of place in the world of 1789-1848 to religious ideology; quality to secular. With a very few exceptions all the thinkers of importance in our- period spoke the secular language, whatever their private religious beliefs. Much of what they thought (and what ordinary people took for granted without much self-conscious thought) will be discussed under the more specific headings of science and the arts; some has already been discussed. Here we shall concentrate on what was after all the major theme which arose out of the dual revolution, the nature of society and the way it was going or ought to go. On this key problem there were two major divisions of opinion: those who accepted the way the world was going and those who did not; in other words those who believed in progress and the others. For in a sense there was only one Weltanschauung of major significance, and a number of other views which, whatever their merits, were at bottom chiefly negative critiques of it: the triumphant, rationalist, humanist ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century. Its champions believed firmly (and correctly) that human history was an ascent, rather than a decline or an undulating movement about a level trend. They could observe that man’s scientific knowledge and technical control over nature increased daily. They believed that human society and individual man could be perfected by the same application of

 

 

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reason, and were destined to be so perfected by history. On these points bourgeois liberals and revolutionary proletarian socialists were at one.

 

Up to 1789 the most powerful and advanced formulation of this ideology of progress had been classical bourgeois liberalism. Indeed, its fundamental system had been so firmly elaborated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that its discussion hardly belongs to this volume. It was a narrow, lucid, and sharp-edged philosophy which found its purest exponents, as we might expect, in Britain and France.

 

It was rigorously rationalist and secular; that is to say convinced of the ability of men in principle to understand all and to solve all ques-tions by the use of reason, and the tendency of irrational behaviour and institutions (among which traditionalism and all religion other than the rational) to obscure rather than to enlighten. Philosophically it tended towards materialism, or empiricism, as befitted an ideology which drew its force and methods from science, in this instance chiefly the mathematics and physics of the seventeenth century scientific revo-lution. Its general assumptions about the world and man were marked by a pervasive individualism, which owed more to the introspection of middle class individuals or the observation of their behaviour than to the a priori principles on which it claimed to be based, and which was expressed in a psychology (though the word was not yet in existence in 1789) that echoed seventeenth century mechanics, the so-called ‘associationist’ school.

 

In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimize his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others,* and ‘naturally’ recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges. In other words, each man was ‘naturally’ possessed of life, liberty and the pursuit of happi-ness, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, though the most logical liberal thinkers preferred not to put this in the language of ‘natural rights’. In the course of pursuing this self-interest, each individual in this anarchy of equal competitors, found it advantageous or unavoidable to enter into certain relations with other individuals, and this complex of useful arrangements—which were often expressed in the frankly commercial terminology of ‘contract’—constituted society and social or political groups. Of course such arrangements and associations implied some diminution of man’s naturally unlimited liberty to do what he liked, one of the tasks of politics being to reduce such interference to the practicable minimum. Except perhaps for

 

* The great Thomas Hobbes actually argued strongly in favour of the—for practical purposes—complete equality of all individuals in all respects except ‘science’.

 

 

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such irreducible sexual groups as parents and their children, the ‘man’ of classical liberalism (whose literary symbol was Robinson Crusoe) was a social animal only insofar as he co-existed in large numbers. Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. Happiness (a term which caused its definers almost as much trouble as its pursuers) was each individual’s supreme object; the greatest happiness of the greatest number, was plainly the aim of society.

 

In fact, pure utilitarianism, which frankly reduced all human relations entirely to the pattern just sketched, was confined to very tactless philosophers like the great Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century or very confident champions of the middle class like the school of British thinkers and publicists associated with the names of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), James Mill (1773-1836) and above all the classical political economists. For two reasons. In the first place an ideology which so completely reduced all except the rational calcula-tion of self-interest to ‘nonsense on stilts’ (to use Bentham’s phrase), conflicted with some powerful instincts of the middle class behaviour it aimed to advance.* Thus it could be shown that rational self-interest might well justify considerably greater interference in the individual’s ‘natural liberty’ to do as he wished and to keep what he earned, than was at all agreeable. (Thomas Hobbes, whose works the British utili-tarians piously collected and published, had actually shown that it precluded any a priori limits on state power, and the Benthamites themselves championed bureaucratic state management when they thought it secured the greatest happiness of the greatest number as readily as laissez-faire.) Consequently those seeking to safeguard private property, enterprise and individual freedom often preferred to give it the metaphysical sanction of a ‘natural right’ rather than the vulnerable one of’utility’. Moreover, a philosophy which so completely eliminated morality and duty by reducing them to rational calculation, might well weaken that sense of the eternal fitness of things among the ignorant poor on which social stability rested.

 

Utilitarianism, for reasons such as these, therefore never monopolized middle class liberal ideology. It provided the sharpest of radical axes with which to chop down traditional institutions which could not answer the triumphant questions: is it rational? Is it useful? Does it contribute to the greatest happiness of the greatest number? But it

 

* It should not be supposed that ‘self-interest’ necessarily meant an anti-social egoism. Humane and socially-mmded utilitarians held that the satisfactions which the individual sought to maximize included, or might with proper education well include, ‘benevolence’ i.e. the urge to help one’s fellow-men. The point was that this was not a moral duty, or an aspect of social existence, but something which made the individual happy. ‘Interest,’ argued d’Holbach in his Systime de la Nature I, p. 268, ‘is nothing but what each of us considers necessary for his happiness.’

 

 

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was strong enough neither to inspire a revolution nor to safeguard against one. The philosophically feeble John Locke rather than the superb Thomas Hobbes remained the favourite thinker of vulgar liberalism; for he at least put private property beyond the range of interference and attack as the most basic of ‘natural rights’. And the French Revolutionaries found it best to put their demand for free enterprise (‘tout citqyen est libre d’employer ses bras, son Industrie et ses capitaux comme itjuge bon et utile a lui-mime. . . . Il peut fabriquer cejjui lui plait et comme il lui plait’)¹ into the form of a general natural right to

liberty (‘L’exercise des droits naturels de chaque homme n’a de bornes que celle qui assurent aux autres membres de la sociiti lajouissance des mimes droits’).*

 

In its political thought classical liberalism thus swerved from the daring and rigour which made it so powerful a revolutionary force. In its economic thought, however, it was less inhibited; partly because middle class confidence in the triumph of capitalism was much greater than confidence in the political supremacy of the bourgeoisie over absolutism or the ignorant mob, partly because the classical assump-tions about the nature and natural state of man undoubtedly fitted the special situation of the market much better than the situation of humanity in general. Consequently classical political economy forms, with Thomas Hobbes, the most impressive intellectual monument to liberal ideology. Its great period is slightly earlier than that with which this volume deals. The publication of Adam Smith’s (1723-90)

 

Wealth of Nations in 1776 marks its .beginning, that of David Ricardo’s (1792-1823) Principles of Political Economy in 1817 its peak, and 1830 the beginning of its decline or transformation. However, its vulgarized version continued to gain adherents among businessmen throughout our period.

 

The social argument of Adam Smith’s political economy was both elegant and comforting. It is true that humanity consisted essentially of sovereign individuals of a certain psychological constitution pur-suing their self-interest in competition with one another. But it could be shown that these activities, when left to operate so far as possible unchecked, produced not only a ‘natural’ social order (as distinct from the artificial ones imposed by aristocratic vested interest, obscurant-ism, tradition or ignorant meddling), but the most rapid possible increase in the ‘wealth of nations’, i.e. the comfort and wellbeing, and therefore the happiness, of all men. The basis of this natural order was the social division of labour. It could be scientifically proved that the existence of a class of capitalists owning the means of production benefited all, including the class of labourers hiring themselves out to its members, just as it could be scientifically proyed that the interests of

 

 

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T HE  AGE  OF  REVOLUTION

 

both Britain and Jamaica were best served by the one producing manufactured goods and the other raw sugar. For the increase in the wealth of nations proceeded by the operations of property-owning private enterprise and the accumulation of capital, and it could be shown that any other method of securing it must slow it down or bring it to a stop. Moreover, the economically very unequal society which resulted inevitably from the operations of human nature, was not incompatible with the natural equality of all men or with justice. For quite apart from securing to even the poorest a better life than he would otherwise have had, it was based on the most equal of all relationships, the exchange of equivalents in the market. As a modern scholar has put it: ‘Nobody was dependent on the benevolence of others; for every-thing that one got from anybody, one gave an equivalent in exchange. Moreover, the free play of natural forces would be destructive of all positions that were not built upon contributions to the common good.’⁸

 

Progress was therefore as ‘natural’ as capitalism. Remove the arti-ficial obstacles to it which the past had erected, and it must inevitably take place; and it was evident that the progress of production went hand in hand with that of the arts, the sciences and civilization in general. Let it not be supposed that the men who held such views were mere special pleaders for the vested interest of businessmen. They were men who believed, with considerable historical justification at this period, that the way forward for humanity was through capitalism.

 

The power of this Panglossian view rested not merely on what was believed to be the unanswerable ability to prove its economic theorems by a deductive reasoning, but on the evident progress of eighteenth-century capitalism and civilization. Conversely, it began to falter not merely because Ricardo discovered contradictions within the system which Smith had overlooked, but because the actual economic and social results of capitalism proved to be less happy than had been fore-cast. Political economy in the first half of the nineteenth century became the ‘dismal’ rather than the rosy science. Naturally it might still be held that the misery of the poor who (as Malthus argued in the famous Essay on Population, 1798) were condemned to linger on the verge of starvation or who (as Ricardo argued) suffered from the introduction of machinery,* still constituted the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which merely happened to be much less than one might have hoped. But such facts, as well as the marked difficulties in capitalist expansion in the period from about 1810 to the 1840s, damped optim-

 

*’The opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy.’ Principles, p. 383.

 

 

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I D E O L O G Y:       SECULAR

 

ism and stimulated critical enquiry, especially into distribution as against the production, which had chiefly pre-occupied the generation of Smith.

 

David Ricardo’s political economy, a masterpiece of deductive rigour, thus introduced considerable elements of discord into the natural harmony on which the earlier economists had put their money. It even stressed, rather more than Smith had done, certain factors which might be expected to bring the engine of economic progress to a stop by attenuating the supply of its essential fuel, such as a tendency for the rate of profit to decline. What is more, he provided the basic general labour theory of value which only needed to be given a twist to be turned into a potent argument against capitalism. Nevertheless, his technical mastery as a thinker, and his passionate support for the practical objects which most British businessmen advocated—free trade and hostility to landlords—helped to give classical political economy an even firmer place in liberal ideology than before. For practical purposes the shock-troops of British middle class reform in the post-Napoleonic period were armed with a combination of Benthamite utilitarianism and Ricardian economics. In turn the massive achieve-ments of Smith and Ricardo, backed by those of British industry and trade, turned political economy into a largely British science, reducing the French economists (who had at the very least shared the lead in the eighteenth century) to the lesser role of predecessors or auxiliaries, and the non-classical economists to a scattering of snipers. Moreover, they made it an essential symbol of liberal advance. Brazil instituted a chair in the subject in 1808—long before France—occupied by a popularizer of Adam Smith, J. B. Say (the leading French economist) and the utilitarian anarchist William Godwin. The Argentine had hardly become independent, when in 1823 ^{t n e} new university of Buenos Aires began to teach political economy on the basis of the already translated Ricardo and James Mill; but not before Cuba, which had its first chair as early as 1818. The fact that the actual economic behaviour of the Latin American rulers caused the hair of European financiers and economists to rise in horror, made no difference to their attachment to economic orthodoxy.

 

In politics, as we have seen, the liberal ideology was neither as coherent nor as consistent. Theoretically it remained divided between utilitarianism and adaptations of the age-old doctrines of natural law and natural right, with the latter prevailing. In its practical programme it remained torn between a belief in popular government, i.e. majority rule, which had logic on its side and also reflected the fact that what actually made revolutions and put the effective political pressure behind reform was not middle class argument but the mobilization of

 

 

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T HE  AGE  OF  REVOLUTION

 

the masses,* and the more prevalent belief in government by a pro-pertied elite—between ‘radicalism’ and ‘whiggism’ to use the British terms. For if government really were popular, and if the majority really ruled (i.e. if minority interests were sacrificed to it, as was logically inevitable), could the actual majority—’the most numerous and poorest classes’*—be relied upon to safeguard freedom and to carry out the dictates of reason which coincided, as was obvious, with the programme of middle class liberals?

Before the French Revolution the main cause for alarm in this respect was the ignorance and superstition of the labouring poor, who were only too often under the sway of priest and king. The Revo-lution itself introduced the additional hazard of a left-wing, anti-capitalist programme, such as was implicit (and some have argued explicit) in certain aspects of the Jacobin dictatorship. Moderate whigs abroad observed this danger early: Edmund Burke, whose economic ideology was one of pure Adam-Smithianism,⁸ retreated in his politics into a frankly irrationalist belief in the virtues of tradition, continuity and slow organic growth, which have ever since provided the theoretical mainstay of conservatism. Practical liberals on the continent shied away from political democracy, preferring a constitutional monarchy with property suffrage, or at a pinch, any old-fashioned absolutism which guaranteed their interests. After 1793-4 ^on ty ^{a n} extremely discontented, or else an extremely self-confident bourgeoisie, such as that of Britain, was prepared with James Mill to trust its own capacity to retain the support of the labouring poor permanently even in a democratic republic.

 

The social discontents, revolutionary movements and socialist ideolo-gies of the post-Napoleonic period intensified this dilemma and the 1830 Revolution made it acute. Liberalism and democracy appeared to be adversaries rather than allies; the triple slogan of the French Revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity, to express a contradiction rather than a combination. Not unnaturally this appeared most obvious in the home of revolution, France. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), who devoted a remarkably acute intellect to the analysis of the inherent tendencies of American democracy (1835) and later to those of the French Revolution, has survived best among the moderate liberal critics of democracy of this period; or rather he has proved particularly con-genial to moderate liberals in the western world since 1945. Perhaps not unnaturally in view of his dictum: ‘From the eighteenth century

 

* Condorcet (1743-94), whose thought is virtually a compendium of enlightened bourgeois attitudes, was converted by the taking of the Bastille from a belief in limited suffrage to one in democracy, though with strong safeguards for the individual and for minorities.

 

 

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I D E O L O G Y:       SECULAR

 

there flow, as from a common source, two rivers. One carries men to free institutions, the other to absolute power.’⁶ In Britain too James Mill’s sturdy confidence in a bourgeois-led democracy contrasts mark-edly with his son John Stuart Mill’s (1806-73) anxiety to safeguard the rights of minorities against majorities, which dominates that gener-ous but worried thinker’s On Liberty (1859).

 

II

 

While the liberal ideology thus lost its original confident swoop—even the inevitability or desirability of progress began to be doubted by some liberals—a new ideology, socialism, reformulated the old eigh-teenth century verities. Reason, science and progress were its firm foundation. What distinguished the socialists of our period from the champions of a perfect society of common ownership who periodically break into literature throughout recorded history, was the unqualified acceptance of the Industrial Revolution which created the very possi-bility of modern socialism. Count Claude de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), who is by tradition reckoned as the pioneer ‘utopian socialist’, though his thought actually occupies a rather more ambiguous position, was first and foremost the apostle of ‘industrialism’ and ‘industrialists’ (two words of Saint-Simonian coinage). His disciples became socialists, adventurous technologists, financiers and industrialists, or both in succession. Saint-Simonianism thus occupies a peculiar place in the history of both capitalist and anti-capitalist development. Robert Owen (1771-1858) in Britain was himself a highly successful pioneer of the cotton industry, and drew his confidence in the possibility of a better society not merely from his firm belief in human perfectibility through society, but also from the visible creation of a society of poten-tial plenty by the Industrial Revolution. Frederick Engels, though reluc-tantly, was also in the cotton business. None of the new socialists wished to turn the clock of social evolution back, though many of their fol-lowers did. Even Charles Fourier (1772-1837), the least sanguine of the socialist founding fathers about industrialism, argued that the solution ay beyond rather than behind it.

 

Moreover, the very arguments of classical liberalism could and were -eadily turned against the capitalist society which they had helped to auild. Happiness was indeed, as Saint-Just said, ‘a new idea in Europe’;⁷ Dut nothing was easier than to observe that the greatest happiness of he greatest number, which was clearly not being achieved, was that )f the labouring poor. Nor was it difficult, as William Godwin, Robert Dwen, Thomas Hodgskin and other admirers of Bentham did, to

 

 

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separate the pursuit of happiness from the assumptions of a selfish indi-vidualism. ‘The primary and necessary object of all existence is to be happy,’ wrote Owen,⁸ ‘but happiness cannot be obtained individually; it is useless to expect isolated happiness; all must partake of it or the few will never enjoy it.’

 

More to the point, classical political economy in its Ricardian form could be turned against capitalism; a fact which led middle class economists after 1830 to view Ricardo with alarm, or even to regard him, with the American Carey (1793-1879), as the source of inspira-tion for agitators and disrupters of society. If, as political economy argued, labour was the source of all value, then why did the bulk of its producers live on the edge of destitution? Because, as Ricardo showed—though he felt uncomfortable about drawing the con-clusions of his theory—the capitalist appropriated in the form of profit the surplus which the worker produced over and above what he received back as wages. (The fact that the landlords also appropriated a part of this surplus did not fundamentally affect the matter.) In fact, the capitalist exploited the worker. It only remained to do without capitalists and thus to abolish exploitation. A group of Ricardian ‘labour economists’ soon arose in Britain to make the analysis and point the moral.

If capitalism had actually achieved	what had been expected of it
in the optimistic days of political economy, such criticisms would have
lacked resonance. Contrary to what	is often supposed, among the
poor there are few ‘revolutions of rising standards’. But in the formative
period of socialism, i.e. between the	publication of Robert Owen’s

Mew View of Society (1813-14)⁹  and the Communist Manifesto (1848),

 

depression, falling money-wages, heavy technological unemployment and doubts about the future expansive prospects of the economy were only too obtrusive.* Critics could therefore fix not merely on the in-justice of the economy, but on the defects of its operation, its ‘internal contradictions’. Eyes sharpened by antipathy thus detected the built-in cyclical fluctuations or ‘crises’ of capitalism (Sismondi, Wade, Engels) which its supporters overlooked, and indeed whose possibility a ‘law’ associated with the name ofJ. B. Say (1767-1832) denied. They could hardly fail to notice that the increasingly uneven distribution of national incomes in this period (‘the rich getting richer and the poor poorer’) was not an accident, but the product of the operations of the system. In brief, they could show not merely that capitalism was unjust, but that it appeared to work badly and, insofar as it worked, to produce the opposite results to those predicted by its champions.

 

* The word ‘socialism’ itself was a coinage of the 1820s.

 

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So far the new socialists merely made their case by pushing the arguments of classical Franco-British liberalism beyond the point where bourgeois liberals were prepared to go. Nor did the new society they advocated necessarily leave the traditional ground of the classical humanist and liberal ideal. A world in which all were happy, and every individual fully and freely realized his or her potentialities, in which freedom reigned and government that was coercion had disappeared, was. the ultimate aim of both liberals and socialists. What distinguishes the various members of the ideological family descended from human-ism and the Enlightenment, liberal, socialist, communist or anarchist, is not the gentle anarchy which is the Utopia of all of them, but the methods of achieving it. At this point, however, socialism parted company with the classical liberal tradition.

 

In the first place it broke radically with the liberal assumption that society was a mere aggregate or combination of its individual atoms, and that its motive force was their self-interest and competition. In doing so the socialists returned to the oldest of all human ideological traditions, the belief that man is naturally a communal being. Men naturally live together and help one another. Society was not a neces-sary but regrettable diminution of man’s unlimited natural right to do as he liked, but the setting of his life, happiness and individuality. The Smithian idea that the exchange of equivalents in the market somehow assured social justice, struck them as either incomprehensible or im-moral. The bulk of the common people held this view even when they could not express it. Many critics of capitalism reacted against the obvious ‘dehumanization’ of bourgeois society (the technical term ‘alienation’, which Hegelians and the early Marx used, reflects the age-old concept of society as man’s ‘home’ rather than as the mere locus of the unattached individual’s activities) by blaming the entire course of civilization, rationalism, science and technology. The new socialists— unlike revolutionaries of the older craftsman type like the poet William Blake and Jean Jacques Rousseau—were careful not to do so. But they shared not only the traditional ideal of society as man’s home, but the age-old concept that before the institution of class society and property men had somehow lived in harmony; a concept which Rousseau ex-pressed by idealizing primitive man, and less sophisticated radical pamphleteers by the myth of the once free and brotherly people con-quered by alien rulers—the Saxons by the Normans, the Gauls by the Teutons. ‘Genius,’ said Fourier, ‘must rediscover the paths of that primitive happiness and adapt it to the conditions ofmodern industry.’¹⁰ Primitive communism reached out across the centuries or the oceans to provide a model for the communism of the future.

 

 

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In the second place socialism adopted a form of argument which, if not outside the range of the classical liberal tradition, had not been greatly stressed within it; the evolutionary and historical. For the classical liberals, and indeed the earliest modern socialists, their proposals were natural and rational, as distinct from the artificial and irrational society which ignorance and tyranny had hitherto imposed on the world. Now that the progress of enlightenment had shown men what was rational, all that remained to be done was to sweep away the obstacles which prevented common sense from having its way. Indeed, the ‘utopian’ socialists (the Saint-Simonians, Owen, Fourier and the rest) tended to be so firmly convinced that the truth had only to be proclaimed to be instantly adopted by all men of education and sense, that initially they confined their efforts to realize socialism to a propaganda addressed in the first plate to the influential classes—the workers, though they would undoubtedly benefit, were unfortunately an ignorant and backward group—and to the construction of, as it were, pilot plants of socialism—communist colonies and co-operative enterprises, mostly situated in the open spaces of America, where no traditions of historic backwardness stood in the way of men’s advance. Owen’s New Harmony was in Indiana, the USA contained some thirty-four imported or home-grown Fourieristic ‘Phalanxes’, and numerous colonies inspired by the Christian communist Cabet and others. The Saint-Simonians, less given to communal experiments, never ceased their search for an enlightened despot who might carry out their proposals, and for some time believed they had found him in the improbable figure of Mohammed AIi, the ruler of Egypt.

 

There was an element of historic evolution in this classical rationalist case for the good society; for an ideology of progress implies one of evolution, possibly of inevitable evolution through stages of historical development. But it was not until Karl Marx (1818-83) transferred the centre of gravity of the argument for socialism from its rationality or desirability to its historic inevitability that socialism acquired its most formidable intellectual weapon, against which polemical defences are still being erected. Marx derived this line of argument from a combination of the Franco-British and the German ideological tradi-tions (English political economy, French socialism and German philosophy). For Marx human society had inevitably broken primitive communism into classes; inevitably evolved through a succession of class societies, each in spite of its injustices in its time ‘progressive’, each containing the ‘internal contradictions’ which at a certain point made it an obstacle to further progress and generating the forces for its supercession. Capitalism was the last of these, and Marx, so far from

 

 

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merely attacking it, used all his world-shaking eloquence to trumpet forth its historic achievements. But capitalism could be shown by means of political economy to possess internal contradictions which inevitably made it at a certain point a bar to further progress and would plunge it into a crisis from which it could not emerge. Capitalism, moreover (as could also be shown by political economy), inevitably created its own grave-diggers, the proletariat whose numbers and discontent must grow while the concentration of economic power in fewer and fewer hands made it more vulnerable to overthrow. Proletarian revolu-tion must therefore inevitably overthrow it. But it could also be shown that the social system which corresponded to the interests of the working class was socialism or communism. As capitalism had pre-vailed, not simply because it was more rational than feudalism, but because of the social force of the bourgeoisie, so socialism would prevail because of the inevitable victory of the workers. It was foolish to sup-pose that it was an eternal ideal, which men could have realized had they been intelligent enough in Louis XIVs day. It was the child of capitalism. It could not even have been formulated in an adequate manner before the transformation of society which created the con-ditions for it. But once the conditions were there, the victory was cer-tain, for ‘mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve’.¹¹

 

Ill

 

Compared to these relatively coherent ideologies of progress, those of resistance to progress hardly deserve the name of systems of thought. They were rather attitudes lacking a common intellectual method, and relying on the acuteness of their insight into the weaknesses of bour-geois society and the unshakeable conviction that there was more in life than liberalism allowed for. Consequently they require relatively little attention.

 

The chief burden of their critique was that liberalism destroyed the social order or community which man had hitherto regarded as essen-tial to life, replacing it by the intolerable anarchy of the competition of all against all (‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost’) and the dehumanization of the market. On this point conservative and revolutionary anti-progressives, or the representative of rich and poor tended to agree even with the socialists, a convergence which was very marked among the Romantics (see chapter 14) and produced such odd compendia as ‘Tory Democracy’ or ‘Feudal Socialism’. Conservatives tended to identify the ideal social order—or as near to the ideal as was practicable, for the social ambitions of the comfortable are always more

 

 

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modest than those of the poor—with whatever regime was threatened by the dual revolution, or with some specific state of the past, e.g. medi-eval feudalism. They also, naturally, stressed the element of ‘order’ in it, for it was this which safeguarded those on the upper steps of the social hierarchy against those on the lower. Revolutionaries, as we have seen, thought rather of some remoter golden time in the past when things had gone well with the people, for no present society is ever really satisfactory for the poor. Also, they stressed the mutual help and community feeling of such an age rather than its ‘order’.

 

Nevertheless both agreed that in important respects the old regime had been or was better than the new. In it God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate, which pleased conservatives, but he also imposed duties (however light and badly carried out) on the high. Men were unequally human, but they were not commodities valued according to the market. Above all they lived together, in tight net-works of social and personal relationships, guided by the clear map of custom, social institutions and obligation. Doubtless Metternich’s secre-tary Gentz and the British radical demogogue and journalist William Cobbett (1762-1835) had a very different medieval ideal in mind, but both equally attacked the Reformation which had, they held, intro-duced the principles of bourgeois society. And even Frederick Engels, the firmest of the believers in progress, painted a notably idyllic picture of the old eighteenth-century society which the Industrial Revolution had disrupted.

 

Having no coherent theory of evolution, the anti-progressive thinkers found it hard to decide what had ‘gone wrong’. Their favourite culprit was reason, or more specifically eighteenth-century rationalism, which sought foolishly and impiously to meddle with matters too complex for human understanding and organization: societies could not be planned like machines. Tt were better to forget, once for all,’ wrote Burke, ‘the encyclopedic and the whole body of economists, and to revert to those old rules and principles which have hitherto made princes great and nations happy.’¹² Instinct, tradition, religious faith, ‘human nature’, ‘true’ as opposed to ‘false’ reason, were marshalled, depending on the intel-lectual bent of the thinker, against systematic rationalism. But above all its conqueror was to be history.

 

For if conservative thinkers had no sense of historical progress, they had a very acute sense of the difference between societies formed and stabilized naturally and gradually by history as against those established suddenly by ‘artifice’. If they could not explain how historical clothes were tailored, and indeed denied that they were, they could explain admirably how they were made comfortable by long wear. The most

 

 

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serious intellectual effort of the anti-progressive ideology went into historical analysis and the rehabilitation of the past, the investigation of continuity as against revolution. Its most important exponents were therefore not the freakish French emigres like De Bonald (i 753-1840) and Joseph De Maistre (1753-1821) who sought to rehabilitate a dead past, often by rationalist arguments verging on the lunatic, even if their object was to establish the virtues of irrationalism, but men like Edmund Burke in England and the German ‘historical school’ of jurists who legitimized a still existing old regime in terms of its historic continuities.

 

IV

 

It remains to consider a group of ideologies poised oddly between the progressive and the anti-progressive, or in social terms, between the industrial bourgeois and proletarian on one side, the aristocratic, mercantile classes and the feudal masses on the other. Their most important bearers were the radical ‘little men’ of Western Europe and the United States and the modest middle classes of Central and South-ern Europe, comfortably but not wholly satisfactorily ensconced in the framework of an aristocratic and monarchical society. Both in some ways believed in progress. Neither was prepared to follow it to its logical liberal or socialist conclusions; the former because these would have doomed the small craftsmen, shopkeepers, farmers and business-men to be transformed either into capitalists or labourers, the latter because they were too weak and after the experience of the Jacobin dictatorship too frightened, to challenge the power of their princes; whose officials in many cases they were. The views of both these groups therefore combine liberal (and in the first case implicitly socialist) components with anti-liberal, progressive with anti-progressive ones. Moreover, this essential complexity and contradictoriness allowed them to see more deeply into the nature of society than either liberal pro-gressives or anti-progressives. It forced them into dialectics.

 

The most important thinker (or rather intuitive genius) of this first group of petty-bourgeois radicals was already dead in 1789: Jean Jacques Rousseau. Poised between pure individualism and the con-viction that man is only himself in a community, between the ideal of the state based on reason and the suspicion of reason as against ‘feeling’, between the recognition that progress was inevitable and the certainty that it destroyed the harmony of ‘natural’ primitive man, he expressed his own personal dilemma as well as that of classes which could neither accept the liberal certainties of factory-owners nor the socialist ones of

 

 

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proletarians. The views of this disagreeable, neurotic, but, alas, great man need not concern us in detail, for there was no specific Rousseauist school of thought or, except for Robespierre and the Jacobins of the Year II, of politics. His intellectual influence was pervasive and strong, especially in Germany and among the Romantics, but it was not that of a system but of an attitude and a passion. His influence among plebeian and petty-bourgeois radicals was also immense, but perhaps only among the most woolly-minded, such as Mazzini and nationalists of his sort, was it predominant. In general it fused with much more orthodox adaptations of eighteenth-century rationalism, such as those of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and Thomas Paine (1737-1809).

 

Recent academic fashions have tended to misunderstand him pro-foundly. They have ridiculed the tradition which bracketed him with Voltaire and the Eycyclopaedists as a pioneer of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, because he was their critic. But those who were in-fluenced by him then regarded him as part of the Enlightenment, and those who reprinted his works in small radical workshops in the early nineteenth century automatically did so in company with Voltaire, d’Holbach and the rest. Recent liberal critics have attacked him as the ancestor of ‘totalitarianism’ on the left. But in fact he exercised no influence at all on the main tradition of modern communism and Marxism.* His typical followers have been throughout our period and since, petty-bourgeois radicals of the Jacobin, Jeffersonian and Mazzini type: believers in democracy, nationalism and a state of small inde-pendents with equal distribution ofproperty and some welfare activities.

 

In our period he was believed to stand above all for equality; for freedom against tyranny and exploitation (‘man is born free but everywhere he is in chains’), for democracy against oligarchy, for the simple ‘natural man’ unspoiled by the sophistications of the rich and educated, and for ‘feeling’ against cold calculation.

 

The second group, which can perhaps best be called that of German philosophy, was far more complex. Moreover, since its members had neither the power to overthrow their societies nor the economic re-sources to make an Industrial Revolution, they tended to concentrate on the construction of elaborate general systems of thought. There were few classical liberals in Germany. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), the brother of the great scientist, is the most notable. Among German middle and upper class intellectuals a belief in the inevitability of progress and in the benefits of scientific and economic

 

* In almost forty years of correspondence with each other, Marx and Engels mentioned him just three times, casually, and rather negatively. However, in passing they appreciated his dialectical approach with anticipated Hegel’s.

 

 

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advance, combined with a belief in the virtues of an enlightened paternal or bureaucratic administration and a sense of responsibility among the upper orders was perhaps the most common attitude, well suited to a class containing so many civil servants and state-employed professors. The great Goethe, himself minister and privy councillor of a petty state, illustrates this attitude well.¹³ Middle class demands— often philosophically formulated as the inevitable working out of the tendencies of history—carried out by an enlightened state: these repre-sented German moderate liberalism best. The fact that German states at their best had always taken a lively and efficient initiative in the organization of economic and educational progress, and that complete laissez-faire was not a particularly advantageous policy for German businessmen, did not diminish the appeal of this attitude.

 

However, though we can thus assimilate the practical outlook of the German middle class thinkers (allowing for the peculiarities of their historic position) to that of their opposite numbers in other countries, it is not certain that we can in this way explain the very marked cool-ness towards classical liberalism in its pure form which runs through much German thought. The liberal commonplaces—philosophical materialism or empiricism, Newton, Cartesian analysis and the rest— made most German thinkers acutely uncomfortable; mysticism, sym-bolism and vast generalizations about organic wholes visibly attracted them. Possibly a nationalist reaction against the French culture which predominated in the earlier eighteenth century helped to intensify this teutonism of German thought. More likely the persistence of the intel-lectual atmosphere of the last age in which Germany had been eco-nomically, intellectually, and to some extent politically, predominant accounts for it; for the decline of the period between the Reformation and the later eighteenth century had preserved the archaism of the German intellectual tradition just as it preserved unchanged the sixteenth-century look of small German towns. At all events the funda-mental atmosphere of German thought—whether in philosophy, science or the arts—differed markedly from the main tradition of the eighteenth century in Western Europe.* At a time when the classical eighteenth-century view was approaching its limits, this gave German thought some advantage, and helps to explain its increasing intellectual influ-ence in the nineteenth century.

 

Its most monumental expression was German classical philosophy, a body of thought created between 1760 and 1830 together v/ith classical

 

* This does not apply to Austria, which had passed through a very different history. The main characteristic of Austrian thought was that there was none at all that deserves mention, though in the arts (especially music, architecture and the theatre) and in some applied sciences, the Austrian Empire was very distinguished.

 

 

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German literature, and in close connection with it. (It must not be forgotten that the poet Goethe was a scientist and ‘natural philosopher’ of distinction and the poet Schiller not only a professor of history* but a distinguished author of philosophical treatises.) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) are its two great luminaries. After 1830 the process of disintegration which we have already seen in action at the same time within classical political economy (the intellectual flower of eighteenth-century ration-alism) also occurred within German philosophy. Its products were the ‘Young Hegelians’ and eventually Marxism.

 

German classical philosophy was, it must always be remembered, a thoroughly bourgeois phenomenon. All its leading figures (Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling) hailed the French Revolution and indeed remained loyal to it for a considerable time—Hegel championed Napoleon as late as the battle ofJena (1806). The Enlightenment was the framework of Kant’s typically eighteenth-century thought, and the starting-point of Hegel’s. The philosophy of both was profoundly impregnated with the idea of progress: Kant’s first great achievement was to suggest a hypothesis of the origin and development of the solar system, while Hegel’s entire philosophy is one of evolution (or, in social terms, historicity) and necessary progress. Thus while Hegel from the very beginning disliked the extreme left wing of the French Revolution and eventually became utterly conservative, he never for a moment doubted the historic necessity of that revolution as the foundation of bourgeois society. Moreover, unlike most subsequent academic philoso-phers, Kant, Fichte and notably Hegel studied some economics (the Physiocrats in Fichte’s case, the British in Kant and Hegel’s); and there is reason to believe that Kant and the young Hegel would have regarded themselves as persuaded by Adam Smith.¹*

 

This bourgeois bent of German philosophy is in one respect more obvious in Kant, who remained all his life a man of the liberal left— among his last writings (1795) is a noble plea for universal peace through a world federation of republics which would renounce war— but in another more obscure than in Hegel. For in Kant’s thought, confined in the bare and modest professor’s lodgings in remote Prussian Koenigsberg, the social content which is so specific in British and French thought is reduced to an austere, if sublime, abstraction; particularly the moral abstraction of ‘the wiU’.f Hegel’s thought is, as

 

* His historical dramas—except the Wallenstein trilogy—contain so many poetic inac-curacies that one would not have thought so.

 

t Thus Lukacs shows that the very concrete Smithian paradox of the ‘hidden hand’, which produces socially beneHcient results from the selfish antagonism of individuals, in Kant becomes the pure abstraction of an ‘unsocial sociability’. Der Junge Hegel, p. 409.

 

 

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all readers are painfully aware, abstract enough. Yet it is, at least initially, far clearer that his abstractions are attempts to come to terms with society—bourgeois society; and indeed in his analysis of labour as the fundamental factor in humanity (‘man makes tools because he is a reasonable being, and this is the first expression of his Will’, as he said in his lectures of 1805-6)¹⁵ Hegel wielded, in an abstract manner, the same tools as the classical liberal economists, and incidentally provided one of the foundations for Marx.

 

Nevertheless, from the very beginning German philosophy differed from classic liberalism in important respects, more notably in Hegel than in Kant. In the first place it was deliberately idealist, rejecting the materialism or empiricism of the classical tradition. In the second place, while the basic unit of Kant’s philosophy is the individual—even if in the form of the individual conscience—Hegel’s starting-point is the collective (i.e. the community), which he admittedly sees disintegrating into individuals under the impact of historical development. And indeed Hegel’s famous dialectic, the theory of progress (in whatever field) through the never-ending resolution of contradictions, may well have received its initial stimulus from this profound consciousness of the contradiction between individual and collective. Moreover, from the very beginning their position on the margins of the area of whole-hearted bourgeois-liberal advance, and perhaps their inability com-pletely to participate in it, made German thinkers much more aware of its limits and contradictions. No doubt it was inevitable, but did it not bring huge losses as well as huge gains? Must it not in turn be superseded?

 

We therefore find classical, but especially Hegelian, philosophy runs oddly parallel with Rousseau’s dilemma-ridden view of the world, though, unlike him, the philosophers made titanic efforts to include their contradictions in single, all-embracing, intellectually coherent systems. (Rousseau, incidentally, had an immense emotional influence on Immanuel Kant, who is said to have broken his invariable habit of taking a regular afternoon constitutional only twice, once for the fall of the Bastille and once—for several days—for the reading of Entile.) In practice the disappointed philosophical revolutionaries faced the problem of ‘reconciliation’ with reality, which in Hegel’s case took the form, after years of hesitation—he remained in two minds about Prussia until after the fall of Napoleon and, like Goethe, took no interest in the wars of liberation—of an idealization of the Prussian state. In theory the transitoriness of the historically doomed society was built into their philosophy. There was no absolute truth. The development of the historic process itself, which took place through the dialectic of

 

 

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contradiction and was apprehended by a dialectical method, or so at least the ‘Young Hegelians’ of the 1830s concluded, ready to follow the logic of German classical philosophy beyond the point at which their great teacher himself wished to halt (for he was anxious, somewhat illogically, to end history with the cognition of the Absolute Idea), as after 1830 they were ready to re-enter the road of revolution which their elders had either abandoned or (like Goethe) never chosen to walk. But the issue of revolution in 1830-48 was no longer the simple conquest of middle class liberal power. And the intellectual revolu-tionary who emerged from the disintegration of classical German philosophy was not a Girondin or a Philosophic Radical, but Karl Marx.

 

Thus the period of the dual revolution saw both the triumph and the most elaborate formulation of the middle class liberal and petty-bourgeois radical ideologies, and their disintegration under the impact of the states and societies they had themselves set out to create, or at least to welcome. 1830, which marks the revival of the major west-European revolutionary movement after the quiescence of the Waterloo period, also marks the beginning of their crisis. They were to survive it, though in a diminished form: no classical liberal economist of the later period had the stature of Smith or Ricardo (certainly not J. S. Mill, who became the representative British liberal economist-philoso-pher from the 1840s), no classical German philosopher was to have Kant’s and Hegel’s scope or power, and the Girondins and Jacobins of France in 1830, 1848 and after are pygmies compared to their ancestors of 1789-94. For that matter the Mazzinis of the mid-nineteenth century cannot compare with the Jean-Jacques Rousseaus of the eighteenth. But the great tradition—the mainstream of intellectual development since the Renaissance—did not die; it was transformed into its opposite. Marx was, in stature and approach, the heir of classical economists and philosophers. But the society whose prophet and architect he hoped to become, was a very different one from theirs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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THE ARTS

 

There is always a fashionable taste: a taste for driving the mail—a taste for acting

 

Hamlet—a taste for philosophical lectures—a taste for the marvellous—a tastefor the

 

simple—a taste for  the brilliant—a taste for		the sombre—a taste for  the tender—
a taste for	the grim—a taste for banditti—a	taste for ghosts—a taste for	the devil—
a taste for	French dancers and Italian singers, and German whiskers and		tragedies—

 

a taste for enjoying the country in November and wintering in London till the end of the dogdays—a tastefor making shoes—a tastefor picturesque tours—a tastefor taste itself, or for essays on taste.

 

The Hon Mrs Pinmoney in T . L. Peacock, Melincourt (1816)

 

In proportion to the wealth of the country, how few in Great Britain are the buildings of any note . . .; how little is the absorption of capital in museums, pictures, gems, curiosities, palaces, theatres or other unreproductive objects! This which is the main foundation of the greatness of the country, is often stated by foreign travellers, and by some of our own periodical writers, as a proof of our inferiority.

 

1. Laing, Notes of a Traveller on the Social and Political State of France, Prussia, Switzerland, Italy and other parts of Europe, 184a¹

 

 

I

 

T H E first thing which strikes anyone who attempts to survey the development of the arts in this period of dual revolution is their extra-ordinary flourishing state. A half-century which includes Beethoven and Schubert, the mature and old Goethe, the young Dickens, Dostoiev-sky, Verdi and Wagner, the last of Mozart and all or most of Goya, Pushkin and Balzac, not to mention a regiment of men who would be giants in any other company, can stand comparison with any other period of similar length in the world’s history. Much of this extra-ordinary record is due to the revival and expansion of the arts appealing to a literate public in practically all European countries which possessed them.*

 

Rather than weary the reader with a long catalogue of names it may be best to illustrate the width and depth of this cultural revival by taking occasional cross-sections through our period. Thus in 1798-1801 the citizen with an appetite for novelty in the arts could enjoy the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge in English, several works

 

* Those of non-European civilizations will not be considered here, except insofar as they were affected by the dual revolution, which was at this period hardly at all.

 

 

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by Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul and Novalis in German, while listening to Haydn’s Creation and Seasons and Beethoven’s First Symphony and first string quartets. In these years J-L David completed his Portrait

of Madame Recamier and Goya his Portrait of the Family of King Charles IV.

In 1824-6 he or she could have read several new novels by Walter Scott in English, Leopardi’s poems and Manzoni’s Promessi Sposi in Italian, Victor Hugo’s and Alfred de Vigny’s poems in French and, if suitably situated, the early parts of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in Russian, and newly edited Norse sagas. Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, Chopin’s first work, Weber’s Oberon, date from these years as do Delacroix’s painting of The Massacre at Chios and Constable’s The Hay Wain. Ten years later (1834-6) literature produced

 

Gogol’s Inspector-General and Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, in France, Balzac’s Pere Goriot and works by Musset, Hugo, Theophile Gautier, Vigny, Lamartine and Alexander Dumas the Elder, in Germany works

 

by Buechner, Grabbe and Heine, in Austria by Grillparzer and Nestroy, in Denmark by Hans Andersen, in Poland Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz, in Finland the fundamental edition of the national epic Kalevala, in Britain poetry by Browning and Wordsworth. Music pro-vided operas by Bellini and Donizetti in Italy, by Chopin in Poland, by Glinka in Russia; Constable painted in England, Caspar David Friedrich in Germany. A year or two on either side of this triennium brings us within reach of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, of Carlyle’s French Revolution, of Goethe’s Faust Part II, of poems by Platen, Eichendorff and Moerike in Germany, of important contributions to Flemish and Hungarian literature as well as of further publications by the chief French, Polish and Russian writers; of Schumann’s Davidsbuendlertaenze and Berlioz’s Requiem in music.

 

Two things are evident from these casual samplings. The first is the extraordinarily wide spread of artistic achievement among the nations. This was new, In the first half of the nineteenth century Russian literature and music suddenly emerged as a world force, as, in a very much more modest way, did the literature of the USA with Fenimore Cooper (1787-1851), Edgar Allan Poe„(1809-49) and Herman Mel-ville (1819-91). So did Polish and Hungarian literature and music, and, at least in the form of the publication of folksong, fairy-tale and epic, the literature of the North and the Balkans. Moreover, in several of these newly-minted literate cultures, achievement was immediate and unsurpassed: Pushkin (1799-1837) for instance remains the classic Russian poet, Mickiewicz (1798-1855) the greatest Polish, Petoefi (1823-49) the Hungarian national poet.

 

The second evident fact is the exceptional development of certain

 

 

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arts and genres. Literature is a case in point, and within literature the novel. Probably no half-century contains a greater concentration of immortal novelists: Stendhal and Balzac in France, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontes in England, Gogol and the young Dostoievsky and Turgenev in Russia. (Tolstoi’s first writing appeared in the 1850s.) Music is perhaps an even more striking case. The standard concert repertoire still rests largely on the composers active in this period—Mozart and Haydn, though these belong really to an earlier age, Beethoven and Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt. The ‘classic’ period of instrumental music was mainly one of German and Austrian achievement but one genre, opera, flourished more widely and perhaps more successfully than any other: with Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini and the young Verdi in Italy, with Weber and the young Wagner (not to mention the last two operas of Mozart) in Germany, Glinka in Russia and several lesser figures in France. The record of the visual arts, on the other hand, is less brilliant, with the partial exception of painting. Admittedly Spain produced in Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) one of its intermittent great artists, and one of the handful of supreme painters of all time. It may be argued that British painting (with J. M. W. Turner, 1775-1851, and John Constable, 1776-1837) reached a peak of achievement and originality somewhat higher than in the eighteenth century, and was certainly more internationally influential than ever before or since; it may also be held that French painting (with J-L David, 1748-1825, J-L Gericault, 1791-1824, J-D Ingres, 1780-1867, F-E Delacroix 1790-1863, Honore Daumier, 1808-79, ^ar, d the young Gustave Courbet, 1819-77) was as eminent as it has ever been in its distinguished history. On the other hand Italian painting virtually came to the end of its centuries-old glory, German painting came nowhere near the unique triumphs of German literature or music, or its own sixteenth century. Sculpture in all countries was markedly less distinguished than in the eighteenth century and so, in spite of some notable achievements in Germany and Russia, was architecture. Indeed the greatest architectural achieve-ments of the period were undoubtedly the work of engineers.

 

What determines the flowering or wilting of the arts at any period is still very obscure. However, there is no doubt that between 1789 and 1848 the answer must be sought first and foremost in the impact of the dual revolution. If a single misleading sentence is to sum up the relations of artist and society in this era, we might say that the French Revo-lution inspired him by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society, which emerged from both, trans-formed his very existence and modes of creation.

 

 

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That artists were in this period directly inspired by and involved in public affairs is not in doubt. Mozart wrote a propagandist opera for the highly political Freemasonry {The Magic Flute in 1790), Beethoven dedicated the Eroica to Napoleon as the heir of the French Revolution, Goethe was at least a working statesman and civil servant. Dickens wrote novels to attack social abuses, Dostoievsky was to be sentenced to death in 1849 f°^r revolutionary activities. Wagner and Goya went into political exile, Pushkin was punished for being involved with the Decembrists, and Balzac’s entire ‘Human Comedy’ is a monument of social awareness. Never has it been less true to describe creative artists as ‘uncommitted’. Those who were, the gentle decorators of rococo palaces and boudoirs or the suppliers of collectors’ pieces for visiting English milords, were precisely the ones whose art wilted away: how many of us remember that Fragonard survived the Revolution by seventeen years? Even the apparently least political of arts, music, had the strongest political associations. This was perhaps the only period in history when operas were written as, or taken to be, political manifestoes and triggered off revolutions.*

 

The link between public affairs and the arts is particularly strong in the countries where national consciousness and movements of national liberation or unification were developing (cf. chapter 7). It is plainly no accident that the revival or birth of national literate cultures in Germany, Russia, Poland, Hungary, the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere should coincide with—and indeed should often be the first manifestation of—the assertion of the cultural supremacy of the ver-nacular language and of the native people, against a cosmopolitan aristocratic culture often employing a foreign language. Naturally enough, such nationalism found its most obvious cultural expression in literature and in music; both public arts, which could, moreover, draw on the powerful creative heritage of the common people—language and folksong. It is equally understandable that the arts traditionally depen-dent on commissions from the established ruling classes, courts and governments, architecture and sculpture and to a lesser extent painting, reflected these national revivals less.f Italian opera flourished as never

 

* Apart from The Magic Flute, we may mention Verdi’s early operas, which were applauded as expressions of Italian nationalism, Auber’s La MuMc de Portici which set off the Belgian revolution of 1830, Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar and various ‘national operas’ such as the Hungarian Hunyady LdszU (1844), which still keep their place in the local repertoire for their associations with early nationalism.

 

t The absence of a sufficiently large literate and politically conscious population over most of Europe limited the exploitation of such newly invented cheap reproductive arts as litho-graphy. But the remarkable achievements of great and revolutionary artists in this and similar mediums—e.g. Goya’s Disasters of War and Caprichos, William Blake’s visionary illus-trations and Daumier’s lithographs and newspaper cartoons, show how strong the attractions

of these propagandist techniques were.

 

 

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before as a popular rather than a court art; Italian painting and architecture died. Of course it must not be forgotten that these new national cultures were confined to a minority of the literate and the middle or upper classes. Except perhaps for Italian opera and the reproducible forms of graphic art, and a few shorter poems or songs, none of the great artistic achievements of this period were within reach of the illiterate or the poor, and most inhabitants of Europe were almost certainly unaware of them, until mass national or political movements turned them into collective symbols. Literature, of course, would have the widest circulation, though mainly among the growing new middle classes, who provided a particularly grateful market (especially among their unemployed womenfolk) for novels and long narrative poetry. Successful authors have rarely enjoyed greater relative prosperity: Byron received £2,600 for the first three cantos of Childe Harold. The stage, though socially much more restricted, also reached a public of thousands. Instrumental music did less well, outside bourgeois countries like England and France and culture-starved ones like the Americas where large public concerts were well established. (Hence several continental composers and virtuosos had their eye firmly on the lucrative, if otherwise undiscriminating English market.)

 

Elsewhere court-employment, the subscription concert, maintained by a limited local patriciate or private and amateur performance, still held the field. Painting, of course, was destined for the individual purchaser and disappeared from sight after its original display at public exhibitions for sale or private dealers; though such public exhibitions were now well established. The museums and art galleries which were founded or opened to the public in this period (e.g. the Louvre and the British National Gallery, founded in 1826) displayed the art of the past rather than the present. The etching, print and lithograph, on the other hand, was ubiquitous, because it was cheap and began to penetrate the newspapers. Architecture, of course, continued to work mainly (except for a certain amount of speculative building of private dwellings) on individual or public commission.

 

II

 

But even the arts of a small minority in society can still echo the thunder of the earthquakes which shake all humanity. The literature and arts of our period did so, and the result was ‘Romanticism’. As a style, a school, an era in the arts, nothing is harder to define or even to describe in terms of formal analysis; not even ‘classicism’ against which ‘romanticism’ claimed to raise the banner of revolt. The romantics

 

 

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themselves hardly help us, for though their own descriptions of what they were after were firm and decided, they were also often quite devoid of rational content. For Victor Hugo romanticism ‘set out to do what nature does, to blend with nature’s creations, while at the same time not mixing them all together: shadow and light, the gro-tesque and the sublime—in other words the body and the soul, the animal with the spiritual’.² For Charles Nodier ‘this last resort of the human heart, tired of ordinary feelings, is what is called the romantic genre: strange poetry, quite appropriate to the moral condition of society, to the needs of surfeited generations who cry for sensation at any cost . . .’³ Novalis thought romanticism meant giving ‘a higher meaning to what is customary, an infinite look to the finite’.⁴ Hegel held that ‘the essence of Romantic art lies in the artistic object’s being free, concrete, and the spiritual idea in its very essence—all this revealed to the inner rather than the outer eye’.⁸ Little illumination is to be derived from such statements, which is to be expected, for the romantics preferred dim and flickering or diffused lights to clear ones.

 

And yet, though it eludes the classifier, who finds its origins and conclusion dissolve as he tries to pin dates on them and its criteria turn into shapeless generalities as soon as he tries to define them, nobody seriously doubts the existence of romanticism or our capacity to recognize it. In the narrow sense it emerged as a self-conscious and militant trend in the arts, in Britain, France and Germany around 1800 (at the end of the decade of the French Revolution) and over a much wider area of Europe and North America after Waterloo. It was preceded before the Revolutions (again chiefly in France and Germany) by what has been called the ‘pre-romanticism’ of Jean-Jacques Rous-seau, and the ‘storm and stress’ of the young German poets. Probably the revolutionary era of 1830-48 saw its greatest European vogue. In a wider sense it dominates several of the creative arts of Europe from the French Revolution onwards. In this sense the ‘romantic’ elements in a composer like Beethoven, a painter like Goya, a poet like Goethe, a novelist like Balzac, are crucial parts of their greatness, as they are not in, let us say, Haydn or Mozart, Fragonard or Reynolds, Mathias Claudius or Choderlos de Laclos (all of whom survived into our period); though none of these men could be described entirely as ‘romantics’ or would have described themselves as such.* In a yet wider sense the approach to art and artists characteristic of romanticism became

 

* Since ‘romanticism’ was often the slogan and manifesto of restricted groups of artists, we risk giving it an unhistorically restricted sense if we confine it entirely to them; or entirely exclude those who disagreed with them.

 

 

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the standard approach of nineteenth-century middle class society, and still retains much of its influence.

 

However, though it is by no means clear what romanticism stood for, it is quite evident what it was against: the middle. Whatever its content, it was an extremist creed. Romantic artists or thinkers in the narrower sense are found on the extreme left, like the poet Shelley, on the extreme right, like Chateaubriand and Novalis, leaping from left to right like Wordsworth, Coleridge and numerous disappointed supporters of the French Revolution, leaping from royalism to the extreme left like Victor Hugo, but hardly ever among the moderates or whig-liberals in the rationalist centre, which indeed was the strong-hold of ‘classicism’. ‘I have no respect for the Whigs,’ said the old Tory Wordsworth, ‘but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me’.⁶ It would be too much to call it an anti-bourgeois creed, for the revolutionary and conquistador element in young classes still about to storm heaven fascinated the romantics also. Napoleon became one of their myth-heroes, like Satan, Shakespeare, the Wandering Jew and other tres-passers beyond the ordinary limits of life. The demonic element in capitalist accumulation, the limitless and uninterrupted pursuit of more, beyond the calculation of rationality or purpose, need or the extremes of luxury, haunted them. Some of their most characteristic heroes, Faustus and Don Juan, share this unappeasable greed with the business buccaneers of Balzac’s novels. And yet the romantic element remained subordinate, even in the phase of bourgeois revolution. Rousseau pro-vided some of the accessories of the French Revolution, but he domi-nated it only in the one period in which it went beyond bourgeois liberalism, that of Robespierre. And even so, its basic costume was Roman, rationalist and neo-classic. David was its painter, Reason its Supreme Being.

 

Romanticism is therefore not simply classifiable as an anti-bourgeois movement. Indeed, in the pre-romanticism of the decades before the French Revolution, many of its characteristic slogans had been used for the glorification of the middle class, whose true and simple, not to say mawkish, feeling had been favourably contrasted with the stiff upper lip of a corrupt society, and whose spontaneous reliance on nature was destined, it was believed, to sweep aside the artifice of court and clericalism. However, once bourgeois society had in fact triumphed in the French and Industrial Revolutions, romanticism unquestionably became its instinctive enemy and can be justly described as such.

 

No doubt much of its passionate, confused,” but profound, revulsion against bourgeois society was due to the vested interest of the two groups

 

 

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which provided its shock-troops: socially displaced young men and professional artists. There had never been a period for young artists, living or dying, like the romantic: the Lyrical Ballads (1798) were the work of men in their twenties, Byron became famous overnight at twenty-four, an age at which Shelley was famous and Keats was almost in his grave. Hugo’s poetic career began when he was twenty, Musset’s at twenty-three. Schubert wrote Erlkoenig at the age of eighteen and was dead at thirty-one, Delacroix painted the Massacre of Chios at twenty-five, Petoefi published his Poems at twenty-one. An unmade reputation or an unproduced masterpiece by thirty is a rarity among the romantics.

 

Youth—especially intellectual or student youth—was their natural habitat; it was in this period that the Quartier Latin of Paris became, for the first time since the middle ages, not merely a place where the Sorbonne was, but a cultural (and political) concept. The contrast between a world theoretically wide open to talent and in practice, with cosmic injustice, monopolized by soulless bureaucrats and pot-bellied philistines, cried to the heavens. The shades of the prison-house —marriage, respectable career, absorption into philistinism—sur-rounded them, and birds of night in the shape of their elders predicted (only too often with accuracy) their inevitable sentence, as Registrator Heerbrand in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Goldener Topf predicts (‘smiling cunningly and mysteriously’) the appalling future of a Court Councillor for the poetic student Anselmus. Byron was clear-headed enough to foresee that only an early death was likely to save him from a ‘respec-table’ old age, and A. W. Schlegel proved him right. There is, of course, nothing universal in this revolt of the young against their elders. It was itself a reflection of the society created by the double revolution. Yet the specific historic form of this alienation certainly coloured a great part of romanticism.

 

So, to an even greater extent, did the alienation of the artist who reacted to it by turning himself into ‘the genius’, one of the most characteristic inventions of the romantic era. Where the social function of the artist is clear, his relation to the public direct, the question what he is to say and how to say it answered by tradition, morality, reason or some other accepted standard, an artist may be a genius, but rarely behaves like one. The few who anticipate the nineteenth century pattern—a Michelangelo, Caravaggio or Salvator Rosa—stand out from the army of men with the standards of professional craftsmen and entertainers, the John Sebastian Bachs, Handels, Haydns and Mozarts, the Fragonards and Gainsboroughs of the pre-revolutionary age. Where something like the old social situation persisted after the double revo-lution, the artist continued as a non-genius, though very likely a vain

 

 

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one. Architects and engineers on specific orders continued to produce structures of obvious use which imposed clearly understood forms. It is significant that the great majority of the characteristic, and virtually all the most famous, buildings of the period from 1790 to 1848 are neo-classical like the Madeleine, the British Museum, St Isaac’s cathedral in Leningrad, Nash’s London, Schinkel’s Berlin, or functional like the marvellous bridges, canals, railway constructions, factories and greenhouses of that age of technical beauty.

However, quite apart from their styles, the architects and engineers of that age behaved as professionals and not as geniuses. Again, in genuinely popular forms of art such as the opera in Italy or (on a socially higher level) the novel in England, composers and writers continued to work as entertainers who regarded the supremacy of the box-office as a natural condition of their art, rather than as a conspiracy against their muse. Rossini would no more have expected to produce an un-commercial opera than the young Dickens an unserializable novel or today the librettist of a modern musical a text wr^;ch is performed as originally drafted. (This may also help to explain why Italian opera at this time was quite unromantic, in spite of its natural vulgarian fondness for blood, thunder and ‘strong’ situations.)

 

The real problem was that of the artist cut off from a recognizable function, patron or public and left to cast his soul as a commodity upon a blind market, to be bought or not; or to work within a system of patronage which would generally have been economically untenable even if the French Revolution had not established its human indignity. The artist therefore stood alone, shouting into the night, uncertain even of an echo. It was only natural that he should turn himself into the genius, who created only what was within him, regardless of the world and in defiance of a public whose only right was to accept him on his own terms or not at all. At best he expected to be understood, like Stendhal, by the chosen few or some undefined posterity; at worst he would produce unplayable dramas, like Grabbe—or even Goethe’s Faust part II—or compositions for unrealistically gigantic orchestras like Berlioz; or else he would go mad like Holderlin, Grabbe, de Nerval and several others. In fact, the misunderstood genius was sometimes amply rewarded by princes accustomed to the vagaries of mistresses or to the value of prestige expenditure, or by an enriched bourgeoisie anxious to maintain a tenuous contact with the higher things of life. Franz Liszt (1811-86) never starved in the proverbial romantic garret. Few have ever succeeded in realizing their megalomaniac fantasies as Richard Wagner was to do. However, between the 1789 and the 1848 Revolutions princes were only too often suspicious of the non-operatic

 

 

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arts* and the bourgeoisie engaged in accumulation rather than spending. Geniuses were therefore in general not only misunderstood but also poor. And most of them were revolutionary.

Youth and ‘genius’ misunderstood would have produced the romantic’s revulsion against the philistine, the fashion of baiting and shocking the bourgeois, the liaison with demi-monde and bohhne (both terms which acquired their present connotation in the romantic period), or the taste for madness or for things normally censored by respectable institutions and standard. But this was only a small part of roman-ticism. Mario Praz’s encyclopedia of erotic extremism is no more ‘The Romantic Agony’⁷ than a discussion of skulls and ghosts in Elizabethan symbolism is a critique of Hamlet. Behind the sectional dissatisfaction of the romantics as young men (even occasionally as young women— this was the first period in which continental women artists appear in their own right in any quantity!^–) ^{a n} ^ ^{a s} artists, there lay a more general dissatisfaction with the kind of society emerging out of the double revolution.

 

Precise social analysis was never the romantic forte, and indeed they distrusted the confident mechanical materialist reasoning of the eighteenth century (symbolized by Newton, the bugbear of both William Blake and Goethe) which they rightly saw as one of the chief tools with which bourgeois society had been built. Consequently we shall not expect them to provide a reasoned critique of bourgeois society, though something like such a critique wrapped in the mystical cloak of ‘nature philosophy’ and walking amid the swirling clouds of metaphysics did develop within a broadly ‘romantic’ framework, and contributed, among other achievements, to the philosophy of Hegel. (See above pp. 250-2.) Something like it also developed, in visionary flashes constantly close to eccentricity, or even madness, among early Utopian socialists in France. The early Saint-Simonians (though not their leader) and especially Fourier can hardly be described as other than romantics. The most lasting results of these romantic critiques were the concept of human ‘alienation’, which was to play a crucial part in Marx, and the intimation of the perfect society of the future. However, the most effective and powerful critique of bourgeois society was to come not from those who rejected it (and with it the traditions of classic seven-

 

* The unspeakable Ferdinand of Spain, who maintained his patronage of the revolutionary Goya, in spite of both artistic and political provocation, was an exception.

 

t Mme de StaSl, George Sand, the painters Mme Vigie Lebrun, Angelica Kauffman in France, Bettina von Arnim, Annette von Droste-Huelshoff in Germany. Women novelists had of course long been common in middle-class England, where this art form was recognized as providing a ‘respectable’ form of earning money for well-brought up girls. Fanny Burney, Mrs Radcliffe, Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell, the Bronte sisters all fall wholly or partly into our period; as does the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

 

 

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teenth century science and rationalism) in toto and a priori, but from those who pushed the traditions of its classical thought to their anti-bourgeois conclusions. Robert Owen’s socialism had not the slightest element of romanticism in it; its components were entirely those of eighteenth century rationalism and that most bourgeois of sciences, poli-tical economy. Saint-Simon himself is best regarded as a prolongation of the ‘enlightenment’. It is significant that the young Marx, trained in the German (i.e. primarily romantic) tradition, became a Marxist only when combined with the French socialist critique and the wholly non-roman-tic theory of English political economy. And it was political economy which provided the core of his mature thought.

 

Ill

 

It is never wise to neglect the heart’s reasons which reason knows nothing of. As thinkers within the terms of reference laid down by the economists and physicists, the poets were outclassed, but they saw not only more deeply but also sometimes more clearly. Few men saw the social earthquake caused by machine and factory earlier than William Blake in the 1790s, who had yet little except a few London steam-mills and brick-kilns to go by. With a few exceptions, our best treatments of the problem of urbanization come from the imaginative writers whose often apparently quite unrealistic observations have been shown to be a reliable indicator of the actual urban evolution of Paris.⁸ Carlyle is a more confused but a more profound guide to England in 1840 than the diligent statistician and compiler J. R. McCulloch; and ifJ. S. Mill is a better one than other utilitarians, it is because a personal crisis made him alone among them aware of the value of the German and Romantic critiques of society: of Goethe and Coleridge. The romantic critique of the world, though ill-defined, was not therefore negligible.

 

The longing that haunted it was for the lost unity of man and nature. The bourgeois world was a profoundly and deliberately asocial one. ‘It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash-payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.’ The voice is that of the Com-munist Manifesto, but it speaks for all romanticism also. Such a world might make men wealthy and comfortable, though as a matter of fact

 

 

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it seemed evident that it also made others—a much greater number— hungry and miserable; but it left their souls naked and alone. It left them homeless and lost in the universe as ‘alienated’ beings. It left them cut off by a revolutionary chasm in world history from even the most obvious answer to alienation, the decision never to leave the old home. The poets of German romanticism thought they knew better than anyone that salvation lay only in the simple modest working life that went on in those idyllic pre-industrial little towns that dotted the dream-landscapes, which they described more irresistibly than they have ever been described by anyone. And yet their young men must leave to pursue the by definition endless quest for the ‘blue flower’ or merely to roam forever, homesick and singing Eichendorff lyrics or Schubert songs. The wanderer’s song is their signature tune, nostalgia their companion. Novalis even defined philosophy in terms of it.⁹

 

Three sources assuaged this thirst for the lost harmony of man in the world: the middle ages, primitive man (or, what could amount to the same thing, exoticism and the ‘folk’), and the French Revolution.

The first attracted chiefly the romanticism of reaction. The stable ordered society of feudal age, the slow organic product of the ages, coloured with heraldry, surrounded by the shadowy mystery of fairy tale forests and canopied by the unquestioned Christian heavens, was the obvious lost paradise of the conservative opponents of bourgeois society, whose tastes for piety, loyalty and a minimum of literacy among the lower orders the French Revolution had only sharpened. With local modifications it was the ideal which Burke threw into the teeth

 

of the rationalist Bastille-stormers in his Reflections on the French Revo-tion (1790). However, it found its classical expression in Germany, a country which in this period acquired something not far from a mono-poly of the medieval dream, perhaps because the tidy Gemuetlichkeit which appeared to reign beneath those Rhine-castles and Black Forest eaves lent itself more readily to idealization than the filth and cruelty

 

of more genuinely medieval countries.* At all events medievalism was a far stronger component of German romanticism than of any other, and radiated outwards from Germany, whether in the form of romantic opera or ballet (Weber’s Freischuetz or Giselle), of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, of historicist theories or of germanically inspired writers like Coleridge or Carlyle. However, in the more general form of a Gothic revival medievalism was the badge of the conservative and especially the religious anti-bourgeois everywhere. Chateaubriand exalted the Gothic

in his Ginie du Christianisme (1802) against the Revolution, the upholders

 

* ‘O Hermann, O Dorothea! Gemuethlichkeit!’ wrote Gautier, who adored Germany like all French romantics. ‘Ne semble-t-il pas que Ton entend du loin Ie cor du postilion?’¹⁰

 

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of the Church of England favoured it against the rationalists and non-conformists whose buildings remained classical, the architect Pugin and the ultra-reactionary and catholicizing ‘Oxford Movement’ of the 1830s were gothicists to the core. Meanwhile from the misty remoteness of Scotland—long a country in which to set archaic dreams like the invented poems of Ossian—the conservative Walter Scott supplied Europe with yet another set of medieval images in his historical novels. The fact that the best of his novels dealt with fairly recent periods of history was widely overlooked.

 

Beside this preponderance of conservative medievalism, which the reactionary governments after 1815 sought to translate into ramshackle justifications of absolutism (cf. above p. 230), leftwing medievalism is unimportant. In England it existed mainly as a current in the popular radical movement which tended to see the period before the Refor-mation as a golden age of the labourer and the Reformation as the first great step towards capitalism. In France it was very much more important, for there its emphasis was not on feudal hierarchy and catholic order, but on the eternal, suffering, turbulent, creative people: the French nation always reasserting its identity and mission. Jules Michelet, the poet as historian, was the greatest of such revolutionary-democratic medievalists; Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, the best-known product of the preoccupation.

 

Closely allied with medievalism, especially through its preoccupation with traditions of mystical religiosity, was the pursuit of even more ancient and profound mysteries and sources of irrational wisdom in the orient: the romantic, but also the conservative, realms of Kublai Khan or the Brahmins. Admittedly the discoverer of Sanskrit, Sir William Jones, was a straightforward Whiggish radical who hailed the American and French Revolutions as an enlightened gentleman should; but the bulk of the amateurs of the East and writers of pseudo-Persian poems, out of whose enthusiasm much of modern orientalism emerged, belonged to the anti-Jacobin tendency. Characteristically Brahmin India was their spiritual goal, rather than the irreligious and rational Chinese empire, which had preoccupied the exotic imaginations of the eighteenth century enlightenment.

 

IV

 

The dream of the lost harmony of primitive man has a much longer and more complex history. It has been overwhelmingly a revolutionary dream, whether in the form of the golden age of communism, of the equality ‘when Adam delved and Eve span’, the free Anglo-Saxon not

 

 

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yet enslaved by the Norman Conquest, or the noble savage showing up the deficiencies of a corrupt society. Consequently romantic primi-tivism lent itself more readily to leftwing rebellion, except where it served merely as an escape from bourgeois society (as in the exoticism of a Gautier or Merimee who discovered the noble savage as a tourist sight in Spain in the 1830s) or where historic continuity made the primitive someone exemplifying conservatism. This was notably the case of ‘the folk’. It was accepted among romantics of all shades that ‘the folk’, i.e. normally the pre-industrial peasant or craftsman, exemp-lified the uncorrupted virtues and that its language, song, story and custom was the true repository of the soul of the people. To return to that simplicity and virtue was the aim of the Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads; to be accepted into the corpus of folksong and fairy-tale the ambition—achieved by several artists—of many a teutonic poet and composer. The vast movement for the collection of folksong, the publication of ancient epic, the lexicography of living language, was closely connected with romanticism; the very word folklore (1846) an invention of the period. Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1803), Arnim and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1806), Grimm’s Fairy-Tales (1812), Moore’s Irish Melodies (1807-34), Dobrovsky’s History of the Bohemian Language (1818), Vuk Karajic’s Serb Dictionary (1818) and Serbian Folksong (1823-33), Tegner’s Frithjofssaga in Sweden (1825), Lonnrot’s Kalevala edition in Finland (1835), Grimm’s German Mythology (1835), Asbjornson and Moe’s Norwegian Folk Tales (1842-71), are so many monuments to it.

 

‘The folk’ could be revolutionary concept, especially among op-pressed peoples about to discover or reassert their national identity, particularly those which lacked a native middle class or aristocracy. There the first dictionary, grammar or collection of folksong was an event of major political importance, a first declaration of independence. On the other hand for those who were struck more by the folk’s simple virtues of contentment, ignorance and piety, the deep wisdom of its trust in pope, king or tsar, the cult of the primitive at home lent itself to a conservative interpretation. It exemplified the unity of innocence, myth and age-old tradition, which the bourgeois society was every day destroying.* The capitalist and the rationalist were the enemies against whom king, squire and peasant must maintain their hallowed union.

 

The Primitive existed in every village; but he existed as an even more revolutionary concept in the assumed golden communistic age

 

* How we are to interpret the new popularity of folk-based ballroom dances in this period, such as the waltz, mazurka and schottischc, is a matter of taste. It was certainly a romantic fashion.

 

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of the past, and as the free noble savage abroad; especially as the Red Indian. From Rousseau, who held it up as the ideal of free social man,

to the

socialists

primitive

society was a sort  of

model for

Utopia.

Marx’s

triple

divisions

of

history—primitive

communism,

class

society,

communism,  on

a

higher  level—echoes,  though

it

also

transforms,

this tradition. The ideal of primitivism was not specially

romantic.

Indeed some of its most ardent

champions

were

in

the

eighteenth

century illuminist tradition. The

romantic

quest

took

its

explorers into the great deserts of Arabia and North Africa, among Delacroix’s and Fromentin’s warriors and odalisques, with Byron through the Mediterranean world, or with Lermontov to the Caucasus, where natural man in the shape of the Cossack fought natural man in the shape of the tribesman amid chasms and cataracts, rather than to the innocent social and erotic Utopia of Tahiti. But it also took them to America, where primitive man was fighting and doomed, a situation which brought him closer to the mood of the romantics. The Indian poems of the Austro-Hungarian Lenau cry out against the red man’s expulsion; if the Mohican had not been the last of his tribe, would he have become quite so powerful a symbol in European culture? Naturally the noble savage played an immeasurably more important part in American romanticism than in European—Melville’s Moby Lick (1851) is his greatest monument—but in the Leatherstocking novels of Fenimore Cooper he captured the old world, as the conservative Chateaubriand’s Natchez had never been able to do.

 

Middle ages, folk and noble savage were ideals anchored firmly to the past. Only revolution, the ‘springtime of peoples’, pointed exclu-sively to the future, and yet even the most Utopian found it comforting to appeal to a precedent for the unprecedented. This was not easily possible until a second generation of romanticism had produced a crop of young men for whom the French Revolution and Napoleon were facts of history and not a painful chapter of autobiography. 1789 had been hailed by virtually every artist and intellectual of Europe, but though some were able to maintain their enthusiasm through war, terror, bourgeois corruption and empire, theirs was not an easy or communicable dream. Even in Britain, where the first generation of romanticism, that of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell and Hazlitt, had been wholly Jacobin, the disillusioned and the neo-conservative prevailed by 1805. In France and Germany, indeed, the word ‘romantic’ had been virtually invented as an anti-revolutionary slogan by the conservative anti-bourgeois of the later 1790s (very often disillusioned former leftists), which accounts for the fact that a number of thinkers and artists in these countries who would by modern

 

 

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standards be reckoned fairly obvious romantics are traditionally ex-cluded from this classification. However, by the later years of the Napoleonic wars new generations of young men began to grow up for whom only the great liberating flame of the Revolution was visible across the years, the ashes of its excesses and corruptions having dropped out of sight; and after Napoleon’s exile even that unsympathetic character could become a semi-mythical phoenix and liberator. And as Europe advanced year by year more deeply into the low featureless plains of reaction, censorship and mediocrity and the pestilential swamps of poverty, unhappiness and oppression, the image of the liberating revolution became ever more luminous.

 

The second generation of British romantics—that of Byron (1788-1824), the unpolitical but fellow-travelling Keats (1795-1821) and above all Shelley (1792-1822)—was the first thus to combine roman-ticism and active revolutionism: the disappointments of the French Revolution, unforgotten by most of their elders, paled beside the visible horrors of the capitalist transformation in their own country. On the continent the junction between romantic art and revolution was antici-pated in the 1820s, but only made fully in and after the French Revo-lution of 1830. This is also true of what may perhaps be called the romantic vision of revolution and the romantic style of being a revolu-tionary, whose most familiar expression is Delacroix’s painting of Liberty on the Barricades (1831). Here saturnine young men in beards and top hats, shirtsleeved workers, tribunes of the people in flowing locks under sombrero-like hats, surrounded by tricolours and phrygian bonnets, recreate the Revolution of 1793—not the moderate one of 1789, but the glory of the year II—raising its barricades in every city of the continent.

 

Admittedly the romantic revolutionary was not entirely new. His immediate ancestor and predecessor was the member of the italianate and masonic revolutionary secret society—the Carbonaro or Phil-hellene, whose inspiration came directly from surviving old Jacobins or Babouvists like Buonarroti. This is the typical revolutionary struggle of the Restoration period, all dashing young men in guards or hussar uniforms leaving operas, soirees, assignments with duchesses or highly ritualized lodge-meetings to make a military coup or place themselves at the head of a struggling nation; in fact, the Byronic pattern. How-ever, not only was this revolutionary fashion much more directly inspired by eighteenth-century modes of thought, and perhaps socially more exclusive than the later one. It still lacked a crucial element of the romantic revolutionary vision of 1830-48; the barricades, the masses, the new and desperate proletariat; that element which

 

 

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Daumier’s lithograph of the Massacre in the Rue Transnonain (1834), with its murdered nondescript worker, added to the romantic imagery.

 

The most striking consequence of this junction of romanticism with vision of a new and higher French Revolution was the overwhelming victory of political art between 1830 and 1848. There has rarely been a period when even the least ‘ideological’ artists were more universally partisan, often regarding service to politics as their primary duty. ‘Romanticism,’ cried Victor Hugo in the preface to Hernani, that manifesto of rebellion (1830), ‘is liberalism in literature.’¹¹ ‘Writers,’ wrote the poet Alfred de Musset (1810-57), whose natural talent—like that of the composer Chopin (1810-49) or the introspective Austro-Hungarian poet Lenau (1802-50)—was for the private rather than the public voice, ‘had a predilection to speak in their prefaces about the future, about social progress, humanity and civilization.’¹² Several artists became political figures and that not only in countries in the throes of national liberation, where all artists tended to be prophets or national symbols: Chopin, Liszt and even the young Verdi among the musicians; Mickiewicz (who saw himself in a messianic role), Petofi and Manzoni among the poets of Poland, Hungary and Italy respectively. The painter Daumier worked chiefly as a political cartoonist. The poet Uhland, the brothers Grimm, were liberal politicians, the volcanic boy-genius Georg Biichner (1810-37) an active revolutionary, Hein-rich Heine (1797-1856), a close personal friend of Karl Marx, an ambiguous but powerful voice of the extreme left.* Literature and journalism fused, most notably in France and Germany and Italy. In another age a Lamennais or a Jules Michelet in France, a Carlyle or Ruskin in Britain, might have been poets or novelists with some views on public affairs; in this one they were publicists, prophets, philosophers or historians carried by a poetic afflatus. For that matter, the lava of poetic imagery accompanies the eruption of Marx’s youthful intellect to an extent unusual among either philosophers or economists. Even the gentle Tennyson and his Cambridge friends threw their hearts behind the international brigade which went to support Liberals against Clericals in Spain.

 

The characteristic aesthetic theories developed and dominant during this period ratified this unity of art and social committment. The Saint-Simonians of France on one hand, the brilliant revolutionary Russian intellectuals of the ‘forties on the other, even evolved the views which

 

* It should be noted that this is one of the rare periods when poets not merely sympathized with the extreme left, but wrote poems which were both good and agitationally usable. The distinguished group of German socialist poets of the 1840s—Herwegh, Weerth, Freiligrath, and of course Heine—deserves mention, though Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy (1820), a riposte to Peterloo, is perhaps the most powerful such poem.

 

 

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later became standard in Marxist movements under such names as ‘socialist realism’;¹⁸ a noble but not overpoweringly successful ideal deriving both from the austere virtue ofJacobinism, and that romantic faith in the power of the spirit which made Shelley call the poets ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. ‘Art for art’s sake’, though already formulated, mostly by conservatives or dilettantes, could not as yet compete with art for humanity’s sake, or for the nations’ or the proletariat’s sake. Not until the 1848 revolutions destroyed the romantic hopes of the great rebirth of man, did self-contained aesthe-ticism come into its own. The evolution of such ‘forty-eighters as Baude-laire and Flaubert illustrates this political as well as aesthetic change, and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education remains its best literary record. Only in countries like Russia, in which the disillusion of 1848 had not occurred (if only because 1848 had not occurred), did the arts continue to remain socially committed or preoccupied as before.

 

V

 

Romanticism is the fashion in art as in life most characteristic of the period of dual revolution, but by no means the only one. Indeed, since it dominated neither the cultures of the aristocracy, nor those of the middle classes and even less of the labouring poor, its actual quanti-tative importance at the time was small. The arts which depended on the patronage or the mass support of the moneyed classes tolerated romanticism best where its ideological characteristics were least obvious, as in music. The arts which depended on the support of the poor were hardly of great interest to the romantic artist, though in fact the entertainment of the poor—penny dreadfuls and broadsheets, circuses, sideshows, travelling theatres and the like—were a source of much inspiration to the romantics, and in turn popular showmen rein-forced their own stock of emotion-stirring properties—transformation scenes, fairies, last words of murderers, brigands, etc.—with suitable goods from the romantic warehouses.

 

The fundamental style of aristocratic life and art remained rooted in the eighteenth century, though considerably vulgarized by an in-fusion of sometimes ennobled nouveaux-riches; as notably in the Napoleonic Empire style, which was of quite remarkable ugliness and pretentiousness, and the British Regency style. A comparison of eigh-teenth century and post-Napoleonic uniforms—the form of art which most direcdy expressed the instincts of the officers and gentlemen responsible for their design—will make this clear. The triumphant supremacy of Britain made the English nobleman the pattern of inter-

 

 

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national aristocratic culture, or rather unculture; for the interests of ‘the dandy’—clean-shaven, impassive and refulgent—were supposed to be confined to horses, dogs, carriages, prize-fighters, gaming, gentlemanly dissipation and his own person. Such heroic extremism fired even the romantics, who fancied dandyism themselves; but probably it fired young ladies of lesser ranks even more, and set them dreaming (in Gautier’s words):

 

 

‘Sir Edward was so splendidly the Englishman of her dreams. The English-man freshly shaved, pink, shining, groomed and polished, facing the first rays of the morning sun in an already perfect white cravat, the Englishman of waterproof and mackintosh. Was he not the very crown of civilization? . . .

 

I shall have English silverware, she thought, and Wedgwood china. There will be carpets all over the house and powdered footmen and I shall take the air by the side of my husband driving our four-in-hand through Hyde Park.

 

. .. Tame spotted deer will play on the green lawn of my country house, and perhaps also a few blond and rosy children. Children look so well on the front seat of a Barouche, beside a pedigree King Charles spaniel . . . .’¹⁴

 

It was perhaps an inspiring vision, but not a romantic one, any more than the picture of Royal or Imperial Majesties graciously attending opera or ball, surmounting expanses of jewelled, but strictly well-born, gallantry and beauty.

 

Middle and lower middle class culture was no more romantic. Its keynote was soberness and modesty. Only among the great bankers and speculators, or the very first generation of industrial millionaires, who never or no longer needed to plough much of their profits back into the business, did the opulent pseudo-baroque of the latter nineteenth century begin to show itself; and then only in the few countries in which the old monarchies or aristocrats no longer dominated ‘society’ entirely. The Rothschilds, monarchs in their own right, already showed off like princes.¹⁵ The ordinary bourgeois did not. Puritanism, evan-gelical or Catholic pietism encouraged moderation, thrift, a comfortable spartanism and an unparalleled moral self-satisfaction in Britain, the USA, Germany and Huguenot France; the moral tradition of eigh-teenth century illuminism and freemasonry did the same for the more emancipated or anti-religious. Except in the pursuit of profit and logic, middle class life was a life of controlled emotion and deliberate re-striction of scope. The very large section of the middle classes who, on the continent, were not in business at all but in government service, whether as officials, teachers, professors or in some cases pastors, lacked even the expanding frontier of capital accumulation; and so did the

 

 

 

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modest provincial bourgeois who knew that the small-town wealth, which was the limit of his achievement, was not very impressive by the standards of the real wealth and power of his age. In fact, middle class life was ‘un-romantic’, and its pattern still largely governed by eighteenth century fashion.

 

This is perfectly evident in the middle class home, which was after all the centre of middle class culture. The style of the post-Napoleonic bourgeois house or street derives straight from, and often directly continues, eighteenth century classicism or rococo. Late-Georgian build-ing continued in Britain until the 1840s, and elsewhere the architectural break (introduced mostly by an artistically disastrous rediscovery of the ‘renaissance’) came even later. The prevailing style of interior decoration and domestic life, best called Biedermayer after its most perfect expression, the German one, was a sort of domestic classicism warmed by intimacy of emotion and virginal dreaming (Innerlichkeit, Gemueth-lichkeit), which owed something to romanticism—or rather to the pre-romanticism of the late eighteenth century—but reduced even this debt to the dimensions of the modest bourgeois playing quartets on a Sunday afternoon in his living room. Biedermayer produced one of the most beautifully habitable styles of furnishing ever devised, all plain white curtains against matt walls, bare floors, solid but mostly elegant chairs and bureaus, pianos, mineral cabinets and vases full of flowers, but it was essentially a late classical style. It is perhaps most nobly exemplified in Goethe’s house in Weimar. It, or something like it, was the setting of life for the heroines of Jane Austen’s (1775-1817) novels, for the evangelical rigours and enjoyments of the Clapham sect, for the high-minded Bostonian bourgeoisie or provincial French readers

of the Journal des Dtbats.

 

Romanticism entered middle class culture, perhaps mostly through the rise in day-dreaming among the female members of the bourgeois family. To show off the breadwinner’s capacity to keep them in bored leisure was one of their main social functions; a cherished slavery their ideal fate. At all events bourgeois girls, like non-bourgeois ones, such as the odalisques and nymphs which anti-romantic painters like Ingres (1780-1867) brought out of the romantic into the bourgeois context, increasingly conformed to the same fragile, egg-faced, smooth-hair-and-ringlet type, the tender flower in shawl and bonnet so characteristic of the 1840s’ fashion. It was a long way from that crouching lioness, Goya’s Duchess of Alba, or the emancipated neo-Grecian girls in white muslin whom the French Revolution had scattered across the salons, or the self-possessed Regency ladies and courtesans like Lady Lieven or Harriete Wilson, as unromantic as they were unbourgeois.

 

 

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Bourgeois girls might play domesticated romantic music like Chopin’s or Schumann’s (1810-56). Biedermayer might encourage a kind of romantic lyricism, like that of Eichendorff (1788-1857) or Eduard Morike (1804-75), in which cosmic passion was transmuted into nos-talgia, or passive longing. The active entrepreneur might even, while on a business trip, enjoy a mountain pass as ‘the most romantic sight I had ever beheld’, relax at home by sketching ‘The Castle of Udolpho’ or even, like John Cragg of Liverpool, ‘being a man of artistic taste’ as well as an ironfounder, ‘introduce cast-iron into Gothic architecture’.¹⁶ But on the whole bourgeois culture was not romantic. The very exhilaration of technical progress precluded orthodox romanticism, at any rate in the centres of industrial advance. A man like James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer (1808-90), was anything but a barbarian if only because he was the son of a Jacobin painter (‘the father of landscape painting in Scotland’), brought up among artists and intellectuals, a lover of the picturesque and the ancient and with all the good Scotsman’s thorough and wide education. Yet what more natural than that the painter’s son should become a mechanic, or that on a youthful walking tour with his father the Devon Ironworks should interest him more than any other sight? For him, as for the polite eighteenth century Edinburgh citizens among whom he grew up, things were sublime but not irrational. Rouen contained simply a ‘magnificent cathedral and the church of St Ouen, so exquisite in its beauty, together with the refined Gothic architectural remains scattered about that interesting and picturesque city’. The picturesque was splendid; yet he could not but note, on his enthusiastic holidays, that it was a product of neglect. Beauty was splendid; but surely, what was wrong with modern architecture was that ‘the purpose of the building is . . . regarded as a secondary consideration’. ‘I was reluctant to tear myself away from Pisa’ he wrote; but ‘what interested me most in the Cathedral was the two bronze lamps suspended at the end of the nave, which suggested to the mind of Galileo the invention of the pendulum.’¹⁷ Such men were neither barbarians nor philistines; but their world was a great deal closer to Voltaire’s or Josiah Wedgwood’s than to John Ruskin’s. The great toolmaker Henry Maudslay no doubt felt much more at home, when in Berlin, with his friends Humboldt, the king of liberal scientists, and the neo-classic architect Schinkel, than he would have done with the great but cloudy Hegel.

 

In any case, in the centres of advancing bourgeois society, the arts as a whole took second place to science. The educated British or Ameri-can manufacturer or engineer might appreciate them, especially in moments of family relaxation and holiday, but his real cultural efforts

 

 

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would be directed towards the diffusion and advancement of know-ledge—his own, in such bodies as the British Association for tht Advancement of Science, or the people’s, through the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and similar organizations. It is charac-teristic that the typical product of the eighteenth century enlightenment, the encyclopaedia,flourishedas never before; still retaining (as in the famous Meyer’s Conversationslexicon of the Germans, a product of the 1830s) much of its militant political liberalism. Byron made a great deal of money out of his poems, but the publisher Constable in 1812 paid Dugald Stewart a thousand pounds for a preface on The Progress of Philosophy to introduce the supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britan-nica.¹⁹ And even when the bourgeoisie was romantic its dreams were those of technology: the young men fired by Saint-Simon became the planners of Suez canals, of titanic railway networks linking all parts of the globe, of Faustian finance, beyond the natural range of interest of the calm, and rationalist Rothschilds, who knew that plenty of money was to be made with a minimum of speculative soaring by conservative means.¹* Science and technology were the muses of the bourgeoisie, and they celebrated its triumph, the railway, in the great (and alas now destroyed) neo-classical portico of Euston station.

 

VI

 

Meanwhile, outside the radius of literacy, the culture of the common people continued. In the non-urban and non-industrial parts of the world it changed little. The songs and feasts of the 1840s, the costumes, designs and colours of people’s decorative arts, the pattern of their customs, remained very much what they had been in 1789. Industry and the growing city began to destroy it. No man could live in a factory town as he had in the village, and the entire complex of culture neces-sarily fell to pieces with the collapse of the social framework which held it together and gave it shape. Where a song belongs to ploughing, it cannot be sung when men do not plough; if it is sung, it ceases to be a folksong and becomes something else. The nostalgia of the emigrant maintained the old customs and songs in the exile of the city, and perhaps even intensified their attraction, for they palliated the pain of uprooting. But outside cities and mills the dual revolution had trans-formed—or more accurately devastated—only patches of the old rural life, notably in parts of Ireland and Britain, to the point where the old ways of living became impossible.

 

Indeed even in industry social transformation had not gone far enough before the 1840s to destroy the older culture completely; all

 

 

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the more so as in Western Europe crafts and manufactures had had several centuries in which to develop a, as it were, semi-industrial pattern of culture. In the countryside miners and weavers expressed their hope and protest in traditional folksong, and the industrial revo-lution merely added to their number and sharpened their experience. The factory needed no worksongs, but various activities incidental to economic development did, and developed them in the old way: the capstan-chanty of the seamen on the great sailing ships belongs to this golden age of’industrial’ folksong in the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury, like the ballads of the Greenland whalers, the Ballad of the Coal-owner and the Pitman’s Wife and the lament of the weaver.²⁰ In the pre-industrial towns, communities of craftsmen and domestic workers evolved a literate, intense culture in which Protestant sectarianism com-bined or competed with Jacobin radicalism as a stimulus to self-educa-tion, Bunyan and John Calvin with Tom Paine and Robert Owen. Libraries, chapels and institutes, gardens and cages in which the artisan ‘fancier’ bred his artificially exaggerated flowers, pigeons and dogs, filled these self-reliant and militant communities of skilled men; Norwich in England was famous not merely for its atheistical and republican spirit but is still famous for its canaries.* But the adaptation of older folksong to industrial life did not (except in the United States of America) survive the impact of the age of railways and iron, and the communities of the old skilled men, like the Dunfermline of the old linen-weavers, did not survive the advance of the factory and the machine. After 1840 they fell into ruin.

 

As yet nothing much replaced the older culture. In Britain, for instance, the new pattern of a wholly industrial life did not fully emerge until the 1870s and 1880s. The period from the crisis of the old tradi-tional ways of life until then was therefore in many ways the bleakest part ofwhat was for the labouring poor an exceedingly bleak age. Nor did the great cities develop a pattern ofpopular culture—necessarily commercial rather than, as in the smaller communities, self-made—in our period.

It is true that the great city, especially the great capital city, already contained important institutions which supplied the cultural needs of the poor, or the ‘little people’, though often—characteristically enough —also of the aristocracy. These, however, were in the main develop-ments of the eighteenth century, whose contribution to the evolution

 

* “There yet stands many an old house’ wrote Francis Horner in 1875 ‘deeply bedded in a town, that used to have its garden—oftentimes a florist’s. Here for instance is the very window—curiously long and lightsome—at which a handloom weaver worked behind his loom, able to watch his flowers as closely as his work—his labour and his pleasure inter-mingled. . . . But the mill has supplanted his patient hand-machine, and brickwork swallowed up his garden.'”

 

 

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of the popular arts has been often overlooked. The popular suburban theatre in Vienna, the dialect theatre in the Italian cities, the popular (as distinct from court) opera, the commedia dell’arte and travelling mime-show, the boxing or race-meeting, or the democratized version of the Spanish bullfight* were products of the eighteenth century; the illustrated broadsheet and chapbook of an even earlier period. The genuinely new forms of urban entertainment in the big city were by-products of the tavern or drink-shop, which became an increasing source of secular comfort for the labouring poor in their social dis-organization, and the last urban rampart of custom and traditional ceremonial, preserved and intensified by journeyman guilds, trade unions and ritualized ‘friendly societies’. The ‘music-hall’ and dance-hall were to emerge from the tavern; but by 1848 it had not yet emerged far, even in Britain, though its emergence was already noted in the 1830s.²² The other new forms of big-city urban entertainment grew out of the fair, always accompanied by its quota of itinerant entertainers. In the big city it became permanently fixed; and even in the 1840s the mixture of sideshows, theatres, hawkers, pickpockets and barrow-boys on certain boulevards provided the romantic intellectuals of Paris with inspiration and the populace with pleasure.

 

Popular taste also determined the shape and decoration of those relatively few individualized commodities which industry produced primarily for the market of the poor: the jugs which commemorate the triumph of the Reform Bill, the great iron bridge over the river Wear or those magnificent three-masters which sailed the Atlantic; the popular prints in which revolutionary sentiment, patriotism or famous crimes were immortalized, and such few articles of furnishing and clothing as the urban poor could afford. But on the whole the city, and especially the new industrial city, remained a gaunt place, whose few amenities—open spaces, holidays—were gradually diminished by the creeping blight of building, the fumes which poisoned all natural life, and the compulsion of unceasing labour, reinforced in suitable cases by the austere Sabbatarian discipline imposed by the middle classes. Only • the new gaslight and the displays of commerce in the main streets here and there anticipated the vivid colours of night in the modern town. But the creation of the modern big city and the modern urban ways of popular life had to await the second half of the nineteenth century. In the first destruction prevailed, or was at best held at bay.

 

* Its original version was knightly, the chief combatant being on horseback; the innovation of killing the bull on foot is traditionally ascribed to an eighteenth century carpenter from Ronda.

 

 

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SCIENCE

 

Let us neverforget that long before we did, the sciences and philosophyfought against the tyrants. Their constant efforts have made the revolution. As free and grateful men, we ought to establish them among us and cherish them for ever. For the sciences and philosophy will maintain the liberty which we have conquered.

 

A member of the Convention’

 

‘Questions of science,’ remarked Goethe, ‘are very frequently career questions. A single discovery may make a man famous and lay the foundation of his fortunes as a

 

citizen….   Every newly observed phenomenon is a discovery, every discovery is property.

 

Touch a man’s property and his passions are immediately aroused.’

 

Conversations with Eckcrmann, December 21, 1823

 

 

 

I

 

To draw a parallelism between the arts and the sciences is always dangerous, for the relationships between either and the society in which they flourish is quite different. Yet the sciences too in their way reflected the dual revolution, partly because it made specific new demands on them, partly because it opened new possibilities for them and faced them with new problems, partly because its very existence suggested new patterns of thought. I do not wish to imply that the evolution of the sciences between 1789 and 1848 can be ana-lysed exclusively in terms of the movements in the society round them. Most human activities have their internal logic, which determines at least part of their movement. The planet Neptune was discovered in 1846, not because anything outside astronomy encouraged its discovery, but because Bouvard’s tables in 1821 demonstrated that the orbit of the planet Uranus, discovered in 1781, showed unexpected deviations from the calculations; because by the later 1830s these deviations had become larger and were tentatively ascribed to disturbances by some unknown celestial body, and because various astronomers set about to calculate the position of that body. Nevertheless even the most passion-ate believer in the unsullied purity of pure science is aware that scientific thought may at least be influenced by matters outside the specific field of a discipline, if only because scientists, even the most unworldly of mathematicians, live in a wider world. The progress of

 

 

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science is not a simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems. It also proceeds by the discovery of new problems, of new ways of looking at old ones, of new ways of tackling or solving old ones, of entirely new fields of enquiry, or new theoretical and practical tools of enquiry. And here there is ample scope for stimulation or the shaping of thought by outside factors. If in fact most sciences in our period had advanced in a simple linear way, as was the case with astronomy, which remained substantially within its Newtonian frame-work, this might not be very important. But, as we shall see, our period was one of radically new departures in some fields of thought (as in mathematics), of the awakening of hitherto dormant sciences (as in chemistry), of the virtual creation of new sciences (as in geology), and of the injection of revolutionary new ideas into others (as in the social and biological sciences).

 

As it happened of all the outside forces shaping scientific develop-ment the direct demands made on scientists by government or industry were among the least important. The French Revolution mobilized them, placing the geometer and engineer Lazare Carnot in charge of the Jacobin war-effort, the mathematician and physicist Monge (Minister of the Navy in 1792-3) and a team of mathematicians and chemists in charge of war production, as it had earlier charged the chemist and economist Lavoisier with the preparation of an estimate of the national income. It was perhaps the first occasion in modern or any other history when the trained scientist as such entered government, but this was of greater importance to government than to science. In Britain, major industries of our period were cotton textiles, coal, iron, railways and shipping. The skills which revolutionized these were those of empirical—too empirical—men. The hero of the British railway revolution was George Stephenson, a scientific illiterate, but a man who could smell what would make a machine go: a super-craftsman rather than a technologist. The attempts of scientists like Babbage to make themselves useful to the railways, or of scientific engineers like Brunei to establish them on rational rather than merely empirical foundations, came to nothing.

 

On the other hand science benefited tremendously from die striking encouragement of scientific and technical education and the somewhat less striking support for research, which arose during our period. Here the influence of the dual revolution is quite clear. The French Revolu-tion transformed the scientific and technical education of its country,

chiefly	by	setting up	the Ecole Polytechnique (1795)—intended  as a
school	for	technicians	of all sorts—and the first sketch of the Ecole

 

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Normde Superieure (1794) which was firmly established as part of a general reform of secondary and higher education by Napoleon. It also revived the drooping royal academy (1795) and created, in the National Museum of Natural History (1794), the first genuine centre for research outside the physical sciences. The world supremacy of French science during most of our period was almost certainly due to these major foundations, notably to the Polytechnique, a turbulent centre of Jacobinism and Liberalism throughout the post-Napoleonic period, and an incomparable breeder of great mathematicians and theoretical physicists. The Polytechnique found imitators in Prague, Vienna and Stockholm, in St Petersburg and Copenhagen, all over Germany and Belgium, in Zurich and Massachusetts, but not in England. The shock of the French Revolution also jolted Prussia out of its educational lethargy, and the new University of Berlin (1806-10), founded as part of the Prussian revival, became the model for most German universities, which in turn were to create the pattern of academic institutions all over the world. Once again, no such reforms took place in Britain, where the political revolution neither won nor conquered. But the immense wealth of the country, which made private laboratories such as those of Henry Cavendish and James Joule possible, and the general pressure of intelligent middle-class persons for scientific and technical education, achieved comparable results. Count Rumford, a peripatetic illuminist adventurer, founded the Royal Institution in 1799. Its fame among laymen was chiefly based on its famous public lectures, but its real importance lay in the unique scope for experimental science it provided for Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. It was in fact an early example of the research laboratory. Bodies for the encouragement of science, like the Birmingham Lunar Society and the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, mobilized the support of indus-trialists in the provinces: John Dalton, the founder of the atomic theory, came out of the latter. The Benthamite Radicals in London founded (or rather took over and diverted) the London Mechanics Institution—the present Birkbeck College—as a school for technicians, London University as an alternative to the somnolence of Oxford and Cambridge, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831) as an alternative to the aristocratic torpor of the degen-erate Royal Society. These were not foundations intended to foster the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, which is perhaps why specific research establishments were slow to make their appearance. Even in Germany the first university research laboratory for chemistry (Liebig’s in Giessen) was not set up until 1825. (Its inspiration was French, needless to say.) There were institutions to provide technicians

 

 

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as in France and Britain, teachers, as in France and Germany, or to inculcate youth with a spirit of service to their country.

 

The revolutionary age therefore swelled the number of scientists and scholars and the output of science. What is more, it saw the geographical universe of science widen in two ways. In the first place the very process of trade and exploration opened new ranges of the world to scientific study, and stimulated thought about them. One of the greatest of the scientific minds of our period, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), made his contributions primarily thus: as an indefatigable traveller, observer, and theorist in the fields of geography, ethnography and natural history, though his noble synthesis of all knowledge, the Kosmos (1845-59), cannot be confined within the limits of particular disciplines.

 

In the second place the universe of science widened to embrace countries and peoples which had hitherto made only the smallest contributions to.it. The list of the great scientists of, say, 1750 contains few except Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, Italians and Swiss. But the shortest list of the major mathematicians of the first half of the nine-teenth century contains Henrik Abel from Norway, Janos Bolyai from Hungary and Nikolai Lobachevsky from the even more remote city of Kazan. Here again science appears to reflect the rise ofnational cultures outside Western Europe, which is so striking a product of the revolu-tionary age. This national element in the expansion of the sciences was in turn reflected in the decline of the cosmopolitanism that had been so characteristic of the small scientific communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The age of the itinerant international celebrity who moved, like Euler, from Basel to St Petersburg, thence to Berlin, and back to the court of Catherine the Great, passed with the old regimes. Henceforth the scientist stayed within his linguistic area, except for shorter visits, communicating with his colleagues through the medium of the learned journals, which are so typical a product of

 

this period: the Proceedings of the Royal Society (1831), the Comptes Rendus de VAcadimie des Sciences (1837), ¹^e Proceedings of the American Philo-sophical Society (1838), or the new specialist journals such as Crelle’s

 

Journal fur Reine und Angewandte Mathematik or the Annates de Chimie et de Physique (1797).

 

II

 

Before we can judge the nature of the impact of the dual revolution on the sciences, it is as well to survey briefly what happened to them. On the whole the classical physical sciences were not revolutionized. That

 

 

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is to say they remained substantially within the terms of reference established by Newton, either continuing lines of research already followed in the eighteenth century or extending earlier fragmentary discoveries and co-ordinating them into wider theoretical systems. The most important of the new fields thus opened up (and the one with the most immediate technological consequences) was electricity, or rather electro-magnetism. Five main dates—four of them in our period— mark its decisive progress: 1786, when Galvani discovered the electric current, 1799, when Volta constructed his battery, 1800, when elec-trolysis was discovered, 1820, when Oersted hit upon the connection between electricity and magnetism, and 1831, when Faraday established the relations between all these forces, and incidentally found himself pioneering an approach to physics (in terms of ‘fields’ rather than mechanical pushing and pulling) which anticipated the modern age. The most important of the new theoretical syntheses was the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, i.e. of the relations between heat and energy.

 

The revolution which turned astronomy and physics into modern science had occurred in the seventeenth century; that which created chemistry was in full swing when our period opens. Of all the sciences this was the most closely and immediately linked with industrial prac-tice, especially with the bleaching and dyeing processes of the textile industry. Moreover, its creators were not only practical men, linked with other practical men (like Dalton in the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and Priestley in the Lunar Society of Birmingham), but sometimes political revolutionaries, though moderate ones. Two were victims of the French Revolution: Priestley, at the hands of the Tory mob, for sympathizing excessively with it, the great Lavoisier on

 

the guillotine, for not sympathizing enough, or rather for being a big business man.

 

Chemistry, like physics, was pre-eminently a French science. Its virtual founder, Lavoisier (1743-94), published his fundamental Traiti Elementaire de Chimie in the year of revolution itself, and the inspiration for the chemical advances, and especially the organization of chemical research, in other countries—even in those which were to become the major centres of chemical research later, like Germany—was primarily French. The major advances before 1789 consisted in bringing some elementary order into the tangle of empirical experiment by eluci-dating certain fundamental chemical processes such as burning, and some fundamental elements such as oxygen. They also brought precise quantitative measurement and a programme of further research into the subject. The crucial concept of an atomic theory (originated by

 

 

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Dalton 1803-10) made it possible to invent the chemical formula, and with it to open up the study of chemical structure. An abundance of new experimental results followed. In the nineteenth century chemistry was to be one of the most vigorous of all the sciences, and consequently one which attracted—as does every dynamic subject—a mass of able men. However, the atmosphere and the methods of chemistry remained largely those of the eighteenth century.

 

Chemistry had, however, one revolutionary implication—the dis-covery that life can be analysed in terms of the inorganic sciences. Lavoisier discovered that breathing is a form of combustion of oxygen. Woehler discovered (1828) that a compound hitherto encountered only in living things—urea—could be synthesized in the laboratory, thus opening up the vast new domain of organic chemistry. Yet, though that great obstacle to progress, the belief that living matter obeyed funda-mentally different natural laws from the non-living, was seriously crippled, neither the mechanical nor the chemical approach as yet enabled the biologist to advance very far. His most fundamental advance in this period, Schleiden and Schwann’s discovery that all living things were composed of multiplicities of cells (1838-9), estab-lished a sort of equivalent of the atomic theory for biology; but a mature biophysics and biochemistry remained far in the future.

 

A revolution even more profound but, by the nature of the subject, less obvious than in chemistry took place in mathematics. Unlike physics, which remained within the seventeenth-century terms of reference, and chemistry, which fanned out on a broad front through the gap opened in the eighteenth, mathematics in our period entered an entirely new universe, far beyond the world of the Greeks, which still dominated arithmetic and plane geometry, and that of the seventeenth century, which dominated analysis. Few except mathematicians will appreciate the profundity of the innovation brought into science by the theory of the functions of complex variables (Gauss, Cauchy, Abel, Jacobi), of the theory of groups (Cauchy, Galois) or of vectors (Hamilton). But even the layman can grasp the bearing of the revolution by which Lobachevsky of Russia (1826-9), and Bolyai of Hungary (1831) over-threw that most permanent ofintellectual certainties, Euclid’s geometry. The entire majestic and unshakable structure of Euclidean logic rests on certain assumptions, one of which, the axiom that parallels never meet, is neither self-evident nor provable. It may today seem ele-mentary to construct an equal logical geometry on some other assump-tion, for instance (Lobachevsky, Bolyai) that an infinity of parallels to any line L may pass through point P; or (Riemann) that no parallels to line L pass through point P; all the more so as we can construct

 

 

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real-life surfaces to which these rules apply. (Thus the earth, insofar as it is a globe, conforms to Riemannian and not Euclidean assump-tions.) But to make these assumptions in the early nineteenth century was an act of intellectual daring comparable to putting the sun instead of the earth into the centre of the planetary system.

 

Ill

 

The mathematical revolution passed unperceived except by a few specialists in subjects notorious for their remoteness from everyday life. The revolution in the social sciences, on the other hand, could hardly fail to strike the layman, because it visibly affected him, generally, it was believed, for the worse. The amateur scientists and scholars in Thomas Love Peacock’s novels are gently bathed in sympathy or a loving ridicule; not so the economists and propagandists of the Steam Intellect Society.

 

There were to be precise two revolutions, whose courses converge to produce Marxism as the most comprehensive synthesis of the social sciences. The first, which continued the brilliant pioneering of the seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalists, established the equiva-lent ofphysical laws for human populations. Its earliest triumph was the construction of a systematic deductive theory of political economy, which was already far advanced by 1789. The second, which in substance belongs to our period and is closely linked with romanticism, was the discovery of historical evolution (cf. also above, pp. 237-9, ²44~5)-

 

The daring innovation of the classical rationalists had been to demonstrate that something like logically compulsory laws were applic-able to human consciousness and free decision. The ‘laws of political economy’ were of this sort. The conviction that they were as far beyond liking and disliking as the laws of gravity (with which they were often compared) lent a ruthless certainty to the capitalists of the early nineteenth century, and tended to imbue their romantic opponents with an equally wild anti-rationalism. In principle the economists were of course right, though they grossly exaggerated the universality of the postulates on which they based their deductions, the capacity of ‘other things’ to remain ‘equal’; and also, sometimes, their own intellectual abilities. If the population of a town doubles and the number of dwellings in it does not rise, then, other things being equal, rents must go up, whether anyone wants them to or not. Propositions of this kind made the force of the systems of deductive reasoning con-structed by political economy, mostly in Britain, though also, to a diminishing degree, in the old eighteenth century centres of the science,

 

 

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France, Italy, and Switzerland. As we have seen, the period from 1776 to 1830 saw it at its most triumphant. (See above p. 237.) It was supplemented by the first systematic presentation of a theory of demo-graphy purporting to establish a mechanical, and virtually inevitable, relationship between the mathematically describable rates of growth of population and of the means of subsistence. T. R. Malthus’s Essay on Population (1798) was neither as original nor as compelling as its sup-porters claimed, in the enthusiasm of the discovery that somebody had proved that the poor must always remain poor, and why generosity and benevolence must make them even poorer. Its importance lies not in its intellectual merits, which were moderate, but in the claims it staked for a scientific treatment of so very individual and capricious a group of decisions as the sexual ones, considered as a social phenomenon.

 

The application of mathematical methods to society made another major advance in this period. Here the French-speaking scientists led the way, assisted no doubt by the superb mathematical atmosphere of French education. Thus Adolphe Quetelet of Belgium, in his epoch-making Sur I’Homme (1835), showed that the statistical distribution of human characteristics obeyed known mathematical laws, from which he deduced, with a confidence since deemed excessive, the possibility of assimilating the social to the physical sciences. The possibility of generalizing statistically about human populations and basing firm predictions on such generalization had long been anticipated by the theorists of probability (Quetelet’s point of departure into the social sciences), and by practical men who had to rely on it, such as the insurance companies. But Quetelet and the flourishing contemporary group of statisticians, anthropometrists and social investigators applied these methods to far wider fields and created what is still the major mathematical tool for the investigation of social phenomena.

 

These developments in the social sciences were revolutionary in the way chemistry was: by following through advances already theoretically made. But the social sciences also had an entirely new and original achievement to their credit, which in turn fertilized the biological sciences and even physical ones, such as geology. This was the dis-covery of history as a process of logical evolution, and not merely as a chronological succession of events. The links of this innovation with the dual revolution are so obvious that they hardly need argument. Thus what came to be called sociology (the word was invented by A. Comte around 1830) sprang directly out of the critique of capitalism. Comte himself, who is normally reckoned its founder, began his career as the private secretary to the pioneer Utopian socialist, the Count of Saint-

 

 

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Simon,* and its most formidable contemporary theorist Karl Marx regarded his theory primarily as a tool for changing the world.

 

The creation of history as an academic subject is perhaps the least important aspect of this historization of the social sciences. It is true that an epidemic of history-writing overwhelmed Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rarely have more men set down to make sense of their world by writing many-volumed accounts of its past, incidentally often for the first time: Karamzin in Russia (1818-24), Geijer in Sweden (1832-6), Palacky in Bohemia (1836-67) are the founding fathers of their respective countries’ historiography. In France the urge to understand the present through the past was particularly strong, and there the Revolution itself soon became the subject of intensive and partisan study by Thiers (1823, ¹ ^ s ) , Mignet (1824), Buonarroti (1828), Lamartine (1847) and the great Jules Michelet (1847-53). It was an heroic period of historiography, but little of the work of Guizot, Augustin Thierry and Michelet in France, of the Dane Niebuhr and the Swiss Sismondi, of Hallam, Lingard and Carlyle in Britain, and of innumerable German professors, now survives except as historical document, as literature or occasionally as the record of genius.

 

The most lasting results of this historical awakening were in the field of documentation and historical technique. To collect the relics of the past, written or unwritten, became a universal passion. Perhaps in part it was an attempt to safeguard it against the steam-powered attacks of the present, though nationalism was probably its most im-portant stimulus: in hitherto unawakened nations the historian, the lexicographer and the folksong collector were often the very founders of national consciousness. And so the French set up their Ecole des Charles (1821), the English a Public Record Office (1838), the Germans began to publish the Monumenta Germaniae Historiae (1826), while the doctrine that history must be based on the scrupulous evaluation of primary records was laid down by the prolific Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). Meanwhile, as we have seen (cf. chapter 14), the lin-guists and folklorists produced the fundamental dictionaries of their languages and collections of their peoples’ oral traditions.

 

The injection of history into the social sciences had its most im-mediate effects in law, where Friedrich Karl von Savigny founded the historical school of jurisprudence (1815), in the study of theology, where the application of historical criteria—notably in D. F. Strauss’s Leben Jesu (1835)—horrified the fundamentalists, but especially in a wholly new science, philology. This also developed primarily in Gcr-

 

* Though Saint-Simon’s ideas are, as we have seen, not easily classifiable, it seems pedantic to abandon the established practice of calling him a Utopian socialist.

 

 

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many, which was by far the most vigorous centre of diffusion for the historical approach. It is not fortuitous that Karl Marx was a German. The ostensible stimulus for philology was the conquest of non-European societies by Europe. Sir William Jones’s pioneer investigations into Sanskrit (1786) were the result of the British conquest of Bengal; Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphs (his main work on the subject was published in 1824), of Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt; Rawlinson’s elucidation of cuneiform writing (1835) reflected the ubiquity of the British colonial officers. But in fact philology was not confined to discovery, description and classification. In the hands chiefly of great German scholars such as Franz Bopp (1791-1867) and the brothers Grimm it became the second social science properly so described; that is to say the second which discovered general laws applicable to so apparently capricious a field as human communication. (The first was political economy.) But unlike the laws of political economy those of philology were fundamentally historical, or rather evolutionary.*

 

Their foundation was the discovery that a wide range of languages, the Indo-European, were related to one another; supplemented by the obvious fact that every existing written European language had plainly been transformed in the course of the centuries and was, presumably, still undergoing transformation. The problem was not merely to prove and classify these relationships by means of scientific comparison, a task which was then being widely undertaken (for instance, in comparative anatomy, by Cuvier). It was also, and chiefly, to elucidate their historic evolution from what must have been a com-mon ancestor. Philology was the first science which regarded evolution as its very core. It was of course fortunate because the Bible is relatively silent about the history of language, whereas, as the biologists and geologists knew to their cost, it is only too explicit about the creation and early history of the globe. Consequently the philologist was less likely to be drenched by the waters of Noah’s flood or tripped by the obstacles of Genesis 1 than his unhappy confrere. If anything the Biblical statement ‘And the whole earth was of one language, and one speech’ was on his side. But philology was also fortunate, because of all the social sciences it dealt not directly with human beings, who always resent the suggestion that their actions are determined by any-thing except their free choice, but with words, which do not. Conse-quently it was left free to face what is still the fundamental problem of

 

* Paradoxically, the attempt to apply the mathematical-physical method to linguistics considered as part of a more general ‘communications theory’ was not undertaken until the present century.

 

 

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the historical sciences, how to derive the immense, and apparendy often capricious variety of individuals in real life, from the operation of invariant general laws.

The pioneer philologists did not in fact advance very far in explaining linguistic change, though Bopp himself already propounded a theory of the origin of grammatical inflections. But they did establish for the Indo-European languages something like a table of genealogy. They made a number of inductive generalizations about the relative rates of change in different linguistic elements, and a few historical generaliza-tions of very wide scope, such as ‘Grimm’s Law’ (which showed that all Teutonic languages underwent certain consonantal shifts, and, several centuries later, a section of Teutonic dialects underwent another similar shift). However, throughout these pioneering explorations, they never doubted that the evolution of language was not merely a matter of establishing chronological sequence or recording variation, but ought to be explained by general linguistic laws, analogous to scientific ones.

 

IV

 

The biologists and geologists were less lucky. For them too history was the major issue, though the study of the earth was (through mining) closely linked with chemistry and the study of life (through medicine) closely with physiology, and (through the crucial discovery that the chemical elements in living things were the same as those in inorganic nature) with chemistry. But for the geologist in any case the most obvious problems involved history—for instance, how to explain the distribution of land and water, the mountains, and above all the strongly marked strata.

 

If the historical problem of geology was how to explain the evo-lution of the earth, that of biology was the double one of how to explain the growth of the individual living thing from egg, seed or spore, and how to explain the evolution of species. Both were linked by the visible evidence of the fossils, of which a particular selection were to be found in each rock-stratum and not in others. An English drainage engineer, William Smith, discovered in the 1790s that the historic succession of strata could be most conveniently dated by their charac-teristic fossils, thus illuminating both sciences through the down-to-earth operations of the Industrial Revolution.

 

The problem had been so obvious that attempts to provide theories of evolution had already been made; notably, for the world of animals, by the stylish but sometimes slapdash zoologist Comte de Buffon (Les Epoques de la Nature, 1778). In the decade of the French Revolution

 

 

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these gained ground rapidly. The ruminative James Hutton of Edin-burgh (Theory of the Earth, 1795) and the eccentric Erasmus Darwin, who shone in the Birmingham Lunar Society and wrote some of his scientific work in verse (^oonomia, 1794), put forward fairly complete evolutionary theories of the earth and of plants and animal species. Laplace (1796) even brought out an evolutionary theory of the solar system, anticipated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and Pierre Cabanis, about the same time, envisaged the very mental faculties of man as the product of his evolutionary history. In 1809 Lamarck of France propounded the first systematic major modern theory of evo-lution, based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

 

None of these theories triumphed. Indeed they were soon met by the passionate resistance of those, like the Tory Quarterly Review, whose ‘general attachment to the cause of Revelation is so decided’.² What was to happen to Noah’s Flood? What to the separate creation of the species, not to mention man? What, above all, to social stability? Not only simple priests and less simple politicians were troubled by such reflections. The great Cuvier, himself the founder of the systematic study of fossils (Recherches sur les ossemensfossiles, 1812),rejected evolution in the name of Providence. Better even to imagine a series of catas-trophes in geological history, followed by a series ofdivine re-creations—

 

it was hardly possible to deny geological as distinct from biological change—than to tamper with the fixity of Scripture and of Aristotle. The wretched Dr Lawrence, who answered Lamarck by proposing a Darwin-like theory of evolution by natural selection, was forced by the outcry of the conservatives actually to withdraw his Natural History of Man (1819) from circulation. He had been unwise enough not only to discuss the evolution of man but also to point out the implications of his ideas for contemporary society. His recantation preserved his job, assured his future career, and a permanent bad conscience, which he assuaged by flattering the courageous Radical printers who from time to time pirated his incendiary work.

 

Not until the 1830s—until politics had taken another turn to the left, we might observe—did mature evolutionary theories break through in geology, with the publication of Lyell’s famous Principles of Geology (1830-33), which ended the resistance of the Neptunists, who argued, with the Bible, that all minerals had been precipitated from aqueous solutions which had once covered the earth (cf. Genesis 1, 7-9) and the catastrophists, who followed Cuvier’s desperate line of argument.

 

In the same decade, Schmerling, researching in Belgium, and Boucher de Perthes, who fortunately preferred his hobby of archaeology to his post as director of customs at Abbeville, forecast an even more

 

 

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alarming development: the actual discovery of those fossils of pre-historic man whose possibility had been hotly denied.* But scientific conservatism was still able to reject this horrifying prospect on the grounds of inadequate proof, until the discovery of Neanderthal man in 1856.

 

It had now to be accepted (a) that the causes now in operation had in the course of time transformed the earth from its original state to the present, (b) that this had taken a vastly longer time than any calculable from the Scriptures and (c) that the succession of geological strata revealed a succession of evolving forms of animals, and therefore implied biological evolution. Significantly enough, those who accepted this most readily, and indeed showed the greatest interest in the problem of evolution were the self-confident Radical laymen of the British middle classes (always excepting the egregious Dr Andrew Ure, best known for his hymns of praise to the factory system). The scientists were slow to accept science. This is less surprising when we recall that geology was the only science in this period gentlemanly enough (per-haps because it was practised outdoors, preferably on expensive ‘geological tours’) to be seriously pursued in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

 

Biological evolution, however, still lagged. Not until well after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions was this explosive subject once again tackled; and even then Charles Darwin handled it with considerable caution and ambiguity, not to say disingenuousness. Even the parallel exploration of evolution through embryology temporarily petered out. Here too early German speculative natural philosophers like Johann Meckel of Halle (1781-1833) had suggested that during its growth the embryo of an organism recapitulated the evolution of its species. But this ‘biogenetic law’, though at first supported by men like Rathke, who discovered that the embryos of birds pass through a stage when they have gill-slits (1829), was rejected by the formidable Von Baer of Koenigsberg and St Petersburg—experimental physiology seems to have had a marked attraction for workers in the Slavonic and Baltic areasf—and this line of thought was not revived until the coming of Darwinism.

 

Meanwhile evolutionary theories had made striking progress in the study of society. Yet we must not exaggerate this progress. The period

of the	dual revolution belongs to the prehistory of all social sciences
* His	AntiquUis celtiques et anfediluvienncs was not published until 1846. In fact several

human fossils had been discovered from time to time, but lay either unrecognized or simply forgotten in the corners of provincial museums.

 

t Rathke taught at Dorpat (Tartu) in Estonia, Pander at Riga, the great Czech physi-ologist Purkinje opened the first physiological research laboratory in Breslau in 1830.

 

 

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except political economy, linguistics and perhaps statistics. Even its most formidable achievement, Marx and Engels’s coherent theory of social evolution was at this time little more than a brilliant guess, put forward in a superb pamphlet-sketch—or used as the basis for historical narrative. The firm construction of scientific bases for the study of human society did not take place until the second half of the century.

 

This is so in the fields of social anthropology or ethnography, of pre-history, of sociology and of psychology. The fact that these fields of study were baptized in our period, or that claims to regard each as a self-contained science with its own special regularities were then first put forward—John Stuart Mill in 1843 was perhaps the first to claim this status firmly for psychology—is important. The fact that special Ethnological Societies were founded in France and England (1839, 1843) to study ‘the races of man’ is equally significant, as is the multi-plication of social enquiries by statistical means and of statistical societies between 1830 and 1848. But the ‘general instructions to travellers’ of the French Ethnological Society which urged them ‘to discover what memories a people has preserved of its origins,… what revolutions it has undergone in its language or behaviour (moeurs), in its arts, sciences and wealth, its power or government, by internal causes or foreign invasion’³ is little more than a programme; though indeed a profoundly historical one. Indeed, what is important about the social sciences in our period is less their results (though a consider-able amount of descriptive material was accumulated) than their firm materialist bias, expressed in a determination to explain human social differences in terms of the environment, and their equally firm commit-ment to evolution; for did not Chavannes in 1787, at the outset of the science, define ethnology as ‘the history of the progress of peoples towards civilization’?⁴

 

One shady by-product of this early development of the social sciences must, however, be briefly mentioned: the theories of race. The existence of different races (or rather colours), of men had been much discussed in the eighteenth century, when the problem of a single or multiple creation of man also exercised the reflective mind. The line between the monogenists and the polygenists was not a simple one. The first group united believers in evolution and human equality with men relieved to find that on this point at least science did not conflict with Scripture: the pre-Darwinians Prichard and Lawrence with Guvier. The second, admittedly, included not only bonafidescientists, but also racialists from the American slave south. These discussions of race produced a lively outburst of anthropometry, mostly based on the

 

 

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collection, classification and measurement of skulls, a practice also encouraged by the strange contemporary hobby of phrenology, which attempted to read character from the configuration of the skull. In Britain and France phrenological societies were founded (1823, 1832) though the subject soon dropped out of science again.

 

At the same time a mixture of nationalism, radicalism, history and field observation introduced the equally dangerous topic of permanent national or racial characteristics in society. In the 1820s the brothers Thierry, pioneer French historians and revolutionaries, had launched themselves into the study of the Norman Conquest and of the Gauls, which is still reflected in the proverbial first sentence of French school readers (‘Nos ancitres les Gaulois’) and on the blue packets of the Gauloise cigarette. As good radicals they held that the French people were descended from the Gauls, the aristocrats from the Teutons who con-quered them, an argument later used for conservative purposes by upper class racialists like the Count of Gobineau. The belief that specific racial stock survived—an idea taken up with understandable zeal by

 

a Welsh naturalist W. Edwards for the Celts—fitted admirably into an age when men purported to discover the romantic and mysterious individuality of their nations, to claim messianic missions for them if revolutionary, or to ascribe their wealth and power to ‘innate superi-ority’. (They showed no tendency to ascribe poverty and oppression to innate inferiority.) But in mitigation it must be said that the worst abuses of racial theories occurred after the end of our period.

 

V

 

How are we to explain these scientific developments? How, in particu-lar, are we to link them with the other historical changes of the dual revolution? That there are links of the most obvious kind is evident. The theoretical problems of the steam engine led the brilliant Sadi Carnot in 1824 ^{t 0 t n e} most fundamental physical insight of the nine-teenth century, the two laws of thermodynamics (Reflexions sur la puissance motrice dufeu*), though this was not the only approach to the problem. The great advance of geology and palaeontology plainly owed much to the zeal with which industrial engineers and builders hacked at the earth, and the great importance of mining. Not for nothing did Britain become the geological country par excellence, setting up a national Geological Survey in 1836. The survey of mineral resources provided chemists with innumerable inorganic compounds to analyse, mining, ceramics, metallurgy, textiles, the new industries

 

* His discovery of the first law was not, however, published until much later.

 

 

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of gas-lighting and chemicals, and agriculture stimulated their labours. And the enthusiasm of the solid British bourgeois Radical and aristo-cratic Whig not merely for applied research but for daring advances in knowledge from which established science itself recoiled is sufficient proof that the scientific progress of our period cannot be separated from the stimulus of the Industrial Revolution.

 

Similarly the scientific implications of the French Revolution are obvious in the frank or concealed hostility to science with which political conservatives or moderates met what they regarded as the natural consequences of eighteenth century materialist and rationalist subversion. Napoleon’s defeat brought a wave of obscurantism. ‘Mathe-matics were the chains of human thought,’ cried the slippery Lamartine, ‘I breathe, and they are broken.’ The struggle between a combative pro-scientific and anti-clerical left which has, in its rare moments of victory, built most of the institutions which allow French scientists to function, and an anti-scientific right, which has done its best to starve them,⁸ has continued ever since. This does not imply that scientists in France or elsewhere were at this period particularly revolutionary. Some were, like the golden boy Evariste Galois, who dashed to the barricades in 1830, was persecuted as a rebel, and killed in a duel provoked by political bullies at the age of twenty-one in 1832. Genera-tions of mathematicians have fed on the profound ideas he wrote down feverishly in what he knew to be his last night on earth. Some were frank reactionaries, like the Legitimist Gauchy, though for obvious reasons the tradition of the Ecole Polytechnique, which he adorned, was militantly anti-royalist. Probably most scientists would have reckoned themselves to be left of centre in the post-Napoleonic period and some, especially in new nations or hitherto unpolitical communities, were forced into positions of political leadership; notably historians, linguists and others with obvious connections with national movements. Palacky became the chief spokesman of the Czechs in 1848, the seven professors of Gottingen who signed a letter of protest in 1837 found themselves national figures,* and the Frankfurt Parliament in the German 1848 Revolution was notoriously an assembly of professors as well as other civil servants. On the other hand, compared with the artists and philosophers, the scientists—and especially the natural ones—showed only a very low degree of political consciousness, unless their subject actually required it. Outside the Catholic countries, for instance, they showed a capacity for combining science with a tranquil religious orthodoxy which surprises the student of the post-Dar-winian era.

 

* They included the brothers Grimm.

 

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Such direct derivations explain some things about scientific develop-ment between 1789 and 1848, but not much. Clearly the indirect effects of contemporary events were more important. No one could fail to observe that the world was transformed more radically than ever before in this era. No thinking person could fail to be awed, shaken, and mentally stimulated by these convulsions and transformations. It is hardly surprising that patterns of thought derived from the rapid social changes, the profound revolutions, the systematic replacement of customary or traditional institutions by radical rationalist innovations, should become acceptable. Is it possible to connect this visible emer-gence of revolution with the readiness of the unworldly mathematicians to break through hitherto operative thought barriers? We cannot tell, though we know that the adoption of revolutionary new lines of thought is normally prevented not by their intrinsic difficulty, but by their conflict with tacit assumptions about what is or is not ‘natural’. The very terms ‘irrational’ number (for numbers like -y/²) ^{o r} ‘imagin-ary’ number (for numbers like V^{– 1} ) indicate the nature of the diffi-culty. Once we decide that they are no more or less rational or real than any others, all is plain sailing. But it may take an age of profound transformation to nerve thinkers to make such decisions; and indeed imaginary or complex variables in mathematics, treated with puzzled caution in the eighteenth century, only came fully into their own after the Revolution.

 

Leaving aside mathematics, it was only to be expected that patterns drawn from the transformations of society would tempt scientists in fields to which such analogies appeared applicable; for instance to introduce dynamic evolutionary concepts into hitherto static ones. This could either happen directly, or through the intermediary of some other science. Thus the concept of the Industrial Revolution, which is fundamental to history and much of modern economics, was introduced in the 1820s frankly as an analogy to the French Revolution. Charles Darwin derived the mechanism of ‘natural selection’ by analogy with the model of capitalist competition, which he took from Malthus (the ‘struggle for existence’). The vogue for catastrophic theories in geology, 1790-1830, may also owe something to the familiarity of this generation with violent convulsions of society.

 

Nevertheless, outside the most obviously social sciences, it is unwise to put too much weight on such external influences. The world of thought is to some extent autonomous: its movements are, as it were, on the same historical wave-length as those outside, but they are not mere echoes of them. Thus for instance, the catastrophist theories of geology also owed something to the Protestant, and especially the

 

 

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Calvinist, insistence on the arbitrary omnipotence of the Lord. Such theories were largely a monopoly of Protestant, as distinct from Catholic or agnostic workers. If developments in the field of the sciences parallel those elsewhere, it is not because each of them can be hooked on to a corresponding aspect of economic or political ones in any simple way.

 

Yet the links are hard to deny. The main currents of general thought in our period have their correspondence in the specialized field of science, and this is what enables us to establish a parallelism between sciences and arts or between both and politico-social attitudes. Thus ‘classicism’ and ‘romanticism’ existed in the sciences, and as we have seen each fitted in with a particular approach to human society. The equation of classicism (or in intellectual terms, the rationalist, mechan-ist Newtonian universe of the Enlightenment) with the milieu of bourgeois liberalism, and of romanticism (or in intellectual terms the so-called ‘Natural Philosophy’) with its opponents, is obviously an over-simplification, and breaks down altogether after 1830. Yet it represents a certain aspect of truth. Until the rise of theories like modern socialism

had	firmly	anchored  revolutionary  thought  in  the	rationalist past
(cf.	chapter	13), such sciences as physics, chemistry	and astronomy

marched with Anglo-French bourgeois liberalism. For instance, the plebeian revolutionaries of the Year II were inspired by Rousseau rather than Voltaire, and suspected Lavoisier (whom they executed) and Laplace not merely because of their connections with the old regime, but for reasons similar to those which led the poet William Blake to excoriate Newton.* Conversely ‘natural history’ was congenial, for it represented the road to the spontaneity of true and unspoiled nature. The Jacobin dictatorship, which dissolved the French Academy, founded no less than twelve research chairs at the Jardin des Planks. Similarly it was in Germany, where classical liberalism was weak (cf. chapter 13), that a rival scientific ideology to the classical was most popular. This was ‘Natural Philosophy’.

 

It is easy to underestimate ‘natural philosophy’, because it conflicts so much with what we have rightly come to regard as science. It was speculative and intuitive. It sought for expressions of the world spirit, or life, of the mysterious organic union of all things with each other, and a good many other things which resisted precise quantitative measurement or Cartesian clarity. Indeed, it was flatly in revolt against mechanical materialism, against Newton, sometimes against reason itself. The great Goethe wasted a considerable amount of his Olympian time trying to disprove Newton’s optics, for no better reason

 

* This suspicion of Newtonian science did not extend to applied work, whose economic and military value was evident.

 

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than that he did not feel happy about a theory which failed to explain the colours by the interaction of the principles of light and darkness. Such an aberration would cause nothing but pained surprise in the Ecole Polytechnique, where the persistent preference of the Germans for the tangled Kepler, with his load of mysticism, over the lucid per-fection of the Principia was incomprehensible. What indeed was one to make of Lorenz Oken’s

 

‘The action or the life of God consists in eternally manifesting, eternally contemplating itself in unity and duality, externally divid-ing itself and still remaining one. . . . Polarity is the first force which appears in the world. . . . The law of causality is a law of polarity. Causality is an act of generation. The sex is rooted in the first move-ment of the world. . . . In everything, therefore, there are two processes, one individualizing, vitalizing, and one universalizing, destructive.’⁶

 

What indeed? Bertrand Russell’s blank incomprehension of Hegel, who operated in such terms, is a good illustration of the eighteenth-century rationalist’s answer to this rhetorical question. On the other hand the debt which Marx and Engels frankly acknowledged to natural philosophy* would warn us that it cannot be regarded as mere verbiage. The point about it is that it worked. It produced not merely scientific effort—Lorenz Oken founded the liberal German Deutsche Natur-forscherversammlung and inspired the British Associationfor the Advancement of Science—but fruitful results. The cell theory in biology, a good deal of morphology, embryology, philology and much of the historical and evolutionary element in all the sciences, were primarily of ‘roman-tic’ inspiration. Admittedly even in its chosen field of biology ‘roman-ticism’ had eventually to be supplemented by the cool classicism of Claude Bernard (1813-78), the founder of modern physiology. On the other hand even in the physico-chemical sciences, which remained the stronghold of ‘classicism’, the speculations of the natural philosophers about such mysterious subjects as electricity and magnetism, brought advances. Hans Christain Oersted of Copenhagen, the disciple of the cloudy Schelling, sought and found the connection between the two

when  he	demonstrated  the	magnetical	effect	of electric  currents
in  1820.	Both approaches to	science, in	effect,	mixed. They never

quite merged, even in Marx who was more clearly aware than most of the combined intellectual origins of his thought. On the whole the

 

* Engels’ Anti-Duehring and Feuerbach contain a qualified defence of it, as well as of Kepler as against Newton.

 

 

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‘romantic’ approach served as a stimulus for new ideas and departures, and then once again dropped out of the sciences. But in our period it cannot be neglected.

 

If it cannot be neglected as a purely scientific stimulus, it can be even less neglected by the historian ofideas and opinions, for whom even absurd and false ideas are facts and historical forces. We cannot write off a movement which captured or influenced men of the highest intellectual calibre, such as Goethe, Hegel and the young Marx. We can merely seek to understand the deep dissatisfaction with the ‘classical’ eighteenth-century Anglo-French view of the world, whose titanic achievements in science and in society were undeniable, but whose narrowness and limitations were also increasingly evident in the period o( the two revolutions. To be aware of these limits and to seek, often by intuition rather than analysis, the terms in which a more satisfactory picture of the world could be constructed, was not actually to construct it. Nor were the visions of an evolutionary, interconnected, dialectical universe which the natural philosophers expressed, proofs or even adequate formulations. But they reflected real problems—even real problems in the physical sciences—and they anticipated the trans-formations and extensions of the world of sciences which have produced our modern scientific universe. And in their way they reflected the impact of the dual revolution, which left no aspect of human life unchanged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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C O N C L U S I O N:                           TOWARDS    1848

 

Pauperism and proletariat are the suppurating ulcers which have sprung from the organism of the modem states. Can they be healed? The communist doctors propose the complete destruction and annihilation of the existing organism. . . . One thing is certain, if these men gain the power to act, there will be not a political but a social revolution, a war against all property, a complete anarchy. Would this in turn give way to new national states, and on what moral and socialfoundations? Who shall lift the veil of thefuture? And what part will be played by Russia? ‘I sit on the shore and wait for the wind,’ says an old Russian proverb.

 

Haxthausen, Studien ueber . . . Russland (1847)¹

 

 

 

I

 

W E began by surveying the state of the world in 1789. Let us conclude by glancing at it some fifty years later, at the end of the most revolutionary half-century in the history recorded up to that date.

 

It was an age of superlatives. The. numerous new compendia of statistics in which this era of counting and calculation sought to record all aspects of the known world* could conclude with justice that virtually every measurable quantity was greater (or smaller) than ever before. The known, mapped and intercommunicating area of the world was larger than ever before, its communications unbelievably speedier. The population of the world was greater than ever before; in several cases greater beyond all expectation or previous probability. Cities of vast size multiplied faster than ever before. Industrial pro-duction reached astronomic figures: in the 1840s something like 640 million tons of coal were hacked from the interior of the earth. They were exceeded only by the even more extraordinary figures for inter-national commerce, which had multiplied fourfold since 1780 to reach something like 800 millions of pound sterling’s worth, and very much more in the currency of less solid and stable units of currency.

 

Science had never been more triumphant; knowledge had never

 

* About fifty major compendia of this type were published between i8op and 1848, not counting the statistics of governments (censuses, official enquiries, etc.) or the numerous new specialist or economic journals filled with statistical tables.

 

 

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been more widespread. Over four thousand newspapers informed the citizens of the world and the number of books published annually in Britain, France, Germany and the USA alone ran well into five figures. Human invention was climbing more dazzling peaks every year. The Argand lamp (1782-4) had barely revolutionized artificial lighting—it was the first major advance since the oil-lamp and candle—when the gigantic laboratories known as gasworks, sending their products through endless subterranean pipes, began to illuminate the factories* and soon after the cities of Europe: London from 1807, Dublin from 1818, Paris from 1819, even remote Sydney in 1841. And already the electric arc-light was known. Professor Wheatstone of London was already planning to link England with France by means of a submarine electric telegraph. Forty-eight millions of passengers already used the railways of the United Kingdom in a single year (1845). Men and women could already be hurtled along three thousand (1846)—before 1850 along over six thousand—miles of line in Great Britain, along nine thousand in the USA. Regular steamship services already linked Europe and America, Europe and the Indies.

 

No doubt these triumphs had their dark side, though these were not so readily to be summarized in statistical tables. How was one to find quantitative expression for the fact, which few would today deny, that the Industrial Revolution created the ugliest world in which man has ever lived, as the grim and stinking, fog-bound back streets of Man-chester already testified? Or, by uprooting men and women in unprece-dented numbers and depriving them of the certainties of the ages, probably the unhappiest world? Nevertheless, we can forgive the champions of progress in the 1840s their confidence and their deter-mination ‘that commerce may go freely forth, leading civilization with one hand, and peace with the other, to render mankind happier, wiser, better’. ‘Sir,’ said Lord Palmerston, continuing this rosy statement in the blackest of years, 1842, ‘this is the dispensation of Providence.’² Nobody could deny that there was poverty of the most shocking kind. Many held that it was even increasing and deepening. And yet, by the all-time criteria which measured the triumphs of industry and science, could even the gloomiest of rational observers maintain that in material terms it was worse than at any time in the past, or even than in un-industrialized countries in the present? He could not. It was sufficiently bitter accusation that the material prosperity of the labouring poor was often no better than in the dark past, and sometimes worse than in periods within living memory. The champions of progress attempted

 

* Boulton and Watt introduced it in 1798, the cotton-mills of Philips and Lee in Man-chester permanently employed a thousand burners from 1805.

 

 

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CONCLUSION:  TOWARDS        1848

 

to fend it off with the argument that this was due not to the operations of the new bourgeois society, but on the contrary to the obstacles which the old feudalism, monarchy and aristocracy still placed in the way of perfect free enterprise. The new socialists, on the contrary, held that it was due to the very operations of that system. But both agreed that these were growing-pains. The ones held that they would be overcome within the framework of capitalism, the others that they were not likely to be, but both rightly believed that human life faced a prospect of material improvement to equal the advance in man’s control over the forces of nature.

 

When we come to analyse the social and political structure of the world in the 1840s, however, we leave the world of superlatives for that of modest qualified statements. The bulk of the world’s inhabitants continued to be peasants as before, though there were a few areas— notably Britain—where agriculture was already the occupation of a small minority, and the urban population already on the verge of exceeding the rural, as it did for the first time in the census of 1851. There were proportionately fewer slaves, for the international slave-trade had been officially abolished in 1815 and actual slavery in the British colonies in 1834, and in the liberated Spanish and French ones in and after the French Revolution. However, while the West Indies were now, with some non-British exceptions, an area of legally free agriculture, numerically slavery continued to expand in its two great remaining strongholds, Brazil and the Southern USA, stimulated by the very progress of industry and commerce which opposed all restraints of goods and persons, and official prohibition made the slave trade more lucrative. The approximate price of a field-hand in the American South was 300 dollars in 1795 but between 1,200 and 1,800 dollars in i860;³ the number of slaves in the USA rose from 700,000 in 1790 to 2,500,000 in 1840 and 3,200,000 in 1850. They still came from Africa, but were also increasingly bred for sale within the slave-owning area, e.g. in the border states of the USA for sale to the rapidly expanding cotton-belt.

 

Moreover, already systems of semi-slavery like the export of ‘inden-tured labour’ from India to the sugar-islands of the Indian Ocean and the West Indies were developing.

Serfdom or the legal bonding of peasants had been abolished over a large part of Europe, though this had made little difference to the actual situation of the rural poor in such areas of traditional latifundist cultivation as Sicily or Andalusia. However, serfdom persisted in its chief European strongholds, though after great initial expansion its numbers remained steady in Russia at between ten and eleven million

 

 

299

 

T HE  AGE  OF  REVOLUTION

 

males after 1811, that is to say it declined in relative terms.* Neverthe-less, serf agriculture (unlike slave agriculture) was clearly on the decline, its economic disadvantages being increasingly evident, and—especially from the 1840s—the rebelliousness of the peasantry being increasingly marked. The greatest serf rising was probably that in Austrian Galicia in 1846, the prelude to general emancipation by the 1848 revolution. But even in Russia there were 148 outbreaks of peasant unrest in 1826-34, 216 in 1835-44, 348 in 1844-54, culminating in the 474 outbreaks of the last years preceding the emancipation of 1861.⁵

 

At the other end of the social pyramid, the position of the landed aristocrat also changed less than might have been thought, except in countries of direct peasant revolution like France. No doubt there were now countries—France and the USA for instance—where the richest men were no longer landed proprietors (except insofar as they also bought themselves estates as a badge of their entry into the highest class, like the Rothschilds). However, even in Britain in the 1840s the greatest concentrations of wealth were certainly still those of the peerage, and in the Southern USA the cotton-planters even created for themselves a provincial caricature of aristocratic society, inspired by Walter Scott, ‘chivalry’, ‘romance’ and other concepts which had little bearing in the negro slaves on whom they battened and the red-necked puritan farmers eating their maize and fat pork. Of course this aristocratic firmness concealed a change: noble incomes increasingly depended on the industry, the stocks and shares, the real estate developments of the despised bourgeoisie.

 

The ‘middle classes’, of course, had increased rapidly, but their numbers even so were not overwhelmingly large. In 1801 there had been about 100,000 tax-payers earning above £150 a year in Britain; at the end of our period there may have been about 340,000;* say, with large families, a million and a half persons out of a total population of 2i millions (1851)4 Naturally the number of those who sought to follow middle class standards and ways of life was very much larger. Not all these were very rich; a good guess J is that the number of those earning over £5,000 a year was about 4,000—which includes the aris-tocracy; a figure not too incompatible with that of the presumable employers of the 7,579 domestic coachmen who adorned the British streets. We may assume that the proportion of the ‘middle classes’ in

 

* The extension of serfdom under Catherine II and Paul (1762-1801) increased it from about 3’8 million males to 10-4 millions in 1811.’

 

t Such estimates are arbitrary, but assuming that everyone classifiable in the middle class kept at least one servant, the 674,000 female ‘general domestic servants’ in 1851 gives us something beyond the maximum of ‘middle class’ households, the roughly 50,000 cooks (the numbers of housemaids and housekeepers were about the same) a minimum.

t By the eminent statistician WilKam Farr in the Statistical Journal, 1857, p. 102.

 

 

300

 

CONCLUSION:  TOWARDS        1848

 

other countries was not notably higher than this, and indeed was generally rather lower.

 

The working class (including the new proletariat of factory, mine, railway, etc.) naturally grew at the fastest rate of all. Nevertheless, except in Britain it could at best be counted in hundreds of thousands rather than millions. Measured against the total population of the world, it was still a numerically negligible, and in any case—except once again for Britain and small nuclei elsewhere—an unorganized one. Yet, as we have seen, its political importance was already immense, and quite disproportionate to its size or achievements.

The political structure of the world was also very considerably transformed by the 1840s; and yet by no means as much as the san-guine (or pessimistic) observer might have anticipated in 1800. Mon-archy still remained overwhelmingly the most common mode of governing states, except on the American continent; and even there one of the largest countries (Brazil) was an Empire, and another (Mexico) had at least experimented with imperial titles under General Iturbide (Augustin I) from 1822 to 1833. It is true that several Euro-pean kingdoms, including France, could now be described as con-stitutional monarchies, but outside a band of such regimes along the eastern edge of the Atlantic, absolute monarchy prevailed everywhere. It is true that there were by the 1840s several new states, the product of revolution; Belgium, Serbia, Greece and a quiverful of Latin American ones. Yet, though Belgium was an industrial power of importance (admittedly to a large extent because it moved in the wake of its greater French neighbour*), the most important of the revo-lutionary states was the one which had already existed in 1789, the USA. It enjoyed two immense advantages: the absence of any strong neighbours or rival powers which could, or indeed wanted to, prevent its expansion across the huge continent to the Pacific—the French had actually sold it an area as large as the then USA in the ‘Louisiana Purchase’ of 1803—and an extraordinarily rapid rate of economic expansion. The former advantage was also shared by Brazil, which, separating peacefully from Portugal, escaped the fragmentation which a generation of revolutionary war brought to most of Spanish America; but its wealth of resources remained virtually unexploited.

 

Still, there had been great changes. Moreover, since about 1830 their momentum was visibly increasing. The revolution of 1830 introduced moderate liberal middle class constitutions—anti-democratic but equally plainly anti-aristocratic—in the chief states of Western Europe. There

 

* About a third of the Belgian coal and pig iron output was exported, almost entirely to France.

 

 

301

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

were no doubt compromises, imposed by the fear of a mass revolution which would go beyond moderate middle class aspirations. They left the landed classes over-represented in government, as in Britain, and large sectors of the new—and especially the most dynamic industrial —middle classes unrepresented, as in France. Yet they were compro-mises which decisely tilted the political balance towards the middle classes. On all matters that counted the British industrialists got their way after 1832; the capacity to abolish the corn-laws was well worth the absention from the more extreme republican and anti-clerical proposals of the Utilitarians. There can be no doubt that in Western Europe middle class Liberalism (though not democratic radicalism) was in the ascendant. Its chief opponents—Conservatives in Britain, blocs generally rallying round the Catholic Church elsewhere—were on the defensive and knew it.

 

However, even radical democracy had made major advances. After fifty years of hesitation and hostility, the pressure of the frontiersmen and farmers had finally imposed it on the USA under President Andrew Jackson (1829-37), ^{a t} roughly the same time as the European revo-lution regained its momentum. At the very end of our period (1847) a civil war between radicals and Catholics in Switzerland brought it to that country. But few among moderate middle class liberals as yet thought that this system of government, advocated mainly by left-wing revolutionaries, adapted, it seemed, at best for the rude petty producers and traders of mountain or prairie, would one day become the charac-

teristic political framework of capitalism, defended	as such against the
onslaughts of the very people who were in  the	1840s  advocating
it.

Only in international politics had there been an apparently whole-sale and virtually unqualified revolution. The world of the 1840s was completely dominated by the European powers, political and economic, supplemented by the growing USA. The Opium War of 1839-42 had demonstrated that the only surviving non-European great power, the Chinese Empire, was helpless in the face of western military and economic aggression. Nothing, it seemed,, could henceforth stand in the way of a few western gunboats or regiments bringing with them trade and bibles. And within this general western domination, Britain was supreme, thanks to her possession of more gunboats, trade and bibles than anyone else. So absolute was this British supremacy that it hardly needed political control to operate. There were no other colonial powers left, except by grace of the British, and consequently no rivals. The French empire was reduced to a few scattered islands and trading posts, though in the process of reviving itself across the Mediterranean

 

 

302

 

CONCLUSION:  TOWARDS        1848

 

in Algeria. The Dutch, restored in Indonesia under the watchful eye of the new British entrepot of Singapore, no longer competed; the Spaniards retained Cuba, the Philippines and a few vague claims in Africa; the Portuguese colonies were rightly forgotten. British trade dominated the independent Argentine, Brazil and the Southern USA as much as the Spanish colony of Cuba or the British ones in India. British investments had their powerful stake in the Northern USA, and indeed wherever economic development took place. Never in the entire history of the world has a single power exercised a world hege-mony like that of the British in the middle of the nineteenth century, for even the greatest empires or hegemonies of the past had been merely regional—the Chinese, the Mohammedan, the Roman. Never since then has any single power succeeded in re-establishing a comparable hegemony, nor indeed is any one likely to in the foreseeable future; for no power has since been able to claim the exclusive status of ‘workshop of the world’.

 

Nevertheless, the future decline of Britain was already visible. Intelligent observers even in the 1830s and 1840s, like de Tocqueville and Haxthausen, already predicted that the size and potential resources of the USA and Russia would eventually make them into the twin giants of the world; within Europe Germany (as Frederick Engels predicted in 1844) would also soon compete on equal terms. Only France had decisively dropped out of the competition for international hegemony, though this was not yet so evident as to reassure suspicious British and other statesmen.

 

In brief, the world of the 1840s was out of balance. The forces of economic, technical and social change released in the past half-century were unprecedented, and even to the most superficial observer, irresistible. Their institutional consequences, on the other hand, were as yet modest. It was, for instance, inevitable that sooner or later legal slavery and serfdom (except as relics in remote regions as yet untouched by the new economy) would have to go, as it was inevitable that Britain could not for ever remain the only industrialized country. It was inevitable that landed aristocracies and absolute monarchies must retreat in all countries in which a strong bourgeoisie was developing, whatever the political compromises or formulae found for retaining status, influence and even political power. Moreover, it was inevitable that the injection of political consciousness and permanent political activitity among the masses, which was the great legacy of the French Revolution, must sooner or later mean that these masses were allowed to play a formal part in politics. And given the remarkable acceleration of social change since 1830, and the revival of the world revolutionary

 

 

303

 

THE  AGE  OF  REVOLUTION

 

movement, it was clearly inevitable that changes—whatever their precise institutional nature—could not be long delayed.*

 

All this would have been enough to give the men of the 1840s the consciousness of impending change. But not enough to explain, what was widely felt throughout Europe, the consciousness of impending social revolution. It was, significantly enough, not confined to revo-lutionaries, who expressed it with the greatest elaboration, nor to the ruling classes, whose fear of the massed poor is never far below the surface in times of social change. The poor themselves felt it. The literate strata of the people expressed it. ‘All well-informed people,’ wrote the American consul from Amsterdam during the hunger of 1847, reporting the sentiments of the German emigrants passing through Holland, ‘express the belief that the present crisis is so deeply interwoven in the events of the present period that “it” is but the commencement of that great Revolution, which they consider sooner or later is to dissolve the present present constitution of things.’⁷

 

The reason was that the crisis in what remained of the old society appeared to coincide with a crisis of the new. Looking back on the 1840s it is easy to think that the socialists who predicted the imminent final crisis of capitalism were dreamers confusing their hopes with realistic prospects. For in fact what followed was not the breakdown of capitalism, but its most rapid and unchallenged period of expansion and triumph. Yet in the 1830s and 1840s it was far from evident that the new economy could or would overcome its difficulties which merely seemed to increase with its power to produce larger and larger quan-tities of goods by more and more revolutionary methods. Its very theorists were haunted by the prospect of the ‘stationary state’, that running down of the motive power which drove the economy forward, and which (unlike the theorists of the eighteenth century or those of the subsequent period) they believed to be imminent rather than merely in theoretical reserve. Its very champions were in two minds about its future. In France men who were to be the captains of high finance and heavy industry (the Saint-Simonians) were in the 1830s still undecided as to whether socialism or capitalism was, the best way of achieving the triumph of the industrial society. In the USA men like Horace Greeley, who have become immortal as the prophets of individualist expansion (‘Go west, young man’ is his phrase), were in the 1840s adherents of Utopian socialism, founding and expounding the merits of Fourierist ‘Phalanxes’, those kibbuz-l&e communes which fit so badly into what

 

* This does not of course mean that all the precise changes then widely predicted as inevitable would necessarily come about; for instance, the universal triumph of free trade, of peace, of sovereign representative assemblies, or the disappearance of monarchs or the Roman Catholic Church.

 

 

304

 

CONCLUSION:  TOWARDS         1848

 

is now thought to be ‘Americanism’. The very businessmen were desperate. It may in retrospect seem incomprehensible that Quaker businessmen like John Bright and successful cotton-manufacturers of Lancashire, in the midst of their most dynamic period of expansion, should have been prepared to plunge their country into chaos, hunger and riot by a general political lock-out, merely in order to abolish tariffs.⁸ Yet in the terrible year of 1841-2 it might well seem to the thoughtful capitalist that industry faced not merely inconvenience and loss, but general strangulation, unless the obstacles to its further expansion were immediately removed.

 

For the mass of the common people the problem was even simpler. As we have seen their condition in the large cities and manufacturing districts ofWestern and Central Europe pushed them inevitably towards social revolution. Their hatred of the rich and the great of that bitter world in which they lived, and their dream of a new and better world, gave their desperation eyes and a purpose, even though only some of them, mainly in Britain and France, were conscious of that purpose. Their organization or facility for collective action gave them power. The great awakening of the French Revolution had taught them that common men need not suffer injustices meekly: ‘the nations knew nothing before, and the people thought that kings were gods upon the earth and that they were bound to say that whatever they did was well done. Through this present change it is more difficult to rule the people.’⁹

 

This was the ‘spectre of communism’ which haunted Europe, the fear of ‘the proletariat’ which affected not merely factory-owners in Lancashire or Northern France but civil servants in rural Germany, priests in Rome and professors everywhere. And with justice. For the revolution which broke out in the first months of 1848 was not a social revolution merely in the sense that it involved and mobilized all social classes. It was in the literal sense the rising of the labouring poor in the cities—especially the capital cities—of Western and Central Europe. Theirs, and theirs almost alone, was the force which toppled the old regimes from Palermo to the borders of Russia. When the dust settled on their ruins, workers—in France actually socialist workers—were seen to be standing on them, demanding not merely bread and employment, but a new state and society.

 

While the labouring poor stirred, the increasing weakness and obsolescence of the old regimes of Europe multiplied crises within the world of the rich and influential. In themselves these were not of great moment. Had they occurred at a different time, or in systems which allowed the different sections of the ruling classes to adjust their

 

 

305

 

THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

rivalries peaceably, they would no more have led to revolution than the perennial squabbles of court factions in eighteenth-century Russia led to the fall of Tsarism. In Britain and Belgium, for instance, there was plenty of conflict between agrarians and industrialists, and different sections of each. But it was clearly understood that the transformations of 1830-32 had decided the issue of power in favour of the industrialists, that nevertheless the political status quo could only be frozen at the risk of revolution, and that this must be avoided at all costs. Conse-quently the bitter struggle between free-trading British industrialists and the agrarian protectionists over the Corn Laws could be waged and won (1846) in the midst of the Chartist ferment without for a moment jeopardizing the unity of all ruling classes against the threat of universal suffrage. In Belgium the victory of the Liberals over the Catholics in the 1847 elections detached the industrialists from the ranks of potential revolutionaries, and a carefully judged electoral reform in 1848, which doubled the electorate,* removed the discontents of crucial sections of the lower middle class. There was no 1848 revo-lution, though in terms of actual suffering Belgium (or rather Flanders) was probably worse off than any other part of Western Europe except Ireland.

 

But in absolutist Europe the rigidity of the political regimes in 1815, which had been designed to fend off all change of a liberal or national kind, left even the most moderate of oppositionists no choice other than that of the status quo or revolution. They might not be ready to revolt themselves, but, unless there should be an irreversible social revolution, they would gain nothing unless someone did. The regimes of 1815 had to go sooner or later. They knew it themselves. The consciousness that ‘history was against them’ sapped their will to resist, as the fact that it was sapped their ability to do so. In 1848 the first faint puff of revolution —often of revolution abroad—blew them away. But unless there was at least such a puff, they would not go. And conversely the relatively minor frictions within such states—the troubles of rulers with the Prussian and Hungarian diets, the election of a ‘liberal’ Pope in 1846 (i.e. one anxious to bring the Papacy a few inches nearer to the nine-teenth century), the resentment of a royal mistress in Bavaria, etc.— turned into major political vibrations.

 

In theory the France of Louis Philippe should have shared the political flexibility of Britain, Belgium and the Dutch and Scandi-navians. In practice it did not. For though it was clear that the ruling class of France—the bankers, financiers and one or two large indus-rialists—represented only a section of the middle class interest, and

 

* It was still no more than 80,000 out of 4,000,000.

 

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CONCLUSION:  TOWARDS        1848

 

moreover, one whose economic policy was disliked by the more dynamic industrialist elements as well as by various vested interests, the memory of the Revolution of 1789 stood in the way of reform. For the opposition consisted not merely of the discontented bourgeoisie, but of the politi-cally decisive lower middle class, especially of Paris (which voted against the government in spite of the restricted suffrage in 1846). To widen the franchise might thus let in the potential Jacobins, the Radicals who, but for the official ban, would be Republicans. Louis Philippe’s premier, the historian Guizot (1840-48), thus preferred to leave the broadening of the social base of the regime to economic development, which would automatically increase the number of citizens with the property qualification to enter politics. In fact it did so. The electorate rose from 166,000 in 1831 to 241,000 in 1846. But it did not do so sufficiently. Fear of the Jacobin republic kept the French political structure rigid, and the French political situation increasingly tense. Under British conditions a public political campaign by means

of after-dinner speeches, such as	the French opposition launched in
1847, would have been perfectly	harmless. Under French conditions
it was the prelude to revolution.

 

For, like the other crises in European ruling-class politics, it coincided with a social catastrophe: the great depression which swept across the continent from the middle 1840s. Harvests—and especially the potato crop—failed. Entire populations such as those of Ireland, and to a lesser extent Silesia and Flanders, starved.* Food-prices rose. Industrial depression multiplied unemployment, and the masses of the urban labouring poor were deprived of their modest income at the very moment when their cost of living rocketed. The situation varied from one country to another and within each, and—fortunately for the existing regimes—the most miserable populations, such as the Irish and Flemish, or some of the provincial factory workers were also politically among the most immature: the cotton operatives of the Nord depart-ment of France, for instance, took out their desperation on the equally desperate Belgian immigrants who flooded into Northern France, rather than on the government or even the employers. Moreover, in the most industrialized country, the sharpest edge of discontent had already been taken away by the great industrial and railway-building boom of the middle 1840s. 1846-8 were bad years, but not so bad as 1841-2, and what was more, they were merely a sharp dip in what was now visibly an ascending slope of economic prosperity. But, taking Western and Central Europe as a whole, the catastrophe of 1846-8 was

 

* In the flax-growing districts of Flanders the population dropped by 5 per cent between 1846 and 1848.

 

 

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THE AGE OF  REVOLUTION

 

universal and the mood of the masses, always pretty close to subsistence level, tense and impassioned.

 

A European economic cataclysm thus coincided with the visible corrosion of the old regimes. A peasant rising in Galicia in 1846; the election of a ‘liberal’ Pope in the same year; a civil war between radicals and Catholics in Switzerland in late 1847, won by the radicals; one of the perennial Sicilian autonomist insurrections in Palermo in early 1848: they were not merely straws in the wind, they were the first squalls of the gale. Everyone knew it. Rarely has revolution been more uni-versally predicted, though not necessarily for the right countries or the right dates. An entire continent waited, ready by now to pass the news of revolution almost instantly from city to city by means of the electric telegraph. In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard the dull sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under every kingdom in Europe its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris’. In 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

308

 

 

 

 

 

CHUtLtSWCW

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EUROPE in 184O

 

German Confederation

 

 

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			Sea

 

CAJJTON₁/              (J

 

	c, •	CHINA – JAPAN
		and the
y	H	PHILIPPINES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NORTH& SOUTH

 

AMERICA & MEXICO

 

 

 

WORLD POPULATION in LARGE CITIES 1800-1850

• Bombay

 

 

‘Madras ₀ n O ^c ‘

 

” ” ” ” ” V y ⁴ A    INDIA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

	1900
Edinburgh—	CftiMovir		100.000	!
ISTANBUL—	••	••	500.000	j
LONDON  —	••	•• 1.000.000		|
	1650			I
Manchester— Cltiisovw  100.000				, ij
NEW YORK-	••	••	500 000	I
PARIS	“	••	1.000.000	J
(Populatlonof Parl> Ih 1800- 500.000)				f

WESTERJM CULTURE  1815 — 1848: OPERA

Places and languages of pertormanc. of t h r | g   ^    ^           _{o p e r Q S !           Rosstnl}_._{Almnia                        0 s / o rinulile           prt}„_{uziontV6aiza          Ladra}–_:   A_uber.-U,Mu»M<hPorliei-

 

ST.PETERSBURG— Ptrformanee* In vernacular

THE STATES OF EUROPE IN 1836

	TOTAL	NUMBER OF	LAND  UNDER	GRAIN	BEEF	IRON	COAL
NAME	POPULATION	CITIES	TILLAGE IN	PRODUCTION	CATTLE	(MILLION
	(THOUSANDS)		MORGEN				CWT)
		( O V E R  5 0 , 0 0 0 )		LN SCHEFFEL	(MILLIONS)
			(MILLION)	(MILLION)

 

 

Russia, including
Poland  and  Cracow	49.538	6
Austria, including
Hungary  and
Lombardy	35.000	8
France	33,000	9
Great Britain, including
Ireland	24.273	17
German  confederation
(excluding Austria,
Prussia)	14.205	4
Spain	14,032	8
Portugal	3.530	i
Prussia	13.093	5
Turkey,  including
Rumania	8,600	5
Kingdom of Naples	7,622	2
Piedmont-Sardinia	4.450	2
Rest of Italy	5,000	4
Sweden and Norway	4,000	i
Belgium.	3.827	4
Netherlands	2.750	3
Switzerland	2 , 0 0 0	0
Denmark	2 , 0 0 0	i
Greece	I1OOO	0

276

 

 

93

 

74

 

67-5

 

 

37-5

 

30

 

30

 

43

 

 

2 0

 

2 0

 

2 0

 

2

 

7

 

7

 

2

 

16

1125

 

 

225

 

254

 

330

 

 

” 5

 

 

145

 

 

I l 6

 

I l 6

 

I l 6

 

2 1

 

5

 

5

₁₉              2 . 1

 

 

IO.4             1 . 2

 

7                 4

 

• ₁₃

 

 

6	I . I
3	0 . 2
3	0 . 2
4-5	2

 

 

• O

 

• 0

 

• O

 

• i-7

2                  0.4

 

2                  0.4

 

• 0 . 1

 

• 0

 

 

 

 

2-3

 

2 0 . 0

 

2OO

 

 

2 . 2

 

O

 

O

 

4.6

 

 

O.I

 

O.I

 

O.I

 

0.6

 

55-4

 

55-4

 

0

 

0

THE WORKSHOP of the WORLD

 

British cotton exports to various parts of the world 1820 and 18A0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

..	r.	»	Spanish	_	. . .	East
U	S	A	America	E u r o P e	A , r , c a	Indies   C h m a	Various

INDUSTRIALISATION

of EUROPE 185O

 

I 20V. of population in cities

I of 100,000 or more.

 

V/////\        6-10V.ofpopulationin

• cities of 100,000 or more.

 

5″/. orless of population in cities of 100,000or more.

 

I	660.000 I	PIg iron production
I	I	in tons.
1.000.000>		Ship tons in ports

 

 

UNITED • «{»

KINGDOM  J

13,500,000 I             l>\

 

* ‘

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHARLESCHEEM

i^ ^

CHARLES GREEN-

 

Arco under Code Civil aft«r 1815

 

French legal  influence

 

National adaptations of CodcCivil

 

French teaal inf tucnce.

 

NOTES

 

 

 

 

 

				CHAPTER  i :  THE WORLD IN THB  I 78OS
1	Saint-Just, Oeuvres computes, II, p. 514.						8	L. B. Namier, 1848, The Revolution of
2 A. Hovclacque,  La taille dans un								the	Intellectuals	(1944);  J.	Vicens
	canton		Iigure.	Revue	Mensuelle de			Vives, Historia Economica de EspaHa
	VEcole d’Anthropologic (Paris 1896).							(1959)-
3	L. Dal		Pane,	Storia del Lavoro		dagli	9	Sten	Carlsson,	Stindssamhdlle ock
	inizi del secolo XVlIl  al 1815 (1958),							stdndspersoncr 1700-1865 (1949).
	p.	135.	R.  S. Eckcrs,		The North-		1
	South  Differential  in  Italian  Eco-						10 Pierre Lebrun et al., La rivoluzione
								industrial in Belgio, Studi Storici, II,
	nomic		Development,		Journal	of		3-4, 1961, pp. 564-5.
	Economic History, XXI,				1961, p. 290.		1		Turgot  {Oeuvres V,  p.		244):
4 Quetelet, qu. by Manouvrier, Sur							11 Like
								‘Ceux qui connaissent la marche du
	la taille des Parisiens, Bulletin de la							commerce  savent  aussi  que  toute
	Sociitt Anthropologique				de Paris,	1888,		entreprise importante, de trafic ou
	P- 171-							d’industrie,  exige  Ie  concours  de
5 H.		See,  Esquisse d’une Histoire du						deux  esptees  d’hommes,  d’entre-
	Regime Agraire en Europe au XVHl et							preneurs . .  . et des ouvriers qui
	XlX	siicles (1921), p. 184, J. Blum,						travaillcnt  pour  Ie  compte  des
	Lord and Peasant in Russia (1961), pp.							premiers, moyennant un salaire con-
	455-60.							venu. Telle est la veritable origine
6 Th.  Haebich,  Deutsche  Latifundicn								de la distinction entre les entrepre-
	(1947). PP- 27 ff-							neurs et les maitres, et les ouvriers
7 A. Goodwin ed. TAe European Nobility								ou compagnons, laquelle est  fonde
	in the Eighteenth Century (1953), p. 52.							sur la nature des choses.’

 

 

 

CHAPTER 2 : THE INDUSTRIAL  REVOLUTION

 

i Arthur Young, Tours in England and Wales, London School of Economics edition, p. 269.

 

• de Toqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J. P. Mayer (1958), pp. 107-8.

• Anna Bezanson, The Early Uses ofthe Term Industrial Revolution, Quarterly Journal of Economics, XXXVI, 1921-2, p. 343, G. N. Clark, The Idea of the Industrial Revolution (Glasgow ‘953)-

 

321

N O T ES

 

4 cf. A. E. Musson & E. Robinson, Science and Industry in the late Eighteenth Century, Economic History Stvitw, XIII. 2, Dec i960, and R. E. Schofield’s work on the Midland Industrialists and the Lunar Society his 47 (March 1956), 48 (1957), Annals of Science II (June 1956) etc.

 

5 K.Berrill,InternationaITradeandthe Rate of Economic Growth, Economic History Review, XII, i960, p. 358.

 

6 W. G. Hoffmann, The Growth of Industrial Economies (Manchester 1958), p. 68.

 

7 A. P. Wadsworth & J. de L. Mann,

 

The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lanca-shire (1931), chapter VII.

 

8 F. Crouzet, Le Blocus Continental et rEconomie Britarmique (1958), p. 63, suggests that in 1805 it was up to two-thirds.

 

9 P. K. O’Brien, British Incomes and Property in the early Nineteenth Century, Economic History Review,

 

XII, a (1959)» P- »67.

 

10 Hoffmann, op. cit., p. 73.

 

11 Baines, History of the Cotton Manu-facture in Great Britain (London 1835).

 

P- « » •

 

12 P. Mathias, The Brewing Industry in

 

England (Cambridge 1959).

 

13 M.  Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics

 

(1892), p. 158.

 

14 Baines, op. cit., p. 112. –

 

15 cf. Phyllis Deane, Estimates of the British National Income, Economic History Review (April 1956 and April «957)-

 

• O’Brien, op. cit., p. 267.

 

• For the stationary state cf. J. Schum-peter, History of Economic Analysis

 

(1954), pp. 570-1. The crucial formulation is John Stuart Mill’s

 

{Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, chapter iv): ‘When a country has long possessed a large production,

and a large net income to make sav-ing from, and when, therefore, the means have long existed of making a great annual addition to capital; it is one of the characteristics of such a country, that the rate of profit is habitually within, as it were, a hand’s breadth of the minimum, and the country therefore on the very verge of the stationary state. . . The mere continuance of the present annual increase in capital if no circumstances occurred to counter its effect would suffice in a small num-ber of years to reduce the net rate of profit (to the minimum).’ However, when this was published (1848) the counteracting force—the wave of development induced by the rail-ways—had already shown itself.

 

18 By the radical John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes, the banker Lord Overstone, Reflections suggested by the perusal of Mr J.

 

Horsley Palmer’s pamphlet on the causes and consequences of the pressure on the Money Market (1837), the Anti-Corn Law campaigner J. Wilson, Fluctua-tions of Currency, Commerce and Manu-facture; referable to the Com Laws (1840); and in France by A. Blanqui (brother of the famous revolutionary)

 

in 1837 and M. Briaune in 1840. Doubtless also by others.

 

19 Baines, op. cit., p. 441. A. Ure & P. L. Simmonds, The Cotton Manufacture ofGreat Britain (1861 edition),p. 390 ff.

 

20 Geo. White, A  Treatise on Weaving

 

(Glasgow 1846), p. 272.

 

21 M. Blaug, The Productivity of Capital in the Lancashire Cotton Industry during the Nineteenth Cen-tury, Economic History Review (April 1961).

 

22 Thomas Ellison, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London 1886), p. 61.

 

382

N O T ES

 

23 Baines, op. cit., p. 356.					Payments  and  Export  of  Capital,
24	Baines, op. cit., p. 489.				1816-1913, Economic History Review V
25	Ure & Simmonds, op. cit., Vol. I,				(1952, 2, p. 24).
	P- 317 ff-			33 John Francis, A History of the English
26 J. H. Clapham, An Economic History					Railway	(1851) II,  136; see also	H.
	of	Modern Britain (1926), p. 427 ff.;			Tuck, The Railway Shareholder’s Man-
	Mulhall, op. cit. pp. 121,332, M. Rob-				ual (7th edition 1846), Preface,		and
	bins, The Railway Age (1962), p. 30-1.				T. Tooke, History ofPrices II, pp. 275,
27	Rondo		E. Cameron, France and the		333-4 for the pressure of accumulated
	Economic Development of Europe 1800-				Lancashire surpluses into railways.
	1914 (1961), p. 77.			34	Mulhall, op. cit., p. 14.
28	Mulhall, op. cit. 501, 497.			35 Annals of Agric. XXXVI,  p.  214.
29	L. H. Jenks, The Migration of British			36 Wilbert		Moore, Industrialisation and
	Capital		to  1875  (New  York  and		Labour (Cornell 1951).
	London		1927), p. 126.	37	Blaug, loc. cit., p. 368. Children under
30	D.  Spring,  The  English  Landed				13, however, declined sharply in the
	Estate in the Age of Coal and Iron,				1830’s.
	Journal of Economic History, (XI,  I,			38 H.  See,		Histoire Economique	de la
	I95i)-				France, Vol. II, p. 189 n.
31 J.		Clegg,  A  chronological  history of 39			Mulhall, op. cit.; Imlah, loc. cit., II,
	Bolton (1876).				52, pp. 228-9. The precise date of
32	Albert M. Imlah, British Balance of				this estimate is 1854.

 

CHAPTER 3: THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

 

 

1 See R. R. Palmer, The Age of Demo-

 

cratic Revolution (1959); J. Godechot,

 

La  Grande Nation  (1956),  Vol.  I,

 

Chapter 1.

 

2 B. Lewis, The Impact of the French

 

Revolution  on  Turkey,  Journal  of

 

World History, I (1953-4, P- ‘°5)-

 

3 H.   See,  Esquisse d’une Histoire du

 

Regime Agraire (1931), pp.  16-17.

 

4 A. Soboul, Les Campagnes Montpel-liiraines a la fin de I’Ancien Regime

 

(•958).

5 A.  Goodwin,  The French Revolution

 

(‘959 cd.), p. 70.

 

6 C. Bloch, L’cmigration francaise au

 

XIX siecle, Etudes d’Histoire Modeme

 

&  Contemp. I  (1947), p.   137;  D.

 

Greer, The Incidence of the Emigra-tion during the French Revolution (1951)

 

however, suggests a very much smaller figure.

 

7 D. Greer, TAe Incidence of the Terror

 

(Harvard 1935).

 

• Oeuvres Computes de Saint-Just, II, p. 147 (ed. C. Vellay, Paris 1908).

 

CHAPTER 4 : WAR
1 Cf. e.g. W. von Grootc, Die Entste-	Navy, 1793-1815 (i960), pp. 370, 373.
htmg d.  Nationalbewussteins in Nord-	3 Gordon	Craig,	The Politics of the
westdeutschland 1790-1830 (1952).	Prussian	Army	1640-1945  (1955),
2 M.  Lewis,  A  Social History of the	p. 26.

 

 

323

 

N O T ES

 

 

P-344-

 

7 G. Bodart, Losses of Life in Modem Wars (1916), p. 133.

 

8 J. Vicens Vives ed. Historia Social de EspaSay America (1956), IV, ii, p. 15.

 

9 G. Bruun, Europe and the French Imperium (1938), p. 7a.

 

10 J. Leverrier, La ffaissance de Varmie nationale, 1789-94 (1939), p. 139;

G.Lefebvre,JVa/)o//on(i936),pp. 198, 537; M. Lewis, op. cit., p. 119; Par-

 

liamentary Papers XVII, 1859, p. 15. 11 Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics: War.

 

I a Cabinet Cyclopedia, I, pp. 55-6 (‘Manu-factures in Metal’).

 

13 E. Tarle, Le Hocus continental et Ie royaume d’Italic (1928), pp. 3-4, 25-31; H. See, Histoire Economique de la France, II, p. 52; Mulhall, loc. cit.

 

• Gayer, Rostow and Schwartz, Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy, 1790-1850 (1953), pp. 646-9; F. Crouzet, Le blocus continental et I’/conomie Britannique (1958), p. 868 ff.

 

CHAPTER 5 :  PEACE

 

I Castlereagh, Correspondence, Third

 

Series, XI, p. 105.

 

a Gentz, Deptches intdites, I, p. 371.

 

3 J. Richardson, My Dearest Uncle, Leopold of the Belgians (1961), p. 165.

• Cameron, op. cit. p. 85.

 

• Ponteil,  Lafayette et  la Pologne

 

(1934)-

 

CHAPTER

6: REVOLUTIONS

I Luding Boerne, Gesammelte Schriflen,

8 cf.  Parliamentary

Papers, XXXIV, of

III, pp. 130-1.

1834; answers to question 53 (causes

a

Memoirs of  Prince Mettemich,  III,

and consequences of the agricultural

p. 468.

riots and burning of 1830 and 183]),

3 Vienna, Verwaltungsarchiv: Polizei-

e.g.

Lambourn,

Speen

(Berks),

hofstelle H 136/1834, jfaurim.

Steeple Claydon

(Bucks), Bonington

4

Guizot,

Of  Democracy in Modern

(Glos), Evenley (Northants).

Societies (London 1838), p. 3a.

9

R.

Dautry,

1848  et

la

Deuxiime

5 The  most  lucid  discussion  of this

Ripubliquc (1848), p. 80.

general

revolutionary  strategy

is

10

St.

Kiniewicz,

La

Pologne

et

contained in Marx’ articles in the

l’ltalie a l’epoque du printeraps des

Neue Rheinische  £eitung during

the

peuples.  La  Pologne au

Xe Congris

1848 revolution.

International Historique, 1955, p.

245.

6

M. L. Hansen, The Atlantic Migration

11 D. Cantimori

in F. Fejto ed., The

(1945), p. 147.

Opening of an Era: 1848 (1948), p. 119.

7 F. C. Mather, The Government and

i a D.  Read,  Press and

People (1961),

the  Chartists,  in  A.  Briggs  ed.

p. 216.

Chartist Studies (1959).

13

Irene Collins,

Government

and News-

paper Press in France,

1814-81 (1959).

N O T ES

 

14 cf. E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (1959). PP- ‘ 7 ‘ – 2 ; V. Volguine, Les idees socialistes et communistes dans les societes secretes (Questions d’Histoire, II, 1954, pp. 10-37); A. B.

 

Spitzer, The Revolutionary Theories of Auguste Blanqui (1957), pp. 165-6.

15 G. D. H.  Cole and A. W.  Filson,

 

British   Working  Class Movements.

 

Select Documents (1951)» P- 4°2.

 

16 J. Zubrzycki, Emigration from Po-land, Population Studies, VI, (1952-3), p. 248.

 

17 Engels to Marx, March 9, 1847.

 

 

	C H A P T ER 7: NATIONALISM
1 Hoffmann	v.   Fallersleben,   Der	turlander (Jb. f. Nationalok. u. Statis-
Deutsche	Zollverein,  in Unpolitische	ts	LVI, 1895, pp. 376 ff.)
Lieder.	5	L.	Liard, L’Enseignement Superieur en

 

2	G. Weill, L’Enseignement Skondaire en			France 1789-1889	(1888), p. 11 ff.
	France 1801-1920 (1921)» P- 72–		6	Paulsen, op. cit., II, pp. 690-1.
3	E.	de  Laveleye,  L’Instruction Ju	7 Handworterbuch		d.  Staabwissenschqften
	Peuple (1872), p. 278.			(2nd ed.) art. Buchhandel.
4	F.	Paulsen,  Geschichte  des  Gelehrten 8		Laveleye, op. cit., p. 264.

 

Unterrichts (1897), II, p. 703; A. Daumard, Les eleves de l’Ecole Poly-technique 1815-48 (Rev. a”Hist. Mod. et Contemp. V. 1958); The total num-ber of German and Belgian students in an average Semester of the early 1840’s was about 14,000. J. Conrad, Die Frequenzverhaltnisse der Uni-versitaten der hauptsachlichen KuI-

9 W.  Wachsmuth,  Europaische  Sitten-

 

geschichte, V, 2 (1839), pp. 807-8. 10 J. Sigmann, lies radicaux badois et

 

l’idee nationale allemande en 1848.

 

Etudes d’Histoire Modeme et Contempo-

 

raine, II, 1948, pp. 213-4.

 

11 J. Miskolczy, Ungam und die Habs-burger-Monarchie (1959), p. 85.

 

CHAPTER  8: LAND

 

1 Haxthausen, Studien . . . ueber Russland (1847), II, p. 3.

 

2 J. Billingsley, Survey of the Board of Agriculture for Somerset (1798), p. 52.

Journals  of   Lewis,  Henry Morgan

 

(1959)» P- >5-

 

7 L. V. A. de Villeneuve Bargemont,

 

Economic  Politique Chritienne (1834),

3 The figures are based		on	the ‘New		Vol. II, p. 3 ff.
	Domesday Book’ of 1871-3, but there			8	C. Issawi, Egypt since 1800. Journal
	is no reason to believe that they do				ofEconomic History, XXI, 1,1961, p. 5.
4	not represent the situation in 1848.			9	B.J. Hovde, The Scandinavian Countries
	Handworterbuch  d.  Staatswissenschaften				1730-1860 (1943), Vol. I, p. 279. For
	(Second Ed.), art. Grundbesitz.				the increase in the average harvest
5	Th. von der Goltz, Gesch. d. Dcutschcn				from  6 million  tons  (1770)  to  10
	Landwirtschaft (1903),	II;	Sartorius		millions,  see  Hwb.  d. Staatswissen-
	v.  Waltershausen,  Deutsche  Wirt-				schaften, art. Bauernbefreiung.
	schaftsgeschichte 1815-1914 (1923),			p. 10 A. Chabert, Essai sur les		mouvements
	132.				des prix  et  des  revenus	iyg8-i8so
6	Quoted in L. A. White ed., The Indian				(1949)  II,  p.  87  ff;  1.	l’Huillier,

 

 

325

 

NOTES
Recherches  sur I’Alsace  NapoUonienne22		M. Emerit, L’etat intellectuel et moral
(»945)> P- 47°-		de l’Algerie en 1830, Revue d’Histoire
Ii eg. G. Desert in E. Labrousse ed.		ModemeetContemporaine,\, 1954^.207.
Aspects de la Crise . . . 1846-31 (1956), 23		R.  Dutt,	The Economic  History of
P- 5«-		India under early British Rule (n.d.
I a J. Godechot, La Grande Nation (1956),		Fourth Ed.), p. 88.
II, p. 584.	24 R. Dutt, India and the Victorian Age
13 A. Agthe, Ursprung u. Lage d. Landar-		(1904), pp. 56-7.
beiter in Livland (1909), pp. 122-8.	25	B.  S.  Cohn,  The  initial  British
14 For Russia, Lyashchenko, op. cit., p.		impact on	India  (Journal of Asian
360; for comparison between Prussia		Studies, 19,  1959-60,  pp.  418-31)
and Bohemia, W. Stark, Niedergang		shows that in the Benares district
und Ende d.  Landwirtsch. Gross-		(Uttar Pradesh) officials used their
betriebs in d. Boehm. Laendern (Jb.		position to acquire land wholesale.
f. Nat. Oek. 146, 1937, p. 434 ff).		Of 74 holders of large estates towards
15 F. Luetge, Auswirkung der Bauernbe-		the end of the century, 23 owed the
freiung, in Jb. f. Nat. Oek. 157, 1943,		original title to the land to their con-
P- 353 ff-		nections with civil servants (p. 430).

16 R. Zangheri, Prime Ricerche sulla dis- 26 Sulekh Chandra Gupta, Land Market

 

tribuzione deltaproprietyfondiaria (1957).				in	the	North	Western		Provinces
17 E. Sereni, // Capitalism) nelle Cam-				(Utter Pradesh) in the first halfof the
pagne (1948), pp. 175-6.				nineteenth century				(Indian Economic
18 cf. G. Mori, La storia dell’industria				Review, IV, 2, August 1958). See also
italiana contemporanea		(Annali deW-		the same author’s equally illuminat-
Instituto Giangiacomo		Feltrinelli, II,		ing and pioneering Agrarian Back-
1959> P- »78-9); and the same author’s				ground  of  1857  Rebellion  in  the
‘Osservazioni  sul  libero-scambismo				North-western			Provinces		(Enquiry,
dei moderati nel Risorgimento’ (Ri-				N. Delhi, Feb. 1959).
vistaStoricadelSocialismo,111,9, i960).			27	R.	P.  Dutt,  India  Today  (1940),
19 Dal Pane, Storia del Lavoro in Italia				pp.	129-30.
dagli inizi del secolo XVIII  al 1815			28 K. H. Connell, Land and Population
(»958), p. ” 9 .				in	Ireland, Economic History Review,
ao R. Zangheri ed. Le Campagne emiliane				II. 3. ’95°. PP- 285, 288.
neWepoca modema (1957), p. 73.			29	S.	H.	Cousens,		Regional  .Death
2i J. Vicens Vives,	ed. Historia Social			Rates in Ireland during the Great
y  Economka de	EspaHa y  America			Famine. Population Studies, XIV,  1,
(‘959). IVii, pp. 92, 95.				i960, p. 65.

 

CHAPTER 9 : TOWARDS THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD

 

i Quoted in W. Armytage, A Social History of Engineering. (1961), p. 126.

 

a Quoted in R. Picard, Le Romantisme Social, (1944), pt. 2, cap. 6.

 

3 J.  Morley,  Life of Richard  Cobden

 

(1903 ed ), p. 108.

4 R. Baron Castro, La poblacion hispano-americana, Journal of World History, V, 1959-60, pp. 339-40.

 

5 J. Blum, Transportation and In-dustry in Austria 1815-48, Journal cf Modern History XV (1943), p. 27.

 

386

 

NOTES

6

Mulhall, op. cit., Post Office.

15 R.

E. Cameron,  op. cit., p.  347;

7

Mulhall, ibid.

Mulhall, op. cit., p. 377.

8

P.

A.

Khromov, Ekonomicheskoe

16 H. Kisch, The Textile Industries in

Razvilie

Rossii

v  XlX-XX  Vekakh

Silesia and the Rhineland, Journal

(1950), Table 19, p. 482-3. But the

of Economic History, XIX, December

amount ofsales increased much faster,

«959-

cf. also J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in

17

O. Fischel and M. V. Boehn, Die

Russia, p. 287.

Mode,  1818-1843  (Munich

1924),

9

R. E. Cameron, op. cit., p. 347.

p. 136.

10 Quoted in S. Giedion,

Mechanisation

18

R. E. Cameron, op. cit., pp. 79, 85.

Takes Command (1948), p. 15a.

i g

The locus classicus of this discussion

11 R. E. Cameron, op. cit., p. 115 ff.

is G. Lefebvre, La revolution francaise

12 R.

E. Cameron, op. cit., p.  347;

et

les paysans

(1932),

reprinted  in

W.

Hoffmann,

The Growth of In-

Etudes sur la resolution francaise (1954).

dustrial Economies (1958), p. 71.

20 G.

Mori,  Osservazioni  sul  libero-

13 W.

Hoffmann,  op.  cit.,  p.  48;

scambismo dei moderati nel Risorgi-

Mulhall, op. cit., p. 377.

mento, Riv. Stork, del Socialismo, III,

14 J. Purs, The Industrial Revolution in

i960, p. 8.

the Czech Lands (Historica, II (i960),

21 C. Issawi, Egypt since

1800, Journal

pp. 199-200).

of

Economic History.

March

1961,

XXI, p. I.

C H A P T ER

IO: CAREER OFCN TO

TALENT

1 F. Engels, Condition of

the Working

12

Oppermann, Geschichte d. KSnigreichs

Class in England, Chapter XII.

Hannover, quoted in T. Klein, 1848,

2

M.

Capefigue,

Histoires des

Grandes

Der Vorkampf (1914), p. 71.

Operations Financiires,

IV

(i860), p. 13

G.

Schilfert,

Sieg u.

Niederlage d.

255-

demokratischen Wahlrechts in d. deutschen

3 M. Capefigue, loc. cit.,pp. 254,248-9.

Revolution 1848-9 (1952), pp. 404-5.

4

A.

Beauvilliers,

UArt

da Cuisinier,

14

Mulhall, op. cit. p. 259.

(Paris 1814).

15

W. R. Sharp,

The French Civil Service

5

H.

See,  Histoire

Economique

de la

16

(New York 1931), pp. 15-16.

France, II, p. 216.

The Census of

Great Britain in 1851

6

A. Briggs, Middle

Class

Conscious-

(London, Longman, Brown,

Green

ness

in

English

Politics

1780-1846,

and Longmans 1854), p. 57.

Past and Present, 9, April

1956, p. 68.

17

R. Portal, La naissance d’une bour-

7

Donald Read, Press and People 1790-

geoisie  industrielle en

Russie

dans

1850 (1961), p. 26.

la premiere moitie du XIX siecle.

8

S.

Smiles, Life of George Stephenson

Bulletin de la Sociitl d’Histoire Moderne,

(1881 ed.), p. 183.

Douzieme s&ie, II, 1959.

9

Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

18 Vienna,

Verwaltungsarchiv, Polizeihof-

10 Leon

Faucher,

Etudes

sur I’Angle-

stelle, H

136/1834.

terre, I (1842), p. 322.

19 A.

Girault et

L. Milliot, Principes

11

M.

J.

Lambert-Dansette, Ojielgues

de Colonisation et de Legislation Coloniale

families

du patronat textile de

Lille-

(1938), p. 359-

Armentiires (Lille 1954), p. 659.

 

 

327

 

N O T ES

20 Louis Chevalier, Classes Laborieuses et 21

D. Simon, Master and Servant in J.

Classes Dangereuses

(Paris

1958)  III,

Saville ed., Democracy and the Labour

pt. 2 discusses the use of the term

Movement (1954).

‘barbarians’, both by those hostile

22

P. Jaccard, Histoire Sociale du Travail

and by those friendly to the labouring

(i960), p. 248.

poor in the 1840s.

23

P. Jaccard, Op. cit., p. 249.

C H A P T ER

Il: THE LABOURING

POOR

i

The  weaver  Hauffe,  born  1807,

1881. IV

Congris International d’Hy-

quoted in Alexander Schneer, Ueber

giene (1883).

die Moth der Leinen-Arbeiter in Schle- 13 F. J. Neumann, Zur Lehre

von d

UsUn . . . (Berlin 1844), p. 16.

Lohngesetzen,

Jb.f.Nat.Oek.

3d ser.

a The

theologian

P.

D.

Michele

IV

1892, p. 374 ff.

Augusti,

Delia liberlA ed eguaglianza

14 R.

Scheer, Entwicklung d Annaberger

degli uomini rull’ordine naturale e civile

Posamentierindustrie im ig. Jahrhundert.

(>79o)i  quoted  in  A.  Cherubini,

(Leipzig 1909), pp. 27-8, 33.

Dottrine e  Metodi  Assistenziali dal

15 N.

McCord,

TAe

Anti-Corn Law

iy8g al 1848 (Milan 1958), p. 17.

League (1958), p. 127.

3

E.  J.  Hobsbawni,  The  Machine

16 ‘Par contre, il est sur que la situation

Breakers, Past and Present, I, 1952.

alimentaire, a Paris, s’est deterioree

4 ‘About  some  Lancashire  Lads’  in

peu a peu avec Ie XIX siecle, sans

The Leisure Hour (1881). I

owe this

doute jusqu’au voisinage des annees

reference to Mr A. Jenkin.

50 ou 60.’ R. Philippe in Annates 16,

5 ‘die

Schnapspest

im

ersten

Drittel

3,

1961, 567, For analogous calcula-

des

Jahrhunderts’,

Handwoerterbuch

tions for

London,

cf.

E. J.

Hobs-

d Staatswissenschaften (Seconded.) art.

bawm,  The  British  Standard  of

‘Trunksucht’.

Living, Economic History Review, X,

6

L.

Chevalier,  Classes Laborieuses et

i,

1957. The total per capita meat

Classes Dangereuses, passim.

consumption of France appears  to

7 J. B. Russell, Public Health Administra-

have remained

virtually unchanged

from 1812 to

1840

{Congris

Interna-

tion in Glasgow (1903), p. 3.

tionale d’Hygiene Paris

1878

(1880),

8

Chevalier op. cit. pp. 233-4.

vol. I, p. 432).

9

E. Neuss, Entstehung u. Entwicklung d.

Klasse d.

besitzlosen LihnarbeiUr in

17

S.

Pollard, A

History of Labour in

Halle (Berlin 1958), p. 283.

Sheffield (i960), pp. 62-3.

10 J. Kuczynski, Geschichte der Ldge der

18 H. Ashworth

in Journal Stat. Soc.

Arbeiter (Berlin  i960),  Vol.  9,  p.

V

(1842), p. 74; E. Labrousse, ed.

264 ff; Vol. 8 (i960), p. 109 ff.

Aspects de la Crise . . . 1846-51 (1956),

11 R. J. Rath, The Habsburgs and the

p.

107.

Great  Depression  in  Lombardo-

19 Statistical

Committee  appointed by the

Venetia

1814-18. Journal 0/ Modern

Anti-Corn Law Conference . . . March

History, XIII, p. 311.

184s (n.d.), p. 45.

12 M. C. Muehlemann, Les prix des

19a R.  K.  Webb

in

English Historical

vivres et Ie mouvement de la popula-

Review, LXV (1950), p. 333 ff.

tion dans Ie canton de Berne 1782-

 

 

328

 

N O T ES
20 Quoted in A. E. Musson, The Ideo-	23	A. Soboul, Les Sansculottes de Paris en
logy of Early Co-operation in Lan-		Pan II	(1958), p. 660.
cashire and Cheshire; Transactions of	24	S. Pollard, op. cit. pp. 48-9.
the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian25		Th.	Mundt,  Der  dritte	Stand  in
Society, LXVIII, 1958, p. 120.		Deutschland und Preussen		. . . (Berlin

 

21 A. Williams, Folksongs of the Upper

 

Thames (1923), p. 105 prints a similar version rather more class conscious.

 

22 A. Briggs, The Language of ‘class’ in early nineteenth century England, in A. Briggs and J. Saville ed.,

 

Essays in Labour History (i960); E. Labrousse, Le mowement ouvrier et Us Idles sociales, III (Cours de la

 

Sorbonne), pp. 168-9; E- Coornaert, La pensee ouvriere et la conscience de classe en France 1830-48, in

 

Studi in Onore di Gino Luzzato, III

 

(Milan 1950), p. 28; G. D. H. Cole,

 

Attempts at General Union (1953), p. 161.

1847), p. 4, quoted by J. Kuczynski, Gesch.d.Lage d. Arbeiter 9, p. 169.

 

26 Karl  Biedermann,   Vorlesungcn  ueber

 

Socialismus und sociale Fragen (Leipzig

 

1847), quoted Kuczynski, op. cit., P- 7¹–

 

• Tylecote, The Mechanics^, Institutes of Lancashire before 1851 (Manchester

 

• 957), VIII.

 

• Quoted in Revue Historique CCXXI (1959), p. 138.

 

• Gosden, The Friendly Societies in

 

England 1815-75 (1961), pp. 23, 31.

 

• E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social

 

Atom, I, pp. 163-5, (London 1903).

 

 

 

 

C H A P T ER 1 2 :  I D E O L O G Y : RELIGION

 

1 Civilta Cattolica II, 122, quoted in L. Dal Pane, il socialismo e Ie questione sociale nella prima annata della Civilta Cattolica {Studi Onore

 

di    Gino   Luzzato,   Milan,    1950,

 

P- ’44-

 

2 Haxthausen, Studien ueber . . . Russ-

 

land (1847), I, p. 388.

 

• Antonio Machado’s portrait of the Andalusian gentleman in Poesias Completas (Austral ed.), pp. 152-4: ‘Gran pagano,

 

Se hizo hermano

 

De una santa cofradia’ etc.

 

• Duveau,  Les Instituteurs (1957),

 

4. 3-4.

 

4a J. S. Trimingham, Islam in West Africa (Oxford 1959), p. 30.

 

5 A. Ramos, Las Culturas negras en el

 

mundo nuevo (Mexico 1943), p. 277 ff.

• F. Wertheim, Indonesian Society in

 

Transition (1956), p. 204.

 

• Census of Great Britain 1651: Religious Worship in England and Wales (London

 

1854).

 

• Mulhall, Dictionary  of  Statistics:

 

‘Religion’.

 

• Mary Merryweather, Experience of Factory Life (Third ed. London 1862), 18. The reference is to the 1840s.

 

• Rees, History of Protestant Non-

 

conformity in Wales (1861).

 

11 Marx-Engels,  Werke (Berlin   1956),

 

I, p. 378.

 

12 Briefwechsel  zwischen Fr.  Gentz und

 

Adam Muller, Gentz to MiiUer, 7 October, 1819.

 

13 Gentz to MiiUer, 19 April, 1819.

 

 

329

 

NOTES

 

CHAPTER  13 : IDE OLOGY:SECULAR

 

i	Archives Parlementaires			1787-1860  t.		6 Quoted in J. L. Talmon, Political
	VIII, p. 429. This was the first draft					Messianism (i960), p. 323.
	of paragraph 4 of the Declaration of					7 Rapport sur Ie mode d’execution du
	Man and Citizen.					decret du 8 ventdse, an II		(Oeuvres
2	Declaration of the Rights of Man and					Computes, II, 1908, p. 248).
	Citizen 1798, paragraph 4.					8 The Book of the New Moral World, pt.
3 E. Roll, A History of Economic Thought						IV, p. 54.
	(1948 ed.), p. ^S-					9 R. Owen, A New View of Society: or
4	Oeuvres de		Condorcet (1804  ed.)			Essays on the PrincipU of the Formation
	XVIII	p. 41a; (Ce que les			citoyens	of the Human Character.
	ont U droit d’attendre de leur				represen- 10 Quoted in Talmon, op. cit., p. 127.
	tants.)	R. R.  Palmer,		The Age of		11 K. Marx,	Preface to the Critique of
	Democratic Revolution, I, (1959), pp. 13-					Political Economy.
	20,	argues—unconvincingly—that				12 Letter to the Chevalier de Rivarol, June 1,
	liberalism was more clearly ‘demo-					‘791-
	cratic’ than is here suggested.					13 For  his	‘declaration  of	political
5 cf.  C.		B.	Macpherson,  Edmund			faith’ see Eckermann, Gespraeche mit
	Burke (Transactions of the Royal Society					Goethe, 4.1.1824.
	of Canada, LIII, Sect. II, 1959, pp.					14 G. Lukacs, Derjunge Hegel, p. 409 for
	19-26).					Kant, passim—esp. II, 5 for Hegel.
						15 Lukacs, op. cit., pp. 411-12.

 

 

CHAPTER I     _{: THE ARTS}

 

• Laing, Notes of a Traveller on the Social and Political State of France,

 

Prussia, Switzerland, Italy and other parts of Europe, 184a (1854 ed.),

 

P- 275-

 

• Oeuvres Computes, XIV, p. 17.

 

• E. Hugo, The Portable Romantic Reader (1957), p. 58.

 

• Fragmente Vermischten Inhalts. (Novalis, SchrifUn (Jena 1923), III, pp. 45-6.
• From The Philosophy of  Fine Art

 

(London 1920), V.I., p. 106 f.

 

• C. Batho, The Later Wordsworth

 

(‘933)> P- 227, see also pp. 46-7, 197-9-

 

• Mario Praz,  The Romantic Agony

 

(Oxford 1933).

8 L. Chevalier, Classes Laborieuses et Classes Dangereuses a Paris dans la premUre moitii du XIX siecU. (Paris

 

«958.)

 

• Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik, I, p. 70.

 

• Jourda, L’exotisme dans la litterature fiancaise depuis Chateaubriand (1939),

 

P- 79-

 

11 V. Hugo, Oeuvres Computes, XV, p. 2.

 

12 Oeuvres Computes, IX  (Paris  1879),

 

212. 212.

 

13 cf. M. Thibert, Le rSU social de Vart d’apris Us Saint-Simoniens (Paris n.d.).

 

• Jourda, op. cit., pp. 55-6.

 

• Capefigue, Histoire des Grandes Operations Financilres, IV, pp. 252-3.

 

• James Nasmyth, Engineer, An Autobio-graphy, Samuel Smiles (1897 end.), P- ’77-

N O T E S

 

17

Ibid. pp. 243, 246, 251.

weavers were particularly enthusiastic

18 E.

Halevy,

History

of

the English

and

rigorous

‘florists’,

recognising

People in the Nineteenth Century (paper-

only eight flowers worthy of compe-

back ed.), I, p. 509.

titive

breeding.

The

Nottingham

19 D.

S.

Landes,

Vieille

Banque  et

lace-makers grew roses, which were

Banque

Nouvelle,

Revue d’Histoire

not

yet—unlike

the

hollyhock—a

Modeme et Contemporaine, III, (1956),

workingman’s flower.

p.

205.

22

Select Committee on Drunkenness (Pari.

20

cf. the

long-playing

records ‘Shuttle

Papers VIII,

1834) Q.571. In 1852,

and  Cage’  Industrial Folk  Ballads,

28 pubs and 21 beershops in Man-

(10T 13), Row, Bullies, Row (T7) and

chester (out of 481 pubs and  1,298

The Blackball Line, (T8) all on Topic,

beershops for a population of 303,000

London.

in the borough)  provided  musical

21

Quoted

in

G.

Taylor,

Nineteenth

entertainment.

(John

T.  Baylee;

Century Florists and their Flowers

Statistics and Facts in reference to the

{The Listener 23.6.1949). The Paisley

Lord’s Day (London 1852), p. 20.)

CHAPTER

15: SCIENCE

i

Quoted

in

S.

Solomon,  Commune,

leprojet d’une Science nouvelle (Lausanne

August 1939, p. 964.

1787).

2

G. C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology

5

cf.  Guerlac,  Science and  National

(1951), p. 116.

Strength, in E. M. Earle ed. Modern

3

Quoted  in  Encyclopedic  de  la

France (1951).

Pleiade, Histoire de la Science (1957),

6

Quoted in S. Mason, A History of the

P- ‘465-

Sciences (1953), p. 286.

4 Essai sur I’education  intellectuelle avec

CHAPTER

l 6 :  CONCLUSION: TOWARDS

1898

 

 

1 Haxthausen, Studien tuber . . . Russ-

 

W   (1847), I, pp. 156-7.

 

2 Hansard, 16 Feb. 1842, quoted in Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians (196I)₁ P- 2-

 

• B. Morris, Encyclopedia of American History (1953), PP- 5’5» 5>6.
• Lyashchenko, History of the Russian National Economy, pp. 273-4.

 

• Lyashchenko, op. cit., p. 370.

6 J. Stamp, British Incomes and Property

 

(1920), pp. 515, 431.

 

• L. Hansen, The Atlantic Migration 1607-1860, (Harvard 1945), p. 252.

 

• McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League

 

1838-46 (London	1958), chapter			V.
9 T.  Kolokotrones,	quoted	in	L.	S.
Stavrianos,  Antecedents		to	Balkan

 

Revolutions, Journal ofModem History,

 

XXIX, 1957, p. 344.

 

 

 

 

331

 

 

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

 

 

 

 

 

B O TH the subject and the literature are so vast that even a highly select bibliography would run into many pages. To refer to all subjects which might interest the reader is impossible. Guides to further reading on most subjects have been compiled by the American Historical Association (A Guide to Historical Literature, periodically revised) and for the use of students by some Oxford teachers; A select list of works on

 

Europe and Europe overseas 1715-1815, edited by J. S. Bromley and A. Goodwin (Oxford 1956) and A select list of books on European history 1815-1914, edited by Alan Bullock and A. J. P. Taylor (1957). The former is better. Books marked * below also contain bibliographies which are recommended.

 

There are several series of general histories covering the period or part of it. The most important is Peuples et Civilisations, because it includes two volumes by George Lefebvre which are historical master-pieces: *La Revolution Francaise (vol. 1, 1789-93 is available in English,

1962) and *Napol(on (1953). F. Ponteil*, Ueveildes nationalitis 1815-48

 

(i960) replaces an earlier volume under the same title by G. Weill, which is still worth consulting. The equivalent American series 7″Ae Rise of Modern Europe is more discursive and geographically limited. The available volumes are Crane Brinton’s *A decade of revolution “7^-99 (‘934)» G. Bruun, *Europe and the French Imperium (1938) and F. B. Artz, * Reaction and Revolution 1814-32 (1934). Bibliographically the most useful of the series is Clio, which is aimed at students and periodically brought up-to-date; note especially the sections sum-marizing current historical debate. The relevant volumes are: E. Pr<$clin and V. L. Tapid, *Le xviiie sikle (2 vols.); L. Villat, La revolution et PEmpire (2 vols.), J. Droz, L. Genet and J. Vidalenc, *L’epoque contemporaine, vol. I, 1815-71.

 

Though old, J.  Kulischer, Allgemeine  Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. II,

 

Neuzeit (republished 1954) is still a good factual summary of economic history, but there are also numerous American college textbooks of approximately equal value, e.g. W. Bowden, M. Karpovitch and A. P.

 

 

332

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Usher, Economic history of Europe since 1750 (1937). J.  Schumpeter,

Business Cycles I (1939) is broader than its title suggests. Of general interpretations, as distinct from histories, M. H. Dobb, Studies in the

development of capitalism (1946) and K. Polanyi, The great transformation

(published as Origins of our Time in England, 1945), as well as Werner Sombart’s older Der moderne Kapitalismus III: Das Wirtschaftsleben im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (1928) are recommended. For population, M. Reinhard, Histoire de la population mondiale de 1700 a 1948 (1949), but especially the brief and quite excellent introductory C. Gipolla’s The economic history of world population (1962). For technology, Singer, Holmyard, Hall and Williams’ A history of technology, IV: the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (1958) is myopic but useful for reference. W. H. Armytage, A social history of engineering (1961) is a better introduction and W. T. O’Dea, The social history of lighting (1958) is both enter-taining and suggestive. See also the books on the history of science.

 

For agriculture the obsolescent but convenient H. S6c, *Esquisse d’une histoire du regime agraire en Europe au i8e et ige sikles (1921) has not yet been replaced by anything as handy. There is as yet no good synthesis

of the modern research work on farming. For money, Marc Bloch’s

 

very brief Esquisse d’une histoire monitaire de I’Europe (1954) is useful as is K. Mackenzie, The banking systems of Great Britain, France, Germany and the USA (1945). For want of a general synthesis R. E. Cameron,

 

France and the economic development of Europe 1800-1914 (1961), one of the most solid pieces of research to have appeared in recent years, can

 

serve as an introduction to problems of credit and investment, together with the still unsurpassed L. H. Jenks, The migration of British capital to 1875 (1927).

 

There is no good general treatment of the industrial revolution, in spite of much recent work on economic growth, not often of great interest to the historian. The best comparative conspectus is in the special number of Studi Storici II, 3-4 (Rome 1961) and the more

 

specialised First international conference of economic history, Stockholm i960 (Paris-Hague 1961). P. Mantoux, The industrial revolution of the 18th century (1906), in spite of its age, remains basic for Britain. There is nothing as good for the period since 1800. W. O. Henderson, *Britain

 

and industrial Europe 1750-1870 (1954) describes British influence and J. Purs, *The industrial revolution in the Czech lands (Historica II, Prague i960) contains a convenient bibliography for seven countries;

 

1. O. Henderson, *The industrial revolution on the continent: Germany, France, Russia 1800-1914 (1961) is aimed at the undergraduate. Among more general discussions Karl Marx, Capital I remains a marvellous, almost contemporary, treatment and S. Giedion, Mechanisation takes

 

333

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

command (1948) is among other things a profusely illustrated and highly suggestive pioneer work on mass production.

1. Goodwin ed., The European nobility in the 18th century (1953) is a

comparative study of aristocracies. There is nothing similar on the bourgeoisie. Luckily the best source of all, the works of the great novelists, notably Balzac, are easily accessible. For the working classes

1. Kuczynski, Geschichte der Lage der Arbeiter unter dem Kapitalismus

 

(Berlin, to be completed in 38 volumes) is encyclopedic. The best contemporary analysis remains F. Engels, Condition ofthe Working Class in England in 1844. For the urban sub-proletariat, L. Chevalier, Classes labor-ieuses et classes dangereuses a Paris dans lepremiire rmoitil du ige siecle (1958) is brilliant synthesis of economic and literary evidence. E. Sereni, Il capitalisms nelle campagne (1946), though confined to Italy and a later period, is the most useful introduction to the study of the peasantry.

 

The same author’s Storia delpaesaggio agrario italiano (1961) analyses the changes in landscape made by man’s productive activities, drawing most imaginatively on the arts. R. N. Salaman, The history and social influence of the potato (1949) is admirable on the historical importance of one type of foodstuff, but in spite of recent research the history of material life remains little known, though J. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, The Englishman’sfood (1939) is a pioneer work. J. Chalmin,

 

L’officierfrancais 1815-1871 (1957), Georges Duveau, L’instituteur (1957) and Asher Tropp, The school teachers (1957) are among the rare his-tories of professions. The novelists still provide by far the best guide to the social changes of capitalism; e.g. John Gait, Annals of the Parish for Scotland.

 

The most stimulating history of science is J. D. Bernal, *Science in history (1954) and S. F. Mason, *A history of the sciences (1953) is good on natural philosophy. For reference M. Daumas ed., *Histoire de la science (Encyclopedic de la Pleiade 1957). J. D. Bernal, Science and industry in the igth century (1953) analyses some examples of their interaction, R. Taton, The French Revolution and t’ie progress of science (in S. Lilley ed., Essays in the social history of science Copenhagen 1953) may be the least inaccessible of several monographs. C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and geology (1951) is entertaining and illustrates the difficulties between science and religion. On education G. Duveau, op. cit, and Brian Simon, Studies in the history of education 1780-1870 (i960) will help to compensate for the absence of a good modern comparative study. On

the press there is G. Weill, Le journal (1934).

There are numerous histories of economic thought, for the subject is

much taught. E. Roll,	A	history of economic thought (various editions)
is a good introduction.	J.	B. Bury, The idea of progress (1920) is still

 

 

334

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

useful. E. HaIeVy, The growth ofphilosophic radicalism (1938) is an ancient but unshaken monument. L. Marcuse, Reason and revolution: Hegel and theriseof social theory (194.1) is excellent and G. D. H. Cole, A history of socialist thought I, 1780-1850, a judicious survey. Frank Manuel, The new world of Henri Saint-Simon (1956) is the most recent study of that elusive but important figure. Auguste Cornu’s Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, Leben u. Werk I, 1818-44 (Berlin 1954, in progress), appears definitive. Hans Kohn, The idea of nationalism (1944) is useful.

There is no general account of religion, but K.  S. Latourette,

 

Christianity in a revolutionary age, I—III (1959-61) surveys the entire world. W. Gantwell Smith, Islam in modern history (1957) and H. R. Niebuhr, The social sources of denominationalism (1929) may introduce the two expanding religions of the period, V. Lanternari, *Movimenti religiosi di liberty e di salvezza (i960), what has been called the ‘colonial heresies’. S. Dubnow, Weltgeschichte des juedischen Volkes, VIII and IX (1929) deals with the Jews.

The best introductions  to the history of the arts are  probably

1. B. Pevsner, Outline ofEuropean architecture (illustrated edition i960), E. H. Gombrich, The story of art (1950) and P. H. Lang, Music in western civilisation (1942). There is unfortunately no equivalent for world literature, though Arnold Hauser, The social history of art, II (1951) covers this field also. F. Novotny, *Painting and sculpture in Europe 1780-1870 (i960) and H. R. Hitchcock, *Architecture in the tgth and soth centuries (1958), both in the Penguin History of Art, contain both illustrations and bibliographies. Among more specialised works mainly

 

on the visual arts one might mention F. D. Klingender, *Art and the

industrial revolution (1947) and Goya and the democratic tradition (1948),

 

1. Clark, The gothic revival (1944), P. Francastel, Le style Empire (1944), and F. Antal’s brilliant but capricious ‘Reflections on Classicism and Romanticism’ {Burlington Magazine 1935, 1936, 1940, 1941). For music, A. Einstein, Music in the romantic era (1947) and Schubert (1951) may be read; for literature, G. Lukacs’ profound Goethe und seine %dt (1955), The historical novel (1962) and the chapters on Balzac and Stendhal in Studies in European realism (1950); also the excellent J. Bronowski,

 

William Blake—a man without a mask (1954 ed.). For a few general themes, consult R. Wellek, A history ofmodern criticism 1750-1950,1 (1955), R. Gonnard, *Le Ugende du bon sauvage (1946), H. T. Parker, The cult of antiquity and the French revolutionaries (1937), P. Trahard, La sensibiliti rivolutionnaire 1791-4 (1936), P. Jourda, Uexotisme dans Ie litterature francaise (1938), and F. Picard Le romantisme social (1944).

 

Only a few topics can be singled out from the history of events in this period. On revolutions and revolutionary movements the bibli-

 

 

335

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

ography is gigantic for 1789, rather less so for 1815-48. G. Lefebvre’s

two works mentioned above and his The coming of the French Revolution

(1949) are standard for the 1789 revolution; A. Soboul, Pricis d’histoire de la Resolution Frangais (1962) is a lucid textbook and A. Goodwin, * The French Revolution (1956) an English conspectus. The literature is too vast for summary. Bromley and Goodwin provide a good guide. To the works mentioned there A. Soboul, Les sansculottes en Van II (i960), an encyclopedic work, G. Rude, The crowd in the French Revolution (1959) and J. Godechot, La contre-revolution (1961) ought to be added. C. L. R. James, The black Jacobins (1938) describes the Haitian revolution. For the insurrectionaries of 1815-48, C. Francovich, Idee sociali e organizza-zione optraia nella prima metd dell’ 800 (1959) is a good and brief study of a significant country, which can serve as introduction. E. Eisenstein, “Filippo Michele Buonarroti (1959) leads us into the world of the secret societies. A. Mazour, The fast Russian revolution (1937) deals with the

Decembrists, R.		F. Leslie, Polish politics and the revolution of November
1830 (1956)	is in	effect	a much broader book than its title suggests.
On labour	movements		there is no general study, for E. Dolldans,

Histoire du mouvement ouvrier I (1936) deals only with Britain and France. See also A. B. Spitzer, The revolutionary theories of Auguste Blanqui (1957),

 

1. O. Evans, Le socialisme romantique (1948), and O. Festy, Le mouvement ouvrier au dibut de la monarchie de Juillet (1908).

 

On the origins of 1848, F. Fejto ed., The opening of an era, 1848 (1948) contains essays, mosdy excellent, on numerous countries; J. Droz, Les revolutions allemandes de 1848 (1957) is invaluable and E. Labrousse ed., Aspects de la crise… 1846-51 (1956) is a collection of detailed economic studies for France. A. Briggs ed., Chartist studies (1959) is the most up-to-date work on its subject. E. Labrousse, ‘Comment naissent les revolutions? (Actes du centenaire de 1848, Paris 1948) attempts a general answer to this question for our period.

 

On international affairs A. Sorel, VEurope et la Revolution Francaise I (1895) ^stiM provides a good background and J. Godechot, La Grande Nation, 2 vols. (1956) describes the expansion of the revolution abroad. Vols. IV and V of the * Histoire des Relations Internationales (by A. Fugier up to 1815 and P. Renouvin 1815-71, both 1954) are lucid and intelligent guides. On the process of war, B. H. Liddell Hart, The ghost of Napoleon (1933) remains a fine introduction to land strategy and E. Tarl6, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 (1942) a convenient study of a particular campaign. G. Lefebvre, *Napolion contains by far

 

the best concise sketch of the nature of the French armies, and M. Lewis, A social history of the navy 1780-1815 (i960) is most instructive.

 

1. F. Heckscher, The Continental System (1922) should be supplemented

 

 

336

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

by F. Crouzet’s massive Le blocus continental et Viconomie britannique (1958) for the economic aspects. F. Redlich, De praeda militari: looting and booty 1500-1815 (1955) casts interesting sidelights. J. N. L. Baker, *A history

of geographical exploration and discovery (1937) and the admirable Russian Atlas geograficheskikh otkrytii i issledovanii (1959) provide the background for the European world conquest; K. Panikkar, Asia and Western dominance (1954) an instructive account of it from an Asian point of view. G. Scelle, Le traite negriire aux Indes de Castille, 2 vols. (1906) and Gaston Martin, Histoire de VEsclavage dans les colonies frangaises (1948) remain basic for the slave-trade. E. O. v. Lippmann, Geschichte des

Zuckers (1929)	may be supplemented	with N. Deerr,  The History of
sugar, 2 vols.	(1949). Eric Williams,	Capitalism and slavery (1944) is
a general interpretation, though sometimes schematic. For the charac-
teristic ‘informal’ colonisation of the		world by trade and gunboat,

1. Greenberg, British trade and the opening of China (1949) and H. S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the igth century (i960) are case-studies. For the two large areas under direct European exploitation, W. F.

 

Wertheim, Indonesian society in transition (Hague-Bandung 1959) is a brilliant introduction (see also J. S. Furnivall, Colonial policy and practice, 1956 which compares Indonesia and Burma), and out of a large but mainly disappointing literature on India the following may be selected:

 

1. Thompson and G. T. Garratt, Rise and fulfilment of British rule in India (1934), Eric Stokes, The English utilitarians and India (1959)—

 

a most illuminating work—and A. R. Desai, The social background of Indian nationalism (Bombay 1948). There is no adequate account of Egypt under Mehemet AIi, but H. Dodwell, The Founder of Modern Egypt (1931) may be consulted.

 

It is impossible to do more than point to one or two histories of some countries or regions. For Britain, E. HaIeVy, History of the English people in the igth century remains fundamental, especially the great survey of England in 1815 in vol. 1; to be supplemented by A. Briggs, The age of improvement 1780-1867 (1959). For France a classic of social history gives the eighteenth century background, P. Sagnac, La formation de la socUtifrancaise moderne, II (1946), and Gordon Wright, France in modern times (1962) a good introductory history-since then. F. Ponteil, La monarchic parlementaire 1815-48 (1949) and F. Artz, France under the Bourbon restoration (1931) are recommended. For Russia M. Florinsky, Russia, II (1953) covers the period since 1800 fully and M. N. Pokrovsky, Brief history of Russia, I (1933) and P. Lyashchenko, History

 

of the Russian national economy (1947) include it. R. Pascal, The growth of modern Germany (1946) is brief and good, K. S. Pinson, Modern Germany (1954) is also introductory. T. S. Hamerow, Restoration, revo-

 

337

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

lution, reaction: economics and politics in Germany 1815-71 (1958), J. Droz, op. cit. and Gordon Craig, The politics of the Prussian army (1955) can be read with profit. On Italy G. Candeloro, Storia dell’ Italia moderna II, 1815-46 (1958) is by far the best, on Spain P. Vilar, Histoire d’Espagne (1949) is a superb brief guide and J. Vicens Vives ed., Historia social de Espanay America Latina, IV/2 (1959) is, among its other merits, beauti-fully illustrated. A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg monarchy 1949) is a good introduction. See also E. Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials (1959). On the Balkans, L. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (1953) and the excellent B. Lewis, The emergence of modern Turkey (1961), on the North, B. J. Hovde, The Scandinavian countries 1720-1865, 3 vols. (1943), will be found helpful. On Ireland, E. Strauss, Irish nationalism

 

and British democracy (1951) and The great famine, studies in recent Irish history (1957). On the Low Countries, H. Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique, v-vi (1926,1932), R. Demoulin, La revolution de 1830 (1950) and H. R. C. Wright, Free Trade and Protection in the !Netherlands 18X&-30 (1955).

 

A few final notes on general works of reference. W. Langer’s Encyclo-pedia of World History (1948) or Ploetz’ Hauptdaten der Weltgeschichtt

 

(1957) give the main dates, the admirable Alfred Mayer, Annals of European civilisation 1501-igoo (1949) deals specially with culture, science and the like. M. Mulhall, Dictionary ofStatistics (1892) remains the best compendium of figures. Among historical encyclopedias the new

Sovietskaya Istoricheskaya Entsiklopediya in 12 volumes covers the world; the

Encyclopedic de la Pleiade has special volumes on Universal History (3), the History of Literatures (2) Historical Research—very valuable— and the History of Science; but these are organised narratively and not under dictionary-headings. CasselVs Encyclopedia ofLiterature (2 vols.) is useful and E. Blom ed., Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (9 vols.) (1954), though a little British, standard. The Encyclopedia of World Art (to be completed in 15 vols., I-V published) is outstanding. The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1931), though getting old, remains very useful. The following atlases, not so far mentioned, may also be consulted with profit: Atlas Istorii SSSR (1950), J. D. Fage, An atlas of African history (1958), H. W. Hazard and. H. L. Cooke, Atlas of Islamic History (1943), J. T. Adams ed., Atlas ofAmerican History (1957) and the general J. Engel et. al Grosser Historischer Weltatlas (1957) and the Rand McNaIIy Atlas of World History (1957).

 

 

 

 

 

 

338

 

 

INDEX

 

 

 

 

 

Abd-el-Kader, Algerian leader, 161, 224

Abel,	Henrik,		mathematician,   380,
282
Afghanistan, Afghans, 107, 224
Africa, African,		2, 3, 7, 8, 13, 19, 25, 26,
34» 35» i°7»		“09» 144» ’61, 170, 223,
224,	267, 299,		303

 

Age of Reason, the, by T. Paine, 221 Albanians, 139, 140

 

Albert, Prince Consort, 186 d’Alembert, J. L. R., encyclopaedist, 20 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, 100, 102,

 

109, 230 Alexandria, 177

Algeria,  108, 153, 161, 177, 197, 224,

 

303

AIi Mohammed (of Persia), reformer, 225

 

AIi Pasha, ‘the Lion of Jannina’, 140

Almanack des Gourmands, 184 Alsace, see France

 

America, American, 8, 10, 18, 19, 24, 25, 33.34» 35. 39» 4°, 54» 69,84,91,128, 130, •42» »53» “72, 223, 257, 2⁶7. 301

American Bible Society, 223

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 223

 

American Civil War, 93, 179 American Constitution, 201, 220 American Declaration of Independence,

 

235

American Methodist Episcopalians, 223 American War of Independence, see

 

Revolution, American Andalusia, see Spain Andersen, Hans C , writer, 254

Anglicans, 30, 223, 225, 232, 265

Annates de Chimic et de Physique, 280

Annales d’Hygiene Publique, 204n

 

 

 

Anti-Corn  Law League, 41, 124, 127,

185
Anti-Diihring by Engels, 295
Appalachians, 228
Apulia, see Italy
Arabia,	Arabs,  139, 224, 267; see also
Bedouin
Aragon, see Spain
Argentine, n o , 142, 239, 303
Aristotle, 287
Argand lamp, 298
Arkwright, R., inventor, 27
Armenia, see Russia
Arnim, Bettina von, writer, 262n
Arnim, L. A. von, writer, 266
Ars, Cur£ d’, priest, 226
Asia, Asian,		7, 8,	ign, 25, 35,		100, 104,
107,	108,	109,	143,	144,	161,	170,
224

 

Aspern-Essling, battle of (1809), 87 Assignats, 94

Atlantic, 19, 138, 167, 276, 301 Auber, O. F. E., composer, 256n Austen, Jane, novelist, 66, 93, 255, 26a,

272

 

Austerlitz, battle of, 86, 94 Australia, 170, 179

 

Austria, 11, 14, 21, 25, 72, 79, 80, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88n, 89, 93, 95, 100, IOI, 102, 103, 105, 106, 117, 124, 125, 126, 134, 136, 140,143, i52n, 157, 170,173,175, 176, 192,196,230,24gn, 254,255,267, 269, 300

 

Austrian Empire, see Austria; see also Bohemia, Croatia, Galicia, Hungary, Illyria, Istria, Italy, Milan, Moravia, Poland, Salzburg, Tyrol, Venice

 

Austrian Netherlands, see Belgium Avignon, 88

 

 

339

 

INDEX

 

Babbage, Charles, scientist, 186, 278 Babeuf, Gracchus, communist; Babou-

 

vists, 11, 57, 73, 113, 115, 122, 123, 126, 268

 

Bach, J. S., composer, 260 Bacon, Francis, philosopher, 219 Baden, 85, 143

 

Bahia, see Brazil

Baines, Edward, journalist-publisher, 4On, 186

Bakuninism, 160

Balkans, 11, 14, 18, 79, 87, 100, 104, 105,

115,	118, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 168,
180, 254
Baltic,	15, 19, 91, IOI, 153, 289

Balzac, H. de, writer, 27, 54, 183, 184, I92n, 253. 254» 855. «56, 258, 259

 

Banda Oriental, see Uruguay Baptists, 186, 223, 225

 

Baptist Missionary Society, 223 Barings, financiers, 96

 

Barlow, Joel, 7gn Baskerville, J., printer, 21 Basques, 159, 180

 

Bastille, 10, 28, 53, 61, 240, 251, 264 Batavian Republic, see Holland Baudelaire, C. (1821-67), poet, 270 Baudrillart, Henri, academic, 199 Bavaria, 85, 159, 306

 

Beauvilliers, A., chef, 184 Bedouin, 139

Beethoven, L. von, composer, 78,79,253,

 

254» 255, 256, 258 Bel-Ami by Maupassant, 183

 

Belgium, 18,24,27,33,44,52, 54,68,72, 73» 81, 82, 90, 93, 100, 101, 103, n o , i n , 113, 117, 118, 183, 127, «3°. ’34. 136, 156, 169, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 192, 205, 254, 279, 284, 287, 301, 306, 307; see also Low Countries

Belleville, 213

 

Bellini, V., composer, 254, 255 Benbow, William, pamphleteer, 210 Bengal, 26, 54, 161, 162, 163, 286 Bentham, Jeremy, reformer, 3, 7gn, 114,

 

164, i88n, 191,192,220,234,236,239, 241, 279

 

Biranger, P. J. de, poet (1780-1857), 124

 

Berg, Grand Duchy of, 82

Berlin, 85,171,175,184,261,274, 279,280 Berlioz, H., composer, 254, 261 Bernard, Claude, physiologist, 295 Berthollet, C-L., chemist, 177 Bessarabia, 101

 

Bible, Chapter is passim, 286, 287, 289, 290

Bible in Spain by George Borrow, 1 i7n Biedermeier, 175, 272, 273

 

Birkbeck College, see London Mechanics Institution

 

Birmingham, si, 32, 78, 221, 279, 281, 287

 

Black George, King of Serbia, 140 Black Sea, 15, 141

 

Blake, William, poet, 78, 243, 256n, 262, 263, 267, 294

 

Blanqui, Auguste, revolutionary, 122, 123, 126, 127

 

Boehme, Jacob, mystic, 218 Boerne, Ludwig, journalist, 109

 

Bohemia, 15, 88n, 143, is6n, 174, 285; see also Czechoslovakia, Czechs

Bolivar, Simon, liberator, no, 142, 164 Bolivia, 110

Bologna, see Italy

 

Bolyai, Janos, mathematician, 280, 282 Bolton, 41, 4&1, 207

Bombay, 143, 162

Bonald, L. de, political writer, 91, 247 Bonaparte, see Napoleon

 

Bonaparte, Joseph, King of Spain, 87 Bopp, Franz, philologist, 286, 287 Bordeaux, 19

Borinage, 202

 

Borrow, George, writer, u 7n Bosnia, Bosnians, 140 Boston, Mass., 10, 272 Boulogne-sur-Mer, n o

 

Boulton, Matthew, industrialist, 21, 187, 298n

Bourbon, Bourbonism, 84, 101, no, 117,

 

“25. ’35. 155» “59. 160, «83 Bouvard, A., astronomer, 277 Brabant, see Belgium Brahmin, 265

 

Brahmo Samaj, see Roy, Ram Mohan Brazil, 10, 14, n o , 142, 153, 224, 239,

 

299> 30’» 303 Brentano, C , writer, 266

 

34O

 

INDEX

 

 

Breslau, 290

Brest, 183

 

Bright, John, politician, 206, 305 Brillat-Savarin, A., gourmet, 184 Brindley, J., engineer, 27 Brissot, J. P., politician, 68 Bristol, 19, 34

 

Britain, 1, 2, 3, 9, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, Chapter 2 passim, 53, 54, 55, 59, 63, 66, 6₇ , 68, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, IO9, IIO, III, 112, 113, II4, II5, 117, Il8, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 135, 136, 138, 139, 141.

 

“5°, i5>, ’53. “55. 157. 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172,174,175,176,177,178,179,180, 181,184,189,190,191,192,193,194, 195,198,201,202,204n, 205,206,207, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 2l6, 220, 221, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232» 235» 236, 238, 239, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 25O, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 283, 285, 286, 289, 291, 292, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307; see also England, Scotland, Wales and under names of towns

 

British Association for the Advancement of Science, 187, 274, 279, 295

 

British Museum, 261 Brittany, see France Brontes, writers, 255, 262n

 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, poet, 262 Browning, Robert, poet, 254

 

Brunei, Isambard Kingdom, engineer, 187, 278

Brussels, I2n

Budapest, 10

 

Budapest, University of, 136 Buechner, Georg, poet, 254,^69 Bueckler, Johannes, see Schinderhannes Buenos Aires, 142, 239

 

Buffon, Comte de, zoologist, 287 Bulgaria, 14011

Bunyan, John, 275

 

Buonarroti, Filippo, revolutionary, 115, 120, 122, 123, 268, 285

Burke, Edmund, political writer, 240, 246, 247, 264

Burma, 7, 107

 

Burney, Fanny, novelist, 262n Burns, Robert, poet, 78, 79

Byron, Lord, poet, 140, 257, 260, 267,

 

268, 274

 

 

 

Qa Ira, 220

Cabanis, Pierre, philosopher, 287 Cabet, E., communist, 122, 244 Cairo, 177

Calabria, see Italy

Calvin, John, Calvinism, 30, 134, 189,

 

275» 294

Cambridge, 30, 269, 279, 289 Campbell, T., poet, 267 Campe, D. H., writer, 79n

 

Canning, George, politician, 100, 103 Cape of Good Hope, 26, 107 Caprichos by Goya, 256n Caravaggio, M. da, painter, 260

Carbonari, Carbonarists, 115, 116, 120,

123,	126,	127,	128,	129,	137,	141,
268
Carfime, M. A., chef, 184
Carey, W., economist, 242
Caribbean,		13, 178

Carinthia, see Illyria

Carlist wars, 117-18, 159, 259

 

Carlyle, T., writer, 27, 254, 263, 264, 269, 285

Carnot, Lazare, Jacobin, 31, 278 Carnot, N. L. Sadi, mathematician and

 

physicist, 291 Carthage, 84 Castile, see Spain

 

Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary, 99, 100, 103

Catalonia, see Spain

Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia,

 

3. “5. 280, 30On

Catholic Church, 64, 74, 80, 89, 113,

 

” 9 , ’33. ’37. ’38, 140. ’42. ’52. 157. 158-60, 188, 204, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226, 229, 231, 232, 271, 292, 302, 304n, 306

Catholic Association, Irish, 138

 

 

341

 

INDEX

 

 

Caucasus, Caucasian, 108, 139, 200, 224, 267

 

Cauchy, A. L., mathematician, 282, 292

 

Cavendish, Henry, scientist, 279 Cawnpore, see India

Celts, 291

 

Central Europe, 8, 24, 36, 87, 92, 141, 153, 168, 181, 189, 191, 218, 247, 305,

 

3°7 Ceylon, 107

Champollion, J. F., Egyptologist, 286

 

Charles IV, Portrait of the Family of King, by Goya, 254

Charles X of France, 183

Chartism, Chartists, 38, 114, 119, 121,

 

122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130, 138, 169, 207, 2io, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216,

 

259» 306

Chateaubriand, F. R. de, writer, 259, 264, 267

 

Cheshire, see England Chicago, 173

 

Childe Harold by Byron, 257 Chile, 110

China, Chinese Empire, 2, 3, 7, 8, ign,

 

=5» 35» 54, i°7. 170, 217, 2² 3. 224. 225, 302, 303

 

Ch’ing Dynasty, see Manchu Chopin, F., composer, 254, 255, 269 Choral Symphony by Beethoven, 254

 

Christians, 14, 55, 104, 142, 160, 16m, 197, 198, 201, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 225, 226, 229, 231, 232, 244, 264

 

Church of England, see Anglicans Church of Scotland, 223 Cisalpine Republic, see Italy Civil Code, French, 74, 75, 90 Clapham sect, 175, 272

 

Clarkson, T., anti-slavery agitator, 79n Claudius, Mathias, poet, 258

 

Cloots, Anarcharis, revolutionary, 7gn Cobbett, William, journalist, 96, 114,

 

215, 246

 

Cobden, Richard, politician, 168, 180, 181, 186, 215

 

Cochrane, Lord, British seaman, n o Cockerill, industrialist, 33, 174 Cole, Sir Henry, administrator, 186

Coleridge, S. T., poet, 78, 187, 253, 259, 263, 264, 267

 

Cologne, 89 Colombia, n o , 143

 

Comidie Humaine by H. de Balzac, 27, 256

 

Communism, Communist, 4, 27, 71, Chapter 11 passim, 234, 244, 305; see also Socialism, Babeuf, Marx

Communist League, 127

 

Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, 4, 28, 128, 234, 242, 263

Complete Suffrage Union, 124

Comptes Rendus de I’Academie des Sciences,

 

280

Comte, A., sociologist, 219, 284

 

Condition of the Working Class in England by F. Engels, 27, 182

Condorcet, Marquis de, philosopher, 219,

 

240

Confederation of the Rhine, 85

Congregationalists,  Independents,   186,

 

227

Connacht, see Ireland

 

Conspiracy of the Equals, see Babeuf, Revolution

Constable, John, artist, 254, 255 Constable, A., publisher, 274 Constantinople, 105, 106 Continental System, 87, 96, 97-8 Convention, see National Convention Cook, James, seaman, 7

 

Cooper, J. Fenimore, novelist, 254, 267 Copenhagen, 135, 279, 295

 

Corday, Charlotte, revolutionary, 68 Corn Laws, 41, 48, 306

 

Cornwall, see Britain Corresponding Societies, 7g Corsica, 74

 

Cortes of Cadiz, 155 Cossacks, 14, 267 Cdte d’Or, see France

 

Courbet, Gustave, artist, 255 Couthon, G., Jacobin, 72 Cracow, 102, 126

Cragg, John, industrialist, 273

 

Creation, The, by Haydn, 254 Crelle’s Journal, 280

Crimean War, 99, 106

Croat, Croatia, 143, 155

 

 

342

 

							INDEX
Croatian Gazette,  see  Illyrian  National								Dobrovsky, J., linguist, 266
Gazette								Doherty, John, trade unionist, 214
Cuba,	153, 180, 239, 303							Dollfus, industrialist, 189
Cuvier, G. L. C , scientist, 286, 287, 290								Donizetti, G., composer, 254, 255
Czartoryski, 120, 133								Don Juan by Moliere, 219
Czechoslovakian, Czech,					14,	1511, 134,		Dostoievsky, F. N., writer, 253, 255, 256
136,	143,			173,  28911,	292;  see also			Doukhobors, 226
Bohemia								Dresden, 93
								Droste-Huelshoff,  Annette von,  writer,
								262n
								Dubarry, Madame, royal mistress, 54
Daguerre, L.-J.-M., inventor,						177		Dublin, 38, 298
								Ducpetiaux, E., statistician, 27
Dalmatia,			102, 136
								Dumas, Alexander, the Elder, writer, 254
Dalmatia,			102, 136; see also Illyria
								Dumouriez, L.-F., general, 66
Dalton, John, scientist, 279, 281, 282
								Dundee, 10
Dansette, industrialists, 189
								Dunfermline, 207, 214, 275
Danton, G.-J., revolutionary,						68, 70, 71
								Dupontde Nemours, P. S., economist, 30
Danube,		14, 140, 141, 171
								Durham, 44
Darwin,		Charles, scientist, 21, 222, 289,
								Durham, County, see Britain
293
								Dutch Reformed Church, 223
Darwin, Erasmus, scientist, 21, 287
Daumier, Honore, artist, 255, 256n, 268
David, J.-L., artist, 254, 255, 259
Davidsbuendlertaenze by Schumann, 254
Davout, L.-N., soldier, 86
Davy, Sir Humphrey, scientist, 279								East India Company, 33, 35, 163, 164
Death and the Maiden by Schubert, 254								East Indies, 13, 19, 35
Decembrists,				115, 116, 256				Eastern Europe, 12, 17, 19, 92, 125, 126,
Declaration of				the Rights	of	Man	and	130, 138, 143, 180, 189, 191
Citizen, 59, 62, 78								Eastern Question, 100, 104, 105, 106
Delacroix, F.-E., artist, 254, 255, 260,								Eckermann, J. P., writer, 277
267, 268								Ecole des Charles, 285
Democracy in America by Alexis de Toque- Ecole Normale Superieure, 279
ville, 111								Ecole Polytechnique, of Paris, 30, 114,
Democratic Association for the Unifica-								i35′> ’89, 278, 279, 292, 295
tion of AU Countries, 129								Ecuador,  n o
Denmark,			14, 23, 101,		112,	130,	135,	Edinburgh, 273, 287
‘ 5 ‘ . ’53. 154. 169. 254. 285								Edwards, W., naturalist, 291
Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Arnim  and								Egypt, 4, 86, 100, 106, 144, 153, 180,
Brentano, 266								181, 224, 244, 286
Desmoulins, Camille, revolutionary, 81								Eichendorff, J. von, poet, 254, 264, 273
Desvinculacion, 157								d’Eichtal, G., Saint-Simonian, 197
Deutsche Naturforscherversammlung, 295								Elbe, River, 14
Devonshire, Sixth Duke of, 45								Elberfeld-Barmen, 174
Dickens, Charles, novelist, 185, 187, 193,								Elssler, Fanny, dancer, 190
253» 254. 255, 256, 261								Emile by J . J. Rousseau, 251
Diderot, D., writer, 20								Emilia, see Italy
Disasters of War by Goya, 256n								Empire, Holy Roman, 88, 89
Djogjakarta, Prince of, see Java War								Enclosure Acts, 31, 153
Disraeli, Benjamin, politician,						196		Encyclopaedia Britannica, 274

 

 

343

 

INDEX

 

Encyclopaedia of Domestic and AgriculturalFenians, see IrishRepublicanBrotherhood

Economy by Kriiniz, 151				Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 26211
Encyclopedic, la grande, 20, 248				Feuerbach by Engels, 295
Engel, Frederick, 189				Feuerbach, L. A., philosopher, 229
Engels, Frederick, communist, 27, 127,				Fichte, J. G., philosopher, 78, 250
128, 174, 182, 234, 241, 246, 290, 295,				Figaro, 183
303				Finland,		101, 169, 254, 266
England, 1, 2, 3, 9, 11, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21,				First Consul, see Napoleon
27,28, 29, 30, 32, 33,36,44,46, 50, 51,				First Lecture on Co-operation, 207
53» 54» 55» 60» 79» 80, 83, 84, 88, 91,				Flanders, Flemish, see Belgium
106,110,113,117,123,138,150, i52n,				Flaubert, G., writer, 270
161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 171, 180, 181,				Fleurus, battle of,			72
182, 184, 187, 189, 192, 198, 206, 207,				Florence,		177
209, 211, 225, 230, 247, 253, 254, 255,				Fourier,		Charles,	socialist,  Fourierists,
256» 257. 261, »63, 265, 270, 271, 275,				122, 241, 243, 244, 262, 304
«79» a85» 287, 290, 294, 296, 298; see				Fragonard, J. H., painter, 256, 258, 260
also Britain				France, French, 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16,
Enlightenment,  the, 20, 21, 234, 243,				21,24,25,28, 29,30,31,33,36,39,43,
248, 250, 294				44.45» 49» 5’» 52» Chapter spassim, 72,
Epirus, 140				77, 78, 79,80,81,82, 83,84,85,86,87,
Epoques de la Nature by Buffon,		287		88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98,
Erlkoenig by Schubert, 260				100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107,
Eroica Symphony, see Beethoven				108, 109, HO, III, 112, 113, 115, Il6,
Essay on Government by James Mill, 185				117, Il8, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124,
Essay on Population by T. L. Malthus, 238,				127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137,
284				»4’» ’44. ‘5’» ’52n, 154, 155, 156, 158,
Essex, see Britain
				159» “60,166,167,170,171,172,173,
Esterhazy, 15
				•74» ’76, 177» 178, 183, 184, 187, 189,
Estonia, 137, 28gn
				191,	192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197» 198,
Ethnological Society, 290
				206, 209, 210, 219, 224, 230, 232, 235,
Euclid, 282, 283
				239, 240, 243, 244, 249, 250, 253, 254,
Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, 254				255» 257, 258, 262n, 263, 264n, 265,
Euler, L., mathematician, 280				267, 269, 271, 272, 279, 280, 281, 284,
Eure department, see France				285, 290, 291, 292, 294, 296, 298, 299,
Europe,  1, passim; see Eastern		Europe,		300, 301, 302» 303» 304. 3°5> 3<>6, 307;
Northern	Europe, Southern	Europe,		see also Revolution
Western	Europe			Francis, John, writer, 47
Euston, 274				Frankfurt, 96, 292
Evans, Oliver, inventor, 172				Frankfurt		Parliament, 192
Eylau, battle of, 86				Franklin, Benjamin, statesman, 21
				Fraternal Democrats, 127, 129
				Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, 85,
			9°
Falck, 173			Frederick William IV, King of Prussia,
Far East, see Asia			230
Faraday, Michael, scientist, 279, 281			Freemasonry, Masonic, 21, 81, 116, 191,
Farr, William, statistician, 204n, 300			218, 256
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 213			Freiligrath, F., poet, 26gn
Faucher, Leon, writer, i88n, 189			Freischuetz, Opera, by Weber, 264
Faust by Goethe, 254, 261			French Revolution by Carlyle, 254

 

 

344

 

I N D E X

 

Friedland, battle of, 87 Friedrich, C. D., artist, 254

 

Frithjofssaga by Tegner, 266 Fromentin, E., painter and writer, 267 Frost, John, Chartist leader, 215 Fuessli (Fuseli), J. H., painter, 78

 

 

 

Gai, L., man of letters, 136 Gainsborough, T., artist, 260 Galicia, 125, 137, 159, 196, 300, 308 Galilei, G., scientist, 273

 

Galois, Evariste, mathematician, 282,292 Galvani, A., scientist, 281

Galway, see Ireland da Gama, Vasco, 26 Gandhi, M. K., 138

 

Garibaldi, G., revolutionary, 63, 130,160 Gaskell, Mrs E. C., novelist, 26211 Gaskell, P., writer, 20411

 

Gauls, 243, 291

 

Gauss, K. F., mathematician, 282 Gautier, Theophile, poet, 254,264n, 266,

 

271

 

Geijer, E. G., historian, 285 Geneva, 54, 91

 

Gtmt du Christianisme by Chateaubriand, 264

 

Genoa, 89, 102, 134

 

Gentz, F., official, 99, 230, 231, 246

 

Geological Survey, British, 291 Georgia, see Russia

 

Gericault, Theodore, artist, 255 Germany, German, 11, 12, 13,14, 27, 30,

3’» 33.44» ⁶2» ⁶ 5 . 6 8 , 73,78, 79,81,82,

83,	84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 96,						102,	103,
104,		106,	n o ,	i n ,	117,	118,	119,	120,
131,		123,	126,	127,	128,	130,	132,	133,
’34.		’35 . ‘ 3 6 , 1 3 7 . 1 S 8 . “43.152”, “55.
156.		158 . l 6 8 >		’70, 172, 173, 174, 175,
177,		178,	180,	181,	184,	186,	187,	192,
196, 197,203,204n,					205,213,225,229,
230, 231, 244, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251,
252, 253, 254,255, 256, 258, 262n, 263,
264,		267, 269, 271, 272, 274, 279,						280,
281,		285, 286, 289, 294, 295, 298, 303,
304.		3°5
German Mythology				by Grimm, 266
Gibraltar,			153

Giessen, 279

 

Gioberti, V . , writer, 232 Girardin, Emile de, journalist, 184

 

Gironde, Girondins, 54, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 113, 129, 252

Giselle, ballet, 264 Glasgow, 9, 34, 40, 203

 

Glinka, M . , composer, 254, 255, 256n Gloucestershire, see Britain Gobineau, J. A. de, writer, 291

 

Godwin, William, philosopher, 239, 241 Goethe, J. W. von, poet and philosopher, 9. 75.175 . 248, 250,251,252,253, 254, 256, 258, 261, 262, 263, 272, 277, 294,

296

 

Gogol, N. V., writer, 11, 193, 254, 255

 

Goldener Top/, Der, by E. T. A. Hoffman, 260

 

Goldsmid, Indian Civil Servant, 162 Gorani, J., Italian publicist, 7gn Gothic, 46, 152, 264, 273 Gottingen, 292

 

Goya, Francisco Goya y Lucicntes, painter, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 272

 

Grabbe, C. D . , poet, 254, 261 Grande Peur, 61

 

Great Britain, see Britain Great Disruption, 226

 

Great Exhibition of 1851, 186, 187 Greece, Greek ,46, 79, 91, 100, 104, 105,

 

109, 112, 115, 116, 130, 136, 140, 141, 142, 144, 159, 282, 301

Greeley, Horace, journalist, 304 Greenland, 275

 

Grillparzer, F. von, dramatist, 254 Grimm, Brothers, scholars, 264, 266, 269,

 

286, 287, 292

 

Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 264, 266 Guadet, M. E., politician, 68

 

Guardia Civil,  192

 

Guiness, 38

 

Guizot, F. P. G., historian and politician, 119, 232, 285, 307

Gujerat,  I39n

 

 

 

Haiti, see San Domingo

 

HaIeVy, Leon, Saint-Simonian, 197 Hallam, H. F., historian, 285

 

345

 

I N D E X

 

Halle, 204, 287

 

Halls of Science, 213, 221 Hambach Festival of 1832, 132 Hamburg, 10

 

Hamilton, Sir W . R., mathematician, 282

 

Hamilton, Alexander, statesman, 7<)n

 

Hamlet, 253, 262

 

Handel, G. F., composer, 260 Handsome Lake, Indian prophet, 225 Hanover, kingdom of, 189

 

Hapsburg, 24, 79, 88, 98, 102, 112, 118, 121, 143, 155, 196; see also Austria, Austrian Empire

 

Hard Times by Dickens, 185, 187 Harring, Harro, revolutionary, 130 Haussa, 224

 

Hawaii, 178, 223

 

Haxthausen,  A.  von, writer,  217,  297,

 

3<>3

Hay Wain, The, by Constable, 254 Haydn, J., composer, 15, 254, 255, 258,

 

260

 

Hazlitt, W., writer, 234, 267

 

Hebert, J.-R., revolutionary, Hebertists,

 

63. 71

Hegel, G. W. F., philosopher, 78, 243, 250, 251, 252, 258, 273, 295

 

Heine, Heinrich, poet, 196, 232, 254, 267

 

Heligoland, 101

 

Hellenic, Hellas, Hellenism, see Greek, Greece

 

Helvetic Republic, see Switzerland Hepburn, Tommy, miners’ leader, 214 Herder, J. G., philosopher, 78

 

Hemani by Victor Hugo, 269 Herwegh, G., poet, 26gn Hess, Moses, communist, 197 Hill, Rowland, inventor, 171

 

Hindu, Hinduism, 55, I3gn, 224

 

History of the Bohemian Language by Dobrovsky, 266

 

Hobbes, Thomas, philosopher, 219, 235n, 236, 237

Hodgskin, Thomas, socialist, 241

 

Hofer,  Andreas, Tyrolean guerilla,  82,

 

159

 

Hoffmann, E. T. A., writer, 260 d’Holbach, P. H., philosopher, 236, 248

Hoelderlin, F., poet, 78, 261

 

Holland, Dutch, 10, 11, 13, 17, 22, 54, 81,82,90, 101, 107, n o , 118, 127, 134, 136, 169, 176, 177, 192, 195, 220, 224, 226, 302, 304, 306; see also Low Countries

 

Hollywood, 183

 

Holy Alliance, 102, 103, 104, 117, 230 Hong Kong, 107

 

Hotel Lambert,  133

 

Hugo, Victor, poet, 254, 258, 259, 260, 265, 269, 308

 

Humboldt, Alexander von, scientist, 7, 273, 280

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, writer, 248

 

Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo, 265

 

Hungary, Hungarian, 12, 15, 16, 79, 80, 88n, 118, 124, 125, 126, 128, 133, 134, 136, 140, 143, 170, 254, 256, 267, 269, 280, 282, 306

 

Hunt, Henry, politician, 114 Hunyady Laszlo (1844), opera, 256n Hussey, Obed, inventor, 150 Hutton, James, geologist, 288

 

 

 

Iberian Peninsula, see Spain, Portugal Illyria, 14, 90, 91, 136, 143, 155

 

Illyrian National  Gazette,  136

 

India, Indian, 3, 7, 8, 26, 33, 34, 35, 55, 10«, 104, 107, 135, 139, 153, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 180, 198, 222, 224, 225, 265, 299, 303

Indian Ocean, 299

 

Indian (American); 13, 77, 121, 142,151, 164, 225, 267

 

Indian Mutiny, 109 Indian Ocean, 26, 223 Indiana, see United States Indonesia, 223, 224, 303 Indo-European, 286, 287

 

Industrial Revolution, 2, 14, Chapter 2 passim, 53, 163, Chapter g passim, 185, 213, 221, 241, 246, 248, 255, 259, 287, 292, 293, 298

 

Ingres, J.-D., artist, 255, 272

 

International, the, 130 Ionian Islands, 101

 

346

 

INDEX

 

 

Ireland, Irish, 10, II, 15, 17, 18, 24, 36, 38, 49» 54» 79» 80, ⁸2» “°> ^I12 » *23»

 

‘3⁶> ’38, 144″» «56, 164, 166, 170, 192, 203, 205, 214, 232, 274, 306, 307

 

Irish Melodies by T. Moore, 266 Irish Republican Brotherhood, 132 Iroquois, see Indians (American) Irvingites, 228

 

Islam, Islamic, 3, 4, 14, 25, 55, 139, 140, 142, 144, 198, 222-5, 3°3

 

Italy, Italian, 8, 9, u , 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 3°. ⁶3» ⁶ 5,73. 74» 78, 79» 8i, 82,83,84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 97, 102, 103, n o , i n ,

115,	116,	117,	118, 119,	120,	125,	126,
128,	129,	130,	133, 134,	136,	137, 141,

 

»43» 144» 152″» ’55. “57.158,159» 169» 171, 180, 181, 192, 229, 232, 253, 254, 255» 256, 257, 261, 269, 276, 280, 284

 

Iturbide, A., general, n o , 301 Ivanovo, 195

 

 

 

Jackson, Andrew, President of USA, 110, 302

 

Jacksonian Democrats, 39, 63, i n , 121 Jacobi, C. G. J., mathematician, 282 Jacobins, Jacobinism, 54, 62, 63, 64, 65,

 

67,68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 95, 100, 106, 109, 113, 114, 115, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129, 14’» >44» »54» «59» 183,210,211,212, 213, 214, 216, 218, 227, 230, 240, 247, 248, 252, 267, 268, 270, 273, 275» 279»

 

294» 3<>7

Jacquard, J. M., inventor, 30 Jamaica, 238

Japan, ign

Jardin des Planies, 294 Java War, 224

 

Jefferson, Thomas, statesman; Jeffer-sonianism, 63, 225, 227, 248

 

Jena and Auerstaedt, battle of, 86, 90, 250

 

Jews, Judaism, n , 12, 64, 134, 189, 196, 197» 219,232, 233, 259

Jones, Sir William, orientalist, 265, 286 Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, Josephin-

 

ian, 23, 24, 155, 157, 191, 194 Joule, James H., scientist, 279

Journal des Dibats, 184, 200, 272

 

Journal Jiir Reine und Angewandte Mathe-matik, 280

 

Jude, Martin, miners’ leader, 214 Junta, of Cadiz, 90

 

 

 

Kabylia, 161

Kalevala, 254, 266

Kane Ridge, Kentucky, 228

 

Kant, Immanuel, philosopher, 61, 78, 250, 251, 252, 287

 

Karajic, Vuk S., man of letters, 266 Karamzin, N. M., historian, 285 Kauffman, Angelica, painter, 262n Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir J., reformer, 204n Kazan, 280

 

Keats, John, poet, 260, 268 Kent, see England

 

Kepler, J., scientist, 295 Kiel, 135

 

Kierkegaard, Soren, philosopher, 230 Kinsky, I5n

Kirghiz, 108

 

Klopstock, F. G., poet, 78, 7gn Kolokotrones, T., Greek rebel, 91, 142 Kolowrat, Hapsburg minister, 143 Koenigsberg, 61, 250, 287

 

Kosmos by A. von Humboldt, 280 Kossovo, 140

 

Kossuth, Louis, Hungarian leader, 125 Kosziusko, T., Polish leader, 7gn Krefeld, 174

 

Krupp, 173 Kliblai Khan, 265 Kiigelgen, 93, 137

 

 

 

Lablache, L., singer, 184 Lachmann, K. C., scholar, 222

 

Laclos, P. A. F. Choderlos de, writer, 258

 

Lafayette, Marquis de, aristocrat and revolutionary, 68, 107

 

Lamarck, J.-B.-A. de M., Chevalier de, biologist, 287

Lamartine, A. de, poet, 254, 285, 292

 

 

347

 

INDEX

 

Lamennais, H.-F. R. de, religious writer, 113,238,269

 

Lancashire, 4,34, 35,4611, 122, 178, 179, 20711, 215, 305; see also England, Britain

 

Lancashire Co-operator, 208 Lancaster, Joseph, educationalist, 30 Laplace, P.-S., Marquis de, mathema-

 

tician and astronomer, 218, 287, 294 Lardner, Dionysius, technical writer, 96 Latin America, 7, 13, 14, 35, 46, 47, 52, 54.55.⁸ ^ >°°, ^{1 0} 3 . i°4> 109, no, 116, 121, 130, 141, 142, 143, 164, 170, 239,

 

301; see also under Countries Latter Day Saints, see Mormons Lavater, J. K., psychologist, 78

Lavoisier, A.-L., chemist, 30, 278, 281,

 

282, 294

Lawrence, Sir William, surgeon, 288,290 League of the Just, see Communist

 

League

League of Outlaws, see Communist League

Leatherstocking novels, 267

Leben Jesu by D. F. Strauss, 185, 222 Leblanc, N., chemist, 177

 

Lebrun, Mme Vigee, painter, 262n Leeds, 213

 

Leeds Mercury, 186 Leipzig, battle of, 87 Leith, 9

 

Lenau, N., poet, 269 Lenin, V. I., 75

 

Leningrad, see St Petersburg Leon, see Spain

Leopardi, G., poet, 254

Leopold I, King of the Belgians, 99 Lermontov, M. Y., poet, 267 Lesseps, F. de, engineer, 144 Levant, 77, »04, 106, 130, 141 Liberia, 225

 

Liberty, On, by J. S. Mill, 241 Libya, 139

 

Liberty on the Barricades by Delacroix, Liebig, J., chemist, 279

 

Liechtenstein, i5n, 89 Ltege, 29, 54

Lieven, Lady, 272

Life for the Tsar, A, by Glinka, 257 Liguria, see Italy

Ligurian Republic, see Italy Lille, 174, 189, 202

 

Lind, Jenny, singer, 190 Lingard, J., historian, 285 List, Frederick, economist, 180

 

Liszt, Franz, composer, 190, 255, 261, 269

Lithuania, 196

Liverpool, 19, 34,45,202n, 206,221,273 Livingstone, David, missionary and ex-

 

plorer, 223 Livonia, 155, 156

 

Lobachevsky, Nikolai I., mathematician, 280, 282

Locke, John, philosopher, 237

Lombardy, 11, 87,93, 125, 136, 173, 205 London, 9, 10, 11, 43.9⁶» ^l68» ’77. ’84.

 

185, 207, 211, 218, 253, 261, 279, 298 London General Omnibus Company,

 

177

London Mechanics Institution, 279 Lonnrot, E., scholar, 266

 

Louis XIV, King of France, 106, 245 Louis XVI, King of France, 55, 61, 65 Louis XVIII, King of France, 101 Louis Philippe, King of France, 124,232,

 

306, 307

Louisiana Purchase, 6gn, 301 Louvre, 257

 

Low Countries, 18, 79, 8i, 86, 155, 176, 184; see also Belgium, Holland

 

Lucania, see Italy Luddites, 39, 201 Luebeck, 90

 

Lunar Society, 21, 78, 187, 279, 281, 287 Luther, Martin, Lutheran, 189,201,221,

 

232

Lyell, C , geologist, 287

Lyons, 72, 122, 175, 200, 214, 216

Lyrical Ballads, 253, 260, 266

 

 

McAdam, J. Loudon, engineer, 30 McCormick, Cyrus, inventor, 150, 173 McCulloch, J. R., economist, 41,46,186,

 

263

Mackintosh, Sir James, political writer,

 

79*> Macedonia, 140

 

348

 

INDEX

 

 

Madeleine, la, 184, 361 Madison, James, statesman, “jgn Madras Board of Revenue, 162 Madrid, 10, 23

Magdeburg, 171

 

Magic Flute by Mozart, 58, 256 Magyar, see Hungary

 

Mahmoud II, Turkish Emperor, 105 Mahrattas, 107, 138, 139

 

Mainz, 81, 89 Maisons-Lafitte, 184

 

Maistre, Joseph de, political theorist, 247 Malta, 86, 101

 

Malthus, T.  R.,  economist,  4on,  163, 186, 199, 205, 206, 238, 284, 293 Manchester, 27, 32, 34, 40, 41, 45, 97,

 

124, 182, 185, i88n, 189, 195,202,206, a n , 221,299

Manchester Guardian, 186

Manchester Literary and  Philosophical

 

Society, 279, 281

Manchester Times, 186

 

Manchester in 1844 by L. Faucher, i88n Manchu (Ch’ing) dynasty, 25, 170 Manzoni, A., writer, 254, 269

 

Marat, J.-P., revolutionary, 63, 68 Marseille, 203, 204

Marseillaise, the, 141

 

Martinovics, Ignatius, revolutionary, 79 Marx,  Karl,  Marxism,  120,  127, 128, 130, 160, 169, 196, 197, 229, 232, 234, 243» 244» 248, 250, 251, 252, 262, 263, 267, 269, 270, 283, 285, 286, 290, 295

 

Masque of Anarchy by Shelley, 269 Massachusetts, see United States

Massacre at Chios, The, by Delacroix, 254,

 

260

Massacre in the Rue Transnonain by Dau-mier, 269

 

Master and Servant law, 50, 198 Maudsley, Henry, engineer, 273 Maupassant, G. de, writer, 183 Mayo, see Ireland

 

Mazzini, G., revolutionary; Mazzinians, 63, 120, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133, 248, 252

Mecca, 224

 

Mechanics Institutes, 187, 214, 279 Meckel, Johann, natural philosopher,

289

Mecklenburg, 93

 

Medina Sidonia, dukes of, 16 Mediterranean, 104, 109, 115, 134, 267,

302

 

Melincourt by T. L. Peacock, 253 Melville, Herman, author, 254, 267 Mendelssohn, Moses, reformer, 196 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, F., composer,

 

196, 255

Merimee, P., writer, 266

 

Methodists, 186, 215, 225, 227, 228, 229 Metternich, Prince C , statesman, 100,

107, 109, 113, 230,246

Mexico, 108, 110, 121, 142, 159, 301

 

Meyer’s Conversations Lexicon, 274 Meyerbeer, G., composer, 196 Michelangelo, artist and sculptor, 260 Michelet, Jules, historian, 214, 265, 269,

 

285

Mickiewicz, A., poet, 133, 254, 269 Middle East, 26, 100, 107; see also Levant Mignet, F.-A.-M., historian, 285

Milan, 126, 175

Mill, James, philosopher, 30, 114, 163,

 

i85n, 236, 239, 240, 241

Mill, John Stuart, philosopher, 185, 241, 252, 262, 290

 

Miller, William, Seventh Day Adventist, 228, 229

 

Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border by Scott, 266

 

Mirabeau, Comte G.-H. R. de, revolu-tionary, 60, 68

 

Missionary Societies, 223 Mississippi, 179

 

Moby Dick by H. Melville, 267 Moerike, E., poet, 254

Mohammed AIi, ruler of Egypt, 4, 106,

 

144, 180, 181, 224, 244 Moltere, J.-B.-P., playwright, 219 Molokans, 217, 226

 

Monge, G., mathematician, 278 Mongols, 91

 

Monroe Declaration, 104 Montenegro, 139, 140 Montpellier, 57

Monumenta Germaniae Historiae, 285

Moravia, 86, 143

Morike, Eduard, poet, 273 Mormons, 228

 

 

349

 

I N D E X

 

Morning Post, 53

 

Morocco, 144

 

Moscow, 87, 91 Moselle, see France

 

Mozart, W. A., composer, 58, 253, 255, 256, 258, 260

Mueller, Adam, writer, 230

 

Muette  de Portici,  La,  opera,  by  Auber,

 

256a Mughal, 26, 161

 

Mulhouse, 174, 189 Murat, J., soldier, 86 Muridism, see Islam

 

Musset, Alfred de, poet, 254, 260, 269

 

 

 

Naples, 9, 23, 81, 82, 90, 109, 125, 155,

 

• 57» ’59. “60, 222

 

Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France,

 

9,	11, 18, 35, 39, 40, 46, 48, 58, 65, 68,
69,7°, 73, 76,77» 7 8 , 8 2 , 8 5 , 8 6 , 8 7 , 8 8 ,
89, 91,92, 93,94, 96» 98, 99. I O ° ,								I 0 I >
103,		106,	109,	129,	137,	144,	156,	159,
176,		182, 189,		192, 217, 218, 223, 250,
251, 256, 259, 267, 268, 279, 286,								292
Napoleon HI, Emperor of France,  129,
198
Nash, John, architect, 261
Nasmyth, James, inventor,						168, 273
National Convention, French, 66, 68, 69,
70» 7>. 72. 77.				277
National Gallery, London,						257
National Guard, 62, 129
National  Holiday				and	Congress of the			Pro-

 

ductive Classes by William Benbow, 210

 

Natural History of Man by Lawrence, 287 Navarre, 59, 159, 160

 

Negro, 13, 69, 121, 208, 224 Nepal, 107

 

Neptunists, 287

 

Nerval, G. de, poet, 261

 

Nestroy, Johann N., playwright, 121, 254 Netherlands, see Holland

 

New Rheinische Zeitung, 128 New England, see United States New Harmony, 244

 

New Lanark Mills, 36

 

New View of Society by R. Owen, 242 New York, 10, 130, 228

Newman, J. H., cardinal, 231 Newport, 2i5n

 

Newton, Isaac, scientist, 249, 262, 277, 281, 294, 295

Ney, Marshal, soldier, 73, 86 Nicaragua, 222

 

Nicholas I, Tsar of Russia, 100, 130 Niebuhr, B. G., historian, 285 Niepce, J.-N., inventor, 177

 

Nijniy Novgorod, 171

 

Ninth Thermidor, Thermidorians, 72, 95

 

Nodier, Charles, writer, 258
Norfolk, see England
Norman Conquest, 243, 266, 291
Normandy, see France
Norse sagas, 254
North America,  1, 10, 26, 46, n o ,			121,
15′.	258
Northern Europe, 19, 167, 218, 254
North Sea, 19, 228
Northern Star,  Chartist  newspaper,			127,
215,	216
North-west Provinces, see India
Northumberland, see Britain
Norway,		101, 154, 169, 226, 280
Norwegian		Folk Tales,  266

 

Norwich, 207, 275

 

Nottingham,  207

 

Novalis, F. von, poet, 254, 258, 259, 264

 

Novum Testamentum by Lachmann, 222

 

 

 

Oberon by Weber, 254

 

O’Connell, Daniel, nationalist, 138 O’Connor, Feargus, Chartist, 138, 215,

 

216 Oddfellows, 2 i s n Odessa, 141

 

Oersted, Hans Christian, physicist, 281,

 

295

 

O’Higgins, Bernardo, revolutionary, n o Ohio, see United States

 

Oken, Lorenz, natural philosopher, 295 ‘Old Believers’, 195, 226

 

Olomouc,  143

 

Operative Builders’ Union, 211 Opium War, 107, 302

 

Oregon, see United States Orient, see Asia

 

350

 

I N D E X

 

Orthodox  Church,      104,  137,  140,  141,

 

142, 159, 226, 231

 

Ossian, 265

 

Owen,  Robert,  Socialist,  36,         114,  119,

 

122, 210, 213, 214, 221, 241, 242, 244,

 

263, 275

 

Oxford, 30, 279, 289

 

Oxford Movement, 231, 265

 

 

 

1. & O. Line, 107 Pacific, 8, 178, 223, 301 Padua, 177

 

Paganini, N., violinist, 190

 

Paine,  Thomas, pamphleteer,  54,  7gn,

 

114,	220,		229, 248,		275
Paisley, 207
Palacky, F., historian, 134, 285, 292
Palermo, 305, 307
Palmerston,			Viscount,			politician,			100,
107,	298
Palmyra, N.Y., 228
Pan Tadeusz by Mickiewicz, 254
Pander, C. H., scientist, 28gn
Pandurs,		14
Pangloss, Dr, 32, 238
Paraguay, n o ; see also						Argentine
Paris, 9,		10, 11, 54, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66,
67, 68, 69, 70, 72,					74,		n o ,	117,	124,
129,	130,		131,	133,	134,		168,	177,	183,
184,	197, 203, 210, 212, 213, 218, 260,
263,	276, 298, 307,				308
Paroles	d’un		Croyant by			Lamennais,			113,
232
Parsees,		143
Paul I, Tsar of Russia, 3O0n

 

Paul, Jean, writer, 254

 

Pauw, Cornelius de, Dutch scholar, 7gn Peacock, T . L., novelist, 2i4n, 253, 283 Peel, Sir Robert, politician, 185 Peloponnese, see Greece

 

Peninsular War, 87, 136 People’s Charter, see Chartists Pke Goriot by Balzac, 254

 

Pereire brothers, financiers, 173, 177, 197 Permanent Settlement, Bengal, 162, 163 Perthes, J. Boucher de, archaeologist, 287 Peronne, 10

 

Persia, 224, 225

Peru, n o ,  142, 164

 

Pestalozzi, J. H., educationalist, 78, 7gn Peterloo, 211, 269

Petoefi, S., poet, 254, 260, 269

 

Phalange, 244 Philhellene, see Greece Philike Hetairia, 141 Philippines, 303 Prenological Societies, 291 Physiocrats, 13, I4g, 250

 

Pickwick Papers by C. Dickens, 254 Piedmont, see Italy, Savoy

Pisa, 273

 

Pius IX, Pope, 119

 

Platen, Graf A. von, poet, 254 Plymouth, 9

Poe, Edgar Allan, writer, 254

 

Poland, Polish, 11, 14, 15, 16, 22, 65, 69, 73. 79, 80,84, 87, 90, 92, 101, 102, 107,

 

n o ,	115, 117,		118,	119, 120,		124,	125,
126,	128,	130,	133,	137,	143,	159,	180,
196, 254, 256,			269

 

Polish Democratic Society, 125
Polytechnique, see Ecole							Polytechnique
Pomerania,			10, 151
Pope, Papal, 81, 89, 137, 159, 191, 201,
232,	306,		308
Portugal,		10,		11, 26,		29,		35,	54,	79,	87,
89,	92,	n o ,		116,		117,		118, 123,			128,
129,	136,		142,		168,	170,		181, 224, 301,
303; see also Latin America
Potocki,J.,			15
Poznania,		126
Prague, 143, 197, 279
Praz, Mario, 262
Prentice, Archibald, journalist,  186
Presbyterian, 225, 227
Presse, La,		184

 

Prichard, J. C., physician and ethnolo-gist, 290

 

Priestley, Joseph, chemist, 21, 27, 78, 7gn, 187, 281

 

Primitive Methodists, see Methodists

 

Principles of Geology by Lyell, 287 Principles of Political Economy by Ricardo,

 

237, 238

 

Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 280

 

Proceedings of the Royal Society, 280 Promessi Sposi by Manzoni, 254

 

351

 

I N D E X

 

Protestant, 138, 152, 186, «04, 219, 220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 231, 232, 275 Prussia, 12, 30, 56, 73,80, 85, 86, 88,90, 100, 101, 102, 106, 119. 126, 135, 151, 153. ’56. ’58, 167, 169, 174, 175, 176, 204, 205, 230, 231, 250, 251, 279, 306

 

Public Record Office, 285 Pugin, A. W. N., architect, 265 Purkinje, J. E., physiologist, 289

 

Pushkin, A. S., poet, 253, 254, 256

 

 

 

Quakers, 30, 124, 186, 225, 227, 305

 

Quarterly Review, 287 Quartier Latin, see Paris

 

Queen of Spades by Pushkin, 254 Quesnay, F., economist, 30 Quetelet, L.-A.-J., statistician, 284

 

 

Rachel, actress, 196

 

Radcliffe, Mrs A., novelist, 262n Radetzky, J. von, soldier, 125 Radziwills, 15

Ragusa, see Illyria

 

Raimund, Ferdinand, playwright, 121 Rajputs, 107

Ranke, Leopold von, historian, 285 Rawlinson, Sir H. L., soldier, 286

Recamier, Portrait of Madame, by J.-L. David, 254

Recherches sur les ossemensfossiles by Cuvier,

 

287
Red Indian, see Indian (American)
Reform	Act	(1832), n o ,			113, 119,	122,
123, 211,		276
Reform Club, 184
Reformation, 2, 246, 249, 265
Republicans,  Republic,  39, 66, 67,  68,
70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 8on,					8 i n , 82,	114,
159» 2’9»		3<J7
Requiem by Berlioz,			254
Restoration,		114, 117,		118,	119, 120,	123,
183,	184,	268
Reuter, Fritz, writer,				93
Revolution passim,			but especially Chap-
ter 3, Chapter 6,			Chapter 15. See			also
under Austria, Belgium,					France,  Ger-

 

many,			Greece,			Hungary,			Ireland,
Italy,			Latin			America,			Poland,
Rumania,				Russia, Spain, Switzerland
Revolutions of 1820-1, 109-10,  115-16,
140-2
Revolutions				of	1830,  101,				104,	107,
I I O – I I ,			and		Chapter			6 passim,		n o ,
123,		240
Revolutions of 1848, 100, 106, 108, 109,
112,		118,		120,	124,		125,	126,	128,	130,
131, 212, 261, 289,							292
Revolution, American (1776), 2, 25, 55n,
58,	210,		220,		227,		265
Revolution, Belgian						(1830), 2560
Revolution, English						(1688), 2, 220

 

Revolution, French (1789-99), 2, 4, 8, 16,18, 2 1 , 2 3 , 2 5 , 2 9 , 30,51, Chapter 3

 

passim,		55, 77,		78, 7gn, 80, 84, 85, 86,
88,	89,	i n ,  112,			113,	120,	123,	125,
127,	135,		140,	144,	153,	154,	155,	156,
«59. ’64,			172,	176,	182,	183,	184,	191,
»95» 209, 210, 213, 220, 227, 229, 231,
«37. 240.			25<>> 255, 256, 258, 259, 261,
264,	265, 267, 268, 269, 272, 278,							279,
287, 292, 293, 299, 303, 305,							307
Revolution, Spanish,					109,	110

 

Revolutions de France et de Brabant, Les, by Camille Desmoulins, 81

 

Reynolds, Sir J., painter, 258 Rhigas, K., revolutionary, 79

Rhine, Rhincland, 79, 81, 82, 86, 87, 90, I O I , 102, 104, 117, 128, 155, 176, 189, 264

 

Ribbonmen, Irish Secret Society, 123

 

Ricardo, David, economist, 163, 205, 237, 238, 239, 242, 252

 

Riemann, G. F. B., mathematician, 282, 283

 

Riga, 289

 

Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, 79, 221 Robespierre, Maximilien, revolutionary, 3,  11, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 80,

 

113, 178,219, 248, 259 Rochdale, 122, 206, 215 Rodney, Admiral G. B., 215

 

Rodrigues, Olinde, Saint-Simonian, 197 Roland, Madame, 68

 

Romagna, see Italy

 

Romantics, Romanticism, 120, 230 – 1, 245-6, 248, Chapter 14 passim

 

35²

I N D E X

 

Rome, Roman, 8, 15, 44, 64, 82, 84, 219, 220, 222, 223, 231, 232, 259, 303, 30411, 305

Ronda, 276

 

Rosa, Salvator, painter, 260 Rosmini, A., Catholic writer, 232 Rossini, G., composer, 255, 261

Rothschild, Meyer Amschel, financier,

 

96

Rothschild, Nathan M., financier, 96 Rothschilds, financiers, 96, 196, 206, 271,

274, 300 Roubaix, 207 Rouen, 174, 273

 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, writer, 70, 71, 75, 80, 219, 243, 247, 248, 251, 252, 258, 259. 267, 294

 

Roy, Ram Mohan, reformer, 54 Royal Institution, 279

Royal Society, 279

Royton Temperance Seminary, 202 Ruhr, 173; see also Berg, Grand Duchy of Rumania, 12, 112, 124, 136, 141, 153 Rumford, Count Benjamin, 279

 

Ruskin, John, writer, 269, 273 Russell, Bertrand, philosopher, 295 Russia, 11, 14, 15, 18, 25, 29, 31, 44, 54,

 

73. 79» 80,82,84,85,86,87,90,93,95,

 

99, IOO, IOI, 102, 104, I05, 106, 108, n o , 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 125, 130,

 

’33. ’34. 135» ’36, 137. «39. >4>> “43. 149, i52n, 153, is6n, 159, 164, 169, 171, 172, 179, 180, 181, 192, 193, 195, 202, 217, 224, 226, 230, 231, 254, 255, 256, 269, 270, 282, 285, 297, 299, 300, 303> 3°5) 306; see also Caucasus, Fin-land, Poland

 

Russian Revolution (1917), 54, 183 Rutland, see England

Ryotwari system, 162

 

 

 

Sahara, 224

 

St Andri, Jeanbon, Jacobin, 68 Saint-Just, L. A. L. de, Jacobin, 3, 7,

 

53. 68, 70, 71, 72. 77. «’3. “23, 241 St Ouen, 273

St Petersburg, 23, 171, 184, 203, 261, 280, 289

Saint-Quentin, 11

Saint-Simon, Count Claude de, political writer; Saint-Simonians, 43, 122, 144, 177. “97. 219, 220, 241, 244, 262, 263, 269, 274, 284, 285n, 304

 

Saliceti, A. L., Jacobin, 82 Sallust, 219

Salzburg, 89

San Domingo, 69, 89, 200

 

San Martin, J. J., revolutionary, 110,142 Sand, George, novelist, 262 Sansculottes, 63, 64, 66, 67, 6g, 70, 71,

 

72, 113, 213, 220

 

Savigny, F. K. von, lawyer, 285

Savoy, 23, 79, 86, 90, 119, 120; see also Piedmont, Italy

Saxon, Saxony, 15, 29, 33, 36, 85, 87, 93,

 

102, 137, 174

 

Say, J. B., economist, 239, 242 Scandinavia, n , 14, 79,87, 90, 118, 127,

 

128, 130, 136, 158, 168, 176, 177, 180, 181, 192, 256, 306; see also Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden

 

Scheldt, River, 101

Schelling, F. W. J., philosopher, 250, 295 Schiller, F., poet, 78, 79n, 9gn, 250, 254 Schinderhannes, German brigand, 197 Schinkel, K. F., architect, 261, 273 Schlegel, A. W., writer, 260

 

Schleiden, M., biologist, 282 Schleswig-Holstein, 135

 

Schmerling, A. de, archaeologist, 288 Schoenborn, I5n

 

Schubert, F., composer, 253, 254, 255, 260, 264

 

Schumann, R., composer, 254, 255, 273 Schwann, T., biologist, 282 Schwarzenberg, 15a

 

Scotland, 11, 30, 79, 150, 167, 214, 226, 265, 273; see also Britain

Scott, Sir Walter, novelist, 254, 264, 266,

 

300

 

Seasons, The, by Haydn, 254 Sedlnitzky, J. Graf, Hapsburg minister,

 

’43

 

Seine Inferieure, see France Senegal, 223

 

Sentimental Education by Flaubert, 270 Senussi, 224

Seraing, 174

 

353

 

								INDEX
Serbs, Serbia, 105, 140, 266, 301									>52n, 155,157,158,159,164,170,177,
Seven Years’ War, 25									180, 181, 189, 192, 194, 230, 255, 266,
Seventh Day Adventists, 298, 229									269, 276, 299, 303; see also Revolution
Seville, 9									Spanish Republic (1931-9), 71, 78, 116
Shakespeare, William, playwright, 234,									Speenhamland System, 48, 167, 201
259									Spithead, 79
Shamyl, Caucasian leader, 139, 224									Stael, Madame A.-L.-G. de, writer, 262n
Sheffield, 206, 212, 221									Staffordshire, see England
Shelley, P. B., poet, 259, 260, 268, 26gn,									Statists, 81
270									Stendhal,  H. Beyle, writer,  183, 255,
Sicily,	7,	9,	15,	17,	101,	153,	155,	157,	261
158, 899, 308									Stephenson, George, engineer, 44, 187,
Sidi  Mohammed  ben Alt  el  Senussi,									278
prophet, 224									Stewart, Dugald, philosopher, 274
Sierra Leone, 225									Stockholm, 23, 279
Sieyes, Abbe, E.-J., politician, 59									Stockton-Darlington Railway, 44
Sikhs, 107, 139									Strassburg, 9, 72
Silesia, 37n, 175, 176, 200, 205, 307									Strauss, David F., theologian, 222, 285
Simon, Sir J., medical reformer, 20411									Sturge, Joseph, Quaker, 124
Sind, 107									Sudan, 223, 224
Singapore, 107, 303									Suez, 107, 144, 274
Sismondi, C.-L.-S.  de, economist  and									Suvorov, general, 85
historian, 4On1 242, 285									Sweden, 10, 14, 16, 92, 101, 154, 155,
Skanderbeg, Albanian hero, 139									169, 174, 266, 285
Skoptsi, 226									Swedenborgians, 214
Slav,	12,	105, 118,			124,	’26,	«36,	140,	Switzerland, 78, 79, 81, 82, 86, 96, n o ,
143, «89									112, 117, 118, 127, 128, 130, 136, 137,
									155, 160, 168, 205, 280, 284, 285, 302,
Slovenia, 14, 143, 155; see also Illyria
									308
Smiles, Samuel, publicist,						186,	187, 202
									Sydney, 298
Smith, Adam, economist,						30, 237, 238,
									Syria, 86, 91, 224
239, 240, 243, 250, 252
									Systhne de la Nature by d’Holbach, 236
Smith, Joseph, founder of Mormons, 228
									Szechenyi, Count, 133
Smith, William, engineer, 287
Socialism, Chapter 11 passim, 241-5,299,
304-5; see also Communism, St Simon,
Utopia
SociiU Generate				pour /avoriser			VIndustrie Tableau de Vital physique et  moral des
Rationale des Pays Bas, 176, 177									ouoriers by Villermi, 27
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Know-									Tahiti, 267
ledge, 274									Taiping, 109, 225
South Africa, 49, 223									Talleyrand, Prince C. M., diplomat, 100,
Southern Europe, 13, 18, 100, 155, 158,									183, 184
180, 191, 247									Talma, actor, 184
Southey, R., poet, 78, 267									Tartary, 14, 200
Soyer, Alexis, chef, 184									Taylor, Edward, journalist, 186
Spa Fields, 211									Tecumseh, Indian chief, 225
Spain, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 24, 26, 27,									Tegner, E., scholar, 266
35» 54» 79» 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88n, 90,									Teignmouth, Lord, 162
9’» 92,93,103,109,110,112,113, 116,									Telford, Thomas, engineer, 30, 78
117, 118, 123, 128, 129, 136, 137, 142,									Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, poet, 269

 

354

 

INDEX

Terror, the, 67-72,

79; see also French

Unitarians,

186, 227

Revolution

United Irishmen, see Ireland

Teutons, 243, 287, 291

United Kingdom, see Britain

Thackeray, W. M., novelist, 255

United Provinces, see Holland

Thackrah, C. T., doctor, 204n

United States of America, 13, 14, 19, 24,

Theory of the Earth by J . Hutton, 288

25» 27» 33» 35» 36, 39n» 4°. 44» 49» 52»

Thierry, Augustin, historian, 285, 291

54» 63, 69n, 77, 78, 98, 103, 106, 108,

Thiers, L.-A., historian and politician,

n o , H I ,

114, 121, 127, 136, 137, 138,

285

>5°» 151» 153» ’54. «67> l68 » l 6 9 , 170»

Third Estate, 58, 60, 61

171, 172, 173, 175, 178, 179, 180, 181,

Third Republic, see France

184, 189, 191, 192, 194, 201, 220, 225,

Tilak, B. G., Indian nationalist,

i3gn

226, 227, 228, 240, 242, 244, 247, 254,

Tilsit, Treaty of, 87

271, 273, 275, 279, 290, 298, 299, 300,

Thirty Years’ War, 92

301, 302, 303, 304, 305

Tocqueville, Alexis de, writer,

27,

m ,

United States of Latin America, see Latin

240, 303

America

Tolpuddle Martyrs,

119, 211

Universities,

135, 136, 250, Chapter 15

Tolstoi, Count L. N., writer, 255

passim, 278-9

Tory,

i n ,

185, 227, 245, 259, 281, 287

Unikar Skelessi, Treaty of, 105

Tour de France, 11

Urals, 108

Tours in England and Wales by

Arthur

Uranus, planet, 277

Young, 27

Ure, Dr Andrew, publicist, 289

Toussaint-Louverture, revolutionary, 69

Uruguay,  n o

Trafalgar,

battle of,

281

USSR, see Russia

Traite Elementaire de Chimie by

Lavoisier,

Utah, see United States

281

Utilitarian,

1,

235-6,  302;  see also

Treves, 89

Bentham

Trieste, 14, 143

Uttar Pradesh, see India

Tripoli, 224

Tuebingen, 222

Turgenev, I. S., novelist, 255

Turgot, A.-R.-J., economist, 30, 55

Valladolid, 10

Turkish Empire, 4, 11, 14, 25, 54, 55, 87,

Valmy, cannonade of, 66

90,

100,

101, 104,

105,

106,

118, 125,

Varennes, 64

139, 140, 144, 153, 181, 224; see also

Vendee, see France

Balkans,

Bulgaria,  Bosnia,

Egypt,

Venezuela, n o ,

142, 143

Greece, Rumania,

Serbia

Venice, 11, 89, 102, 177

Turner, J. M. W., painter, 255

Veracruz, 10

Tuscany, see Italy

Verdi, G., composer, 253, 255, 256a, 269

Tyneside, 44

Vergennes, C. G., Comte de, statesman,

Tyrol, 82, 83, 88n,

159, 160, 230

9′

Vergniaud, P. V., Girondin, 68

Verona, 177

Udolpho, Castle of, by Mrs Radcliffe,

273

Victoria, Queen, 67, 99, 169, 187

Vienna, 15, 80, 121, 130, 133, 136, 141,

Uhland, L., poet, 269

184, I97n, 218, 276, 279

Ukraine, 104, 124, 159, 179, 226

Vigny, Alfred de, poet, 77, 254

Ulster, see Ireland

Villerm6, L. R., social investigator, 27,

Umbria, see Italy

198, 204

Uniate Church, 159

Virgin of Guadalupe, 142, 159

 

 

355

 

INDEX

 

Vitkovice, 173

Volga, River, 14

 

Volta, Count A., scientist, 381 Voltaire, F.-M. A. de, writer, 32, 248,

 

873. «94

Vonckists, Belgian party, 81

 

 

 

Wade, J., writer, 242

Wagner, Richard, composer, 253, 255, 256, 261

 

Wagram, battle of, 87 Wahhabi, see Bedouin

 

Wales, 150, 178, 190, 204, 225, 228, 291 Wallenstein trilogy, by F. Schiller, 25on Warsaw, Grand Duchy of, 90 Washington, George, American Pre-

sident, 79n, 215

 

Waterloo, battle of, 43, 87, 94, 209, 252, 258

 

Watt, James, inventor, 21, 27, 30, 78n, 187, 2g8n

 

Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, 237 Weber, K. M. von, composer, 254, 264 Wedgwood, Josiah, industrialist, 20, 21,

187, 273

 

Wedgwood, Thomas, 187 Weerth, G., poet, 26gn Weimar, 175, 272

 

Weitling, W., communist, 220 Wellington, Duke of, general, 184, 185 Wesley, John, 227, 119, 223, 225, 226,

228; see also Methodists

 

West Indies, 34, 55, 77, 96, 108, 299 Western Europe, 7, 8, 13, 14; 15, 16, 19,

 

24,85,88,100, i n , i2i, 123,124,141, 142, 144, 152, 166, 168, 173, 180, 181, 196, 224, 225, 247, 249, 252, 275, 280, 301, 302, 305, 306, 307

Westphalia, kingdom of, 82, 90 Wheatstone, Sir C., inventor, 298 Whigs, 78, 79, ” I , 138, 259, 265, 292 Whiteboys, Irish secret society, 123 Wieland, C. M., poet, 78 Wilberforce, W., reformer, 7gn, 220 Wilkinson, John, ironmaster, 78

 

William I, King of the United Nether-lands, 176

 

Williams, David, reformer, 79n Wilson, Harriete, courtesan, 185, 272 Wingate, Indian Civil Servant, 162 Woehler, F., scientist, 282 Wordsworth, William, poet, 78, 253, 254,

 

259, 266, 267 Workingmen’s Party, 121 Wurtemberg, 85 Wiltshire, set England

 

 

 

Yorkshire, see Britain

Young, Arthur, agriculturist, 27, 49 Young Europe, 120, 129, 132 Young, G. M., 187

 

Young Germany, see Germany Young Hegelians, see Hegel Young Italy, see Italy

 

Young Poland, see Poland

Young Scandinavia, see Scandinavia Yugoslavia, 140

 

 

 

Zagreb, 136

Zanzibar, 178

 

Zoonomia (1794) by E. Darwin, 287 Zoroastrianism, 225

Zurich, 86, 279

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

356

Understanding Jewish Influence II: Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism

http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/UnderstandJI-2.htm

Understanding Jewish Influence II:

Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism

Kevin MacDonald

---

The history of Zionism illustrates a dynamic within the Jewish community in which the most radical elements end up pulling the entire community in their direction. Zionism began among the most ethnocentric Eastern European Jews and had explicitly racialist and nationalist overtones. However, Zionism was viewed as dangerous among the wider Jewish community, especially the partially assimilated Jews in Western countries, because it opened Jews up to charges of disloyalty and because the Zionists’ open racialism and ethnocentric nationalism conflicted with the assimilationist strategy then dominant among Western Jews. Zionist activists eventually succeeded in making Zionism a mainstream Jewish movement, due in large part to the sheer force of numbers of the Eastern European vanguard. Over time, the more militant, expansionist Zionists (the Jabotinskyists, the Likud Party, fundamentalists, and West Bank settlers) have won the day and have continued to push for territorial expansion within Israel. This has led to conflicts with Palestinians and a widespread belief among Jews that Israel itself is threatened. The result has been a heightened group consciousness among Jews and ultimately support for Zionist extremism among the entire organized American Jewish community.

In the first part of this series I discussed Jewish ethnocentrism as a central trait influencing the success of Jewish activism.¹ In the contemporary world, the most important example of Jewish ethnocentrism and extremism is Zionism. In fact, Zionism is incredibly important. As of this writing, the United States has recently accomplished the destruction of the Iraqi regime, and it is common among influential Jews to advocate war between the United States and the entire Muslim world. In a recent issue of Commentary (an influential journal published by the American Jewish Committee), editor Norman Podhoretz states, “The regimes that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced are not confined to the three singled-out members of the axis of evil [i.e., Iraq, Iran, and North Korea]. At a minimum, the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as ’friends’ of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen.”² More than anything else, this is a list of countries that Israel doesn’t like, and, as I discuss in the third part of this series, intensely committed Zionists with close links to Israel occupy prominent positions in the Bush administration, especially in the Department of Defense and on the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. The long-term consequence of Zionism is that the U.S. is on the verge of attempting to completely transform the Arab/Muslim world to produce governments that accept Israel and whatever fate it decides for the Palestinians, and, quite possibly, to set the stage for further Israeli expansionism.

Zionism is an example of an important principle in Jewish history: At all the turning points, it is the more ethnocentric elements—one might term them the radicals—who have determined the direction of the Jewish community and eventually won the day.³ As recounted in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jews who returned to Israel after the Babylonian captivity energetically rid the community of those who had intermarried with the racially impure remnant left behind. Later, during the period of Greek dominance, there was a struggle between the pro-Greek assimilationists and the more committed Jews, who came to be known as Maccabeans.

At that time there appeared in Israel a group of renegade Jews, who incited the people. “Let us enter into a covenant with the Gentiles round about,” they said, “because disaster upon disaster has overtaken us since we segregated ourselves from them.” The people thought this a good argument, and some of them in their enthusiasm went to the king and received authority to introduce non-Jewish laws and customs. They built a sports stadium in the gentile style in Jerusalem. They removed their marks of circumcision and repudiated the holy covenant. They intermarried with Gentiles, and abandoned themselves to evil ways.⁴

The victory of the Maccabeans reestablished Jewish law and put an end to assimilation. The Book of Jubilees, written during this period, represents the epitome of ancient Jewish nationalism, in which God represents the national interests of the Jewish people in dominating all other peoples of the world:

I am the God who created heaven and earth. I shall increase you, and multiply you exceedingly; and kings shall come from you and shall rule wherever the foot of the sons of man has trodden. I shall give to your seed all the earth which is under heaven, and they shall rule over all the nations according to their desire; and afterwards they shall draw the whole earth to themselves and shall inherit it forever.⁵

A corollary of this is that throughout history in times of trouble there has been an upsurge in religious fundamentalism, mysticism, and messianism.⁶  For example, during the 1930s in Germany liberal Reform Jews became more conscious of their Jewish identity, increased their attendance at synagogue, and returned to more traditional observance (including a reintroduction of Hebrew). Many of them became Zionists.⁷As I will discuss in the following, every crisis in Israel has resulted in an increase in Jewish identity and intense mobilization of support for Israel.

Today the people who are being rooted out of the Jewish community are Jews living in the Diaspora who do not support the aims of the Likud Party in Israel. The overall argument here is that Zionism is an example of the trajectory of Jewish radicalism. The radical movement begins among the more committed segments of the Jewish community, then spreads and eventually becomes mainstream within the Jewish community; then the most extreme continue to push the envelope (e.g., the settlement movement on the West Bank), and other Jews eventually follow because the more extreme positions come to define the essence of Jewish identity. An important part of the dynamic is that Jewish radicalism tends to result in conflicts with non-Jews, with the result that Jews feel threatened, become more group-oriented, and close ranks against the enemy—an enemy seen as irrationally and incomprehensibly anti-Jewish. Jews who fail to go along with what is now a mainstream position are pushed out of the community, labeled “self-hating Jews” or worse, and relegated to impotence.

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Table 1:

Jewish Radicals Eventually Triumph within the

Jewish Community: The Case of Zionism

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1. Zionism began among the more ethnocentric, committed segments of the Jewish community (1880s).
2. Then it spread and became mainstream within the Jewish community despite its riskiness. (1940s). Supporting Zionism comes to define what being Jewish is.
3. Then the most extreme among the Zionists continued to push the envelope (e.g., the settlement movement on the West Bank; constant pressure on border areas in Israel).
4. Jewish radicalism tends to result in conflicts with non-Jews (e.g., the settlement movement); violence (e.g., intifadas) and other expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment increase.
5. Jews in general feel threatened and close ranks against what they see as yet another violent, incomprehensible manifestation of the eternally violent hatred of Jews. This reaction is the result of psychological mechanisms of ethnocentrism: Moral particularism, self-deception, and social identity.
6. In the U.S., this effect is accentuated because committed, more intensely ethnocentric Jews dominate Jewish activist groups.
7. Jews who fail to go along with what is now a mainstream position are pushed out of the community, labeled “self-hating Jews” or worse, and relegated to impotence.

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Origins of Zionism in Ethnic Conflict in Eastern Europe

The origins of Zionism and other manifestations of the intense Jewish dynamism of the twentieth century lie in the Yiddish-speaking world of Eastern Europe in the early nineteenth century. Originally invited in by nobles as estate managers, toll farmers, bankers, and moneylenders, Jews in Poland expanded into commerce and then into artisanry, so that there came to be competition between Jews and non-Jewish butchers, bakers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, and tailors. This produced the typical resource-based anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior so common throughout Jewish history.⁸ Despite periodic restrictions and outbursts of hostility, Jews came to dominate the entire economy apart from agricultural labor and the nobility. Jews had an advantage in the competition in trade and artisanry because they were able to control the trade in raw materials and sell at lower prices to coethnics.⁹

This increasing economic domination went along with a great increase in the population of Jews. Jews not only made up large percentages of urban populations, they increasingly migrated to small towns and rural areas. In short, Jews had overshot their economic niche: The economy was unable to support this burgeoning Jewish population in the sorts of positions that Jews had traditionally filled, with the result that a large percentage of the Jewish population became mired in poverty. The result was a cauldron of ethnic hostility, with the government placing various restrictions on Jewish economic activity; rampant anti-Jewish attitudes; and increasing Jewish desperation.

The main Jewish response to this situation was an upsurge of fundamentalist extremism that coalesced in the Hasidic movement and, later in the nineteenth century, into political radicalism and Zionism as solutions to Jewish problems. Jewish populations in Eastern Europe had the highest rate of natural increase of any European population in the nineteenth century, with a natural increase of 120,000 per year in the 1880s and an overall increase within the Russian Empire from one to six million in the course of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Anti-Semitism and the exploding Jewish population, combined with economic adversity, were of critical importance for producing the sheer numbers of disaffected Jews who dreamed of deliverance in various messianic movements—the ethnocentric mysticism of the Kabbala, Zionism, or the dream of a Marxist political revolution.

Religious fanaticism and messianic expectations have been a typical Jewish response to hard times throughout history.¹¹ For example, in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire there was “an unmistakable picture of grinding poverty, ignorance, and insecurity”¹² among Jews that, in the context of high levels of anti-Semitism, effectively prevented Jewish upward mobility. These phenomena were accompanied by the prevalence of mysticism and a high fertility rate among Jews, which doubtlessly exacerbated the problems.

The Jewish population explosion in Eastern Europe in the context of poverty and politically imposed restrictions on Jews was responsible for the generally destabilizing effects of Jewish radicalism in Eastern Europe and Russia up to the revolution. These conditions also had spillover effects in Germany, where the negative attitudes toward the immigrant Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) and their foreign, clannish ways contributed to the anti-Semitism of the period.¹³ In the United States, radical political beliefs held by a great many Jewish immigrants and their descendants persisted even in the absence of difficult economic and political conditions and have had a decisive influence on U.S. political and cultural history into the present. The persistence of these beliefs influenced the general political sensibility of the Jewish community and has had a destabilizing effect on American society, ranging from the paranoia of the McCarthy era to the triumph of the 1960s countercultural revolution.¹⁴ In the contemporary world, the descendants of these religious fundamentalists constitute the core of the settler movement and other manifestations of Zionist extremism in Israel.

The hypothesis pursued here is that Jewish population dynamics beginning in the nineteenth century resulted in a feed-forward dynamic: Increasing success in economic competition led to increased population. This in turn led to anti-Jewish reactions and eventually to Jewish overpopulation, poverty, anti-Jewish hostility, and religious fanaticism as a response to external threat. In this regard, Jewish populations are quite the opposite of European populations, in which there is a long history of curtailing reproduction in the face of perceived scarcity of resources.¹⁵ This may be analyzed in terms of the individualism/collectivism dimension, which provides a general contrast between Jewish and European culture:¹⁶ Individualists curtail reproduction in response to adversity in order to better their own lives, whereas a group-oriented culture such as Judaism responds to adversity by strengthening group ties; forming groups with charismatic leaders and a strong sense of ingroup and outgroup; adopting mystical, messianic ideologies; and increasing their fertility—all of which lead to greater conflict.

There is an association between religious or ethnic fanaticism and fertility, and it is quite common for competing ethnic groups to increase their fertility in response to perceived external threats.¹⁷ Ethnic activists respond to the perceived need to increase the numbers of their group in several ways, including exhorting coethnics to reproduce early and often, banning birth control and abortions, curtailing female employment in order to free women for the task of reproducing, and providing financial incentives. In the contemporary world, Jewish activists both within Israel and in the Diaspora have been strong advocates of increasing Jewish fertility, motivated by the threat of intermarriage in the Diaspora, the threat of wars with Israel’s neighbors, and as a reaction to Jewish population losses stemming from the Holocaust. Pro-natalism has deep religious significance for Jews as a religious commandment.¹⁸ Within Israel, there is “a nationwide obsession with fertility,” as indicated by the highest rate of in-vitro fertilization clinics in the world—one for every 28,000 citizens. This is more than matched by the Palestinians. Originating in the same group-oriented, collectivist culture area as the Jews, the Palestinians have the highest birth rate in the world and have been strongly attracted to charismatic leaders, messianic religious ideology, and desperate, suicidal solutions for their political problems.¹⁹

For the Jews, the religious fundamentalism characteristic of Eastern Europe from around 1800–1940 has been a demographic wellspring for Judaism. Jewish populations in the West have tended to have low fertility. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Western Jewish populations would have stagnated or declined in the absence of “the unending stream of immigrants from Jewish communities in the East.”²⁰ But the point here is that this demographic wellspring created the stresses and strains within this very talented and energetic population that continue to reverberate in the modern world.

These trends can be seen by describing the numerically dominant Hasidic population in early nineteenth-century Galicia, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire; similar phenomena occurred throughout the Yiddish-speaking, religiously fundamentalist culture area of Eastern Europe, most of which came to be governed by the Russian empire.²¹ Beginning in the late eighteenth century, there were increasing restrictions on Jewish economic activity, such as edicts preventing Jews from operating taverns, engaging in trade, and leasing mills. There were restrictions on where Jews could live, and ghettos were established in order to remove Jews from competition with non-Jews; taxes specific to Jews were imposed; there were government efforts to force Jewish assimilation, as by requiring the legal documents be in the German language. These laws, even though often little enforced, reflected the anti-Jewish animosity of wider society and undoubtedly increased Jewish insecurity. In any case, a large percentage of the Jewish population was impoverished and doubtless would have remained so even in the absence of anti-Jewish attitudes and legislation. Indeed, the emigration of well over three million Jews to Western Europe and the New World did little to ease the grinding poverty of a large majority of the Jewish population.

It was in this atmosphere that Hasidism rose to dominance in Eastern Europe. The Hasidim passionately rejected all the assimilatory pressures coming from the government. They so cherished the Yiddish language that well into the twentieth century the vast majority of Eastern European Jews could not speak the languages of the non-Jews living around them.²² They turned to the Kabbala (the writings of Jewish mystics), superstition, and anti-rationalism, believing in “magical remedies, amulets, exorcisms, demonic possession (dybbuks), ghosts, devils, and teasing, mischievous genies.”²³Corresponding to this intense ingroup feeling were attitudes that non-Jews were less than human. “As Mendel of Rymanów put it, ‘A Gentile does not have a heart, although he has an organ that resembles a heart.’ ”²⁴ All nations exist only by virtue of the Jewish people: “Erez Yisreal [the land of Israel] is the essence of the world and all vitality stems from it.”²⁵ Similar attitudes are common among contemporary Jewish fundamentalists and the settler movement in Israel.²⁶

The Hasidim had an attitude of absolute faith in the person of the zaddic, their rebbe, who was a charismatic figure seen by his followers literally as the personification of God in the world. Attraction to charismatic leaders is a fundamental feature of Jewish social organization—apparent as much among religious fundamentalists as among Jewish political radicals or elite Jewish intellectuals.²⁷ The following account of a scene at a synagogue in Galicia in 1903 describes the intense emotionality of the community and its total subordination to its leader:

There were no benches, and several thousand Jews were standing closely packed together, swaying in prayer like the corn in the wind. When the rabbi appeared the service began. Everybody tried to get as close to him as possible. The rabbi led the prayers in a thin, weeping voice. It seemed to arouse a sort of ecstasy in the listeners. They closed their eyes, violently swaying. The loud praying sounded like a gale. Anyone seeing these Jews in prayer would have concluded that they were the most religious people on earth.²⁸

At the end of the service, those closest to the rabbi were intensely eager to eat any food touched by him, and the fish bones were preserved by his followers as relics. Another account notes that “devotees hoping to catch a spark from this holy fire run to receive him.”²⁹ The power of the zaddic extends so far “that whatever God does, it is also within the capacity of the zaddic to do.”³⁰

An important role for the zaddic is to produce wealth for the Jews, and by taking it from the non-Jews. According to Hasidic doctrine, the non-Jews have the preponderance of good things, but

It was the zaddic who was to reverse this situation. Indeed, R. Meir of Opatów never wearied of reiterating in his homilies that the zaddik must direct his prayer in a way that the abundance which he draws down from on high should not be squandered during its descent, and not “wander away,” that is, outside, to the Gentiles, but that it mainly reach the Jews, the holy people, with only a residue flowing to the Gentiles, who are “the other side” (Satan’s camp).³¹

The zaddics’ sermons were filled with pleas for vengeance and hatred toward the non-Jews, who were seen as the source of their problems.

These groups were highly authoritarian—another fundamental feature of Jewish social organization.³² Rabbis and other elite members of the community had extraordinary power over other Jews in traditional societies—literally the power of life and death. Jews who informed the authorities about the illegal activities of other Jews were liquidated on orders of secret rabbinical courts, with no opportunity to defend themselves. Jews accused of heretical religious views were beaten or murdered. Their books were burned or buried in cemeteries. When a heretic died, his body was beaten by a special burial committee, placed in a cart filled with dung, and deposited outside the Jewish cemetery. In places where the authorities were lax, there were often pitched battles between different Jewish sects, often over trivial religious points such as what kind of shoes a person should wear. In 1838 the governor of southwestern Russia issued a directive that the police keep tabs on synagogues because “Very often something happens that leaves dead Jews in its wake.”³³ Synagogues had jails near the entrance, and prisoners were physically abused by the congregation as they filed in for services.

Not surprisingly, these groups had extraordinary solidarity; a government official observed, “The Hasidim are bound to each other with heart and soul.”³⁴ This solidarity was based not only on the personality of the rebbe and the powerful social controls described above, but on the high levels of within-group generosity which alleviated to some extent their poverty. Needless to say, Hasidic solidarity was seen as threatening by outsiders: “How much longer will we tolerate the Hasidic sect, which is united by such a strong bond and whose members help one another.”³⁵

Hasidism triumphed partly by its attraction to the Jewish masses and partly because of the power politics of the rebbes: Opposing rabbis were forced out, so by the early nineteenth century in Galicia, Poland, and the Ukraine, the vast majority of Jews were in Hasidic communities. Their triumph meant the failure of the Jewish Enlightenment (the Haskalah) in Eastern Europe. The Haskalah movement advocated greater assimilation with non-Jewish society, as by using vernacular languages, studying secular subjects, and not adopting distinguishing forms of dress, although in other ways their commitment to Judaism remained powerful. These relatively assimilated Jews were the relatively thin upper crust of wealthy merchants and others who were free of the economic and social pressures that fueled Hasidism. They often cooperated with the authorities in attempts to force the Hasidim to assimilate out of fear that Hasidic behavior led to anti-Jewish attitudes.

As noted above, one source of the inward unity and psychological fanaticism of Jewish communities was the hostility of the surrounding non-Jewish population. Jews in the Russian Empire were hated by all the non-Jewish classes, who saw them as an exploitative class of  petty traders, middlemen, innkeepers, store owners, estate agents, and money lenders.³⁶ Jews “were viewed by the authorities and by much of the rest of population as a foreign, separate, exploitative, and distressingly prolific nation.”³⁷ In 1881 these tensions boiled over into several anti-Jewish pogroms in a great many towns of southern and southwestern Russia. It was in this context that the first large-scale stirrings of Zionism emerged.³⁸ From 1881–1884, dozens of Zionist groups formed in the Russian Empire and Romania.

Political radicalism emerged from the same intensely Jewish communities during this period and for much the same reasons.³⁹ Political radicalism often coexisted with messianic forms of Zionism as well as intense commitment to Jewish nationalism and religious and cultural separatism, and many individuals held various and often rapidly changing combinations of these ideas.⁴⁰

The two streams of political radicalism and Zionism, each stemming from the teeming fanaticism of threatened Jewish populations in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, continue to reverberate in the modern world. In both England and America the immigration of Eastern European Jews after 1880 had a transformative effect on the political attitudes of the Jewish community in the direction of radical politics and Zionism, often combined with religious orthodoxy.⁴¹ The immigrant Eastern European Jews demographically swamped the previously existing Jewish communities in both countries, and the older community reacted to this influx with considerable trepidation because of the possibility of increased anti-Semitism. Attempts were made by the established Jewish communities to misrepresent the prevalence of radical political ideas and Zionism among the immigrants.⁴²

The Zionist and radical solutions for Jewish problems differed, of course, with the radicals blaming the Jewish situation on the economic structure of society and attempting to appeal to non-Jews in an effort to completely restructure social and economic relationships. (Despite attempting to appeal to non-Jews, the vast majority of Jewish radicals had a very strong Jewish communal identity and often worked in an entirely Jewish milieu.⁴³) Among Zionists, on the other hand, it was common from very early on to see the Jewish situation as resulting from irresoluble conflict between Jews and non-Jews. The early Zionist Moshe Leib Lilienblum emphasized that Jews were strangers who competed with local peoples: “A stranger can be received into a family, but only as a guest. A guest who bothers, or competes with or displaces an authentic member of the household is promptly and angrily reminded of his status by the others, acting out of a sense of self-protection.”⁴⁴ Later, Theodor Herzl argued that a prime source of modern anti-Semitism was that Jews had come into direct economic competition with the non-Jewish middle classes. Anti-Semitism based on resource competition was rational: Herzl “insisted that one could not expect a majority to ‘let themselves be subjugated’ by formerly scorned outsiders whom they had just released from the ghetto…. I find the anti-Semites are fully within their rights.”⁴⁵ In Germany, Zionists analyzed anti-Semitism during the Weimar period as “the inevitable and justifiable response of one people to attempts by another to make it share in the formation of its destiny. It was an instinctive response independent of reason and will, and hence common to all peoples, the Jews included.”⁴⁶

As was often the case during the period, Zionists had a much clearer understanding of their fellow Jews and the origins of anti-Jewish attitudes. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, a prominent Zionist and leader of the American Jewish Congress whose membership derived from Eastern Europe immigrants and their descendants, accused Western European Jews of deception by pretending to be patriotic citizens while really being Jewish nationalists: “They wore the mask of the ruling nationality as of old in Spain—the mask of the ruling religion.”⁴⁷  Wise had a well-developed sense of dual loyalty, stating on one occasion “I am not an American citizen of Jewish faith. I am a Jew. I am an American. I have been an American 63/64ths of my life, but I have been a Jew for 4000 years.”⁴⁸

Zionists in Western countries were also at the ethnocentric end of the Jewish population. Zionism was seen as a way of combating the assimilatory pressures of Western societies: “Zionist ideologues and publicists argued that in the West assimilation was as much a threat to the survival of the Jewish people as persecution was in the East.”⁴⁹  Zionism openly accepted a national/ethnic conceptualization of Judaism that was quite independent of religious faith. As Theodore Herzl stated, “We are a people—one people.”⁵⁰ The Zionist Arthur Hertzberg stated that “the Jews in all ages were essentially a nation and…all other factors profoundly important to the life of this people, even religion, were mainly instrumental values.”⁵¹ There were a number of Zionist racial scientists in the period from 1890–1940, including Elias Auerbach, Aron Sandler, Felix Theilhaber, and Ignaz Zollschan. Zionist racial scientists were motivated by a perceived need to end Jewish intermarriage and preserve Jewish racial purity.⁵²Only by creating a Jewish homeland and leaving the assimilatory influences of the Diaspora could Jews preserve their unique racial heritage.

For example, Auerbach advocated Zionism because it would return Jews “back into the position they enjoyed before the nineteenth century—politically autonomous, culturally whole, and racially pure.”⁵³ Zollschan, whose book on “the Jewish racial question” went through five editions and was well known to both Jewish and non-Jewish anthropologists,⁵⁴ praised Houston Stewart Chamberlain and advocated Zionism as the only way to retain Jewish racial purity from the threat of mixed marriages and assimilation.⁵⁵ Zollschan’s description of the phenotypic, and by implication genetic commonality of Jews around the world is striking. He notes that the same Jewish faces can be seen throughout the Jewish world among Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Oriental Jews. He also remarked on the same mix of body types, head shapes, skin, and hair and eye pigmentation in these widely separated groups.⁵⁶

For many Zionists, Jewish racialism went beyond merely asserting and shoring up the ethnic basis of Judaism, to embrace the idea of racial superiority. Consistent with the anti-assimilationist thrust of Zionism, very few Zionists intermarried, and those who did, such as Martin Buber, found that their marriages were problematic within the wider Zionist community.⁵⁷ In 1929 the Zionist leaders of the Berlin Jewish community condemned intermarriage as a threat to the “racial purity of stock” and asserted its belief that “consanguinity of the flesh and solidarity of the soul” were essential for developing a Jewish nation, as was the “will to establish a closed brotherhood over against all other communities on earth.”⁵⁸

Assertions of Zionist racialism continued into the National Socialist period, where they dovetailed with National Socialist attitudes. Joachim Prinz, a German Jew who later became the head of the American Jewish Congress, celebrated Hitler’s ascent to power because it signaled the end of the Enlightenment values, which had resulted in assimilation and mixed marriage among Jews:

We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind…. For only he who honours his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honour towards the national will of other nations.⁵⁹

The common ground of the racial Zionists and their non-Jewish counterparts included the exclusion of Jews from the German Volksgemeinschaft.⁶⁰ Indeed, shortly after Hitler came to power, the Zionist Federation of Germany submitted a memorandum to the German government outlining a solution to the Jewish question and containing the following remarkable statement. The Federation declared that the Enlightenment view that Jews should be absorbed into the nation state

discerned only the individual, the single human being freely suspended in space, without regarding the ties of blood and history or spiritual distinctiveness. Accordingly, the liberal state demanded of the Jews assimilation [via baptism and mixed marriage] into the non-Jewish environment…. Thus it happened that innumerable persons of Jewish origin had the chance to occupy important positions and to come forward as representatives of German culture and German life, without having their belonging to Jewry become visible. Thus arose a state of affairs which in political discussion today is termed “debasement of Germandom,” or “Jewification.” …Zionism has no illusions about the difficulty of the Jewish condition, which consists above all in an abnormal occupational pattern and in the fault of an intellectual and moral posture not rooted in one’s own tradition.⁶¹

Zionism As a “Risky Strategy”

Zionism was a risky strategy—to use Frank Salter’s term⁶²—because it led to charges of dual loyalty. The issue of dual loyalty has been a major concern throughout the history of Zionism. From the beginnings of Zionism, the vast majority of the movement’s energy and numbers, and eventually its leadership, stemmed from the Eastern European wellspring of Judaism.⁶³ In the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a deep conflict within the Jewish communities of Western Europe and the U.S., pitting the older Jewish communities originating in Western Europe (particularly Germany) against the new arrivals from Eastern Europe, who eventually overwhelmed them by force of numbers.⁶⁴ Thus, an important theme of the history of Jews in America, England, and Germany was the conflict between the older Jewish communities that were committed to some degree of cultural assimilation and the ideals of the Enlightenment, versus the Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Eastern Europe and their commitment to political radicalism, Zionism, and/or religious fundamentalism. The older Jewish communities were concerned that Zionism would lead to anti-Semitism due to charges of dual loyalty and because Jews would be perceived as a nation and an ethnic group rather than simply as a religion. In England, during the final stages before the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, Edwin Montagu “made a long, emotional appeal to his colleagues [in the British cabinet]: how could he represent the British government during the forthcoming mission to India if the same government declared that his (Montagu’s) national home was on Turkish territory?”⁶⁵ Similar concerns were expressed in the United States, but by 1937 most American Jews advocated a Jewish state, and the Columbus Platform of the Reform Judaism of 1937 officially accepted the idea of a Palestinian homeland and shortly thereafter accepted the idea of political sovereignty for Jews in Israel.⁶⁶

In post–World War I Germany, a major goal of Reform Judaism was to suppress Zionism because of its perceived effect of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism due to charges of Jewish disloyalty.⁶⁷ In Mein Kampf, Hitler argued that Jews were an ethnic group and not simply a religion, which was confirmed by his discovery that “among them was a great movement . . . which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the Zionists.”⁶⁸  Hitler went on to remark that although one might suppose that only a subset of Jews were Zionists and that Zionism was condemned by the great majority of Jews, “the so-called liberal Jews did not reject Zionists as non-Jews, but only as Jews with an impractical, perhaps even dangerous, way of publicly avowing their Jewishness. Intrinsically they remained unalterably of one piece.”⁶⁹

Hitler’s comments reflect the weak position of the Zionists of his day as a small minority of Jews, but they also show the reality of the worst fears of the German Reform movement during this period: that the publicly expressed ethnocentric nationalism of the Zionists would increase anti-Semitism, because Jews would be perceived not as a religious group but as an ethnic/national entity with no ties to Germany. The existence of Zionism as well as of international Jewish organizations such as the Alliance Israélite Universelle (based in France) and continued Jewish cultural separatism were important sources of German anti-Semitism beginning in the late nineteenth century.

In the Soviet Union, Stalin regarded Jews as politically unreliable after they expressed “overwhelming enthusiasm” for Israel and attempted to emigrate to Israel, especially since Israel was leaning toward the West in the Cold War.⁷⁰ During the fighting in 1948, Soviet Jews attempted to organize an army to fight in Israel, and there were a great many other manifestations of Soviet-Jewish solidarity with Israel, particularly in the wake of Jewish enthusiasm during Golda Meir’s visit to the Soviet Union. Stalin perceived a “psychological readiness on the part of the volunteers to be under the jurisdiction of two states—the homeland of all the workers and the homeland of all the Jews—something that was categorically impossible in his mind.”⁷¹  There is also some indication that Stalin, at the height of the Cold War, suspected that Soviet Jews would not be loyal to the Soviet Union in a war with America because many of them had relatives in America.⁷²

In the U.S., the dual loyalty issue arose because there was a conflict between perceived American foreign policy interests that began with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The U. S. State Department feared that a British protectorate in Palestine would damage commercial interests in the region and that in any case it was not in the interests of America to offend Turkey or other Middle Eastern states.⁷³While President Woodrow Wilson sympathized with the State Department position, he was eventually persuaded by American Zionists, notably Louis Brandeis, to endorse the declaration; it was then quickly approved by the British.

The dual loyalty issue was also raised in Britain, most especially after the Second World War, when the Labour government failed to support the creation of a Jewish state. Many British Jews gave generously to finance illegal activities in the British protectorate of Palestine, including the smuggling of arms and refugees and Jewish attacks on British forces.⁷⁴ British losses to Jewish terrorism during this period were not trivial: the bombing of the King David Hotel by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and his associates led to the deaths of eighty-three of the British administrative staff plus five members of the public. These activities led to widespread hostility toward Jews, and the Labour government pointedly refused to outlaw anti-Semitism during this period. During the late 1960s and 1970s, charges of dual loyalty appeared in the House of Commons among Labour MPs, one of whom commented that “it is undeniable that many MPs have what I can only term a dual loyalty, which is to another nation and another nation’s interests.”⁷⁵

Attitudes ranging from unenthusiastic ambivalence to outright hostility to the idea of a Zionist homeland on the part of presidents, the State Department, Congress, or the American public persisted right up until the establishment of Israel in 1948 and beyond. After World War II, there continued to be a perception in the State Department that American interests in the area would not be served by a Jewish homeland, but should be directed at securing oil and military bases to oppose the Soviets. There was also concern that such a homeland would be a destabilizing influence for years to come because of Arab hostility.⁷⁶ Truman’s defense secretary, James Forrestal, “was all but obsessed by the threat to [American interests] he discerned in Zionist ambitions. His concern was shared by the State Department and specifically by the Near East Desk.”⁷⁷  In 1960 Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declared in response to attempts to coerce Egypt into agreeing to Israel’s use of the Suez Canal, “in recent years we have seen the rise of organizations dedicated apparently not to America, but to foreign states and groups. The conduct of a foreign policy for America has been seriously compromised by this development.”⁷⁸ Truman himself eventually caved in to Zionist pressure out of desire to ensure Jewish support in the 1948 election, and despite his own recently revealed personal misgivings about Jewish myopia in pursuit of their own interests.⁷⁹

Zionist Extremism Becomes Mainstream

Since the Second World War, there has been a long evolution such that the American Jewish community now fully supports the settler movement and other right-wing causes within Israel. Zionists made a great deal of progress during the Second World War. They engaged in “loud diplomacy,” organizing thousands of rallies, dinners with celebrity speakers (including prominent roles for sympathetic non-Jews), letter-writing campaigns, meetings, lobbying, threats against newspapers for publishing unfavorable items, insertion of propaganda as news items in the press, and giving money to politicians and non-Jewish celebrities in return for their support.⁸⁰ By 1944, thousands of non-Jewish associations would pass pro-Zionist resolutions, and both Republican and Democratic platforms included strong pro-Zionist planks, even though the creation of a Jewish state was strongly opposed by the Departments of State and War.⁸¹

A 1945 poll found that 80.5% of Jews favored a Jewish state, with only 10.5% opposed.⁸² This shows that by the end of the Second World War, Zionism had become thoroughly mainstream within the U.S. Jewish community. The triumph of Zionism occurred well before consciousness of the Holocaust came to be seen as legitimizing Israel. (Michael Novick dates the promotion of the Holocaust to its present status as a cultural icon from the 1967 Six-Day War.⁸³) What had once been radical and viewed as dangerous had become not only accepted, but seen as central to Jewish identity.

Since the late 1980s, the American Jewish community has not been even-handed in its support of Israeli political factions, but has supported the more fanatical elements within Israel. While wealthy Israelis predominantly support the Labor Party, financial support for Likud and other right-wing parties comes from foreign sources, particularly wealthy U.S. Jews.⁸⁴ The support of these benefactors is endangered by any softening of Likud positions, with support then going to the settler movement. “Organized U.S. Jews are chauvinistic and militaristic in their views.”⁸⁵

Within Israel, there has been a transformation in the direction of the most radical, ethnocentric, and aggressive elements of the population. During the 1920s–1940s, the followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky (the “Revisionists”) were the vanguard of Zionist aggressiveness and strident racial nationalism, but they were a minority within the Zionist movement as a whole. Revisionism had several characteristics typical of influential nineteenth-century Jewish intellectual and political movements—features shared also with other forms of traditional Judaism. Like Judaism itself and the various hermeneutic theories typical of other Jewish twentieth-century intellectual movements, the philosophy of Revisionism was a closed system that offered a complete worldview “creating a self-evident Jewish world.”⁸⁶ Like the Hasidic movement and other influential Jewish intellectual and political movements, Revisionism was united around a charismatic leader figure, in this case Jabotinsky, who was seen in god-like terms—“Everyone waited for him to speak, clung to him for support, and considered him the source of the one and only absolute truth.”⁸⁷ There was a powerful sense of “us versus them.” Opponents were demonized: “The style of communication . . . was coarse and venomous, aimed at moral delegitimization of the opponent by denouncing him and even ‘inciting’ the Jewish public against him.”⁸⁸

Jabotinsky developed a form of racial nationalism similar to other Zionist racial theorists of the period (see above). He believed that Jews were shaped by their long history as a desert people and that establishment of Israel as a Jewish state would allow the natural genius of the Jewish race to flourish. “These natural and fundamental distinctions embedded in the race are impossible to eradicate, and are continually being nurtured by the differences in soil and climate.”⁸⁹

The Revisionists advocated military force as a means of obtaining a Jewish state; they wanted a “maximalist” state that would include the entire Palestine Mandate, including the Trans-Jordan (which became the nation of Jordan in 1946).⁹⁰ In the 1940s, its paramilitary wing, the Irgun, under the leadership of Menachem Begin, was responsible for much of the terrorist activities directed against both Arabs and the British forces maintaining the Palestinian Mandate until 1948, including the bombing of the King David Hotel and the massacre at Deir Yasin that was a major factor in terrorizing much of the Palestinian population into fleeing.⁹¹

Over time, the Labor Party has dwindled in influence, and there has followed the rise and ascendancy of the Likud Party and ultra-nationalism represented by Begin, who came to power in 1977 and began the process of resurrecting Jabotinsky,⁹² by Yitzhak Shamir (commander of LEHI [the Stern Group], another pre-1948 terrorist group), and now by the government of Ariel Sharon, whose long record of aggressive brutality is described briefly below. Fundamentalists and other ultranationalists were a relatively weak phenomenon in the 1960s, but have increased to around 25 percent in the late 1990s and are an integral part of Sharon’s government. In other words, the more radical Zionists have won out within Israel. (As Noam Chomsky notes, there has been a consensus on retaining sovereignty over the West Bank, so that the entire Israeli political spectrum must be seen as aggressively expansionist.⁹³ The differences are differences of degree.)

The connections between Jabotinsky and the current Israeli government are more than coincidental: Just before Israel’s election in February 2001, Sharon was interviewed seated “symbolically and ostentatiously beneath a large photo of Vladimir Jabotinsky, spiritual father of militant Zionism and Sharon’s Likud party. Jabotinsky called for a Jewish state extending from the Nile to the Euphrates. He advocated constant attacks to smash the weak Arab states into fragments, dominated by Israel. In fact, just what Sharon tried to do in Lebanon. Hardly a good omen for the Mideast’s future.”⁹⁴

Sharon has been implicated in a long string of acts of “relentless brutality toward Arabs,” including massacring an Arab village in the 1950s; the “pacification” of the Gaza Strip in the 1970s (involving large-scale bulldozing of homes and deportation of Palestinians); the invasion of Lebanon, which involved thousands of civilian deaths and the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees; and the brutal Israeli response to the recent Palestinian intifada.⁹⁵ The Kahan Commission, an Israeli board formed to investigate the Lebanese incident, concluded that Sharon was indirectly responsible for the massacre, and it went on to say that Sharon bears personal responsibility.

The intention of the Sharon government is to make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they will voluntarily leave, or, failing that, to simply expel them. Ran HaCohen, an Israeli academic, sums up the situation as of June 2002:

Step by step, Palestinians have been dispossessed and surrounded by settlements, military camps, by-pass roads and checkpoints, squeezed into sealed-off enclaves. Palestinian towns are besieged by tanks and armed vehicles blocking all access roads. West Bank villages too are surrounded by road blocks, preventing the movement of vehicles in and out: three successive mounds of rubble and earth, approximately 6 feet high, with 100 metre gaps between them. All residents wishing to move in and out of the village—old or young, sick or well, pregnant or not—have to climb over the slippery mounds. At present, this policy seems to have been perfected to an extent that it can be further institutionalised by long-term bureaucracy: a permit system, considerably worse than the “pass laws” imposed on blacks in Apartheid South Africa.⁹⁶

Little has changed since this assessment. Recently this state of affairs is being formalized by the construction of a series of security walls that not only fence in the Palestinians but also result in the effective seizure of land, especially around Jerusalem.⁹⁷  The wall encircles and isolates Palestinian villages and divides properties and farmland in ways that make them inaccessible to their owners.⁹⁸

The current state of affairs would have been absolutely predictable simply by paying attention to the pronouncements and behavior of a critical subset of Israeli leaders over the last fifty years. Again, they have been the most radical within the Israeli political spectrum. The clear message is that an important faction of the Israeli political spectrum has had a long-term policy of expanding the state at the expense of the Palestinians, dating from the beginnings of the state of Israel. Expansionism was well entrenched in the Labor Party, centered around David Ben-Gurion, and has been even more central to the Likud coalition under the leadership of Menachem Begin and, more recently, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. The result is that the Palestinians have been left with little hope of obtaining a meaningful state, despite the current “road map to peace” efforts. The next step may well be expulsion, already advocated by many on the right in Israel, although the strategy of oppression is in fact causing some Palestinians to leave voluntarily.⁹⁹ Voluntary emigration has long been viewed as a solution by some, including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (on the more “liberal” end of the Israeli political spectrum), who urged that Israel “create…conditions which would attract natural and voluntary migration of the refugees from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to Jordan.”¹⁰⁰

“Transfer,” whether voluntary or involuntary, has long been a fixture of Zionist thought going back to Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and Ben-Gurion.¹⁰¹ Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary in 1937: “the compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish state . . . we have to stick to this conclusion the same way we grabbed the Balfour Declaration, more than that, the same way we grabbed at Zionism itself.”¹⁰² A prominent recent proponent of expulsion is Rehavam Zeevi, a close associate of Sharon and Israel’s Minister of Tourism as well as a member of the powerful Security Cabinet until his assassination in October, 2001. Zeevi described Palestinians as “lice” and advocated the expulsion of Palestinians from Israeli-controlled areas. Zeevi said Palestinians were living illegally in Israel and “We should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice. We have to stop this cancer from spreading within us.” There are many examples, beginning no later than the mid-1980s, of leading Israeli politicians referring to the occupied territories on the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria.”¹⁰³

The point is that movements that start out on the extreme of the Jewish political spectrum eventually end up driving the entire process, so that in the end not only American Jews but pro-Israeli non-Jewish politicians end up mouthing the rhetoric that was formerly reserved for extremists within the Jewish community. In 2003, at a time when there are well over one hundred Israeli settlements on the West Bank and Gaza filled with fanatic fundamentalists and armed zealots intent on eradicating the Palestinians, it is revealing that Moshe Sharett, Israeli prime minister in the 1950s, worried that the border settlements were composed of well-armed ex-soldiers—extremists who were intent on expanding the borders of Israel. Immediately after the armistice agreement of 1948 Israeli zealots, sometimes within the army and sometimes in the nascent settler movement, began a long string of provocations of Israel’s neighbors.¹⁰⁴ An operation of the Israeli army (under the leadership of Ariel Sharon) that demolished homes and killed civilians at Qibya in 1953 was part of a broader plan: “The stronger the tensions in the region, the more demoralized the Arab populations and destabilized the Arab regimes, the stronger the pressures for the transfer of the concentrations of Palestinian refugees from places near the border away into the interior of the Arab world—and the better it was for the preparation of the next war.”¹⁰⁵ At times the army engaged in provocative actions without Prime Minister Sharett’s knowledge,¹⁰⁶ as when David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, led a raid in 1955 which resulted in a massacre of Arabs in Gaza. When confronted with his actions by an American Jew, Ben-Gurion “stood up. He looked like an angry prophet out of the Bible and got red in the face. He shouted, ‘I am not going to let anybody, American Jews or anyone else, tell me what I have to do to provide for the security of my people.”¹⁰⁷

The war to occupy the West Bank did not take place until 1967, but Sharett describes plans by the Israeli army to occupy the West Bank dating from 1953. Throughout the period from 1948–1967 “some of the major and persistent accusations” by the Israeli right were that the Labor-dominated governments had accepted the partition of Palestine and had not attempted to “eradicate Palestinian boundaries” during the 1948 war.¹⁰⁸ The annexation of East Jerusalem and the settlement of the West Bank began immediately after the 1967 war—exactly what would be expected on the assumption that this was a war of conquest. Menachem Begin, who accelerated the settlement process when he assumed power in 1977, noted, “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that [Egyptian President] Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”¹⁰⁹

Given the tendency for Jewish radicals to carry the day, it is worth describing the most radical Zionist fringe as it exists now. It is common among radical Zionists to project a much larger Israel that reflects God’s covenant with Abraham. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, maintained that the area of the Jewish state stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.”¹¹⁰ This reflects God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15: 18–20 and Joshua 1 3–4: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.” The flexibility of the ultimate aims of Zionism can also be seen by Ben-Gurion’s comment in 1936 that

The acceptance of partition [of the Palestinian Mandate] does not commit us to renounce Transjordan [i.e., the modern state of Jordan]; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.¹¹¹

Ben-Gurion’s vision of “the boundaries of Zionist aspirations” included southern Lebanon, southern Syria, all of Jordan, and the Sinai.¹¹² (After conquering the Sinai in 1956, Ben-Gurion announced to the Knesset that “Our army did not infringe on Egyptian territory…. Our operations were restricted to the Sinai Peninsula alone.”¹¹³ Or consider Golda Meir’s statement that the borders of Israel “are where Jews live, not where there is a line on the map.”¹¹⁴

These views are common among the more extreme Zionists today—especially the fundamentalists and the settler movement—notably Gush Emunim—who now set the tone in Israel. A prominent rabbi associated with these movements stated: “We must live in this land even at the price of war. Moreover, even if there is peace, we must instigate wars of liberation in order to conquer [the land].”¹¹⁵ Indeed, in the opinion of Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, “It is not unreasonable to assume that Gush Emunim, if it possessed the power and control, would use nuclear weapons in warfare to attempt to achieve its purpose.”¹¹⁶ This image of a “Greater Israel” is also much on the minds of activists in the Muslim world. For example, in a 1998 interview Osama bin Laden stated,

[W]e know at least one reason behind the symbolic participation of the Western forces [in Saudi Arabia] and that is to support the Jewish and Zionist plans for expansion of what is called the Great Israel…. Their presence has no meaning save one and that is to offer support to the Jews in Palestine who are in need of their Christian brothers to achieve full control over the Arab Peninsula which they intend to make an important part of the so called Greater Israel.¹¹⁷

To recap: A century ago Zionism was a minority movement within Diaspora Judaism, with the dominant assimilationist Jews in the West opposing it at least partly because Zionism raised the old dual loyalty issue, which has been a potent source of anti-Semitism throughout the ages. The vast majority of Jews eventually became Zionists, to the point that now not only are Diaspora Jews Zionists, they are indispensable supporters of the most fanatic elements within Israel. Within Israel, the radicals have also won the day, and the state has evolved to the point where the influence of moderates in the tradition of Moshe Sharett is a distant memory. The fanatics keep pushing the envelope, forcing other Jews to either go along with their agenda or to simply cease being part of the Jewish community. Not long ago it was common to talk to American Jews who would say they support Israel but deplore the settlements. Now such talk among Jews is an anachronism, because support for Israel demands support for the settlements. The only refuge for such talk is the increasingly isolated Jewish critics of Israel, such as Israel Shamir¹¹⁸ and, to a much lesser extent, Michael Lerner’s Tikkun.¹¹⁹The trajectory of Zionism has soared from its being a minority within a minority to its dominating the U.S. Congress, the executive branch, and the entire U.S. foreign policy apparatus.

And because the Israeli occupation and large-scale settlement of the West Bank unleashed a wave of terrorist-style violence against Israel, Jews perceive Israel as under threat. As with any committed group, Jewish commitment increases in times of perceived threat to the community. The typical response of Diaspora Jews to the recent violence has not been to renounce Jewish identity but to strongly support the Sharon government and rationalize its actions. This has been typical of Jewish history in general. For example, during the 1967 and 1973 wars there were huge upsurges of support for Israel and strengthened Jewish identity among American Jews: Arthur Hertzberg, a prominent Zionist, wrote that “the immediate reaction of American Jewry to the crisis was far more intense and widespread than anyone could have foreseen. Many Jews would never have believed that grave danger to Israel could dominate their thoughts and emotions to the exclusion of everything else.”¹²⁰ The same thing is happening now. The typical response to Israel’s current situation is for Jews to identify even more strongly with Israel and to exclude Jews who criticize Israel or support Palestinian claims in any way.

This “rallying around the flag” in times of crisis fits well with the psychology of ethnocentrism: When under attack, groups become more unified and more conscious of boundaries, and have a greater tendency to form negative stereotypes of the outgroup. This has happened throughout Jewish history.¹²¹

Several commentators have noted the void on the Jewish left as the conflict with the Palestinians has escalated under the Sharon government. As noted above, surveys in the 1980s routinely found that half of U.S. Jews opposed settlements on the West Bank and favored a Palestinian state.¹²² Such sentiments have declined precipitously in the current climate:

At a progressive synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Rabbi Rolando Matalo was torn between his longtime support for Palestinian human rights and his support for an Israel under siege. “There is a definite void on the left,” said Matalo…. Many American Jewish leaders say Israel’s current state of emergency—and growing signs of anti-Semitism around the world—have unified the faithful here in a way not seen since the 1967 and 1973 wars…. These feelings shift back and forth, but right now they’re tilting toward tribalism.¹²³

Note that the author of this article, Josh Getlin, portrays Israel as being “under siege,” even though Israel is the occupying power and has killed far more Palestinians than the Palestinians have killed Israelis.

“I don’t recall a time in modern history when Jews have felt so vulnerable,” said Rabbi Martin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles…. This week, the center will be mailing out 600,000 “call to action” brochures that say “Israel is fighting for her life” and urge American Jews to contact government leaders and media organizations worldwide….  Rabbi Mark Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, said debate over the West Bank invasion and the attack on the Palestinian Jenin refugee camp is overshadowed by “a strong sense that Israel needs us, that the world Jewry needs us, that this is our wake-up call.” He said he has been overwhelmed in recent weeks by numerous calls from members of synagogues asking what they can do to help or where they can send a check…. “I have American friends who might have been moderate before on the issue of negotiating peace, but now they think: ‘Our whole survival is at stake, so let’s just destroy them all,’” said Victor Nye, a Brooklyn, N.Y., businessman who describes himself as a passionate supporter of Israel.

In this atmosphere, Jews who dissent are seen as traitors, and liberal Jews have a great deal of anxiety that they will be ostracized from the Jewish community for criticizing Israel.¹²⁴ This phenomenon is not new. During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post criticized the Begin government and was inundated with protests from Jews. “Here dissent becomes treason—and treason not to a state or even an ideal (Zionism), but to a people. There is tremendous pressure for conformity, to show a united front and to adopt the view that what is best for Israel is something only the government there can know.”¹²⁵  During the same period, Nat Hentoff noted in the Village Voice, “I know staff workers for the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress who agonize about their failure to speak out, even on their own time, against Israeli injustice. They don’t, because they figure they’ll get fired if they do.”¹²⁶

Reflecting the fact that Jews who advocate peace with the Palestinians are on the defensive, funding has dried up for causes associated with criticism of Israel. The following is a note posted on the website of Tikkun by its editor, Michael Lerner:

TIKKUN Magazine is in trouble—because we have continued to insist on the rights of the Palestinian people to full self-determination. For years we’ve called for an end to the Occupation and dismantling of the Israeli settlements. We’ve called on the Palestinian people to follow the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela and Gandhi—and we’ve critiqued terrorism against Israel, and insisted on Israel’s right to security. But we’ve also critiqued Israel’s house demolitions, torture, and grabbing of land. For years, we had much support. But since Intifada II began this past September, many Jews have stopped supporting us—and we’ve lost subscribers and donors. Would you consider helping us out?”¹²⁷

Another sign that Jews who are “soft” on Israel are being pushed out of the Jewish community is an article by Philip Weiss.¹²⁸

The refusal of liberal American Jews to make an independent stand has left the American left helpless. American liberalism has always drawn strength from Jews. They are among the largest contributors to the Democratic Party; they have brought a special perspective to any number of social-justice questions, from the advancement of blacks and women to free speech. They fostered multiculturalism…. The Holocaust continues to be the baseline reference for Jews when thinking about their relationship to the world, and the Palestinians. A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from a friend of a friend in Israel about the latest bus-bombing. “They’re going to kill us all,” was the headline. (No matter that Israel has one of largest armies in the world, and that many more Palestinians have died than Israelis). Once, when I suggested to a liberal journalist friend that Americans had a right to discuss issues involving Jewish success in the American power structure—just as we examined the WASP culture of the establishment a generation ago—he said, “Well, we know where that conversation ends up: in the ovens of Auschwitz.”

Because of Jewish ethnocentrism and group commitment, stories of Jews being killed are seen as the portending of another Holocaust and the extinction of the Jewish people rather than a response to a savage occupation—a clear instance of moral particularism writ large.

The same thing is happening in Canada where Jews are concerned about declining support by Canadians for Israel. “The past three years have been extraordinarily tough on Jews in Canada and around the world,” said Keith Landy, national president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. “Every Jew has felt under attack in some form.”¹²⁹ The response has been increased activism by deeply committed wealthy Jews, including, most famously, Israel Asper, executive chairman of CanWest Global Communications Corp. Asper has used his media empire to promote pro-Likud policies and has punished journalists for any deviation from its strong pro-Israel editorial policies.¹³⁰ The efforts of these activists are aimed at consolidating Jewish organizations behind “hawkish” attitudes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Older Jewish organizations, such as the Canada-Israel Committee and the Canadian Jewish Congress, would be remodeled or driven out of existence to exclude Jews less committed to these attitudes.

Conclusion

An important mechanism underlying all this is that of rallying around the flag during times of crisis, a phenomenon that is well understood by social psychologists. Group identification processes are exaggerated in times of resource competition or other perceived sources of threat,¹³¹ a finding that is highly compatible with an evolutionary perspective.¹³²  External threat tends to reduce internal divisions and maximize perceptions of common interest among ingroup members, as we have seen among American Jews in response to perceived crises in Israel, ranging from the Six-Day War of 1967 to the unending crises of the 1990s and into the new millennium.¹³³ Jewish populations also respond to threat by developing messianic ideologies, rallying around charismatic leaders, and expelling dissenters from the community. Traditionally this has taken the form of religious fundamentalism, as among the Hasidim, but in the modern world these tendencies have been manifested in various forms of leftist radicalism, Zionism, and other Jewish intellectual and political movements.¹³⁴ Throughout Jewish history, this siege mentality has tended to increase conflict between Jews and non-Jews. In the context of the intense ethnic conflict of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the conflict was exacerbated by an enormous increase in the Jewish population.

And in all cases, the leaders of this process are the more ethnocentric, committed Jews. They are the ones who donate to Jewish causes, attend rallies, write letters, join and support activist organizations. As J. J. Goldberg, the editor of the Forward, notes,  Jews who identify themselves as doves feel much less strongly about Israel than those who identify themselves as hawks. “Jewish liberals give to the Sierra Fund. Jewish conservatives are Jewish all the time. That’s the whole ball game. It’s not what six million American Jews feel is best — it’s what 50 Jewish organizations feel is best.”¹³⁵  In other words, it’s the most radical, committed elements of the Jewish community that determine the direction of the entire community.

As a European in a society that is rapidly becoming non-European, I can sympathize with Jabotinsky’s envy of the native Slavic peoples he observed in the early twentieth century:

I look at them with envy. I have never known, and probably never will know, this completely organic feeling: so united and singular [is this] sense of a homeland, in which everything flows together, the past and the present, the legend and the hopes, the individual and the historical.¹³⁶

Every nation civilised or primitive, sees its land as its national home, where it wants to stay as the sole landlord forever. Such a nation will never willingly consent to new landlords or even to partnership.¹³⁷

It is the memory of this rapidly disappearing sense of historical rootedness and sense of impending dispossession that are at the root of the malaise experienced by many Europeans, not only in the U.S. but elsewhere. The triumph of Zionism took a mere fifty years from Herzl’s inspiration to the founding of the state of Israel. There is a tendency to overlook or ignore the powerful ethnocentrism at the heart of Zionism that motivated people like Jabotinsky, especially on the part of the American Jewish community, which has been dedicated throughout the twentieth century to pathologizing and criminalizing the fragile vestiges of ethnocentrism among Europeans.¹³⁸

But the bottom line is that the Zionists were successful. Israel would not have become a state without a great many deeply ethnocentric Jews willing to engage in any means necessary to bring about their dream: a state that would be a vehicle for their ethnic interests. It would not have come about without the most radical among them—people like Jabotinsky, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and their supporters—a group which now includes the entire organized American Jewish community. The impending dispossession of Europeans will only be avoided if people of their ilk can be found among the political class of Europeans.

The final paper in this series will discuss neo-conservatism as a Jewish intellectual and political movement. A main point of that paper will be that Jewish neo-conservatives are the current radicals who are charting the direction of the entire Jewish community.

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Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology, California State University —Long Beach, and the author of a trilogy on Judaism as an evolutionary strategy: A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998), all published by Praeger 1994-1998. A revised edition of The Culture of Critique (2002), with an expanded introduction, is available in a quality soft cover edition from http://www.1stBooks.com or http://www.amazon.com.

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References

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Herzl, T. (1970). The Jewish State, trans. H. Zohn. New York: Herzl Press.

Herzl, T. (1960). Complete Diaries, vol. II, p. 711.

Hewstone, M., Rubin, M., & Willis, H. (2002). Intergroup bias. Annual Review of Psychology 53:575–604.

Hitler, A. (1943). Mein Kampf, trans. R. Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; originally published 1925–1926.

Hogg, M. A., & Abrams, D. (1987). Social Identifications. New York: Routledge.

John, R., & Hadawi, S. (1970a). The Palestine Diary, 1914–1945: Britain’s Involvement. New York: The New World Press.

John, R., & Hadawi, S. (1970b). The Palestine Diary, 1945–1948: United States, United Nations Intervention.New York: The New World Press.

Johnson, G. (1995). The evolutionary origins of government and politics. In Human Nature and Politics, ed. J. Losco & A. Somit. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Keller, B. (2002). The sunshine warrior. New York Times Magazine, September 23.

Kornberg, R. (1993). Theodore Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Laqueur, W. (1972). A History of Zionism. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Lilienthal, A. M. (1953). What Price Israel? Chicago: Henry Regnery Co.

Lilienthal, A. M. (1978). The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? New York: Dodd, Mead.

Lindemann, A. S. (1991). The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank) 1894–1915. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lindemann, A. S. (1997). Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. New York: Cambridge University Press.

MacDonald, K. B. (1994/2002). A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism As a Group Evolutionary Strategy, with Diaspora Peoples. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Originally published in 1994 by Praeger (Westport, CT).

MacDonald, K. B. (1997). Life history theory and human reproductive behavior: Environmental/contextual influences and heritable variation. Human Nature 8:327–359.

MacDonald, K. B. (1998a). Separation and Its Discontents:: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism. Westport, CT: Praeger.

MacDonald, K. B. (1998b/2002). The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Bloomington, IN: 1stBooks Library. Originally published in 1998 by Praeger (Westport, CT).

MacDonald, K. B. (2000). Book Review Essay: The numbers game: Ethnic conflict in the contemporary world. Population and Environment 21:413–425.

MacDonald, K. B. 2002.What makes Western culture unique? The Occidental Quarterly 2(2):8–38.

MacDonald, K. B. (2003). Understanding Jewish activism I: Background traits for Jewish activism. Occidental Quarterly 2(3):5–38.

Mahler, R. (1985). Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.  Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.

Masalha, N. (1992). Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies.

Massing, M. (2002). Deal breakers, American Prospect, March 11.

Meyer, M. A. (1988). Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neusner, J. (1987). Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine: History, Messiah, Israel, and the Initial Confrontation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nicosia, F. R. (1985). The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Niewyk, D. L. . (1980). The Jews in Weimar Germany. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Norden, E. (1995). An unsung Jewish prophet. Commentary 99(4):37–43.

Novick, P. (1999).The Holocaust in American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Parsons, J. (1998). Human Population Competition. A Study of the Pursuit of Power through Numbers. Lewiston, NY & Lampeter, Wales: The Edwin Mellen Press.

Podhoretz, N. (2002). In praise of the Bush doctrine. Commentary, September.

Prinz, J. (1934). Wir Juden. Berlin: Erich Press.

Rokach, L. (1986). Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, 3^rd edition. Belmont, MA: Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. Originally published 1980.

Rubenstein, J. (1996). Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg. New York: Basic Books.

Ruppin, A. (1971). Arthur Ruppin: Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, ed. A. Bein, trans. K. Gershon. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Sachar, H. M. (1992). A History of Jews in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Sacks, J. (1993). One People? Tradition, Modernity, and Jewish Unity. London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.

Salter, F. K. (2002a). Fuzzy but real: America’s ethnic hierarchy. Paper presented at the meetings of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, Montreal, August 9.

Salter, F. K. (Ed.) (2002b). Risky Transactions. London: Berghan.

Schatz, J. (1991). The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Shahak, I. (1993). Relations between Israel and organized American Jews.  Middle East Policy Council Journal, 2(3). http://www.mepc.org/public_asp/journal_shahak/shahak45.asp

Shahak, I. (1994). Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. Boulder, CO: Pluto Press.

Shahak, I., & Mezvinsky, N. (1999). Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. London: Pluto Press.

Shavit, Y. (1988). Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 1925–1948. London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

Teitelbaum, M. S., & Winter, J. (1998). A Question of Numbers: High Migration, Low Fertility, and the Politics of National Identity.New York: Hill and Wang.

Vaksberg, A. (1994). Stalin against the Jews, trans. A. W. Bouis. New York: Knopf.

Vital, D. (1975). The Origins of Zionism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University, The Clarendon Press.

Weiss, P. (2002). Holy or unholy, Jews and right in an alliance, New York Observer, September 19.

Wheatcroft, G. (1996). The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Endnotes

1. MacDonald 2003.

2. Podhoretz 2002.

3. Sacks 1993, ix–x.

4. 1 Maccabees 1:11–15; http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/apo/011

5. Jubilees 32:18–19.

6. MacDonald 1994/2002, Ch. 3.

7. Meyer, 1988, 388.

8. MacDonald 1994/2002, Ch. 5.

9. See MacDonald 1998/2004, preface to the paperback edition.

10. Alderman 1992, 112; Frankel 1981, 103; Lindemann 1991, 28–29, 133–135.

11. E.g., For exampple, Scholem 1971; MacDonald 1994/2002,Ch. 3.

12. Lewis 1984, 164.

13. Aschheim 1982.

14. MacDonald 1998/2002, especially Ch. 3.

15. MacDonald 1997, 2002.

16. See MacDonald (1998/2002), 2003.

17. Bookman 1997; Teitelbaum & Winter 1997; Parsons, 1998; MacDonald, 2000.

18. Bookman 1997, 89.

19. Bookman 1997; MacDonald 2000.

20. Vital 1975, 28.

21. The following relies on Mahler 1985.

22. Vital 1975, 46.

23. Mahler 1985, 16.

24. Mahler 1985, 17.

25. Mahler 1985, 17.

26. MacDonald 2003; Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 58–60.

27. MacDonald 1998/2002.

28. Ruppin 1971, 69.

29. In Mahler 1985, 8.

30. In Mahler 1985, 249.

31. Mahler 1985, 251.

32. MacDonald 1998/2002.

33. Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 37.

34. In Mahler 1985, 21.

35. In Mahler 1985, 21.

36. See summary in MacDonald 1998/2004.

37. Lindemann 1991, 17.

38. Vital 1975, 65ff.

39. Vital 1975, 314.

40. See Frankel 1981.

41. Alderman 1983, 47ff; MacDonald 1998/2002, Ch. 3.

42. Alderman 1983, 60; MacDonald 1998/2004, Ch. 8.

43. MacDonald 1998/2002, Ch. 3; Vital 1975, 313.

44. Vital 1975, 117.

45. Kornberg 1993, 183; inner quote from Herzl’s diary.

46. Niewyk 1980, 94.

47. In Frommer 1978, 118.

48. In Lilienthal 1953, 165.

49. Endelman 1991, 196.

50. Herzl 1970, 76.

51. In Neusner 1987, 203.

52. Efron 1994; Endelman 1991, 196.

53. Efron 1994, 136.

54. Efron 1994, 155.

55. Gilman 1993, 109; Nicosia 1985, 18.

56. See Efron 1994, 158.

57. Norden, 1995.

58. In Niewyk 1980, 129–130

59. Prinz 1934; in Shahak 1994, 71–72; italics in text.

60. Nicosia 1985, 19.

61. In Dawidowicz 1976, 150–152.

62. Salter 2002b.

63. Laqueur 1972; Vital 1975.

64. Frommer 1978; Alderman 1983

65. Laqueur 1972, 196; see also John & Hadawi 1970a, 80.

66. Laqueur 1972, 546, 549; Wheatcroft 1996, 98–147; The Columbus Platform: “Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism” (1937); reprinted in Meyer 1988, 389.

67. Meyer 1988, 339.

68. Hitler 1943, 56.

69. Ibid., 57.

70. Schatz 1991, 375n.13.

71. Vaksberg 1994, 197.

72. Rubenstein 1996, 260.

73. Sachar 1992, 256ff.

74. Alderman 1983, 129.

75. In Alderman 1983, 151.

76. Goldmann 1978, 31; Lilienthal 1978, 50, 61; Sachar 1992, 580.

77. Sachar 1992, 597.

78. In Cohen 1972, 325.

79. Regarding Truman’s attitudes toward Jews, see “Harry Truman’s Forgotten Diary: 1947 Writings Offer Fresh Insight on the President,” Washington Post, July 11, 2003, p. A1;  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40678-2003Jul10.html

80.   Bendersky 2000, 325.

81. Ibid., 328; John & Hadawi 1970a, 357.

82. Wheatcroft 1996, 226.

83. Novick 1999, 155.

84. Shahak 1993.

85. Ibid.

86. Shavit 1988, 23.

87. Ibid., 67.

88. Shavit 1988, 80.

89. In Shavit 1988, 112.

90. John & Hadawi 1970a, 249.

91. Ibid., 351. John & Hadawi 1970b, 329.

92. M. Bruzonsky, “The Mentor Who Shaped Begin’s Thinking: Jabotinsky,” Washington Post, Outlook Section, Sunday, Nov. 16, 1980.

93. Chomsky 1999, 54.

94. E. Margolis, “Sharon Won the Battle, but Does It Mean More War?” Toronto Sun, Feb. 11, 2001.

95. Ibid.

96. HaCohen 2002.

97. Brubacher 2002.

98. “U.S. May Punish Israel for Building Fence in W. Bank,” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 2003.

99. Cockburn 2002.

100. In Chomsky 1999, 116.

101. Chomsky 1999, 117; Masalha 1992.

102. In Masalha 1992, 210.

103. Aruri 1986

104. Chomsky 1999, 101.

105. Rokach 1986.

106. Wheatcroft 1996, 249.

107. In Findley 1989, 277.

108. Shavit 1988, 243.

109. Chomsky 1999, 100; see also http://www.cactus48.com/truth.html.

110. Herzl 1960, 711.

111. Chomsky 1999, 161; see also http://www.cactus48.com/truth.html.

112. In Chomsky 1999, 161.

113. In Chomsky 1999, 161.

114. In Chomsky 1999, 50.

115. In Shahak & Mezvinsky 1999, 73.

116. Ibid., 73.

117. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html

118. http://www.israelshamir.net/

119. http://www.israelshamir.net/ ; http://www.tikkun.com/

120. Hertzberg 1979, 210.

121. MacDonald 1998a, Ch. 1.

122. Findley 1989, 265.

123. Getlin 2002.

124. Ibid.

125. In Findley 1989, 269.

126. In Findley 1989, 271.

127. http://www.tikkun.com/, September 2002.

128. Weiss 2002.

129. O. Ross, 2003. Power struggle crisis worries Jewish groups. Toronto Star, October 4, 2003. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1065219009151&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154

130. See MacDonald, 2003.

131. Hogg & Abrams 1987; Hewstone, Rubin & Willis 2002.

132. MacDonald 1998a.

133. Alexander 1979.

134. MacDonald 1998b/2002.

135. In Massing 2002.

136. In Shavit 1988, 116.

137. In Wheatcroft 1996, 207.

138. MacDonald 1998/2002.

Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

Jewish Fundamentalism in

Israel

 

 

 

 

by

 

 

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

published by

 

Pluto Press

 

 

 

 

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1999

 

ISBN 0 7453 1281 0 hbk

 

 

Also available from Amazon.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preface

 

 

 

 

Virtually identified with Arab terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism is anathema throughout the non-Muslim world. Virtually identified with ignorance, superstition, intolerance and racism, Christian fundamentalism is anathema to the cultural and intellectual elite in the United States. The recent significant increase in its number of adherents, combined with its widening political influence, nevertheless, make Christian fundamentalism a real threat to democracy in the United States. Although possessing nearly all the important social scientific properties of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism is practically unknown outside of Israel and certain sections of a few other places. When its existence is acknowledged, its significance is minimized or limited to arcane religious practices and quaint middle European dress, most often by those same non-Israeli elite commentators who see so uncompromisingly the evils inherent in Jewish fundamentalism’s Islamic and/or Christian cousins.

 

As students of contemporary society and as Jews, one Israeli, one American, with personal commitments and attachments to the Middle East, we cannot help seeing Jewish fundamentalism in Israel as a major obstacle to peace in the region. Nor can we help being dismayed by the dismissal of the perniciousness of Jewish fundamentalism to peace and to its victims by those who are otherwise knowledgeable and astute and so quick to point out the violence inherent in other fundamentalist approaches to existence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This book is a journey of understanding—often painful, often dreary, often disturbing—for us as Jews who have a stake in Jewry . With our hearts and minds we want Jews, together with other people, to recognize and strive for the highest ideals, even as we fall short of them. We see these ideals as central to the values of Western civilization and applicable throughout the civilized world. We believe these values do not stand in the way of peace anywhere. That a perversion of these values in the name of Jewish fundamentalism stands as an impediment to peace, to the development of Israeli democracy and even to civilized discourse outrages us, both as Jews and as human beings. To identify and lessen, if not purge, this outrage, we have written this book and undertaken this journey in the hope that it may bring understanding to our readers as it has brought understanding to us. Our assumption is that peace in the Middle East cannot be achieved until the currents and cross-currents of contemporary life in the region are understood. In this most historical and most religious area, understanding entails an exploration of the past that continues to impinge upon the attitudes, values, assumptions and behaviors of all the people of this beautiful and troubled land. Jewish opposition in Israel to Jewish fundamentalism greatly increased after a Jewish, fundamentalist, religious fanatic, Yigal Amir, who insisted that he was acting in accordance with dictates in Judaism, shot and killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. That numerous groups of religious Jews after the assassination supported this murder in the name of the “true” Jewish religion aroused interest in Israel in past killings by Jews of other Jews who were alleged to be heretics or sinners. In our book we cite present and past investigations by Israeli scholars documenting that for centuries prior to the rise of the modern nation state, Jews, believing they were acting in accordance with God’s word and thus preparing themselves for eternal paradise, punished or killed heretics and/or religious sinners. Contemporary Jewish fundamentalism is an attempt to revive a situation that often existed in Jewish communities before the influence of modernity. The basic principles of Jewish fundamentalism are the same as those found in other religions: restoration and survival of the “pure” and pious religious community that presumably existed in the past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In our book we describe in some detail the origins, ideologies, practices and overall impact upon society of fundamentalism. We emphasize mostly the messianic tendency, because we believe it to be the most influential and dangerous. Jewish fundamentalists generally oppose extensions of human freedoms, especially the freedom of expression, in Israel. In regard to foreign policy, the National Religious Party, ruled by supponers of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism, has continuously opposed any and all withdrawals from territories conquered and occupied by Israel since 1967. These fundamentalists opposed Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai in 1978, just as twenty years later they continued to oppose any withdrawal from the West Bank. These same Jews printed and distributed atlases allegedly showing that the land of Israel, belonging only to the Jews and requiring liberation, included the Sinai, Jordan, Lebanon, most of Syria and Kuwait. Jewish fundamentalists have advocated the most discriminative proposals against Palestinians. Not surprisingly, Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir, the most sensational Jewish assassins of the 1990s, and most of their admirers have been Jewish fundamentalists of the messianic tendency.

 

In the 1990s, Israeli sociologists and scholars in other academic fields have focused more attention than ever before upon the social effects in Israeli society of Jewish fundamentalists. The overwhelming opinion of these scholars is that the adherents of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel are hostile to democracy .The fundamentalists oppose equality for all citizens, especially non-Jews and Jewish “deviants” such as homosexuals. The great majority of religious Jews in Israel, influenced by fundamentalists, share these views to some extent. In a book review published on October 14, 1998, Baruch Kirnrnerling, a distinguished Israeli sociologist, citing evidence from a study conducted by other scholars, commented:

 

The values of the [Jewish] religion, at least in its Orthodox and nationalistic form that prevails in Israel, cannot be squared with democratic values. No other variable—neither nationality, nor attitudes about security, nor social or economic values, nor ethnic descent and education—so influences the attitudes of [Israeli] Jews against democratic values as does

 

 

 

 

 

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religiosity.¹

 

Citing additional evidence, Kimmerling commented further that secular, Israeli Jews who had acquired college or university education had the greatest attachment to democratic values and that religious Jews who studied in yeshivot (religious schools) most opposed democracy. It is clear that fundamentalist antagonism to democratic values, as well as to most aspects of secular culture and life style, is deeply instilled in Israel’s religious schools.

 

The documentation of fundamentalist antagonism to the secular life style of a majority of Israeli Jews is clear. The September 20, 1998, edition of Yediot Ahronot, the largest circulation, Hebrew language, daily Israeli newspaper, for example, contained a “cultural profile” survey of Israeli Jewish society. The survey revealed that the major Israeli consumers of culture, who visit museums and attend concerts and the theater, had finished high school and defined themselves as either secular or not Orthodox (religious). The Israeli religious press and pronouncements by Israeli rabbis, condemning cultural activity, have confirmed the survey’s findings.

 

Jewish fundamentalists have displayed severe enmity against Jews who adopt a different sexual life style. Many Israeli rabbis and the Israeli religious political patties in the 1990s reacted sharply against the increased visibility and power of the homosexual and lesbian communities in Israel. According to the Halacha {Jewish religious law), homosexuality is punishable by death by stoning, and, although the punishment is not clear, lesbian relations are forbidden. The Israeli secular press emphasized in the 1990s some of the more outrageous rabbinical proposals for dealing with homosexuals; these included a “compulsory healing treatment” and/or a period of “education in a closed institution.” Many rabbis, when interviewed, indicated that they favored imposition of the death penalty for Jewish homosexual men. (The rabbis tended to leave lesbians alone.) In their televised election advertisements, Israeli religious political parties usually have emphasized that homosexual Jews constitute one of the greatest dangers facing Israel. The religious parties have been successful in their attempts to eliminate in

 

 

 

 

 

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public school courses any mention of Hebrew homosexual love poems, some of which contain beautiful Hebrew lyrics. This censorship is evidence of fundamentalist influence.

 

Conflicts in Israeli society between adherents and opponents of Jewish fundamentalism rank among the most important issues in Israeli politics. In this book we do not attempt to discuss all of these problems and/or issues. Rather, we focus upon what we consider to be the most vital problems and issues of Jewish fundamentalism.

 

Defenders of the “Jewish interest” often attack persons who write critically about Jews and/or Judaism for not emphasizing in the same text positive features that may have nothing or little to do with the substance under focus. Some of these defenders, for example, attacked Seffi Rachlevsky after the publication of his best-selling book, “Messiahs’ Donkeys.” In his book, Rachlevsky correctly claimed that Rabbi Kook, the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism (who is featured in our book), said “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews— all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” The Rachlevsky detractors did not attempt to refute substantivey the relevance of the Kook quotation. Rather, they argued that Rabbi Kook said other things and that Rachlevsky, by neglecting to mention them, had distorted the teachings of Rabbi Kook. Rachlevsky pointed out that Rabbi Kook’s entire teaching was based upon the Lurianic Cabbala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. One of the basic tenants of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary. If an influential Christian bishop or Islamic scholar argued that the difference between the superior souls of non-Jews and the inferior souls of Jews was greater than the difference between the human soul and the souls of cattle, he would incur the wrath of and be viewed as an anti-Semite by most Jewish scholars regardless of whatever less meaningful, positive statements he included. From this perspective the

 

 

 

 

 

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detractors of Rachlevsky are hypocrites. That Rabbi Kook was a vegetarian and even respected the rights of plants to the extent that he did not allow flowers or grass to be cut for his own pleasure neither distracted from nor added anything to his position regarding the comparison of the souls of Jews and non-Jews. That Kook deprecated unnecessary Jewish brutality against non-Jews should not minimize criticism of his expressed delight in the belief that the death of millions of soldiers during World War One constituted a sign of the approaching salvation of Jews and the coming of the Messiah.

 

The detractors of Rachlevsky and those who may level similar criticisms against our book and us are not the only hypocrites in this area. Shelves of bookshops in English-speaking and other countries groan under the weight of books on Jewish mysticism in general and on Hassidism and the Lurianic Cabbala more specifically. Many of the authors of these books are widely regarded as famous scholars because of the minutiae of their scholarship. The people who read only these books on these subjects, however, cannot suspect that Jewish mysticism, the Lurianic Cabbala, Hassidism and the teachings of Rabbi Kook contain basic ideas about Jewish superiority comparable to the worst forms of anti-Semitism. The scholarly authors of these books, for example Gershon Scholem, have willfully omitted reference to such ideas. These authors are supreme hypocrites. They are analogous to many authors of books on Stalin and Stalinism. Until recently, people who read only the books written by Stalinists could not know about Stalin’s crimes and would have false notions of the Stalinists’ regimes and their real ideologies.

 

The fact is that certain Jews, some of whom wield political influence, consider Jews to be superior to non-Jews and view the world as having been created only or primarily for Jews. This belief in Jewish superiority is most dangerous when held by Jews who love their children, are honest in their relations with other Jews and perform, as do fundamentalists in all religions, various acts of piety. This belief is less dangerous when held by Jews who are not overwhelmingly concerned about religion and/or corruption. A parallel worth citing here is that in a secular, totalitarian system, a dedicated party worker or a convinced nationalist is usually more

 

 

 

 

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dangerous and harmful than a corrupt member of the same ideological system.

 

Our final point in this preface is both personal and universal. As Jews, we understand that our own grandparents or great-grandparents probably believed in at least some of the views described in our book. This same statement may apply to other contemporary Jews. In the past many non-Jews, as individuals and as members of groups, held anti-Semitic views, which, especially when the circumstances were propitious, influenced the behavior of others towards Jews. Similarly, in the past, slavery was universally practiced and justified, the inferior status of women was a global phenomenon and the belief that a country belonged to an individual or family and was heritable was common. Jewish fundamentalists still believe, as they have in the past, in a golden age when everything was, or was going to be, perfect. This golden age is so much of a reality for them that, when faced with issues of pernicious beliefs and practices, they take refuge by invoking God’s word, by falsely describing the past and by condemning non-Jews for harboring feelings of superiority and having contempt for Jews. The fundamentalists also justify their own belief in Jewish superiority and their feeling of contempt for non-Jews; they seek to reproduce the mythical golden age in which their views would dominate. We have written this book in order to reveal the essential character of Jewish fundamentalism and its adherents. This character threatens democratic features of Israeli society. We believe that awareness is the necessary first step in opposition. We realize that by criticizing Jewish fundamentalism we are criticizing a part of the past that we love. We wish that members of every human grouping would criticize their own past, even before criticizing others. This, we further believe, would lead to a better understanding between human groups and would be followed, perhaps slowly and hesitantly, by better treatment of minorities. Most of our book is concerned with basic beliefs and resultant policies in Israeli Jewish society. We believe that a critique of Jewish fundamentalism, which entails a critique of the Jewish past, can help Jews acquire more understanding and improve their behavior towards Palestinians, especially in the territories conquered in and occupied since

 

 

 

 

 

 

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1967. We hope that our critique will also motivate other people in the Middle East to engage in criticism of their entire past in order to increase their knowledge of themselves and improve their behavior towards others in the present. All of this could constitute a major factor in bringing peace to the Middle East.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

 

 

This is a political book about Jewish fundamentalism in Israel. It includes some original scholarly research but is based to a great extent upon the scholarly research of others. Hopefully, this book is analytical.

 

We have inserted in the text many and copious quotations from serious articles that have appeared in the Israeli Hebrew press. The majority of articulate Israeli Jews have learned about Jewish fundamentalism and some of the reactions thereto during the past ten to fifteen years from these articles. Some of these articles provided summaries of and analyses by leading scholars who have researched in-depth aspects of Jewish fundamentalism.

 

We have quoted and have usually explained texts from talmudic literature. Such texts have been and still are often used in Israeli politics and often quoted in the Israeli Hebrew press. We have concluded that in the usual English translations of talmudic literature some of the most sensitive passages are usually toned down or falsified—as a result, we have ourselves translated all of the texts from talmudic literature that we have quoted in the book. The quotations from the Bible, however, follow the standard translations, sometimes in more modem English, except when specifically noted otherwise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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We realize that we have presented a number of lengthy quotations. We determined that this was necessary in order to explain our points adequately. We believe the quotations deserve to be and should be read in full. Instead of footnoting each quotation separately in the traditional scholarly manner, we decided to mention in the text from where each quotation was taken. Although this may at times appear to be a bit redundant, it makes the flow of understanding easier.

 

Although our book deals primarily with recent developments in Jewish fundamentalism, it is rooted in Jewish history. A brief overview of Jewish history, especially for readers who may lack adequate knowledge thereof, is necessary in order to provide the contextual framework for the subject matter. Fundamentalists of all religions wish to restore society to the “good old times” when the faith was allegedly pure and was practiced by everyone. Fundamentalists believe that in the “good old times” all the evils associated with modernity were absent, To gain an understanding of Jewish fundamentalism, it is imperative to identify the historical period that fundamentalists believe should be re-established. In order to do this, we must specify the various periods of Jewish history.

 

Jewish history is usually divided into four major periods. The first is the biblical period during which most of the Jewish Bible (Old Testament in the Christian tradition) was written. Although its beginning time is uncertain, this period lasted until about the fifth century BC. Judaism, at least in its major characteristics, did not exist in this time period. The Hebrew word “yehudim” (“Jews” in post-biblical Hebrew) and its cognates in the Jewish Bible only denotes the inhabitants of the small kingdom of Judea and is used to distinguish these inhabitants from all the other people, called Israelites or “sons of Israel” or, rarely, “Hebrews.” The Bible anyway is not the book that primarily determines the practices and doctrines of Orthodox Jews.¹ The most fundamentalist Orthodox Jews are largely ignorant of major parts of the Bible and know some parts only through commentaries that distort meaning. Controversies, moreover, consumed the biblical period. The majority of Israelites, including inhabitants of Judea, practiced idolatry throughout much of this period. Only a minority of Israelites followed those tendencies from

 

 

 

 

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which Judaism subsequently arose. In short, Judaism, as it came to be known, did not exist during the biblical period.

 

The second period of Jewish history, usually called the Second Temple period, began in the fifth century BC and lasted until the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70. This was the formative period of Judaism with its subsequent characteristics. The term “Jews,” which denotes those people who followed the distinctive religion of Judaism and the name Judea, which denotes the land wherein Jews lived, appeared in this period. Near the end of this period, after Jews had conquered most of Palestine, the Romans adopted the term “Judea” in describing Palestine.³ The two most important new Jewish characteristics that developed in this period were Jewish exclusiveness and the resultant separation of Jews from all other nations. For the first time the persons of other nations were referred to by the collective name of gentiles.⁴ The second new characteristic was based upon the assumption that the Jews must follow biblical law, that is, the true interpretation of the law. During most of this period, however, disputes centering upon differing and rival interpretations of the law occurred. At times, these disputes erupted into civil wars. The long-lasting quarrel between the Pharisees and Saducees was but one example of such disputes. Shortly after the beginning of this period, Alexander the Great conquered Palestine. States influenced by Hellenism ruled Palestine for almost a thousand years thereafter; even the short-lived independent Jewish state of the Hasmonean dynasty was in most essentials a type of Hellenistic state. Consequentially, Jewish society and the Hebrew language, even though keeping their Jewish characteristics were transformed by the influences of Hellenism. Hellenism influenced even more deeply the Jewish diaspora in Mediterranean countries. Jews in those countries often spoke and prayed in Greek. Unfonunately most of the Jewish literature in Greek, which was produced in this period, was subsequently lost by the Jews; only that part preserved by various Christian churches has remained.

 

Most historians date the beginning of the third period in AD 70 with the destruction of the Second Temple. Other historians prefer to date the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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beginning of the third period in AD 135, when the last major Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire ended. This period ended at different times in different countries with the onset of modernity and the rise of modern nation states. Modernity began when Jews were granted rights as citizens equal to those granted to non-Jews and consequently when their autonomy, which entailed subjection to the rabbis, ended. This occurred in the United States and France, for example, by the end of the eighteenth century; this did not occur in Russia until 1917 or in Yemen until the 1950s. The Jewish rebellions against the Romans resulted in a permanent loss of Jewish population in Palestine; the importance of the Jewish diaspora thus increased. This change became fully operative in the fifth century AD. Additionally, the failure of rebellions caused the Jews to lose hope that the Temple would be rebuilt and that the animal sacrifices performed in the Temple, previously the heart-center of the Jewish religion, would be restored before the coming of the Messiah. The repeated defeats caused most Jews to accommodate themselves to the ruling authority of Rome and of other states in return for the limited autonomy directed by the rabbis. Thus, in the Roman empire of the fourth century AD, in a system created much earlier, all the Jews were in religious matters subject to the Patriarch who had the power to punish them by flogging, by levying fines for religious offenses and by imposing taxes. The dignitary called Patriarch in Roman sources was called President (“Nassi” in Hebrew) in Jewish sources. He presided over the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court, and in Palestine appointed court members and other religious functionaries. The Patriarch, whose post was hereditary, held a high official rank in the hierarchy of Roman state officials. A similar arrangement simultaneously existed in Iraq where the top official was called the head of the diaspora. Both the patriarch and the head of the diaspora claimed to have been descended from the family of King David. The office of the patriarch lapsed shortly after AD 429; the office of the head of the diaspora lasted until about AD 1100. Both offices provided the framework for models of Jewish autonomy. This autonomy, which persisted until the modern era, and later repercussions thereof, contributed to the rise of Jewish fundamentalism. The great abundance of literature produced in the third period, the longest in the entire course of Jewish history, was

 

 

 

 

 

 

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written mostly in Hebrew but also in Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Yiddish and other languages. The major theme was religion; the minutiae of religious observances were mainly emphasized. Poetry, philosophy and science, predominantly of the Aristotelian variety, appeared at some times in some places but were neither universal nor continuous. In many diaspora areas, particularly in central Europe, the only literature produced until 1750 was religious. From the perspective of Jewish fundamentalism the most important occurrence in the third period was the growth of Jewish mysticism, usually referred to by the name of Cabbala. Jewish mysticism transformed Jewish beliefs without changing, except for a few details, Jewish observance. Between 1550 and 1750, the great majority of Jews in western Europe accepted the Cabbala and its set of beliefs. This was the end of the third period of Jewish history, which immediately preceded the rise of modern nation states and the beginning of modern influences. Mysticism is still accepted by and constitutes a vital part of Jewish fundamentalism, being especially important in the messianic variety. As shown in our book, the ideology of the messianic variety of Jewish fundamentalism is based upon the Cabbala. In spite of making occasional references to the Bible, Jewish fundamentalists generally have consistently pinpointed and described the last part of this third period as the golden age that they wish to restore. It is important to note that, beyond the spawning of Jewish fundamentalism, the wide circulation of religious literature in this third period created a strong sense of Jewish unity, based upon a common religion and the Hebrew language. (Almost all educated Jews, regardless of what language they spoke, understood and employed Hebrew as a written language for their religion.)

 

The fourth and modern period of Jewish history is the one in which we live. It began at different times in different countries; many Israeli Jews passed directly from pre-modern to modern times. As discussed in Chapter 3 of our book, this phenomenon has been especially important for Oriental Jews. Our book emphasizes that Jewish fundamentalism arose as a reaction against the effects of modernity upon Jews. The influence of Jewish fundamentalism upon the Israeli Jewish community can only be understood adequately within the context of the entire course of Jewish history.

 

 

 

 

 

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• Chapter 1: Jewish Fundamentalism within Jewish Society

 

 

 

• Chapter 2: The Rise of the Haredim in Israel

 

 

 

• Chapter 3: The Two Main Haredi Groups

 

 

 

• Chapter 4: The National Religious Party and the Religious Settlers

 

 

 

• Chapter 5: The Nature of the Gush Emunim Settlements

 

 

 

• Chapter 6: The Real Significance of Baruch Goldstein

 

 

 

• Chapter 7: The Religious Background of Rabin’s Assassination

 

 

 

• Note on Bibliography and Related Matters

 

 

 

• Glossary

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes

 

 

 

 

1. 1. Baruch Kimmerling, review of Yohanan Peres and Efraim Ya’ar Yukhtman, Between Agreement and Dispute: Democracy and Peace in Israeli Society (Jerusalem: The Israeli Institute for Democracy, 1998) in Kimmerling carefully reviewed and analyzed the data, assembled between 1993 and 1995 by Peres and Yukhtman.

 

2. 2. We explain this to some extent in this book. This is explained in greater detail in Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (London: Pluto Press, 1994).

 

3. 3. The Romans actually adopted the term Judea by employing the form of “provincia Judea” in describing Palestine, which in the Bible is called by other names.

 

4. 4. The Hebrew word for gentiles is “goyim,” a word which, as used in the Bible, simply means nations. The singular “goy” in the Bible was—and is— applied to the Israelites themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Web Editor’s Note

 

 

 

This document has been edited slightly to conform to American stylistic, punctuation and hypertext conventions. Other than a slight reorganization of sections and the correction of a few typographical errors, no further changes to the text have been

 

 

 

 

 

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made.

 

This document is best viewed with 1024×768 pixel screen area.

 

Reprinted in accordance with U.S. copyright law.

 

 

 

 

 

Alabaster’s Archive

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chaper One: Jewish Fundamenatlism Within Jewish Society by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinksy

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

 

Jewish Fundamenatlism Within Jewish

Society

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost every moderately sophisticated Israeli Jew knows the facts about Israeli Jewish society that are described in this book. These facts, however, are unknown to most interested Jews and non-Jews outside Israel who do not know Hebrew and thus cannot read most of what Israeli Jews write about themselves in Hebrew. These facts are rarely mentioned or are described inaccurately in the enormous media coverage of Israel in the United States and elsewhere. The major purpose of this book is to provide those persons who do not read Hebrew with more understanding of one important aspect of Israeli Jewish society.

 

This book pinpoints the political importance of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, a powerful state in and beyond the Middle East that wields great influence in the United States. Jewish fundamentalism is here briefly defined as the belief that Jewish Orthodoxy, which is based upon the Babylonian Talmud, the rest of talmudic literature and halachic literature, is still valid and will eternally remain valid. Jewish fundamentalists believe that the Bible itself is not authoritative unless interpreted correctly by talmudic literature. Jewish fundamentalism exists not only in Israel but in every country that has a sizeable Jewish community. In countries other than Israel, wherein Jews constitute a small minority of the total population, the general importance of Jewish fundamentalism is limited mainly to acquiring funding and garnering political support for fundamentalist adherents in Israel. Its importance in Israel is far greater, because its adherents can and do influence the state in various ways. The variety of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel is striking. Many fundamentalists, for instance, want the temple rebuilt on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem or at least want to keep the site, which is now a holy Muslim praying place, empty of visitors. In the United States most Christians would not identify with such a purpose, but in Israel a significant number of Israeli Jews who are not fundamentalists identify with and support this and

 

 

 

 

 

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similar demands. Some varieties of Jewish fundamentalism are clearly more dangerous than others. Jewish fundamentalism is not only capable of influencing conventional Israeli policies but could also substantially affect Israeli nuclear policies. The same possible consequences of fundamentalism feared by many persons for other countries could occur in Israel.

 

The significance of fundamentalism in Israel can only be understood within the context of Israeli Jewish society and as part of the contribution of the Jewish religion to societal internal divisions. Our consideration of this broad topic begins by focusing upon the ways sophisticated observers divide Israeli Jewish society politically and religiously. We then proceed to the explanation of why Jewish fundamentalism influences in varying degrees other Israeli Jews, thereby allowing fundamentalist Jews to wield much greater political power in Israel than their percentage of the population might appear to warrant.

 

The customary two-way division of Israeli Jewish society rests upon the cornerstone recognition that as a group Israeli Jews are highly ideological. This is best evidenced by their high percentage of voting, which usually exceeds 80 per cent. In the May 1996 elections, over 95 per cent of the better educated, richer, secular Jews and the religious Jews in all categories of education and income voted. After discounting the large number of Israeli Jews who live outside Israel (over 400,000), most of whom did not vote, it can be safely assumed that almost every eligible voter in these two crucial segments of the population voted. Most Israeli political observers by now assume that Israeli Jews are divided into two categories: Israel A and Israel B. Israel A, often referred to as the “left,” is politically represented by the Labor and Meretz Parties; Israel B, referred to as the “right” or the “right and religious parties,” is comprised of all the other Jewish parties. Almost all of Israel A and a great majority of Israel B (the exception being some of the fundamentalist Jews) strongly adhere to Zionist ideology, which in brief, holds that all or at least the majority of Jews should emigrate to Palestine, which as the Land of Israel, belongs to all Jews and should be a Jewish state. A strong and increasing enmity between these two segments of Israeli

 

 

 

 

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society nevertheless exists. There are many reasons for this enmity. The reason relevant to this study is that Israel B, including its secular members, is sympathetic to Jewish fundamentalism while Israel A is not. It is apparent from studies of election results over a long period of time that Israel B has consistently obtained a numerical edge over Israel A. This is an indication that the number of Jews influenced by Jewish fundamentalism is consistently increasing.

 

In his article “Religion, Nationalism and Democracy in Israel,” published in the Autumn 1994 issue of the periodical, Z’Manim (no. 50-51), Professor Baruch Kimmerling, a faculty member of Hebrew University’s sociology department, presented data pertaining to the religious division of Israeli Jewish society. Citing numerous research studies, Kimmerling showed conclusively that Israeli Jewish society is far more divided on religious issues than is generally assumed outside of Israel, where belief in generalizations, such as “common to all Jews,” is challenged less than in Israel. Quoting the data of a survey taken by the prestigious Gutman Institute of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Kimmerling pointed out that whereas 19 per cent of Israeli Jews said they prayed daily, another 19 per cent declared that they would not enter a synagogue under any circumstances.¹ Influenced by the Gutman Institute analysis and similar studies, Kimmerling and other scholars have concluded that Israel A and Israel B contain hard-core believers who hold diametrically opposed views of the Jewish religion. This conclusion is almost certainly correct.

 

More generally, the attitude towards religion in Israeli Jewish society can be divided into three parts. The religious Jews observe the commandments of the Jewish religion, as defined by Orthodox rabbis, many of whom emphasize observance more than belief. (The number of Reform and/or Conservative Jewish in Israel is small.) The traditional Jews keep some of the more important commandments while violating the more inconvenient ones; they do honor the rabbis and the religion. The secularists may occasionally enter a synagogue but respect neither the rabbis nor the religious institutions. The line between traditional and secular Jews is often

 

 

 

 

 

 

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vague, but the available studies indicate that 25 to 30 per cent of Israeli Jews are secular, 50 to 55 per cent are traditional and about 20 per cent are religious. Traditional Jews obviously belong to both the Israel A and Israel B categories.

 

Israeli religious Jews are divided into two distinctly different groups. The members of the religiously more extreme group are called Haredim. (The singular word is Haredi or Hared.) The members of the religiously more moderate group are called religious-national Jews. The religious-national Jews are sometimes called “knitted skullcaps” because of their head covering. Haredim usually wear black skullcaps that are never knitted, or hats. The religious-national Jews otherwise usually dress in the more usual Israeli fashion, while the Haredim almost always wear black clothes.

 

The Haredim are themselves divided into two parties. The first, Yahadut Ha’Torah (Judaism of the Law) is the party of the Ashkenazi Haredim who are of East European origin. Yahadut Ha’Torah itself is a coalition of two factions. The second is Shas, the party of the Oriental Haredim who are of Middle Eastern origin. (The differences between the two types of Haredim will be more specifically discussed in Chapter 3.) The religious-national Jews are organized in the National Religious Party (NRP). By analyzing the 1996 electoral vote and making some necessary adjustments, we can estimate the population percentages of these two groups of religious Jews. In the 1996 election the Haredi parties together won 14 of the 120 total Knesset seats. Shas won ten seats; Yahadut Ha’ Torah won four. The NRP won nine seats. Some Israeli Jews admittedly voted for Shas because of talismans and amulets distributed by Shas that were supposedly valid only after a “correct” vote. Some NRP members and sympathizers, moreover, admittedly voted for secular right-wing parties. Everything considered, the Haredim probably constitute 11 per cent of the Israeli population and 13.4 per cent of the Israeli Jews; the NRP adherents probably constitute 9 per cent of the Israeli population and 11 per cent of the Israeli Jews.

 

The basic tenets of the two groups of religious Jews need some introductory explanation. The word “hared” is a common Hebrew word meaning “fearful.”

 

 

 

 

 

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During early Jewish history, it meant “God-fearing” or exceptionally devout. In the mid-nineteenth century it was adopted, first in Germany and Hungary and later in other parts of the diaspora, as the name of the party of religious Jews that opposed any modern innovation. The Ashkenazi Haredim emerged as a backlash group opposed to the Jewish enlightenment in general and especially to those Jews who refused to accept the total authority of the rabbis and who introduced innovations into the Jewish worship and life style. Seeing that almost all Jews accepted these innovations, the Haredim reacted even more extremely and banned every innovation. The Haredim to date have insisted upon the strictest observance of the Halacha. An illustrative example of opposition to innovation is the previously mentioned and still current black dress of the Haredim; this was the dress fashion of Jews in Eastern Europe when the Haredim formed themselves into a party. Before that time Jews dressed in many different styles and were often indistinguishable in dress from their neighbors. After a brief time, almost all Jews except for the Haredim again dressed differently. The Halacha, moreover, does not enjoin Jews to dress in black and/or to wear thick black coats and heavy fur caps during the hot summer or at any other time. Yet, Haredim in Israel continue to do so in opposition to innovation; they insist that dress be kept as it was in Europe around 1850. All other considerations, including climatic ones, are overridden.

 

 

 

In contrast to the Haredim, the religious-nationalist Jews of the NRP made their compromises with modernity at the beginning of the 1920s when the split between the two large groupings in religious Judaism first appeared in Palestine. This can be immediately observed in their dress, which, with the exception of a small skullcap, is conventional. Even more importantly, this is evident in their selective observance of the Halacha, for example, in their rejection of many commandments regarding women. NRP members do not hesitate to admit women to positions of authority in many of their organizations and in the political party itself. Before both the 1992 and 1996 elections the NRP published and distributed an advertisement, containing photographs of various public figures including some women supporting the party, and boasted more broadly on television of female support. Haredim did not and would not do this. Even when Haredim, who ban television

 

 

 

 

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watching for themselves, decided to present some television election programs directed to other Jews, they insisted that all participants be male. During the 1992 campaign the editors of a Haredi weekly consulted the rabbinical censor about whether or not to publish the above-mentioned NRP advertisement. The rabbinical censor ordered the paper to publish the advertisement with all photographs of the NRP women blotted out. The editors did what the censor ordered. Outraged, the NRP sued the newspaper for libel and sought damages in Israeli secular courts, disregarding the rulings of Haredi rabbis prohibiting using secular courts to settle disputes among Jews.

 

The religious-nationalist Jewish compromises with modernity regarding women are exceedingly complicated in many ways. The Halacha forbids Jewish males to listen to women singing whether in a choir or solo regardless of what is sung. This is stated directly in the halachic ruling that a voice of a woman is adultery. This is interpreted by later halachic rulings stipulating that the word “voice” here means a woman’s singing not speaking. This rule, originating in the Talmud, occurs in all codes of law. A Jewish male who willingly listens to a woman’s singing commits a sin equivalent either to adultery or fornication. The great majority of NRP faithful members, nevertheless, listen to women singing and thus commit “adultery” routinely. Some of the most strict NRP members, especially among the religious settlers in the West Bank, have not only puzzled over this problem but at times have tried to solve the problem of how to adjust by developing creative approaches. In the early 1990s some of the settlers founded a new radio station, Arutz, or Channel, 7. For their station to become successful and to appeal as broadly as possible to Israeli Jews, the settlers understood that the songs of the fashionable singers of the day, some of whom were women, would have to be broadcast. The rabbinical censor, however, has refused to allow a breach of the Halacha whereby male listeners would hear female singers and thus commit “adultery.” After further consultation with the censor, the settlers devised an acceptable solution that is still being employed. Men sing the songs, made popular by women; the male voices are then electronically changed to the female pitch and are broadcast

 

 

 

 

 

 

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accordingly over Arutz 7. A part of the traditional public is satisfied by this expedient, and the learned NRP rabbis insist that no adultery is committed when men listen to the songs being sung. The Haredim obviously have rejected and condemned this accommodation and to date have refused to listen to Arutz 7. Even more importantly, the Haredim, after increasing somewhat their political power in the 1988 elections, were able to impose their position in this regard upon the whole state by forcing a change in the opening of the new Knesset session. The opening ceremony previously began with the singing of “Hatikva,” the Israeli national anthem, by a mixed male-female choir. After the 1988 election, in deference to Haredi sensitivities, a male singer replaced the mixed choir. After the 1992 election, won by Labor, an all-male choir of the Military Rabbinate sang “Hatikva.”

 

How can the Haredim, who altogether constitute only a small percentage of Israel’s Jewish population, at times, either alone or even with the help of the NRP, impose their will upon the rest of society? The facile explanation is that both the Labor and Likud parties kowtow to the Haredim for political support. This explanation is insufficient. The kowtowing continued between 1984 and 1990 during the time that Labor and Likud had formed a coalition. Currying favor from the Haredim for alignment purposes was then politically unnecessary. The offered explanation, furthermore, does not adequately take into account the special affinity of all the religious parties, perceived since 1980 as fundamentalist, to Likud and other secular right-wing parties. This affinity, especially between Likud and the Haredi religious parties, based upon a shared world outlook, is at the crux of Israeli politics. (This affinity is analogous to that existing between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and their secular right parties.) The relatively simple case of the NRP illustrates this well. The NRP recognizes, although does not always follow, the same halachic authorities as do the Haredi parties. The NRP also adheres to the same ideals relating to the Jewish past and, more importantly, to the future when Israel’s triumph over the non-Jews will allegedly be secure. The differences between the NRP and the Haredim stem from the NRP’s belief that redemption has begun and will soon be completed by the imminent coming of the Messiah. The Haredim do not share this belief. The NRP believes that special circumstances at the

 

 

 

 

 

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beginning of redemption justify temporary departures from the ideal that could help advance the process of redemption. NRP support in some situations for military service for talmudic scholars is a relevant example here. These deviant NRP ideas have been undermined since the 1970s by the expanding Haredi influence upon increasing numbers of NRP followers who have resisted departures from strict talmudic norms and have favored Haredi positions. This process has been counter-balanced to some extent by the growth in prestige of the NRP settlers who are esteemed as pioneers of messianism even though the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin by a messianist may have momentarily increased Haredi prestige.

 

The religious influence upon the Israeli right-wing of Israel B is attributable both to its militaristic character and its widely shared world outlook. Secular and militaristic right-wing, Israeli Jews hold political views and engage in rhetoric similar to that of religious Jews. For most Likud followers, “Jewish blood” is the reason why Jews are in a different category than non-Jews, including, of course, even those non-Jews who are Israeli citizens and who serve in the Israeli army. For religious Jews, the blood of non-Jews has no intrinsic value; for Likud, it has limited value. Menachem Begin’s masterful use of such rhetoric about Gentiles brought him votes and popularity and thus constitutes a case in point. The difference in this respect between Labor and Likud is rhetorical but is nevertheless important in that it reveals part of a world outlook. In 1982, for example, when the Israeli army occupied Beirut, Rabin representing Labor, although advocating the same policies as favored by Sharon and Likud, did not explain the Sabra and Shatila Camp massacres by stating, as did Begin: “Gentiles kill Gentiles and blame the Jews.” Even if Rabin had himself been capable of saying this, he knew that most of his secular supporters in Labor, who distinguish between Gentiles who hate Jews and those who do not, would not have tolerated such a statement. They would have repudiated such rhetoric as being both untrue and harmful.

 

Religious influence is evident in the right’s general reverence for the Jewish past and its insistence that Jews have an historic right to an expanded Israel

 

 

 

 

 

 

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extending beyond its present borders. More than other secular Israelis, members of the Israeli right insist upon Jewish uniqueness. During many centuries of their existence, the great majority of Jews were similar in some ways to the present-day Haredim. Thus, those Jews who today revere the Jewish past as evidence of Jewish uniqueness respect to some extent religious Jews as perpetuators of that past. An essential part of the right’s emphasis upon uniqueness is its hatred of the concept of “normality,” that is, that Jews are similar to other people and have the same desire for stability as do other nations. Some cultural affinities between secular and religious Jews of the Israeli right are not primarily ideological. Many Likud supporters, whether Sephardic or Ashkenazi in origin, are traditionalists; they view rabbis as glamorous figures and are affected by childhood memories of the patriarchal family in which education was dominated by the grandfather and the women “knew their place.” Although most pronounced in those of the religious vanguard, such considerations also affect secular Jews of the right. The right often exaggerates the beauty and superiority of the Jewish past, especially when arguing for the preservation of Jewish uniqueness.

 

The religious and secular members of the right share fears as well as beliefs. In an October 6, 1993, article, published in Haaretz, Israel’s most prestigious daily Hebrew-Ianguage newspaper, Doron Rosenblum, relying upon varied sources, illustrated this by quoting pronouncements of Likud leaders that were designed to show Israelis the grave nature and risks of the peace process and at the same time to continue the boasting that Likud had initiated the process.

 

Rosenblum quoted the following statement by Likud Member of the Knesset (MK) Uzi Landau, who after the 1996 elections was appointed chairperson of the Knesset Committee for Defense and Foreign Affairs:

 

If Rabin’s policies toward Syria are followed, one morning they [Israeli Jews] will awaken to see columns of Syrian tanks descending from the Golan Heights like herds of sheep … The settlements of the Galilee will then be attacked by fire-power stronger than that used in [the war of] 1973 … Since the idea

 

 

 

 

 

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of extermination of Israelis remains a topic in the Syrian consciousness … any [Israeli] withdrawal from the Golan Heights will only precipitate the moment that the Syrian knife will approach the throat of every inhabitant of the Galilee … Syrian policies are fixed by a genetic code not subject to rapid changes.

 

Apparently keeping to its double-standard approach, the Western media, which would almost certainly have blasted any non-Jewish politician for attributing Israeli policies to a Jewish genetic code not subject to rapid changes, avoided commenting upon the Landau statement.

 

Rosenblum also quoted MK Benny Begin, a major Likud leader, who expressed the fear that Syria would make a frontal attack upon Israel. This fear is commonly expressed by members of most Israeli political parties. What is characteristic of Israel B, however, is that, as Benny Begin specifically declared, the aims of a Syrian invasion will be the same as “the aims of Pogromists of Kishinev to cut Jewish throats.”² Begin added that this time nuclear scientists would help in the Syrian venture. Comparing the unarmed Jewish community, a small minority in the Russian Empire, with Israel and its army illustrates a common attitude to the Jewish past held by the secular right-wing Israeli parties and the religious Jews. This attitude takes no cognizance of historical development. Jews in whatever condition are always the real or potential victims of Gentiles.

 

Rosenblum, who is a member of Israel A, perceived all such imagery as incongruous. Observing that Landau regarded the Syrians as sheep, he asked: “Can it be that he [Landau] means to say that we are wolves?”

 

Rosenblum then offered his analysis of why this rhetoric has nevertheless been so persuasive:

 

The suspicion is long-standing that members of the national camps [that is, the secular right] use power-mad rhetoric to cover their subliminal existential fear of the entire world. This fear was not dispelled in the slightest when the state of Israel was founded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Labor, in spite of all its faults, has succeeded by whatever means to cast aside such fear and replace it with a constructive and pragmatic world outlook. Likud, which resumed its historical note with ease, has not.

 

Those chauvinistic Jews who speak with utmost confidence about Israel’s power and ability to impose its will upon the Middle East are most susceptible to such fears. The same people who predict that a second Holocaust will almost immediately occur if Israel makes any concession to the Arabs also often state categorically that the Israeli army, if not restrained by politicians, by Americans, or by leftist Jews, could conquer Baghdad within one week. (Ariel Sharon actually made this claim a few months before the outbreak of the October 1973 war.) The fear and the self-confidence co-exist harmoniously. The belief in Jewish uniqueness enhances this co-existence. Most foreign observers do not realize that a sizeable segment of the Israeli Jewish public holds these chauvinistic views. The schizophrenic blend of inordinate fears and exaggerated self-confidence, common to the Israeli secular right and religious Jews, resembles ideas held by anti-Semites who usually view Jews as being at the same time both powerful and easy to defeat. This is one of the reasons why attitudes of Israeli right-wing individuals toward the Gentiles, especially toward the Arabs, resemble so closely the attitudes of anti-Semites toward the Jews.

 

The secular right and the religious Jews also share other fears. They fear the West and its public opinion. They fear and condemn Jewish leftists, a term sufficiently broad to include most Labor followers, for not being sufficiently Jewish, for preferring Arabs to Jews and for living lives of delusion. They view the left as dangerous because of its ability to attract new recruits, especially from the ranks of the country’s intellectual elite.

 

The issue of normalcy most divides the Israeli right from the left. The left longs for normalcy and wants Jews to be a nation like all other nations. The entire Israeli right, on the other hand, is united in its resentment of the idea of normalcy and its belief, along the lines of the Jewish religion, that Jews are exceptional–different from other people and nations. Reverence for the

 

 

 

 

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national past allegedly solidifies this uniqueness. Religious Jews believe that God made the Jews unique; many of the secular right believe that Jews are doomed to be unique by their past and have no free choice in this matter.

 

Another, but somewhat less important, reason for the affinity between the secular right and religious Jews is that the latter are capable of providing “convincing” arguments for perpetual Jewish rule over the land of Israel and for the denial of certain basic rights to the Palestinians. These arguments are not only put in terms of national security but more importantly in terms of the God-given right to these territories. The secular Likud scholars and politicians are often far too alienated from the Jewish past and Jewish values to talk competently, or indeed even to understand properly, such matters. Only the religious can provide an in-depth rationale for Likud’s policies, which are grounded not in short-term strategic considerations but rather in the long history of the special relationship between God and his chosen people.

 

Although far more intense among members of Israel B, these same sentiments can be discerned among members of Israel A. This fact provides the explanation for the political concessions made to the religious parties. (Foreign observers have too often incorrectly attributed these concessions merely to the size and/or the lobbying power of the religious parties.) These sentiments have also affected Jewish historiography and education. Since the late 1950s, and especially after the 1967 war, Israeli Jewish historians, scholars in allied fields and popularizers, although generally less dishonest in their writings than most of their diaspora colleagues, have too often unduly beautified and romanticized past Jewish societies and have carefully avoided normal criticism. This type of apologia constituted a new trend. From the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, early Zionists and others in modern Jewish movements were severely critical of many aspects of their own religious cultural tradition and tried to change, in many cases even to destroy, parts of that tradition. Since the late 1980s, some younger Israeli historians, perhaps prompted by a growing polarization of Israeli Jewish society, have written and published some critical works that

 

 

 

 

 

 

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have shaken to some extent the still current apologetic trend.

 

 

The comparison of the world outlook and fears of the secular right with those of the Haredim requires more explanation. Standard Haredic perceptions of the world can only be understood as relics of pre-modern times. Menachem Friedman, a Westernized observant Jew, a highly regarded authority on the Haredim in both mandatory Palestine and the state of Israel and a professor at the religious Bar-Ilan University, provided an excellent description of these Haredic perceptions in a Davar article published on November 4, 1988.

 

Friedman wrote this article to explain the electoral fiasco that developed from the unsuccessful attempt of some candidates on the religious list of 1988 to advocate some moderation regarding the treatment of Palestinians. Friedman explained:

 

The Haredi world is Judeocentric. The essence of Haredi thought is the notion of an abyss separating the Jews from the Gentiles. This is why any coalition between Labor and Haredi doves is impossible. There actually is no such thing as a Haredi dove. People who speak about the Haredi world usually do not know how to read its signs. They do not understand that world nor its prominent personalities. The distance between Haredi doves and hawks is not great. Haredi doves and hawks share a common point of departure. Both see the relationship between non-Jews and Jews as they had seen them before Israel was established. They assume that non-Jews and Jews are poles apart. Non-Jews want to kill and destroy the Jews; the rightful differences between Jews should only be about how they should react to the ever-present non-Jewish desire. Currently, these are two alternative Haredi reactions to that common assumption. Rabbi Shach [the spiritual leader of one of the two Haredi factions] says that since the non-Jews hate us we need to keep quiet and refrain from provoking them by not reminding them of our existence. The Lubovitcher Rebbe says that we should be strong. [The Lubovitcher Rebbe, Rabbi

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Menachem Schneerson, died in 1992.] Those are two alternative answers, both arising from the common concept that a gap separates Jews from non-Jews. Rabbi Shach is not a dove in the same sense as Shulamit Aloni [a former Meretz Party leader] is a dove. Aloni is a dove, because she believes in a humanism that emphasizes the fundamental equality of all human beings and nations and the capability of different human beings and nations to communicate. Rabbi Shach believes that communicating with non-Jews is not possible and that they may only be able to forget that Jews exist. The Lubovitcher Rebbe states that we should be strong in order to defend ourselves against the non-Jews who always want to destroy us. [The difference between the two leaders] can be illustrated by their respective attitudes toward the peace [treaty] with Egypt. They both say that there is no peace and there can never be one, because the Egyptians want to exterminate us. Rabbi Shach, however, adds that we should try to minimize Jewish casualties] by keeping quiet. The Lubovitcher Rebbe says that, because the peace does not exist in any case, we should refuse to make any concessions. The Haredi dove does not believe in any kind of peace, and, therefore, all the talk about a narrow coalition, headed by Labor [and including Haredim] is completely baseless.

 

 

 

Subsequent political developments in Israel, including the election of Netanyahu in May 1996, have confirmed the truth of Professor Friedman’s analysis. From another Haredi perspective Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph, the spiritual authority of the Shas Party, corroborated this article. Rabbi Yoseph argued in a September 18, 1989 article in Yated Ne’eman that since Israel is too weak to demolish all Christian churches in the Holy Land it is also too weak to retain all the conquered territories. Using this reasoning, Rabbi Yoseph advocated that Israel make territorial concessions in order to avert a war in which Jewish lives will be lost. Rabbi Yoseph did not mention Palestinians nor even their most rudimentary rights. The Haredi world view

 

 

 

 

 

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is similar to the view held by the Israeli secular right. The world view of Likud politicians, enthusiastically supported by followers, is basically the classic world view of religious Jews; it has undergone significant secularization but has kept its essential qualities.

 

The alliance between the religious and secular parties of the right produced the Netanyahu victory in the 1996 election. This alliance was forged in spite of two deep political differences between the parties. The first difference concerns democracy, especially as illustrated by the structure of Israeli parties; the second difference revolves around Zionism.

 

All Israeli political parties except for the Haredi were and remain structured along the lines of parties in Western countries, especially those in the United States. Most of the Israeli parties, for example, introduced primaries in order to choose their candidates for the Knesset elections. The Haredi party structure, however, is different and peculiar, perhaps analogous only to what has happened in Iran. All the Haredi parties have a two-tier structure. The tier that is lower in importance includes the acting politicians, who, even if they are ministers or Knesset members, humbly profess in public that they are merely serving the party’s rabbinical sage councils whom they consult for directions before making any decisions. None of the Haredi politicians of any one party accept direction from rabbinical councils of other Haredi parties. The councils’ deliberations are kept secret; their decisions are not subject to any appeal since they are regarded as divinely inspired. The council members are not elected either by rabbis or lay people. If a council member dies, his successor is appointed by the remaining members. The rabbinical members of Haredi party councils, usually referred to by their followers as sages, make all decisions and view with suspicion the usual party structure, because it is viewed as innovative and modern. The modern political party structure, including membership, branches, internal elections and a host of other items that exist in the NRP, is totally absent in the Haredi parties. The disagreement and sometimes even hatreds of one another by Haredi parties stem from recognition of different rabbinical “sages” as final authorities. The Haredi political structure has preserved a male monopoly. To date, there have been no female Haredi politicians. Haredi disunity has

 

 

 

 

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prevented more rapid Haredization of parts of Israeli society. Structure similar to the Haredi was common in Jewish commmunities from the second century of the common era until the abolition of Jewish communal autonomy in modern nation states. The aim of Haredi practices has been and still is to preserve the Jewish way of life as it existed prior to modern times. Haredi parties, in their attempt to preserve an ancient Jewish regime, have to date constituted a political backlash directed against the tide of modernity that engulfed the NRP. The Haredi reaction, like many others, is often disguised as a romantic desire to return to a past that was allegedly happier and more emotionally secure for Jews than the modern life with its doubts and uncertainties. The Haredi-indoctrinated community strives to suppress all doubts of members and believes that happiness is thus achieved.

 

The disagreement between Haredim and most other Israeli Jews over Zionism is complex. The Haredim and the Zionists agree about the centrally important Zionist principle that anti-Semitism is an eternal quality common to all non-Jews and is different from xenophobia and/or any hatred of other minorities. This view is, of course, similar to that held of Jews by anti-Semites. (This similarity probably accounts for the political contact between some Zionists, beginning with Herzl, and “moderate” anti-Semites, who only wanted to rid their societies of Jews or limit the numbers of Jews in their societies without killing them.) The views concerning and the fears of anti-Semitism shared by the secular right and the Haredim accord with this central principle of Zionism better than do the views currently held by the left Labor and Meretz parties, which are frequently accused by Likud of not being sufficiently Zionist.

 

Haredi ideology nevertheless clashes with Zionism on certain other principles. Two major examples are the Zionist aims to concentrate all Jews, or as many as possible, in and to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. These aims or dogmas contradict the Haredi interpretations of the Talmud and talmudic commentaries. Because of the perceived contradiction, Haredim have consistently proclaimed, and still proclaim, their strong opposition to Zionism; they claim that the state of Israel is merely another

 

 

 

 

 

 

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diaspora for Jews, and they avoid using Zionist symbols. Every Israeli political party other than the Haredi, including the NRP, end or begin their conventions with the singing of “Hatikva,” the Israeli national and the world Zionist movement anthem; the Haredi parties and organizations do not do this but instead recite Jewish prayers. The media often condemns the Haredim for not singing “Hatikva” on official occasions. At all international Zionist conventions held in Israel only the Israeli flag is displayed. At Haredi conventions held in Israel all flags of the nation states from which delegates came, including Israel, are displayed in alphabetical order.

 

The Haredi objection to Zionism is based upon the contradiction between classical Judaism, of which the Haredim are the continuators, and Zionism. Numerous Zionist historians have unfortunately obfuscated the issues here. Some detailed explanation is therefore necessary. In a famous talmudic passage in Tractate Ketubot, page 111, which is echoed in other parts of the Talmud, God is said to have imposed three oaths on the Jews. Two of these oaths that clearly contradict Zionist tenets are: 1) Jews should not rebel against non-Jews, and 2) as a group should not massively emigrate to Palestine before the coming of the Messiah. (The third oath, not discussed here, enjoins the Jews not to pray too strongly for the coming of the Messiah, so as not to bring him before his appointed time.) During the course of post-talmudic Jewish history, rabbis extensively discussed the three oaths. Of major concern in this discussion was the question of whether or not specific Jewish emigration to Palestine was part of the forbidden massive emigration. During the past 1,500 years, the great majority of traditional Judaism’s most important rabbis interpreted the three oaths and the continued existence of the Jews in exile as religious obligations intended to expiate the Jewish sins that caused God to exile them.

 

In recent years, a number of Israeli Jewish scholars, who in general have developed a more honest Jewish historiography, have focused upon the essence of rabbinical interpretations of the three oaths. In his highly regarded scholarly book, Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism (published in Hebrew in Israel in 1993), Aviezer Ravitzky, for example, provided a good summary of rabbinical interpretations of the three

 

 

 

 

 

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oaths from the fifth century AD (or CE–Common Era). In his analysis Ravitzky noted that in the ninth century Rabbi Shmuel, son of Hosha’ana, an important leader of Palestinian Jewry, in a poetic prayer quoted the following as God’s words. “I took the oath of my people not to rebel against Christians and Muslims, told them to be silent until I myself will overturn them as I did in Sodom.” In the thirteenth century during the time that some rabbis and poets emigrated to Palestine for religious reasons,³ Ravitzky continued, other rabbis in many parts of the world quoted the three oaths theory to warn against the spread of this potentially dangerous phenomenon. Rabbi Eliezer, son of Moshe, the spiritual leader of a Jewish congregation in Wurtzburg, Germany, in the thirteenth century warned Jews who wrongly emigrated to Palestine that God would punish them with death. At about the same time, Rabbi Ezra of Gerona, Spain, a famous cabbalist, wrote that a Jew emigrating to Palestine forsakes God who is only present in the diaspora, where a majority of Jews live, and not in Palestine. In his book Ravitzky stressed that similar and even more extreme views continued to be expressed until the nineteenth century. The celebrated German rabbi, Yehonathan Eibshutz, wrote in the mid-eighteenth century that massive immigration of Jews to Palestine, even with the consent of all the nations of the world, was prohibited before the coming of the Messiah. In the early nineteenth century, Moses Mendelsohn and other supporters of the Jewish Enlightenment, as well as their opponents such as Rabbi Rafael Hirsch, the father of modern orthodoxy in Germany, agreed and continued to derive this prohibition from the three oaths. Hirsch wrote in 1837 that God had commanded Jews “never to establish a state of their own by their own efforts.” Rabbis in Central Europe were even more extreme. In 1837, the same year that Hirsch prohibited Jews from declaring a Jewish state, an earthquake in northern Palestine killed a majority of the inhabitants of Safad, of which many were Jews, some of whom had recently immigrated. Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum, a leading Hungarian rabbi, attributed the earthquake to God’s displeasure with excessive Jewish emigration to Palestine. Teitelbaum stated: “It is not God’s will that we should go to the land of Israel by our own efforts and will.” Rabbi Moshe Nachmanides, who died in 1270, was the one exceptional Jewish leader who opined that Jews should not

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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only emigrate to but should also conquer the land of Israel. Other important rabbis of that time and for many centuries thereafter ignored or strongly disagreed with the view of Nachmanides.

 

In the 1970s, seven centuries after his death, Nachmanides became the patron saint of the NRP and the Gush Emunim settlers. NRP rabbis also have claimed that the three oaths do not apply in messianic times and that, although the Messiah has not yet appeared, a cosmic process called the beginning of redemption has begun. During this period some of the previous religious laws should allegedly be disregarded; others should be changed. Thus, the dispute between the NRP and the Haredim has centered upon the issue of whether Jews are living in normal times or in the period of the beginning of redemption. Having made some political gains and becoming more self-confident after the 1988 national election, the Haredim strengthened their principled opposition to Zionism and to the NRP. In 1989, the two most important Haredi rabbis, Rabbi Shach and Rabbi Yoseph, held an anti-Zionist convention in Bnei Brak, Israel. Their speeches, devoted to expressions of principled opposition to Zionism and the beginning of redemption doctrine, were published in the Haredi newspaper, Yated Ne’eman, on September 18, 1989. The two rabbis from an halachic perspective also addressed the vital Israeli political issue of whether some areas of the land of Israel should be given to non-Jews, that is, to Palestinians. They refuted the NRP and Gush Emunim view that in accordance with the beginning of redemption no land of Israel should be given to non-Jews. Rabbi Yoseph and Shach argued that Jews still live in normal times when visible help of God cannot always be expected to save Jewish lives.

 

Rabbi Yoseph, renowned for his halachic erudition, presented in-depth analysis and correctly noted that Rabbi Shach here agreed fully with him. Rabbi Yoseph began by disagreeing with the NRP and Gush Emunim rabbis who argued that the beginning of redemptit1n and God’s commandment to conquer the land of Israel were more important than the saving of Jewish lives that would be lost in the war of conquest. Rabbi Yoseph acknowledged that in messianic times Jews would be more powerful than non-Jews and

 

 

 

 

 

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would then be obligated to conquer the land of Israel, to expel all non-Jews and to destroy the idolatrous Christian churches. Rabbi Yoseph, however, asserted that the messianic time of redemption had not yet arrived. He wrote:

 

The Jews are not in fact more powerful than the non-Jews and are unable to expel the non-Jews from the land of Israel because the Jews fear the non-Jews …

 

God’s commandment is then not valid … Even non-Jews who are idolaters live among us with no possibility of their being expelled or even moved. The Israeli government is obligated by international law to guard the Christian churches in the land of Israel, even though those churches are definitely places of idolatry and cult practice. This is so in spite of the fact that we are commanded by our [religious] law to destroy all idolatry and its servants until we uproot it from all parts of our land and any areas that we are able to conquer … Surely, this fact continues to weaken the religious meaning of the Israeli army’s conquests [in 1967].

 

The quotation cited above illustrates well a part of Israel’s realpolitik. Before the 1996 election, both Peres and Netanyahu regarded Rabbi Yoseph as an important political figure and often courted him openly. This was done in spite of Yoseph’s publicly declared doctrine that Jews, when sufficiently powerful, have a religious obligation to expel all non-Jews from the country and destroy all Christian churches. Leftists and most peace advocates in Israel lauded Yoseph and Shach for agreeing to withdrawal from the occupied territories but neglected to mention and actually suppressed the major thrust of the Yoseph and Shach position. For the most part the Western media avoided reporting the most essential points of the Yoseph speech. The reality here is that the Yoseph-Shach view constitutes one part of the hawkish heart of Israeli politics.

 

In his speech Rabbi Yoseph also acknowledged the halachic prohibition of selling real estate to non-Jews in the land of Israel, but he limited this prohibition to a time when doing so would not cause the loss of Jewish life.

 

 

 

 

 

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In the same manner he dealt with the issue of whether Jews should trust only in the hope of God’s help or should take their own precautions against danger or war. Yoseph contended that this issue is analogous to the question of whether a Jew who is ill on Yom Kippur should be given food to save his or her life. In the latter case, according to Rabbi Yoseph, the Jew who is ill should be given food even if the medical experts disagree with one another about the danger to life that would exist if the fast were observed. Following this line of reasoning, Rabbi Yoseph opined that, even if the military experts disagreed with one another as to whether withdrawal from the territories would avert war, the government should order withdrawal. Rabbi Yoseph, not influenced by the trusting-in-God argument, pointed out that Jews had been killed in previous wars and that the miraculous coming of the Messiah establishing God’s rule over the world would occur without the loss of a single Jewish life. Rabbi Yoseph also noted that the state of Israel is filled with Jewish sinners who provoke God. He quoted numerous rabbinical authorities who agreed with him that the three oaths were still valid.

 

Rabbi Yoseph’s view did not interest Rabin, Peres or Netanyahu. His dazzling display of erudition, occupying three large pages of small print, moreover, did not convince a single NRP rabbi. Rabbis Yoseph and Shach, who a bit later became enemies, continued to oppose Zionism and the beginning of redemption doctrine; they continued to advocate their variety of Jewish fundamentalism and to command the allegiance in 1996 of fourteen members of the 120-member Knesset. Rabbi Shach, who is more extreme in his opposition to Zionism than is Rabbi Yoseph, prohibited the Knesset members of his political party, Yahadut Ha’Torah, from becoming ministers in Netanyahu’s Zionist government. Shach, however, ordered his party’s Knesset members to support the Netanyahu government. Netanyahu rewarded Yahadut Ha’Torah by creatively giving it control of the ministry of housing. Netanyahu made himself the housing minister and signed almost blindly anything submitted by Deputy Minister Ravitz of the Yahadut Ha’Torah Party. This procedure was obviously employed to obviate the necessity of Yahadut Ha’Torah’s formally joining a Zionist government while nevertheless enjoying its benefits. Contrary to Rabbi Shach, Rabbi Yoseph

 

 

 

 

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ordered members of his party to become ministers in the Netanyahu government. These facts illustrated the political importance of Rabbis Yoseph’s and Shach’s views.

 

Rabbi Yoseph’s clearly expressed views on the territories not only reflect the Haredi view but also clearly resemble a great part of the actual foreign policy of the state of Israel. Rabbi Yoseph has argued that Jews have a religious duty to expel all Christians from the state of Israel only if doing so would not endanger Jewish life. Rabbi Yoseph has postulated that any Jewish concessions to non-Jews in the state of Israel has to be based solely upon the consideration of whether denial thereof could prove harmful for Jews. Rabbi Yoseph would almost certainly have favored a permanent occupation of all the territories if he were convinced that this would not provoke Arabs to harm Jews. Israeli governmental leaders with almost full support of Israeli Jews believed after the June 1967 war that the Arabs were incapable of harming Israel and therefore refused to make any concessions. Only after suffering grievous losses in the October 1973 war, and fearing another war, did the government of the state of Israel, again with almost the full support of Israeli Jews, agreed to return the Sinai to Egypt. In 1983, even after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, the Israeli leaders contemplated permanent occupation of one-third of Lebanon and domination of the remaining two-thirds. Sharon concluded a peace treaty, based upon those terms, with the then puppet Lebanese government. The guerilla warfare, conducted by the Lebanese in 1984 and 1985, which resulted in consistent Israeli casualties, caused the Israeli leaders to abandon those plans and to retreat. Israeli foreign policy, although usually conceived and conducted by secular Jews, has to date displayed an essence derived in part from the Jewish religious past. Indeed, the Zionist movement, which underwent a partial secularization, also kept many basic Jewish religious principles. Rabbi Yoseph, Ben-Gurion, Sharon and all major Israeli politicians share a common ground in policy advocacy.

 

 

 

 

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Notes

 

 

 

1. 1. Some Israeli Jews refuse to enter a synagogue as a principled protest against the Jewish religion; this phenomenon is rarely found in non-Israeli Jewish communities but can be compared to the attitude of some radicals to Christianity, for example, in France.

 

2. 2. The Kishinev pogrom in 1903 in the Ukraine section of the Russian Empire was the first major pogrom in eastern Europe after a lapse of many years. Kishinev became the symbolic term of and for murders of Jews everywhere.

 

3. 3. The religious reasons centered upon the fulfillment of religious Common to almost all pious Jews who emigrated to Palestine in pre-Zionist times was the belief that all religious observances connected with agriculture could not be fulfilled outside of but rather only in the land of Israel. Wanting to fulfill as many commandments as possible, therefore, these Jews thus emigrated to Palestine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Web Editor’s Note

 

This document has been edited slightly to conform to American stylistic, punctuation and hypertext conventions. No further changes to the text have been made.

 

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Chaper One: Jewish Fundamenatlism Within Jewish Society by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinksy

 

 

Reprinted in accordance with U.S. copyright law.

 

 

 

 

 

Alabaster’s Archive

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter 2: The Rise of the Haredim in Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

The Rise of the Haredim in Israel

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Although expanding steadily from the early 1970s, Jewish religious fundamentalism in Israel attracted relatively little interest in the dominant secularly oriented Israeli society until 1988. Members of the various Haredi sects, generally self-contained in residentially segregated areas of Israeli cities, led lives absorbed by concerns and preoccupations that appeared exotic at best to outsiders. Although some members of these sects clashed sharply over specific issues with the secular part of Israeli society and at those times acquired a bit of public attention, they were mostly ignored. The sensational Haredi political success in the Israeli parliamentary elections of 1988, predicted by none of the professional pollsters, surprised many people. Because of their continued political successes in succeeding elections through the 1990s, the Haredim put themselves into a position at various times to be able to dictate to the Israeli secular majority.

 

The Haredi political successes not only caused many Israeli Jews to look more closely at and to be more concerned with the Haredim but also sparked increased attention abroad, especially in the United States. The interest generated in the United States prompted the writing and publication of many new books and articles in English that focused upon the folkloristic aspects of the Haredim but unfortunately largely ignored their basic ideology and world outlook. The following discussion will attempt to analyze, particularly for those readers who are not literate in Hebrew, the political importance of the Haredi upsurge. A crucial part of this analysis is the acceptance of the well-documented proposition that an understanding of the entire Israeli political right is to some extent dependent upon an understanding of the basic elements of Haredi politics, apart from the disagreements, splits and reunification efforts of many Haredi individuals and sects. The two major questions to be analyzed are:

 

• How have the Haredi parties secured their political influence?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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• What organizational structure have the Haredi employed for maximum political success?

 

Concern with education has provided the major answer to both questions. The Haredi have on balance successfully educated their own children and other Jewish children, over whom they have obtained custody, in a manner guaranteeing maximum continuity. The Haredi have influenced many Israeli Jews in addition to their own by acquiring direct authority over several school networks and by indirectly influencing numbers of other schools.

 

Throughout the twentieth century, the Haredim have attempted to continue Jewish education as it had mostly existed in the diaspora before the Enlightenment influenced Jewish society. The governments in the countries in which the Haredim lived, however, have at times insisted upon some modernized curricular content that was inconsistent with and in opposition to what had previously been taught in Jewish schools. This was the case in Israel until 1980. Since 1980, helped by generous Israeli governmental subsidies, the Haredim have attempted with some success to reimpose the earlier type of Jewish education and the earlier school networking system in many poorer provincial Israeli towns and in slum areas of larger Israeli cities. The Haredi goal has obviously been to perpetuate their educational influence upon an increasing segment of younger-generation Israelis.

 

Historically, Jewish schooling began with the heder for Jewish male children aged three or four. (The heder, a word meaning “room” in Hebrew, was the name of the traditional Jewish elementary school as it existed from talmudic times in the earliest centuries of the Common Era until the formation of the first modern nation-states at which time many Jews strove to modify or abolish the heder.) The heder was previously for males only. According to the Talmud and the Halacha, females do not need education and are explicitly forbidden from some forms of study. Until modern times, most Jewish women received no formal education and were mostly illiterate. This stood in striking contrast to Jewish males. Faced with governments of modern nation states and with many Jews themselves reacting against and abolishing the exclusion of females from formal education, the Haredim

 

 

 

 

 

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established special institutions to train, more precisely to indoctrinate, young Haredi girls to accept and to agree to inferior education. Heder education consists only of sacred, Jewish studies. Secular subjects, including arithmetic, foreign languages, science, literature and Hebrew grammar are excluded. Most of the Bible is included among subjects not taught. After studying the Pentateuch with the help of a commentary by Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki who died in 1099), the students proceed directly to study of the easier parts of the Talmud. After studying about eight years, the less capable students are sent to various places to learn a craft, trade or some other occupation; the more capable are admitted to an institution of higher learning called a yeshiva. (Yeshiva in Hebrew means sitting or meeting.) Usually, several levels of “yeshivot” (plural) exist. The weeding-out process of students continues at each level. Those students who are found to be less capable are directed to moneymaking pursuits and somewhat later to involvement in religious services as minor rabbis or as supervisors of religious kashrut rules in restaurants, hospitals, the army and other institutions. The more capable students proceed in their learning by going from one yeshiva level to another. After graduating from the highest yeshiva and marrying, the best of the students spend their lives in an institution called a kollel (a term derived from the word meaning “entire”) and spend their time studying only talmudic literature. A few of the most capable are later appointed to high rabbinic positions or become heads of yeshivot or kollels.

 

As mentioned previously, traditional Jewish education, described above, does not include any secular or humanistic studies. It is worth re-emphasizing that this exclusion of secular subjects includes not only mathematics, all sciences and foreign languages but also Hebrew literature, which includes poetry dealing with religious subjects, grammar and Jewish history. It is thus no surprise that Hebrew religious poetry, even the medieval masterpieces, are unknown to the Haredim. Only the sacred studies (a pre-modern term in Judaism) are taught with the greatest possible intensity. The sacred studies consist mostly of the Talmud and some subsequent talmudic literature. At the highest yeshiva level, one out of twelve to fourteen hours per day of sacred studies may be devoted to the study of morality, which

 

 

 

 

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primarily consists of lurid descriptions of the punishment, inflicted by God either in the life of this world or in hell, for even the smallest deviations from religious commandments. The teachings of the biblical prophets, the books of Job and Ecclesiastes and numerous other parts of the Bible are studied neither in the heders nor the yeshivot and are therefore unknown to the Haredim. Except for the Pentateuch, Haredim know only those parts of the Bible quoted in the Talmud and then only within the context of talmudic interpretation. Haredim generally lack knowledge of major parts of the Bible; this lack of knowledge constitutes one source of the differences between the Haredim and some other religious as well as most secular Israeli Jews. Yeshiva students are often deprived of sleep. After reaching the age of sixteen, Yeshiva students devote at least twelve to fourteen hours per day to study. The classes are noisy, because the students shout about what they are studying. Studying in silence is considered to be a sin. Chaos is often the result in the classroom; different students often shout about different passages of texts. Students may ask questions about the internal matters of what is being studied but never about the assumptions upon which interpretations are made or about the external world. Students are most often isolated from the outside world, especially from the secular world. Students are prohibited from contact with unbelievers. The teacher’s authority is extensive and almost absolute. The main teacher or the head of the yeshiva usually will select the wives for students.

 

The type of education described above has shaped human character. It also inevitably has produced dissenters. The first Jewish dissenters from Judaism in modern times rebelled against this type of education and became principled opponents of the religion that from their perspectives tried to subject them to such totalitarian controls. Other individuals, schooled in the Haredi tradition, have ultimately yielded to temptations of modernity, such as watching television and attending movies. This usually has resulted in a weakening of commitment to Haredi Judaism but seldom to its renunciation. In Israel such persons have been and still are called “traditional” or “Mesorati.” These people have usually remained–and still are–outwardly uncritical of what they learned; they have continued to

 

 

 

 

 

 

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worship the charismatic rabbis without paying any price for renunciating the prohibition of forbidden secular pleasures. Others who have strayed but have not undergone self-emancipation have after a temporary break returned to sacred studies to be again indoctrinated by their education.

 

The Haredim emphasize the sanctity and predominant importance of the sacred studies; they believe that the virtue emanating from those engaged in sacred studies is responsible for all good happenings for Jews. For that reason those who engage in sacred studies are not required to make their own livings, are granted numerous privileges and are exempted from communal duties. All of this originated and became universal among Jews in talmudic times. Living in autonomous communities, in which they retained local rule, Jews could and did determine that individuals engaged in sacred studies be exempted from paying taxes and from most other obligations and burdens for which members of the community were responsible. Additionally, the disciples of the sages, those who reached a specified high degree of proficiency in the sacred studies, were granted special privileges in many areas of life over which the Jewish community had control. During talmudic times (c. AD 200-500) in Iraq, for example, the disciples of the sages, who also were merchants, were granted the privilege of selling their merchandise before ordinary Jews were allowed to do so in the markets of Jewish towns. That meant that these disciples of the sages had no competition.

 

A burning issue in Jewish history, and in Israeli politics, is how rabbis and rabbinical students earn their livelihoods. In Israel the constantly increasing burden of support weighs heavily upon taxpayers, most of whom are not religious. This has provoked and continues to provoke resentment, especially when combined with the fact that a majority of rabbinical students do not have to serve in the army. Most Israeli religious Jews, especially the Haredim, attempt to justify state support and freedom from army service by arguing that the Jews and the Jewish state of Israel exist by virtue of their support of talmudic study. Their support is supposedly responsible in turn for God’s support, which includes God’s allowing Israel to win its wars. This argument, similar to arguments made by clergy of other religions and

 

 

 

 

 

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frequently emphasized in the Israeli media, alleges that God’s help not soldiers win wars. This argument specifies that God provides other benefits as well. He, for example, grants good weather because of rabbis and students who spend most of their time studying Talmud. Engaging in such study is the best way, better than reciting prayers, giving charity or performing other good deeds, to gain entrance into paradise. Those who engage in talmudic study make it possible for themselves, their families, their financial supporters and, to some extent, other Jews to enter paradise.

 

Direct financial support of rabbis and students of Talmud is, nevertheless, a relatively new innovation in Judaism. During the lengthy period of Talmud composition, approximately 50 BC to AD 500, and for centuries thereafter, rabbis and students received no salaries or any other forms of financial support for talmudic study. (Elementary teachers who taught Bible to small children were paid.) Indeed, the Talmud itself prohibited payments for talmudic study. Some talmudic sages were working-class people who had well-known professions and earned their livelihoods from their labors. The only form of financial reward that was allowed for a talmudic sage was a recompense for not working. This can be illustrated by a talmudic anecdote about one of the most important sages, Abaye, who lived in Babylonia in the fourth century AD. Abaye was a farmer and cultivated his farm by himself. If asked a question by someone while working, he told the questioner: “Work on this irrigation canal for me while I ponder your question.” The last important rabbi who fully supported such behavior was Maimonides, who died in 1204. Maimonides’ ruling in his Learning Torah Laws (chapter 3, verse 10) is often quoted by secular, Jewish Israelis:

 

Anyone supposing that he will engage in Torah [talmudic study] and not engage in labor, thus taking his livelihood from charity, should be considered a person who has extinguished the light of religion, put Torah to shame, caused evil to himself and lost his chance to enter paradise, since it is forbidden to make profit form the sayings of Torah in this world. The sages said: “Everyone who makes profit from the sayings of Torah loses his life.” They [the sages]

 

 

 

 

 

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have also ordered and said: “Do not make it [Torah] either a crown in which to boast or an axe with which to work.” And they [the sages] have further ordered and said: “Love labor and hate the rabbinate.” All Torah not accompanied by labor will be nullified, and the end of such a person [so engaged] will be that he will rob the people.

 

Many Israeli secular Jews use this statement of Maimonides to document their contention that all rabbis, especially rabbis in Israel, are robbers.

 

Why for centuries have almost all religious Jews not paid attention to the opinion of Maimonides, which is solidly based on many talmudic passages? The answer is that religious Jews read any sacred text, including the Talmud and the writings of Maimonides, only with the help of the most sacred commentaries that become the accepted religious opinions. Regarding the above-quoted passage of Maimonides, the most important, subsequent commentary is “Kesef Mishne” (“an addition of silver”), written by Rabbi Joseph Karo, who died in 1575. Karo, the author of Shulhan Aruch which to date is the most authoritative compendium of the Halacha, opposed the opinion of Maimonides on this issue. Almost all subsequent rabbis accepted the opposing position of Karo. In the beginning of his “Kesef Mishne,” Karo mentioned that Maimonides in his commentary on Mishne wrote at length against salaries of rabbis and presented a sizeable list of talmudic rabbis who were laborers receiving no salaries for talmudic studies. Karo wrote:

 

He, let his memory be blessed [Maimonides], brought the example of Hillel, who was a wood-cutter while a talmudic student. This is not proof. We must assume that he [Hillel] engaged in labor only at the beginning of his studies. In his [Hillel’s] time there were thousands of talmudic students; perhaps, they gave financial support only to the most famous among them.. .But how can we assume that when Hillel became famous and was teaching the people they did not give him financial support?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Religious Jews in Israel use this form of reasoning, which without adequate proof attributes customs of current rabbis to the hallowed past. Secular Israeli Jews often have satirized such reasoning by telling a joke that is known to almost every Israeli Jew. This joke is based upon the fact that, although no halachic reference exists concerning an obligation of a male Jew to wear a head covering, there is no other visible custom to which religious Jews are universally so faithful. Indeed, the popular Hebrew saying for a formerly religious male that became secular is “He took off his skullcap.” The joke centers upon a rabbi’s being asked to provide the proof for the obligation that male Jews must wear head coverings. The rabbi in the joke answers: “The Bible says: ‘And Abraham went’ [to a certain place]. Can you imagine that he went without a head covering?” The joke’s ridiculing of the usual mode of rabbinic reasoning is obvious.

 

Karo argued that all famous sages, described in the Talmud itself as laborers or craftsmen, must have been given financial support. Karo concluded by arguing that priests in the temple were paid for their work and that, therefore, rabbis, who are equivalent to priests, should be paid. Talmudic students should be paid, Karo maintained, because without students there would be no rabbis. “Those in control of the usual expenditures [in Jewish congregations] should be compelled to pay the rabbis,” he stated. “The current custom is that all Jewish rabbis receive their salaries from the Jewish] public.” This was the general custom in the sixteenth century, except in some distant communities such as Yemen. The salaries of rabbis continually increased as did the occasions on which they took fees from their captive public. Evidence of rabbinic corruption in Jewish communities since the latter part of the seventeenth century is abundant. The rabbinate’s alliance with rich people in oppressing poor people, especially in Ashkenazi communities, and the use of bribery and other undue influence in the appointments of rabbis are but two of the many aspects of this corruption. Corrupt practices of many Israeli rabbis, both Haredi and NRP, have been well-documented by the Israeli Hebrew press and are widely known in Israel. This corruption is a continuation of a long-term trend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The granting of special privileges for pursuing sacred studies exists in modem Israeli society. One of the most controversial issues in the State of Israel has been, and continues to be, the deferments from military service for most students and graduates of yeshivot. These students and graduates first receive a draft deferment on the basis of declarations from heads of yeshivot. When their deferments expire, the students or graduates are either entirely exempted from army service or are inducted directly into the army reserve forces after undergoing only brief and cursory recruit training. They are disqualified from serving in any dangerous or even unpleasant capacities. Their chances of being killed or wounded in wartime are thus greatly reduced. Their deferments mean that these students or graduates do not have to serve in the army for the period of three years, which is compulsory for all other Israeli Jewish males who are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. In his analysis of this situation, Ehud Asheri reported in his August 22, 1996 article, published in Haaretz, that at that time 5 per cent of all Jewish males were so deferred.

 

The vehement passions aroused by and the debates over this issue have antagonistically deepened the split between Israeli Jewish secularists and the Haredim. Currently, many secular Jews complain, as they and others have in the past, that the Haredim do not share equally with other Israeli Jews the tasks and burdens imposed upon society. The Haredim argue, as they continually have in the past, that such reasoning is fallacious. Influenced by their education, the Haredim are convinced that all victories as well as defeats of the Israeli army are due to God’s intervention and that without doubt God takes into consideration the numbers, progress in study and commitment of those Jews who engage in talmudic study. The Haredim cite numerous passages in the Talmud and in subsequent talmudic literature that are emphatic on this point. Not only the privileged students and graduates of yeshivot but also traditional Israeli Jews support the Haredim and the cited sacred Jewish writings on this point.

 

The attitude of many secular Israeli Jews towards sacred studies and the Talmud is the exact opposite of that held by the Haredim. Secularly oriented parodies of the Talmud have remained popular and still abound in Israeli

 

 

 

 

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society. Many of these parodies revolve around the Haredi rationale underlying the deferment and exclusion from military service. In December 1988, for example, during one of the recurrent disputations about the deferment from service of yeshiva students, the Haredim pointed to the talmudic version of the biblical account of the victories of Yo’av, the general of King David. The Haredim quoted the talmudic interpretation that these victories were attributable to David’s sacred studies, since in their view Talmud in an oral form dated back to Moses and perhaps to Abraham and was written later. Some secular writers responded publicly that David rather remained at home and sent Yo’av to fight, because he was occupied in committing adultery with Bathsheba and causing the death of her husband, Uriah. One columnist in the Israeli press, certainly not Haredi-oriented, opined that David was probably more keen about studying Bathsheba’s bodily curvature than he was about studying the Talmud. Such debate has had, and continues to have, a bearing upon Israel similar in some ways to the effect upon politics that similar debate had in Christian Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. What many foreign observers of Israeli Jewish society have not grasped is that, even with the scientific and technological accomplishments in Israel, the Haredim and most other Israeli Jewish fundamentalists live figuratively in a time period that corresponds closely to European Christian societies many generations ago. These fundamentalists have not made the quantum leap, as have secular Israelis, into modern times. The tension between fundamentalist and secular Israelis, therefore, stems mostly from the fact that these two groups live in different time periods.

 

Haredim often propound theories even more extreme than those mentioned previously. Many Haredi rabbis, for example, assert that the Holocaust, including most particularly the deaths of one-and-a-half million Jewish children, was a well-deserved divine punishment, not only for all the sins of modernity and faith renunciation by many Jews, but also for the decline of Talmudic study in Europe. The Haredim and their traditional Jewish followers attribute the death of every Jew, including each innocent child, not to natural causes but to direct action of God. The Haredim believe that God

 

 

 

 

 

 

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punishes each Jew for his or her sins and sometimes punishes the entire Jewish community, including many who are innocent, because of the sins committed by other Jews. In 1985, when twenty-two children, twelve and thirteen years of age, were killed in the town of Petah Tikva in a traffic accident involving their bus, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, one of the heads of the Shas Party and the then Minister of the Interior, stated in a television appearance that the children were victims, because a movie house was allowed to remain open on the Sabbath eve. Many members of the Hebrew press, predominantly representing secular Jews, attacked Rabbi Peretz mercilessly for making this statement. The Shas Party, nevertheless, in the next election did not lose but rather gained votes in various places, including Petah Tikva. The Haredim held and advocate similar beliefs about God’s punishing and rewarding Jews in many areas of life on the basis of Jews’ either committing sins or following God’s word.

 

In the late 1990s, the primary concern of the Haredim is to expand their educational system, especially in poorer localities wherein they successfully offer material inducements such as hot meals, The Haredim strongly lobby the non-Haredi public schools with their propaganda. In some places these lobbying efforts are successful. In other areas the fierce opposition by parents who are educated and politically effective thwarts the Haredi propaganda and lobbying efforts. Haredi influence is sometimes extreme in specific places. In Netivot, one of the most religious towns in Israel, for example, the Haredim have successfully opposed any public high school, because it would be obligated to provide instruction in secular subjects. Netivot is the only Jewish town in Israel without a high school.

 

In order to proselytize and to spread their superstitions, Haredim often exploit the distress of people. Relatives of terminally ill hospital patients, especially if they are traditional, are often approached by messengers of a charismatic rabbi, who first reiterate that the doctors cannot help and then suggest that the relatives buy some sacred water, consecrated by a certain rabbi, and smear the patient with it. The messengers relate stories about miracles that occur after the use of this sacred water, which is never distributed without a non-returnable payment. The messengers, of course,

 

 

 

 

 

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never mention the failure of sacred water miracles. The secular Hebrew press at times will report on the failure of these miracles, especially when a large amount of money is known to have been spent for the sacred water. Such reporting, however, most often only deepens the chasm between those who read and those who do not read but loathe the secular Hebrew press. In their own press the Haredim not only attack the secular press but also display their general hostility towards secular Israeli Jews. Until the later part of the 1980s, most of the Israeli Jewish public paid little attention to the Haredi press. Since then, general public attention has increased considerably. Dov Albaum, one of Israel’s foremost experts on Haredi affairs, focused upon this point in two Hebrew-language articles, one published in the August 30, 1996 issue of the newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, the other published in the July-August issue of the bi-monthly periodical, Ha’ain Hashvi’it (The Seventh Eye), which is published by the Israeli Democracy Institute and is devoted to analyzing the Israeli press. Albaum discussed the structure of the Haredi press in Yediot Ahronot and then proceeded to a discussion in Ha’ain Hashvi’it of the Haredi attitude as a whole towards secular Israeli Jews. According to Albaum, the violent attacks in the Haredi press upon Aharon Barak, the president of the Israeli Supreme Court, attracted increased public attention. The Haredi press called Barak “the most dangerous enemy ever to face the Haredi public.” Albaum pointed out that the earlier Haredi press attacks upon the left-wing kibbutzim, the Israeli army, the secular media and many other secular institutions and figures aroused little general interest. The attack upon the Supreme Court, long regarded as the holiest symbol of Israeli secular democracy, piqued the interest of many secular Jews. The violent Haredi press attacks upon Yitzhak Rabin, while he was prime minister, did not have the same effect. Shortly before Rabin’s assassination an article in one of the most popular Haredi weekly publications, Ha’Shavua (The Week) predicted:

 

 

 

The day will come when the Jews will bring Rabin and Peres to the defendant’s bench in court with the only two alternatives being the noose or the insane asylum. This insane and evil pair have either gone mad or are obvious traitors. Rabin and Peres have

 

 

 

 

 

 

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guaranteed their place in the Jewish memory as evil Jews of the worst kind. They resemble the apostates or the Jews who served the Nazis.

 

Reiterating that secular Jewish interest in Israel heightened after the attack upon Barak and the Supreme Court, Albaum observed that increasing numbers of secular Israelis are insulted when they read in the Haredi press that their lives are garbage and their children are hallucinating, lifeless drug addicts. Albaum explained:

 

Haredi journalists deliberately exaggerate all marginal phenomena in secular society. They describe all murders, cases of alcoholism and hard drug situations as characteristics of secular Jewish society. In addition, they allege as facts incorrect statements, engage in the wildest forms of slander and often use the most derogatory terminology. Their aim is to condemn absolutely the secular, Jewish lifestyle.

 

It is difficult to avoid considering such depiction as analogous to the Nazi methodology.

 

The structure of the Haredi press is significant. Albaum pinpointed as the main Haredi ideological trendsetter Yated Ne’eman (Faithful Tent-Peg), the official newspaper of the Degel Ha’Torah faction, headed and controlled by Rabbi Shach. Albaum explained that Yated Ne’eman is strictly monitored by a committee of five rabbis, all appointed by Rabbi Shach and headed by Rabbi Natan Zohavsky. At least one of the committee’s rabbis is in the newspaper’s office each evening except the Shabbat. Every word of every article, advertisement and announcement must be approved for publication by the rabbi(s) on duty. Certain words and expressions, such as aids or television, are not allowed to be printed. The term “Red Cross,” supposedly associated with Christianity, is especially prohibited from usage.

 

Yated Ne’eman articles often ferociously attack rival Haredi factions. One example is that all advertisements about social events of the Shas Party,

 

 

 

 

 

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which is despised by Rabbi Shach, are not allowed to be printed. The importance of this prohibition was highlighted when, after an apparent lull in the spiritual war between Rabbi Shach and Shas, one of the newspaper’s editors dared to publish an advertisement announcing the bar-mitzvah of Aryeh Der’i’s son. (Aryeh Der’i is a Member of the Knesset and an important Shas leader.) Upon learning of this, Rabbi Shach strongly reprimanded Rabbi Zochovsky, the head of the overseeing committee of rabbis.

 

Spiritual censorship committees exist and monitor everything printed in other Haredi newspapers. Albaum asserted: “Freedom of the press is an unknown concept in the Haredi press.” Haredi editors, according to Albaum, proclaim a different kind of freedom: “the right of our public not to know certain things.” The censoring rabbis decide what the public should not know.

 

In reflecting the general Haredi attitude towards secular Jews, Haredi press articles often present arguments reminiscent of anti-Semitic statements about all Jews. Albaum pointed to a February 1996 article, for example, in which Israel Friedman reiterated the position that the land of Israel belongs only to the Haredim and that secular Jews and Palestinians should leave it. In addressing secular Jews, Friedman in his article stated: “Go away from here … We tell you this in a friendly manner. Go away. American crime will easily absorb the criminal secular youth who are all enchanted by alcohol, drugs and earrings. They are bloodsuckers who drink our blood. They dare to live on land that belongs to us.” In another article Albaum quoted Nathan Ze’ev Grossman, the editor of Yated Ne’eman, as attributing the rise of neo-Nazism in European countries “to the influence of the Rabin government.” Grossman described all kibbutzim as Nazi institutions and proposed “to put them on trial according to the precedent of the Nuremberg trials.”

 

The Haredim demand that other Jews should, at least in public and especially in regard to matters of symbolism, behave according to their dictates. Haredi demands, often supported by traditionalist Jews, so frequently cause political scandals that they can be described as a staple of Israeli politics. More Israeli government crises have occurred because of religious scandals than for any other reasons. To further their political

 

 

 

 

 

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interests, the Haredim insist upon employing certain symbols. This insistence has played an important role in Israeli politics. Many Israeli Jews, together with a much greater number of diaspora Jews, in deference to what they believe is Jewish tradition and the commandments of Judaism, support Haredi demands to keep and display symbols of religious observance. Such support has produced scandal. One particularly illustrative scandal occurred in Autumn 1992 and occupied Israeli politics for many months. During the time of this scandal, the Haredi Shas Party threatened to leave the Rabin government, not because of Rabin’s plans to deal with the Palestinians nor because of possible concessions to the Syrians but rather because the then Minister of Education Shulamit Aloni, on a visit to Nazareth was photographed eating in a non-kosher, Arab restaurant and thus violating the religious symbol of the ritual purity of food. Only six months prior to the Aloni affair another scandal involving a Member of the Knesset had occurred; MK Yael Rayan was photographed on a Tel Aviv beach, dressed in a swimsuit and reading a book on Yom Kippur. All the religious political parties then protested furiously against what they termed this “profanation ofJudaism.” After hearing traditionally religious Labor Party Knesset members echo the same sentiments, Prime Minister Rabin, who was not traditionally religious, reinforced the accusation.

 

During her tenure as minister of education, Shulamit Aloni made numerous statements that were viewed as being in opposition to symbols in Judaism and thus blasphemous; these statements resulted in scandals. One month before arousing scandal by eating in an Arab restaurant, for example, Aloni publicly acknowledged that the denial of the world’s being created in six days was a tenable hypothesis. She also publicly struck the controversial, although hardly earth-shattering, position that the teaching ofJudaism in the state’s secular schools should be slightly changed. (She was content to leave as it is the teaching of Judaism in the state’s religious schools.) Aloni caused even more furore when she publicly slighted some biblical figures. Ranny Talmor, a respected Israeli journalist, rightly observed in her October 14, 1992 article in the newspaper, Hadashot;

 

[Aloni] scarcely escaped Galileo’s fate after he

 

 

 

 

 

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persisted in maintaining that the earth moved around the sun. Some supposedly enlightened, secular Jews whispered to one another: “Of course she is right, but why does she need to say this in public?” The Jewish Grand Inquisitors were delighted in their realization that they had scored another victory against the weak-minded infidels.

 

The Jewish Inquisitors harassed Aloni even more after Rabin forced her to apologize publicly in an open letter to Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph, the spiritual head of the Shas Party. Yoel Markus, a well-known Israeli journalist, reflected widely held opinion when he observed in his October 13, 1992 Haaretz article:

 

As is well known, each concession in such matters only encourages the demand for more. This is why the abject surrender to Jewish religious demands by members of the Labor and Meretz Parties makes us wonder. Rabin has solemnly undertaken to check closely an intelligence report, submitted to him by the National Religious Party [NRP], describing how Aloni violated the Sabbath and ate non-kosher food in Israel and abroad. The Chairman of the Labor Party faction in the Knesset [Elie Dayan] publicly rebuked Aloni and Member of the Knesset Yael Dayan.

 

The NRP hired detectives to spy on ministers in order to discover what transgressions of Jewish religious commandments they committed. Such spying continued while the Rabin and Peres governments were in power. Rabin and Peres, while prime ministers, obtained all the findings of the detectives and continually attempted to keep their ministers from transgressing any religious laws in public.

 

In his Haaretz article, Yoel Markus articulated many fears, shared by a sizeable segment of the Israeli Jewish public:

 

We can also expect demands that each minister and member of the Knesset be accompanied by a

 

 

 

 

 

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kashrut inspector, who holds a full-time job for this purpose and that similar inspectors be appointed to insure that kashrut is observed in every neighborhood and on every street in Israel. A demand may also be made to establish vice squads, authorized to raid private homes in order to ascertain whether kashrut is being observed and whether, God forbid, a wife does not by chance have sex with her husband in the period of impurity during and after the time of menstruation [lasting eight to fourteen days.]

 

Other Israeli journalists expressed similar fears and went further than did Markus in their published articles. Some attacked not only the religious but also the secular Jews who remained silent about the attacks upon them and their behavior and who would allow continual efforts by religious surveyors to brainwash systematically. Many Israeli Jews, whose opinions were represented by certain journalists, saw the activities and actual victories by religious factions as advancements towards a full-scale Jewish “Khomeinism” in Israel.

 

The discussion of the Aloni scandal continued for weeks in the Israeli press and became increasingly political. Nahum Barnea wrote in his October 23, 1992 Yediot Ahronot article:

 

Rabin encouraged the torrents of anti-Aloni propaganda by advancing the slogan “either Aloni or peace.” What connection can there be between Aloni’s dietary preferences and peace … On four separate occasions Rabin summoned the leaders of Meretz (Aloni’s party] to his office in order to convey to them the complaints about Aloni made by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual head of the Shas Party.

 

In his October 23, 1992 Davar article, Amir Oren censured Rabin for being subservient to Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph and for equating the rabbi’s power to be equal to that of Stalin’s in his time. Oren opined that the Shas Party had begun to fulfil in Israel a role analogous to that of the Shi’ites in Lebanon. In Oren’s view Israel, “far from being the only democracy in the Middle East

 

 

 

 

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was imitating Lebanon and Iran, becoming in effect half a state of anarchy and half a theocracy.”

 

Amnon Abromovitz in his October 23, 1992 Maariv article put a somewhat different spin on the Aloni scandal. He wrote: “The vicious use of Aloni as a scapegoat by the religious Jews generated public support for her. A repelling stench of religious zeal, fundamentalism and sexism is emanating from the harassment of Aloni.” Abromovitz blamed Rabin for encouraging this harassment, but he added that despite all her talk and non-kosher eating, Aloni had granted religious institutions, especially those of the Shas, more money than had any previous Minister of Education. Abramovitz concluded: “Aloni may talk blasphemously about God, but she has been foremost in generosity to those who believe in Him.”

 

The leaders of the Labor Party and their non-traditionalist sympathizers answered the above expressions of fear, especially after Oslo, by arguing that concessions to the demands of the Haredim were necessary to ensure backing for the peace process. This stock answer did not satisfy many secular Israelis. What Markus concluded represented broad secular opinion:

 

The reason for Rabin’s servility to Shas is supposed to be politics. Labor experts in skullduggery assure us that the Shas Party may leave the coalition if it finds it no longer able to withstand pressure from the other Haredi circles … The conclusion is that Labor must do its best to placate them …Politics is important, but freedom of conscience and everyone’s right to follow one’s creed are even more important. Jewish secularism is a creed. The crude hypocrisy, with which the ministers fake religious devotions, leads nowhere but only damages their government’s integrity. If Shas wants to leave Rabin’s coalition, it will do so by order of its rabbis. It will then not help if Rabin puts on an Haredi garb and/or if Aloni shaves her head to cover it with a coif. [The reference here is to a commandment of traditional Judaism that a woman, before marrying, has to shave her head and

 

 

 

 

 

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cover it with a coif. The Haredim attempt to enforce this rule strictly. Many Jewish, religious women cut only some of their hair and cover the remainder with wigs. Many secular, Jewish women are enraged by this rule.]

 

By design, Haredi rabbis and politicians select secular women in politics as the primary targets of their attacks, even though they could pinpoint secular men as much, if not more, for transgressions of religious law. The Haredim repeatedly refer to Jewish women, engaged in politics, as witches, bitches or demons. Although a bit crude at times in the use of descriptive language, the Haredim approach mirrors to a great extent traditional Judaism’s broadly based position regarding women. This position not only restricts the rights of women but in many ways holds women in contempt. Rule 8 in Chapter 3 of the Kitzur Shulhan Aruch (Abridgment of Shulhan Aruch), an elementary textbook for Jews with little talmudic education, for example, dictates: ” A male should not walk between two females or two dogs or two pigs. In the same manner the males should not allow a woman, dog or pig to walk between them.” All Haredi boys between the ages of ten and twelve study and are required to observe this rule. (Few dogs and no pigs can be found in Haredi neighborhoods.) Traditional Judaism also prohibits women from playing even insignificant roles in politics and/or in any public activities in which they may appear to be leading males. Women are forbidden to drive buses or taxis; they can drive private cars only if no males apart from those in their own families or other women are passengers. These and many rules are followed in Haredi neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods women who are “dressed immodestly” are often insulted and/or assaulted. Many traditionally religious Jewish males in other than Haredi neighborhoods, who do not observe inconvenient religious commandments, take the lead of the Haredim in resenting and opposing participation of women in politics. These traditionally religious males regard such participation by women as a threat to their domination of their own families.

 

The numerous misogynistic statements in the Talmud and in talmudic literature constitute a part of every Haredi male’s sacred study. The

 

 

 

 

 

 

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statement in Tractate Shabat, page 152b, defining a woman is exemplary: “A woman is a sack full of excrement.” The learned Talmudic Encyclopedia (volume 2, pages 255-7), written in modern Hebrew and thus understandable to all educated Israeli Jews, devotes a section to the “nature and behavior of women.” In this section the proposition appears that the urge for the sexual act is greater among men than among women. The evidence presented for this is that men tend to hire women prostitutes because their urge for sex is greater than the urge of women. For that reason the Halacha punishes a wife who refuses to have sexual relations with her husband much more severely than it punishes a husband who refuses to have sexual relations with his wife. For the same reason a prospective husband is obliged to see his wife-to-be before marrying her but a prospective wife is not obligated to see her husband-to-be before marriage. After seeing his prospective bride, moreover, the prospective husband can send a messenger and conduct the marriage through the messenger. Jewish folklore contains stories describing the utilization of this procedure.

 

The halachic prohibition of teaching talmudic literature and/or the Bible to women has been in the past and is currently still of great importance. Studying “Torah Sheba’al Peh” (the oral law) is for the Halacha a supremely important commandment. It is equivalent in importance to all the other commandments put together. (The law, according to belief, was given by God orally to Moses and was handed down orally for many centuries before being written.) This obligation, termed “Talmud Torah” or “learning the Torah” is viewed as independent of time. Every pious male Jew is obligated to devote a portion of all days and nights, including holidays and working days, to this study. A basic talmudic rule frees women from positive obligations that are dependent on special times and obliges women only with positive obligations that are independent of time. Women, for example, are obliged to keep the Sabbath and the holidays that last more than twenty-four hours and are thus considered to be independent of time. Women, on the other hand, are not obliged to hear the shofar (ram’s horn) blown on the New Year, which only takes a short time and is thus considered to be dependent on time. (There are a few exceptions to this rule.) A woman is

 

 

 

 

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permitted to fulfill what she is not obliged to do; hence she can choose to hear the ram’s horn blown on the New Year. This rule underlines the women’s religious inferiority to men, since another talmudic dictate is that a person who fulfills a commandment because he is obliged to do so is greater and receives a greater reward from God than a person who fulfills a commandment he is not obliged to fulfill. A Jewish woman that comes to the synagogue on the New Year and hears the ram’s horn being blown, according to traditional Judaism, will receive a smaller reward from God than a male who does the same, because she is not obliged to hear whereas he is so obliged. Tractate Kiddushin (page 34a) of the Talmud, however, ruled that women are not obliged to fulfill “Talmud Torah,” even though it is an obligation independent of time. This ruling is part of Halacha. The rule was later amended to mean that women should learn only the special obligations that they must keep to the extent that they know what to do and what to avoid. The issue, therefore, arose: What parts of sacred studies are women permitted to learn or to be taught? The talmudic answer to this question, based upon many quotations, was given by Maimonides. In his work, Talmud Torah Laws (chapter 1, rule 13), Maimonides wrote:

 

A woman who has studied Torah receives a reward [from God], but it is an inferior one when compared to man’s reward. This is because she is not obligated [to do so], and everyone who does what he is not obliged to do gets an inferior reward compared to [the reward given to] one who does what he is commanded to do. The woman nevertheless receives some reward. The sages commanded a father not to teach his daughter Torah, because most woman never intend to learn anything and will, because of the weak understanding, convert the pronouncements of Torah into nonsense. The sages said: “Everyone who teaches his daughter Torah can be compared to one who teaches her insipid matters.” This rule, however, applies only to talmudic studies. Although a woman should not be taught the Bible, she, if taught, would not have been taught insipid matters.

 

 

 

 

 

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A somewhat shortened version of this is given in the authoritative compendium of the Halacha, Shulhan Aruch (Yorah Deah, rule 246, paragraph 6). In modern times the Haredim have attempted to modify those rules to some extent. They have taught and still do teach girls the easier parts of the Talmud, in which arguments between the rabbis, that are considered to be dangerous for the “weak female mind,” do not occur. Similarly, the Haredim have taught and do teach girls the Pentateuch but reserve the highest level and most serious commentaries for the boys. The Haredim maintain in their schools a strict separation of girls from boys and do not allow the girls to observe boys playing in the schoolyard.

 

Many Israeli Jews, who in their youth received thorough talmudic educations, have later in their lives reacted antagonistically against Orthodox Judaism’s depiction and treatment of women. Some of these Jews in reaction have written articles that are often published in the Israeli Hebrew press but are almost never translated into English. Kadid Leper, for example, a well-known Israeli journalist who as a youth studied in a yeshiva for years before becoming a secularist, wrote in his April 18, 1997 Hai’r article under the title “Woman is a sack full of excrement,” the following:

 

Beatings, sexual brutality, cruelty, deprival of rights, use of a woman as merely a sexual object; you can find all of this there [in the Talmud] … For two thousand years women had a well-defined place in the Jewish religion [Orthodox Judaism]; this place is different from what the rabbinical establishment describes; according to the Halacha, the place of women is in the garbage heap together with cattle and slaves. According to the Jewish religion [Orthodox Judaism] a man buys for himself a slave woman for her entire life simply by providing food and dress and granting to his wife the sexual act.

 

This kind of published article, together with the many published reports of rabbinical harassment of women, have not only firmed polarization in Israeli Jewish society but have contributed significantly to the growing secular

 

 

 

 

 

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enmity towards Haredim.

 

 

In many areas of Israeli Jewish society, the Haredim continue to maintain their separateness and at the same time assert that other Jews accept Haredi dicta. This is well illustrated by an example from the area of medicine. In his December 25, 1995 Yediot Ahronot article, Dov Albaum discussed the request submitted two weeks previously by the Haredim to the Israeli Ministry of Health:

 

Rabbi Yehoshua Sheinberger, the head of the Medicine by Law Organization, requested what seemed to be an innocent request that, as a concession to the religious Jews, personal blood donations be permitted. Previously, a person who donated a unit of blood for a patient undergoing surgery received a document entitling the recipient of the donation to one unit of blood from the general reserves of the Blood Bank. This new request, if accepted, would create a situation in which blood donors would be able to demand that hospitals or first aid stations give their blood donations only to specific recipients.

 

Rabbi Sheinberger, supported by two other important rabbis, argued that Haredim usually refuse to donate blood but might change their attitude if this demand were accepted. Albaum in his article discussed the additional motivation behind this request:

 

Beneath the surface there is a completely different problem that led to the rabbis’ approaching the [Israeli] Ministry of Health. Haredi religious law authorities have in recent years dealt with the following issue: “Is it permissible for a pious Jew to receive a blood transfusion from non-Jews or from Jews who do not observe Jewish religious laws?” Haredi rabbis fear that, receiving “tainted,” secular blood, or non-Jewish blood might cause a pious Jew to behave badly and even, heaven forbid, harm his

 

 

 

 

 

 

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observance of the Jewish religious laws.

 

 

Several months before the above-mentioned request, Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph addressed this problem at length in his new book, Questions and Answers– Statements: “Blood that comes from forbidden [that is, non-kosher] foods may cause a negative effect upon its Jewish recipients. It may produce bad qualities, such as cruelty and/or boldness … Therefore, a pious Jew, who does urgently need a transfusion and who faces no danger in waiting to receive blood from a strictly religious Jew, should wait.” Rabbi Yoseph offered similar advice for those pious Jews needing organ transplants; he advised them only to accept such donations from other pious Jews. This dictate erupted into a serious dispute among rabbis in Israel and astonished many secular Jews. In another published article, Albaum reported that Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, a former chief rabbi of Israel, disagreed with Rabbi Yoseph and stated: “When a secular Jew is born, he is born with kosher blood and all the forbidden foods that he later eats are dissolved and made marginal in his blood.” In regard to non-Jews, however, Rabbi Eliyahu mostly agreed with Rabbi Yoseph and held that religious Jews should attempt to avoid blood donations from them. Rabbi Eliyahu did not totally forbid blood donations for Jews from non-Jews. He stated:

 

It is permitted at certain times that Jews receive blood, or in the case of sucklings mother’s milk, from non-Jews, in spite of the fact that such blood is detrimental to their Jewish characteristics and spirit. This is because blood is transferred slowly and is made marginal in the cycling of Jewish blood in the body. Nevertheless, when possible, a Jew should avoid receiving such blood.

 

Rabbi Sheinberger finally admitted that such rulings constituted the primary reason for his request: “The Haredi community has a problem in this area. For the Haredim blood from a Jew who eats only kosher food is preferable to blood from a Jew who does not observe dietary laws.” Other Haredi rabbis agreed. Rabbi Levy Yitzhak Halperin, the head of the Scientific Religious Institute for Jewish Law Problems explained: “Blood donations from non-

 

 

 

 

 

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Jews or from Jews who eat forbidden foods are a problem. Jewish religious law holds that a Jewish child should preferably not be breast fed by a non-Jewish woman because her milk consists of forbidden food and contaminates the Jewish child.” Such positions and statements antagonized secular Jews and met great opposition from the great majority of members of the Israeli medical profession.

 

In 1994 Rabbi Sheinberger ignited another controversy and created scandal with a similar request, He met with senior physicians from the Israel Transplants Association and discussed with them the Jewish religious prohibition on organ donations. In Israel Haredi Jews refuse organ transplants from their and/or their relatives’ corpses. On this issue the Haredi position influences many people for superstitious as well as religious reasons. Organ transplants in Israel are thus difficult to arrange. Surgeons frequently request Haredi rabbis to appeal to their followers to agree to organ transplants from corpses of their relatives in order to save lives. The surgeons’ argument is based upon the Jewish religious law giving priority to saving Jewish lives. In his discussion Rabbi Sheinberger put the condition that only a Haredi rabbi could authorize such transplants. He explained: “Jewish religious law states that it is forbidden to transplant Jewish organs into either non-Jews or Jews who are not pious. It is obvious that it is prohibited under any circumstances to transplant Jewish organs into Arabs, all of whom hate Jews.” Rabbi Sheinberger, when asked for his definition of a Jew who is not pious, replied that a rabbi must determine the status of every Jew. Sheinberger’s request caused a huge commotion and was rejected.

 

Many non-Haredi rabbis allow an organ of a non-Jew to be transplanted into a body of a Jew in order to save the life of the Jew. They, however, oppose the transplant of an organ from a Jew into the body of a non-Jew. Some important rabbis go much further in discussing and ruling about differences between Jews and non-Jews on medical matters. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, an influential member of the Habad movement and the head of a yeshiva near Nablus, for instance, opined in an April 26, 1996 Jewish Week article, reproduced in Haaretz that same day: “If every single cell in a Jewish body

 

 

 

 

 

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entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.” Rabbi Ginsburgh drew two conclusions from this statement: “If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life.” It is noteworthy that Rabbi Ginsburgh is one of the authors of a book lauding Baruch Goldstein, the Patriarchs’ Cave murderer. In that book Ginsburgh contributed a chapter in which he wrote that a Jew’s killing non-Jews does not constitute murder according to the Jewish religion and that killing of innocent Arabs for reasons of revenge is a Jewish virtue. No influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburgh’s statements; most Israeli politicians have remained silent; some Israeli politicians have openly supported him.

 

The Haredi demand to establish the Halacha as the law of the state of Israel has in recent years received increased support from the more pious members of the NRP. Briefly summarized, the specifics of this demand are:

 

• God’s political authority must be formally and juridically recognized. Ordained rabbis, God’s certified agents, must be the decision makers.

 

• Rabbis must oversee all social institutions, adjudicate all issues that arise, make final judgements about all social services and censor all printed, pictorial and sound matter.

 

• Sabbath, other religious laws, physical separation of women from men in public places and “modesty” in female conduct and dress must be enforced by law.

 

• Individuals must be obligated legally to report all noticed offenses of others to rabbinical authorities.

 

The theocratic, totalitarian nature of the Haredi demand for the Halacha to be the binding law of the State of Israel is obvious.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter Three

 

 

The Two Main Haredi Groups

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A brief consideration of the historical background should provide a basis for understanding the differences between the two major Haredi groups: the Ashkenazi and the Oriental, formerly called Sephardi. Throughout most of their history, Jews lived scattered in different countries. Not surprisingly, separate Jewish communities emerged, comprised of Jewish residents of a single country, of a cluster of countries or sometimes of different parts of a single country. Until about AD 1050 one particular community existed as a Jewish center, recognized by other communities as the authority for dictating rules and issuing instructions binding upon Jews throughout the world. The last such center was the Jewish community of Iraq. After the collapse of the last center in Iraq, the differences between Jewish communities deepened considerably. Different communities, for example, although keeping and using some of the ancient prayers common to all Jews, composed new prayers, used only in their own services. Even the chanting of prayers in different communities changed and thus varied. Religious rules of conduct in almost every conceivable area of life, to which pious Jews adhered, also changed to some extent and varied from one community to another.

 

The Ashkenazi community that emerged in northern France and western Germany between the tenth and twelfth centuries became more innovative and began to deviate more from previously established patterns than any other community with the possible exceptions of small communities in remote countries, such as Georgia. The Ashkenazi divergences became embedded and persisted. Until this day, for example, most pious Ashkenazi Jews refuse to eat meat or any foods containing meat that are prepared under supervision of non-Ashkenazi rabbis; pious members of other Jewish communities are content with dietary supervision of rabbis not belonging to their community. Thus, a pious Sephardi Jew, visiting a pious Ashkenazi Jew will eat food prepared by the latter, but a pious Ashkenazi Jew visiting a Sephardi Jew will refuse to eat any foods containing meat or often any food whatsoever. Ashkenazi exclusiveness is evident in many other aspects of their religious conduct. Sephardi Jews, on the other hand, developed as early as the twelfth century an exclusiveness of their own, based upon the

 

 

 

 

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consideration that they were superior in some ways to other Jews. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews, a part of Sephardi Jewry, especially developed a pride in the supposed “purity of descent.” (In Hebrew Sephardi means Spanish.) Most of them not only refused to marry but also often despised being together with Ashkenazi Jews. Moses Maimonides, who lived until 1204 and was both a rabbi and the greatest medieval Jewish philosopher, moralized in a testament addressed to his son:

 

Guard your soul by not looking into books composed by Ashkenazi rabbis, who believe in the blessed Lord only when they eat beef seasoned with vinegar and garlic. They believe that the vapor of vinegar and the smoke of garlic will ascend to their nostrils and thus make them understand that the blessed Lord is near to them … You, my son, should stay only in the pleasant company of our Sephardi brothers, who are called the men of Andalusia [or southern Spain, then ruled by the Muslims ] because only they have brains and are clever.

 

Similar statements, in which members of a Jewish community express feelings of their superiority over other Jews, abound in Jewish literature and are common. Even as late as the 1960s older Sephardi rabbis and other Jewish men in Jerusalem, when signing their names, would invariably add the Hebrew initials meaning “pure Spanish.” Ashkenazi exclusiveness, as it developed and deepened over centuries, however, became more all-encompassing and extreme than Sephardi exclusiveness.

 

The developing exclusiveness had geographical, social and political causes. Prior to the formation of the Ashkenazi community, almost all Jews lived in the Mediterranean basin or in countries, such as Iraq, connected with the basin by trade routes. In the tenth century most Mediterranean countries were under either Muslim or Byzantine rule. The communications between this region and the emerging feudal Europe were tenuous largely because of the language barriers: Greek and Arabic, spoken on the one side, were largely unknown in Western Christian areas, while Latin was largely

 

 

 

 

 

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unknown in the Orient. Jews, who almost always spoke the language(s) of the people among whom they lived, encountered the same communication obstacle as did other people. The Ashkenazi community, therefore, framed its own life style without knowledge about or guidance from the older, Jewish communities. The Ashkenazi Jewish life style developed within the context of the emerging feudalism in Europe, which differed in many crucial respects from other regimes in other areas in that time period. In spreading eastward into the emerging states in central and eastern Europe, the Ashkenazi community solidified its cohesiveness and its identity: these have persisted to date but in more pronounced forms among religious rather than secular Ashkenazi Jews.

 

Expelled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1498, Sephardi Jews not only settled in but also transformed other Jewish communities. In these communities the new Sephardi immigrants tended to maintain an exclusiveness and to remain aloof from other Jews. Having come from the relatively developed society of the Spain of the Renaissance and having settled in less developed countries, they soon became the wealthiest, best educated and most politically connected Jews in Mediterranean countries. The Sephardi Jews that settled in Saloniki (now in Greece but then part of the Ottoman Empire) received privileges from the Ottoman Sultan, because they manufactured the best cloth and provided textiles for the uniforms worn by members of elite units of the Ottoman army. The Saloniki Sephardi Jews kept this monopoly for 130 years, losing it only when more modern textiles were imported from England and the Netherlands. Spanish Jews mostly and Italian Jews to a lesser extent actually did most of the creative work in all areas of medieval Jewish culture. Largely because of their wealth and education, Sephardi Jews imposed their customs, language and name upon Jewish communities in all the countries to which they emigrated. One good illustration of this occurred in Jewish communities in the Balkans and what is now Turkey. The Jews in these communities called themselves “Romaniole,” taken from the popular name of the Byzantine Empire “Romania.” They spoke Greek until about 1550 at which time, influenced by the effects of the Sephardi immigration, began to call themselves “Sephardi” and to speak Ladino, an ancient form of Spanish. The fact is that no

 

 

 

 

 

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Sephardi communities existed other than those made up of the immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula, their descendents or those who assimilated themselves into Sephardi communities. European travelers and some Ashkenazi Jews have referred, and still refer, mistakenly to all non-Ashkenazi Jews as Sephardi. This is because the real Sephardi Jews established a lasting hegemony over other Jewish communities. Many other than Sephardi, non-Ashkenazi members of Jewish communities have more correctly defined themselves not only as Jews but also as Iraqis, Moroccans, Italians or another nationality.

 

Until the end of the seventeenth century, Ashkenazi Jews constituted a small minority of world Jewry. Their cultural advancement trailed far behind other Jewish communities, especially the Sephardi and Italian. Since the eighteenth century, the populations of Mediterranean countries, especially those in the Ottoman Empire, steadily declined economically and demographically. This trend greatly affected Jewish communities of those countries. Between 1700 and 1850, Jewish populations in these countries steeply declined and became increasingly impoverished. The modest increase in Jewish population between 1850 and 1914 did not to a significant extent offset the decline. From the beginning of the eighteenth century the political and technological advancements in Europe affected the Ashkenazi community. From the mid-eighteenth century the Ashkenazi population began to increase rapidly; by 1800 Ashkenazi Jews had become the majority of world Jewry; this increase and the majority percentage accelerated in the nineteenth century. Jews living in the European part of the Russian Empire, nearly all of them Ashkenazi, proliferated sevenfold between 1795 and 1914. Ashkenazi Jews developed a variety of innovations in Judaism, some of them secularist. By the first half of the twentieth century, Ashkenazi Jews had surpassed the relatively small, non-Ashkenazi minority in every major respect, including Talmudic studies. The current split between religious Ashkenazi Jews and non-Ashkenazi Jews stems from the fact that during the past two centuries, in contrast to what had previously been the case, almost all rabbis of distinction have been Ashkenazi. In non-Ashkenazi communities during this time period the quality of talmudic study,

 

 

 

 

 

 

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of books published and even of older books being reprinted has disastrously declined.

 

Until 1948, Zionism and the emigration of Jews to Palestine were predominantly Ashkenazi inventions. Most religious Jews viewed Zionism as being in opposition to Judaism; hence, only Jews emancipated from their religious past could become Zionists. Even so, few Ashkenazi Jews immigrated to Palestine because of Zionist convictions. The great majority of those who immigrated did so only because their lives were so difficult in their own countries of origin. The great majority of Jews in Israel in 1948 were those who had immigrated to Palestine after the increase in anti-Semitism in Europe after 1932 and especially after Hider came to power in Germany. The number of non-Ashkenazi Jews in Israel at the time of the state’s creation was relatively small. For most Jews in non-Ashkenazi communities, the religious influence, especially the messianic strain, was in the 1950s and early 1960s still potent. Living standards in Israel in the 1950s, although below those throughout Europe, were superior to those in most of the Arab Middle East. The Israeli government, therefore, could easily persuade Jews from many countries, for example, Morocco, Yemen and Bulgaria, to immigrate to Israel. The Israeli government induced Jewish immigration from Iraq by bribing the government of Iraq to strip most Iraqi Jews of their citizenship and to confiscate their property. By contrast, few Jews immigrated to Israel from the more advanced countries of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Greece or Egypt. The majority of the Israeli Jewish population shifted to the non-Ashkenazi. During the period from 1949 to 1965, Ashkenazi Jews in Israel declined to a minority that stabilized at about 40 per cent of Israel’s population. The substantial immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union thereafter increased the Ashkenazi population to about 55 per cent. By virtue of their having come from more advanced countries, the bulk of Ashkenazi Jews were relatively modern in outlook and secular.

 

The non-Ashkenazi Jews, increasingly referred to as “Orientals” instead of “Sephardis,” remained predominantly religious. Upon their arrival in Israel many Oriental Jews and their children were put through a cultural

 

 

 

 

 

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socialization directed by veteran Ashkenazi residents and advocated by members of the Zionist Labor Party then in power. This socialization included a considerable amount of coercive modernization and attempts to secularize the young. The results of this coercion were mixed during most of the first two decades of Israel’s existence. The majority of Oriental Jews remained traditionalists, meaning that these people ignored the more exacting commandments of Judaism, such as the ban of Sabbath travel, but followed other commandments, especially those dealing with synagogue attendance. Even more importantly, it meant that they retained belief in the magical powers of rabbis and “holy men.” To date, only a few Oriental politicians dare criticize a rabbi in public, even when the rabbi strongly opposes or curses them. Ashkenazi Jews of all political views in contrast criticize rabbis freely. Most Ashkenazi politicians despise any kowtowing to rabbis. Almost all Oriental politicians, including the Black Panthers of the early 1970s and the members of tiny Oriental peace movements, commonly bow to and kiss the hands of rabbis in public.

 

The Ashkenazi religious minority, particularly its Haredi segment, has resisted secularization of Oriental Jews. They have succeeded to some extent, most particularly in persuading a minority to retain the strict observance of Judaism’s commandments. They have established separate religious schools and yeshivot for the Orientals and have admitted, although in strictly controlled numbers, some of the most qualified Oriental youngsters to their own schools and yeshivas. After the passage of time, an Oriental Haredi elite group of rabbis and talmudic scholars emerged in Israel. Almost without exception, Ashkenazi Haredi rabbis trained members of this elite group.

 

By the beginning of the 1990s, the confrontation between the unbending Haredi version of Ashkenazi exclusiveness and Oriental traditionalism, which previously was potentially explosive, erupted. The Ashkenazi Haredi movement insisted upon completely freezing the situation that existed in central and eastern Europe around 1860. The Oriental Jews, trained by Ashkenazi Haredi Jews, were forced to discard their traditional garb, wear the black Ashkenazi clothing and learn and speak Yiddish. Yiddish was the

 

 

 

 

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language of oral instruction in the Haredi yeshivot; Hebrew was reserved for writing. The Oriental traditionalists were also forced to adopt the Ashkenazi manner of praying, which differed in numerous ways from their former method. Revered rabbis, who commanded authority and encountered almost no opposition, imposed those radical changes. By contrast, the various attempts by the Labor movement to impose modernizing constraints upon the Orientals in the 1950s sparked furious opposition among the Oriental masses, who would often criticize politicians but hardly ever criticize rabbis.

 

The Oriental students in Ashkenazi Haredi yeshivot, after years of docile submission to demands and after being ordained as rabbis, were not granted status equal to that of their fellow students and rabbis. They have continued to accept and even today seem to be content with their inferior treatment. An excellent illustration of this is the inequality in intermarriage with their Ashkenazi peers. All Jewish communities share the time-honored custom that the head of the yeshiva arranges all marriages of yeshiva students. He carefully picks the daughters of rich and pious Jews as wives for students. The better students are matched with the daughters of the wealthiest parents. (The head of the yeshiva also matches daughters of rabbis with sons of the wealthiest parents.) Yeshiva students have selflessly complied with this matchmaking; resisting has been–and still is–considered to be a grave sin. This practice was instituted so that yeshiva students, who had no marketable skills, and their families would be supported. Students could continue their sacred studies, and the entire supporting family would supposedly then be able to enter paradise. More recently, yeshiva heads, when unable to find wealthy, prospective fathers-in-law for students, find prospective wives that are previously trained in skilled professions suitable for Haredi women and are willing to support husbands engaged in “sacred studies.” (Such support will supposedly bring the wives to paradise.) By being matchmakers, yeshiva heads have most often been able to control the livelihoods and thus the lives of yeshiva students and their families.

 

Ashkenazi Haredi Jews have never formally prohibited marriages with pious

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jews from other communities. Such marriages, nevertheless, often have been–and still are–considered disgraces. Because of this, the heads of Ashkenazi Haredi yeshivot adopted the custom, still followed, of matching Oriental students, however distinguished in their studies, with either physically handicapped Ashkenazi brides or ones from poor families.

 

Not surprisingly, an unwritten rule developed whereby Oriental students, however distinguished, would not be appointed to any responsible teaching positions even in lower-rank yeshivot, attended solely by Oriental students. These teaching jobs were reserved for Ashkenazi rabbis, the underlying assumption being that Oriental Jews were not yet sufficiently mature to hold responsible religious positions. When Rabbi Shach, one of the foremost Haredi leaders, explicitly reiterated this assumption shortly before the 1992 elections, he was denounced as being racist by many Ashkenazi secular Jews; neither Oriental rabbis nor Oriental political activists uttered one word of public criticism.

 

No Oriental initiative was responsible for the creation of the Haredi political party, Shas. Rabbi Shach formed Shas before the 1988 elections, because he, in his rivalry with other prominent Ashkenazi Haredi rabbis, needed to have Knesset members that would be subservient only to him. He, therefore, ordered those rabbis that were his students and retained personal allegiance to him to form two new, separate, Haredi political parties: Degel Ha’Tora (Banner of the Law) would be purely Ashkenazi; Shas (an acronym for Sephardi List for Tradition) would be purely Oriental. After the formation of both parties, the party leaders publicly regarded Rabbi Shach as their highest spiritual authority and vowed to obey him unconditionally. In order to make Shas also attractive to non-Haredi Orientals, Shach handpicked a non-Haredi Oriental rabbi upon whom he could rely–Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph, the former chief rabbi of Israel–to act as the nominal party head. Shach, of course, retained authority. For Shach, Yoseph’s greatest virtue was that, after failing to win re-election as chief rabbi due to the NRP’s refusal to exert influence on his behalf, Yoseph hated the NRP as fiercely as did Shach himself. As is well known in Israel, hatred between secular Jews cannot match in intensity the mutual hatred between diverse groups of religious

 

 

 

 

 

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Jews, especially in the quarrels between rabbis representing those diverse groups. Shach had good reason to expect that, because of his wish to retaliate against NRP rabbis, Yoseph would remain loyal to him and be content with his subordinate role.

 

For a while everything worked as Shach had planned. The two parties, controlled by Shach, obtained eight Knesset seats altogether in the 1988 elections; Degal Ha’Tora had two seats; Shas, six seats. The Haredi party, Agudat Israel, against which Shach formed his parties, obtained only five seats. Degel Ha’Tora and Shas preferred a Likud government and after the 1988 elections supported Yitzhak Shamir as the prime minister. Their support may have been decisive. After 1990 Shamir would not have had a Knesset majority without their support. The self-demeaning attempts by the Labor Party leader, Shimon Peres, to reverse this situation failed. Peres spent months attending lessons of Talmud, given in his home by Rabbi Yoseph. Peres attempted unsuccessfully to be received by Rabbi Shach; Shach received many petty secular politicians but not Peres. Peres made repeated, public pronouncements about how deeply he respected Judaism in general and the Haredi rabbis in particular. Everything Peres attempted was in vain. Shach and his rival Haredi rabbis did not bend in their support for Shamir. Yitzhak Rabin’s victory over Peres for the leadership position in the Labor Party primaries preceding the 1992 elections was largely due to Labor’s rank-and-file disillusionment with Peres’ attempts to ingratiate himself with Haredi Jews and to win their support. In spite of this experience, Peres repeated the same attempts that resulted in the same results in the 1996 elections.

 

The Haredi parties wielded political power after 1988, most especially in the 1988-90 period. Peres, still in the government after 1988, supported their demands; Shamir, while Prime Minister, was even more resolute with support. Haredi political success can best be measured by the amounts of money the two Haredi parties were able to obtain from the state through so-called “special money” grants, not subject to fiscal controls of the state. These special money grants were made through a voluntary association, formed to remain under the real control of a Haredi Knesset member or his

 

 

 

 

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friends. The ministry of finance made grants from the state budget to such associations, most often on the basis of flimsy purpose statements and with no control exerted over expenditures. The resultant corruption was enormous, reaching a scale unprecedented in the entire history of the State of Israel and finally causing the withdrawal of such special money grants.

 

The extensive corruption involved in the obtaining of this special money did not necessarily mean that the money itself was used illicitly. Shas spent most of this money to establish a network of institutions designed to exert a lasting influence and to train cohorts of militants that in the future could enable the party to maximize its control over its public. This network consisted of a chain of educational institutions designed to revive traditional Jewish education for boys with only sacred and not secular subjects taught. (Shas largely ignored the education of girls.) Adult males between the ages of 40 and 50 were encouraged to leave their professions or give up their businesses in order to enroll in institutions and study sacred subjects with guaranteed remuneration. The remuneration, that is, salaries for studying, were admittedly low, but numerous individuals considered the life of study preferable to their persisting to do menial work or to maintain decaying businesses. The recruits did more than study Talmud. They were required to do political work for Shas. These recruits soon constituted Shas’ political cadre, which has been and remains instrumental in turning Haredi neighborhoods into electoral constituencies under almost any conceivable circumstances.

 

Informed Israeli political commentators have recognized the public and political impact of such Haredi political activity. In his June 26,1992 article in Al-Hamishmar, Professor Gideon Doron, Rabin’s major advisor on strategy during the 1992 elections, explained after Rabin’s victory why the Labor Party refrained from canvassing votes in Shas-dominated neighborhoods:

 

This is a party that keeps its public under continuous influence during election and other times … Shas’ method is to turn electoral outcomes into sources of monetary revenues and spend the money obtained

 

 

 

 

 

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during the four years [between one election and another]. The method succeeds. True, they also use magic spells, amulets and vows that greatly influence their public, but their role is secondary.

 

According to Doron, the best way to appeal to the Shas constituency is to do so through those of the salaried elite whose role anyway is to keep the constituency under control. Doron pointed out that, with the exception of the previously mentioned elite, Shas’ followers are essentially the same as the “Oriental tradition-minded segment of Likud supporters.” By acquiring political power, Shas leaders, particularly Rabbi Yoseph, gained self-confidence and began to seek emancipation from the tutelage of Ashkenazi Haredi rabbis. In each Shas-dominated neighborhood, Rabbi Yoseph rather than Rabbi Shach was acclaimed to be the greatest rabbi in the world. After some years of continual adulation by the masses, Rabbi Yoseph almost certainly came to believe that he no longer needed to be subordinate to Rabbi Shach.

 

The split between Shas and Rabbi Shach came after the 1992 elections and was sparked by a triviality. The split in reality was over the rival claims by Shach and Yoseph to be regarded as the spiritual head of Shas. Rabin, when forming his coalition, approached and accepted the demands of Shas. Before signing an agreement, Shas asked Rabbi Shach for approval. Shach refused, because, as discussed in another chapter, Shulamit Aloni was to be named Minister of Education. Shach’s newspaper, Yated Ne’eman, editorialized that this appointment was worse than the killing of one million children during the Holocaust. The reasoning employed here was that the Nazis killed the children but did not prevent their souls from going to paradise, whereas the appointment of Aloni could corrupt Jewish souls and deprive them of paradise. Rabbi Yoseph and the Shas Party, nevertheless, decided to risk the souls of Jewish children and joined Rabin’s government. Rabbi Shach and his followers reacted negatively in a furious manner that persisted thereafter.

 

The confrontation between the two Haredi movements has been waged in

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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the magical area over the contest of spiritual authority. In keeping with commonly held and magical Haredi beliefs, the Shas leaders’ sin of resisting Rabbi Shach’s will could be punished by a few curses resulting in either the deaths or sicknesses of those leaders and/or their family members. The result would allegedly restore heavenly equilibrium. In order to further this magical result, Rabbi Shach’s supporters resorted to conduct previously employed in similar situations. They published fake announcements of deaths, hospitalizations and/or traffic accidents of Shas leaders and then either notified the families accordingly by telephone or sent ambulances to their homes. As noted above, internecine hatred between religious Jews, and especially between Haredi rabbis, is often virulent. The existence of such hatred has continually resulted in disunity within ranks that limits Haredi political power. The methods of internecine infighting have been so customarily employed within Haredi culture that, unfortunately for Rabbi Shach’s followers, the impact is severely limited. In the domain of magic, moreover, Shas has on its side the great authority and renowned miracle worker, Rabbi Kaduri, who announced that he would shield all Shas leaders by casting cabbalistic spells. Rabbi Kaduri also claimed that God revealed to him that harassment by other Haredi Jews would qualify Shas leaders for the greatest Jewish virtue, sanctification of the Lord’s name through martyrdom.

 

In the contest of spiritual authorities, debate ensued over whether Rabbi Yoseph ‘s spirituality was sufficiently great to validate his challenge to Shach’s rabbinical authority, especially in light of Yoseph ‘s former allegiance to Shach. Following the debate all the Shas rabbis decided to obey Rabbi Yoseph. Shas rabbis and followers then began to extol Rabbi Yoseph as “the greatest rabbi of his generation,” greater even than any Ashkenazi rabbi. This honor had previously been awarded to Rabbi Shach. Shas had won its independence. The Ashkenazi Haredi Jews thus could not defeat but did sever all connections with Shas. No Ashkenazi rabbi distanced himself from Shach’s pronouncements; some added even more venom. The leader of the largest Hassidic sect, the Gur Hassids, reiterated his previously expressed view that Israel lost the Yom Kippur War (of October 1973) because a woman, Golda Meir, was prime minister. He

 

 

 

 

 

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implied that Israel would lose its next war because of Shulamit Aloni. Ashkenazi rabbis and their followers used weapons more hurtful than their curses and pronouncements. They desecrated Shas synagogues, usually just before the beginning of the Sabbath, thus making it difficult to clean in time without desecrating the Sabbath. Many Shas leaders, who had been educated in Ashkenazi institutions and who continued to pray in Ashkenazi synagogues, were harassed or beaten during the reciting of prayers. One Shas leader, Rabbi Pinhassi, was spat upon and beaten in an Ashkenazi synagogue in the Haredi town of Bnei Brak during a Sabbath prayer session. Some children of Shas leaders were terribly abused. The then Minister of the Interior, Yitzhak Der’i, had to remove his sons from an Ashkenazi yeshiva after they were publicly humiliated. Der’i was repeatedly harassed, often when attempting to pray in synagogues, by Shach ‘s followers and by religious settlers. Shas followers fought back. On several occasions they beat up those who had harassed Der’i; they also desecrated Ashkenazi synagogues in retaliation. Shas retaliations ultimately served their opponent’s cause by escalating the conflict.

 

The split and conflict within Haredi ranks illustrate the religious transformation of Oriental Jews. For over two decades many secular Oriental groups were founded; they all failed to obtain the support of the populations they claimed to represent and, as a result, collapsed ignominiously. Their failure can be attributed to their obstinate refusal to recognize that the Oriental Jewish communities define themselves primarily in religious terms. The Haredi Shas Party will in the foreseeable future likely remain the sole Oriental political party in Israel. This particular case study may help illustrate the nature of religious transformation of a not fully modernized population.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Alabaster’s Archive

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter Four

 

 

The National Religious Party and the

Religious Settlers

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

The ideology of the NRP and Gush Emunim, the group of religious settlers in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, is more innovative than the ideology of Haredi Jews. Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Kook, who was the chief rabbi of Palestine and a most prominent rabbinical supporter of Zionism, devised this ideology in the early 1920s and developed it thereafter. Rabbi Kook the elder, as he was called, was a prolific author. His followers considered him to be divinely inspired. After his death in 1935 he achieved the status of a saint in NRP circles. His son and successor as NRP leader, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook the younger, who died in 1981 at the age of 91, also achieved saintly status. Rabbi Kook the younger wrote no books and did not achieve the talmudic competency of his father, but he possessed a strongly charismatic personality and exerted great influence upon his students. He elaborated orally the political and social consequences of his father’s teachings. The rabbis who graduated from his yeshiva in Jerusalem, Merkaz Harav, or Center of the Rabbi, and remained devoted followers of his teaching established a Jewish sect with a well-defined political plan. In early 1974, almost immediately after the shock of the October 1973 war and a short time before the cease-fire agreement with Syria was signed, Rabbi Kook’s followers with their leader’s blessing and spiritual guidance founded Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful). The Gush Emunim aims were to initiate new and to expand already existent Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. With the help of Shimon Peres, who in the summer of 1974 became the Israeli defense minister and thus the person in charge of the Occupied Territories, Gush Emunim in the remarkably short time of a few years succeeded in changing Israeli settlement policy. The Jewish settlements, which continue to spread throughout the West Bank and to occupy a large chunk of the Gaza Strip, provide testimony of and documentation for Gush Emunim ‘s influence within Israeli society and upon Israeli governmental policies.

 

Gush Emunim ‘s success in changing Israeli settlement policy in the 1970s

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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is politically explicable. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan determined Israeli settlement policy from the end of the 1967 war unti11974. He did not allow the establishment of Jewish settlements in the bulk of the territories. The only exception he made was to allow a tiny group of Jewish settlers to live near Hebron. Dayan wanted to envelop the densely inhabited parts of these areas by creating a settlement zone in the almost uninhabited Jordan Valley and northern Sinai (the Yamit area). In order to preserve the Israeli alliance with the feudal notables who were in firm control of the villages (although not of the larger towns), Dayan promised not to confiscate village lands; he mostly kept his promise. Gush Emunim demonstrated its strength by organizing enormous demonstrations in 1974 and 1975 opposing the Dayan promise. These demonstrations were also directed against United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for backing the Dayan policy. Peres, who became defense minister after Dayan in 1974 in the first Rabin government (1974-77), initiated a new policy which he called “functional compromise” and for which he acquired Gush Emunim support. According to this policy all the land inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that was not being used by the inhabitants could be confiscated for the exclusive use of the Jews. Palestinian political leaders who accepted this new policy arrangement would be offered absolute rule over Palestinians. The government of the State of Israel would control only certain essential functions in Palestinian areas.

 

Prime Minister Rabin at first opposed this policy. In 1975, Peres conspired with Gush Emunim and planned strategy to combat Rabin’s opposition. Gush Emunim organized a mass rally in Sebastia, a disused railway station near Nablus. Rabin forbade the demonstration, but Gush Emunim demonstrators succeeded in circumventing the army roadblocks and assembled in Sebastia. During the period of the ensuing lengthy negotiations Peres lent some support to Gush Emunim. More demonstrators arrived on the scene. Finally, a compromise settlement that favored Gush Emunim was reached. Gush Emunim members were allowed to settle in what is now the flourishing settlement of Kedumim. Operating in much the same manner, Gush Emunim in 1976 with the help of Peres founded the settlement Ofra as a temporary work camp and the settlement Shilo as a

 

 

 

 

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temporary archaeological camp. Gush Emunim also pursued similar policies and initiated settlement beginnings in the Gaza Strip. The Gush Emunim settlements, agreed to by Peres in 1975 and 1976, still exist and are flourishing. Following the 1977 election of Menachem Begin as prime minister, a “holy alliance” of the religious Gush Emunim and successive secular Ismeli governments occurred and has remained in place to date.

 

Having achieved settlement policy successes, Gush Emunim rabbis cleverly conducted a number of political intrigues and were able to achieve domination of the NRP. From the mid-1980s the NRP has followed the ideological lead of Gush Emunim. After the death of Rabbi Kook the younger, the spiritual leadership of Gush Emunim became centered in a semi-secret rabbinical council, selected by mysterious criteria from among the most outstanding disciples of Rabbi Kook. These rabbis have continued to make policy decisions based upon their belief in certain innovative elements of ideology not openly advocated or detailed but derived from their distinct interpretation of Jewish mysticism, popularly known as Cabbala. The writings of Rabbi Kook the elder serve as the sacred texts and are perhaps intentionally even more obscure than other cabbalistic writings. In-depth knowledge of talmudic and cabbalistic literature, including modern interpretations of both, and special training are prerequisites for understanding Kook’s writings. The implications of Kook’s writings are theologically too innovative to allow for a popularized presentation to an otherwise educated Jewish public. This is probably the reason why so few analyses of the Gush Emunim ideology have appeared. The one significant and learned analysis is an essay by Professor Uriel Tal, published originally in Hebrew in Haaretz on September 26, 1984, and published in English in The Jerusalem Quarterly (No.35, Spring 1985) under the title: “Foundations of a Political Messianic Trend in Israel.” The Tal essay, although marred to some extent by sociological jargon and by some analogies not well adapted to its theme, is the most valuable analysis to date. Several relatively good studies in Hebrew of the more mundane aspects of Gush Emunim have appeared as books. The one study in English is Ian Lustick’s book, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (1988). The initiative

 

 

 

 

 

 

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for the Lustick book was apparently connected to Lustick’s personal reaction to the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair¹ and began as a paper written for the United States Department of Defense. This may explain the book’s excessive concentration on the changing political stances of Gush Emunim and its relative neglect of important parts of ideology. Contrary to what the title suggests, the book contains little description or explanation of Jewish fundamentalism. To some extent, moreover, this book is apologetic; the more extreme aspects of Gush Emunim dogmas and beliefs are not accurately revealed. Some of what is missing in the Lustick book can fortunately be found in the chapter titled “Nationalistic Judaism,” in Yehoshafat Harkabi’s book, Israel’s Fateful Hour (1988). The ensuing discussion of Gush Emunim ideas and politics will take cognizance of the Lustick and Harkabi analyses but will rely more upon Tal’s study and other Hebrew writings.

 

The status of non-Jews in the Cabbala as compared to that in talmudic literature is a good beginning point for discussion. Most of the many Jewish authors that have written about the Cabbala in English, German and French have either avoided this subject or have hidden its essence under clouds of misleading generalizations. These authors, Gershon Scholem being one of the most significant, have employed the trick of using words such as “men,” “human beings” and “cosmic” in order to imply incorrectly that the Cabbala presents a path leading towards salvation for all human beings. The actual fact is that cabbalistic texts, as opposed to talmudic literature, emphasize salvation for only Jews. Many books dealing with the Cabbala that are written in Hebrew, other than those written by Scholem, present an honest description of salvation and other sensitive Jewish issues. This point is well illustrated in studies of the latest and most influential school of Cabbala, the Lurianic School, founded in the late sixteenth century and named after its founding rabbi, Yitzhak Luria. The ideas of Rabbi Luria greatly influenced the theology of Rabbi Kook the elder and still underlie the ideologies of Gush Emunim and Hassidism. Yesaiah Tishbi, an authority on the Cabbala who wrote in Hebrew, explained in his scholarly work, The Theory of Evil and the (Satanic) Sphere in Lurianic Cabbala (1942, reprinted in 1982): “It is plain that those prospects and the scheme [of salvation] are intended only for

 

 

 

 

 

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Jews.” Tishbi cited Rabbi Hayim Vital, the chief interpreter of Rabbi Luria, who wrote in his book, Gates of Holiness: “The Emanating Power, blessed be his name, wanted there to be some people on this low earth that would embody the four divine emanations. These people are the Jews, chosen to join together the four divine worlds here below.” Tishbi further cited Vital’s writings in emphasizing the Lurianic doctrine that non-Jews have satanic souls: “Souls of non-Jews come entirely from the female part of the satanic sphere. For this reason souls of non-Jews are called evil, not good, and are created without [divine] knowledge.” In his illuminating Hebrew-language book, Rabbinate, Hassidism, Enlightenment: The History of Jewish Culture Between the End of the Sixteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1956), Ben-Zion Katz explained convincingly that the above doctrines became part of Hassidism. Accurate descriptions of Lurianic doctrines and their wide influence upon religious Jews can be found in numerous other studies, written in Hebrew. In books and articles written in other languages, and thus read by most interested non-Israeli Jews and non-Jews, such descriptions and analyses are most often absent. The role of Satan, whose earthly embodiment according to the Cabbala is every non-Jew, has been minimized or not mentioned by authors who have not written about the Cabbala in Hebrew. Such authors, therefore, have not conveyed to readers accurate accounts of general NRP or its hard-core, Gush Emunim politics.

 

A modern and influential expression of the attitudes derived above is evident in the teachings and writings of the late “Lubovitcher Rebbe,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who headed the Chabad movement and wielded great influence among many religious Jews in Israel as well as in the United States. Schneerson and his Lubovitch followers are Haredim; nevertheless, they involved themselves in Israel’s political life and shared many concepts with Gush Emunim and the NRP. The ideas of Rabbi Schneerson that appear below are taken from a book of his recorded messages to followers in Israel, titled Gatherings of Conversations and published in the Holy Land in 1965. During the subsequent three decades of his life until his death, Rabbi Schneerson remained consistent; he did not

 

 

 

 

 

 

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change any of the opinions. What Rabbi Scheerson taught either was or immediately became official, Lubovitch, Hassidic belief.

 

Regarding the non-Jew the Lubovitcher Rebbe’s views were clear even if a bit disorderly: “In such a manner the Halacha, stipulated by the Talmud, showed that a non-Jew should be punished by death if he kills an embryo, even if the embryo is non-Jewish, while the Jew should not be, even if the embryo is Jewish. As we [the talmudic sages] learn from Exodus 22:21, beginning with the words ‘and if any mischief will follow.”‘ This quoted verse is a part of a passage beginning in verse 21, describing what should be done “if men strive and hurt a woman with child,” thus damaging the embryo. Verse 22, whose beginning is quoted by the Lubovitcher Rebbe, says in full: “And if any mischief will follow, then you shall give soul for soul.” (Some English translations use the wording “life for life” instead of “soul for soul.”) The above stated difference in the punishment of a Jew and a non-Jew for the same crime is common in the Talmud and Halacha.

 

The Lubovitcher Rebbe continued:

 

 

The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person sterns from the common expression: “Let us differentiate.” Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of “let us differentiate” between totally different species. This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … The Old Rabbi [a pseudonym for one of the holy Lubovitch rabbis] explained that the passage in Chapter 49 of Hatanya [the basic book of Chabad]: “And you have chosen us” [the Jews] means specifically that the Jewish body was chosen [by God], because a choice is thus made between outwardly similar things. The Jewish body “looks as if it were in substance similar to bodies of non-Jews,” but the meaning … is that the bodies only seem to be similar in material substance, outward look and

 

 

 

 

 

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superficial quality. The difference of the inner quality, however, is so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species. This is the reason why the Talmud states that there is an halachic difference in attitude about the bodies of non-Jews [as opposed to the bodies of Jews]” “their bodies are in vain.” … An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness. As has been explained, an embryo is called a human being, because it has both body and soul. Thus, the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish embryo can be understood. There is also a difference in bodies. The body of a Jewish embryo is on a higher level than is the body of a non-Jew. This is expressed in the phrase “let us differentiate” about the body of a non-Jew, which is a totally different kind. The same difference exists in regard to the soul: the soul of a Jewish embryo is different than the soul of a non-Jewish embryo. We therefore ask: Why should a non-Jew be punished if he kills even a non-Jewish embryo while a Jew should not be punished even if he kills a Jewish embryo? The answer can be understood by [considering] the general difference between Jews and non-Jews: A Jew was not created as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews.”In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” [Genesis 1:1] means that [the heavens and the earth] were created for the sake of the Jews, who are called the “beginning.” This means everything, all developments, all discoveries, the creation, including the “heavens and the earth—are vanity compared to the Jews. The important things are the Jews, because they do not exist for any [other] aim; they themselves are [the divine] aim.”

 

After some additional cabbalistic explanation the Lubovitcher Rebbe

 

 

 

 

 

 

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concluded:

 

 

Following from what has already been said, it can be understood why a non-Jew should be punished by death if he kills an embryo and why a Jew should not be punished by death. The difference between the embryo and a [baby that was] born is that the embryo is not a self-contained reality but rather is subsidiary; either it is subsidiary to its mother or to the reality created after birth when the [divine] purpose of its creation is then fulfilled. In its present state the purpose is still absent. A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity. It is written,”And the strangers shall stand and feed your flocks” [Isaiah 61:5]. The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews. Because of this a non-Jew should be punished with death if he kills an embryo, while a Jew, whose existence is most important, should not be punished with death because of something subsidiary. We should not destroy an important thing for the sake of something subsidiary. It is true that there is a prohibition against [hurting] an embryo, because it is something that will be born in the future and in a hidden form already exists. The death penalty should be implicated only when visible matters are affected; as previously noted, the embryo is merely of subsidiary importance.

 

Comments concerning and partial summaries of the above opinions have appeared, but with insufficient emphasis in the Israeli Hebrew press. In 1965, when the above was published, the Lubovitcher Rebbe was allied in Israel to the Labor Party; his movement had already acquired many important benefits from the government then in power as well as previous Israeli governments. The Lubovitchers, for example, had obtained autonomy for their own education system within the context of religious state education. In the mid-1970s the Lubovitcher Rebbe decided that the Labor Party was too moderate and thereafter shifted his movement’s political support sometimes to Likud and sometimes to a religious party. Ariel Sharon

 

 

 

 

 

 

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was the Rebbe’s favorite Israeli senior politician. Sharon in turn praised the Rebbe publicly and delivered a moving speech about him in the Knesset after the Rebbe’s death. From the June 1967 war until his death the Lubovitcher Rebbe always supported Israeli wars and opposed any retreat. In 1974 he strongly opposed the Israeli withdrawal from the Suez area, conquered in the October 1973 war; he promised Israel divine favors if it persisted in occupying that land. After his death thousands of his Israeli followers, who continued to hold the views expressed in the above quoted passage, played an important role in Netanyahu’s election victory by demonstrating at many cross-road junctions before election day; they chanted the slogan: “Netanyahu is good for the Jews.” Although subsequently strongly criticizing Netanyahu for meeting with Arafat, signing the Hebron agreement and agreeing to a second withdrawal, the Rebbe’s followers continued their overall preference for the Netanyahu government.

 

Among the religious settlers in the Occupied Territories the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups. Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer of Palestinians, was one of them (Goldstein will be discussed in Chapter 6.) Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, who wrote a chapter of a book in praise of Goldstein and what he did, is another member of their group. Ginsburgh is the former head of the Yoseph Tomb Yeshiva, located on the outskirts of Nablus. Rabbi Ginsburgh, who originally came to Israel from the United States and has good connection to the Lubovitcher community in the United States, has often expressed his views in English in American Jewish publications. The following appeared in an April 26, 1996 Jewish Week (New York) article that contained an interview with Rabbi Ginsburgh:

 

Regarded as one of the Lubovitcher sect’s leading authorities on Jewish mysticism, the St. Louis born rabbi, who also has a graduate degree in mathematics, speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based, spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of the Torah.”If you saw two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” Rabbi Ginsburgh told the

 

 

 

 

 

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Jewish Week. “If every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.” Later, Rabbi Ginsburgh asked rhetorically: “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value,” he explained.”There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”

 

Changing the words “Jewish” to “German” or “Aryan” and “non-Jewish” to “Jewish” turns the Ginsburgh position into the doctrine that made Auschwitz possible in the past. To a considerable extent the German Nazi success depended upon that ideology and upon its implications not being widely known early. Disregarding even on a limited scale the potential effects of messianic, Lubovitch and other ideologies could prove to be calamitous.

 

The difference in the attitudes about non-Jews in the Halacha and the Cabbala is well illustrated by the difference expressed specifically in regard to non-Jews who have converted to Judaism. The Halacha, although discriminating against them in some ways, treats converts as new Jews. The Cabbala is unable to adopt this approach because of its emphasis upon the cosmic difference between Jews and non-Jews. The Cabbala explains that converts are really Jewish souls consigned firstly to non-Jewish bodies as punishments and later redeemed by conversion to Judaism either because the punishment ended or because a holy man interceded. This explanation is part of cabbalistic belief in metempsychosis, which is absent in the Halacha. According to the Cabbala, a satanic soul cannot be transformed into a divine soul by mere persuasion.

 

The ensuing discussion of Gush Emunim ideas and politics takes cognizance of the Lustick and Harkabi studies but relies primarily upon primary source material and upon analyses by Tal and other Hebrew-language writers. Tal described and analyzed Gush Emunim principles by quoting extensively from writings of Rabbi Yehuda Amital, an outstanding

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gush leader who was appointed minister without portfolio in the Israeli government in November 1995, by then Prime Minister Peres and who served in that capacity until June 1996. Peres described Amital as a moderate. In explaining Amital’s views, Tal relied heavily upon Amital’s published article,”On the significance of the Yom Kippur War [1973]. ” To illustrate Amital’s emphasis upon spiritual yearning and the political-messianic stream of thought, Tal quoted the following:

 

The war broke out against the background of the revival of the kingdom of Israel, which in its metaphysical (not only symbolic) status is evidence of the decline of the spirit of defilement in the Western world … The Gentiles are fighting for their mere survival as Gentiles, as the ritually unclean. Iniquity is fighting its battle for survival. It knows that in the wars of God there will not be a place for Satan, for the spirit of defilement, or for the remains of Western culture, the proponents of which are, as it were, secular Jews.

 

Tal further interpreted Amital’s and thus Gush Emunim’s basic views:

 

 

The modern secular world, according to this approach,”is struggling for survival, and thus our war is directed against the impurity of Western culture and against rationality as such.” It follows that the alien culture has to be eradicated because “all foreignness draws us closer to the alien, and the alien causes alienation, as is the position of those who still adhere to Western culture and who attempt to fuse Judaism with rationalist empiricist and democratic culture.” According to Amital’s approach, the Yom Kippur War has to be comprehended in its messianic dimension: a struggle against civilization in its entirety.

 

Tal proceeded in his discussion to ask Arnital, a multi-faceted, serious question: “What is the point of all the affliction? Why do wars continue, if the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Messiah has already come and if the Kingdom of Israel has already been established?” Arnital replied: “The war initiates the process of purification, of refinement, the purifying and cleaning of the congregation of Israel.” Tal continued to discuss: “We thus learn that there is only one explanation of the wars: they refine and purify the soul. As impurity is removed, the soul of Israel—by virtue of the war—will be refined. We have already conquered the lands; all that now remains is to conquer impurity.”

 

The followers of the two Rabbi Kooks have applied the above concepts to all other Israeli wars. Rabbi Shmaryahu Arieli, for example, explained, according to Tal, that the 1967 war was a “metaphysical transformation” and that the Israeli conquests transferred land from the power of Satan to the divine sphere. This supposedly proved that the “messianic era” had arrived. Tal also quoted the teachings of Rabbi E. Hadaya: “[The conquests of 1967] liberated the land from the other side [a polite name for Satan], from a mystical force that embodies evil, defilement and moral corruption. We [the Jews] are thus entering an era in which absolute sovereignty rules over corporeality.” Tal emphasized that these statements constituted a warning that any Israeli withdrawal from conquered areas would have metaphysical consequences that could result in restoring to Satan sovereignty over that land. Other Gush Emunim leaders directly and indirectly expressed the same ideas in their public statements and writings.

 

There can be little doubt that Gush Emunim has seriously affected Israeli Jewish religious leaders and lay people. During the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, for example, the military rabbinate in Israel, clearly influenced by the ideas of the two Rabbi Kooks, exhorted all Israeli soldiers to follow in the footsteps of Joshua and to re-establish his divinely ordained conquest of the land of Israel. This exhortation of conquest included extermination of non-Jewish inhabitants. The military rabbinate published a map of Lebanon in which the names of Lebanese towns had been changed to the names of cities found in the Book of Joshua. Beirut, for example, was changed to Be’erot. The map designated Lebanon as land belonging to the ancient northern tribes of Israel, Asher and Naphtali. As Tal wrote: “Israel’s military presence in Lebanon confirmed the validity of the Biblical promise in

 

 

 

 

 

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Deuteronomy 11:24: ‘Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours; our border shall be from the wilderness, from the river Euphrates, to the western sea.”‘ The followers of the two Rabbis Kook viewed Lebanon as being delivered from the power of Satan with its inhabitants being killed in the process. Such a view is not exceptional; it has numerous ancient and modern parallels, both religious and secular. The idea of a murderous purification of land from the evil and defilement that provoke God is common. In her chapter,”The Rites of Violence,” in the book, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Natalie Z. Davis, for example, presented the same idea as being the rationalization for the massacres perpetrated by France in the second half of the sixteenth century. In his excellent book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, to cite another example, Norman Cohn discussed Christian religious movements that sought to bring about the millennium by the use of force resulting in the deaths of many people.

 

Three interpretative and interrelated comments about Tal’s analysis of Gush Emunim should be made. First, the rabbis, cited as authorities by both Tal and the authors of this book, are not obscure or fringe rabbis but are important Israeli figures. As previously noted, Shimon Peres, when prime minister, regarded one of them, Rabbi Amital, as a moderate and appointed him minister without portfolio. Second, Tal was able to comprehend the real essence of what he termed the “political messianic trend.” His expertise in German Nazism, particularly in Nazi ideology and its sources, almost certainly helped him in his study of Gush Emunim. (See Tal’s book in Hebrew, Political Theology and the Third Reich, Tel-Aviv University Press, 1989.) The similarities between the Jewish political messianic trend and German Nazism are glaring. The Gentiles are for the messianists what the Jews were for the Nazis. The hatred for Western culture with its rational and democratic elements is common to both movements. Finally, the extreme chauvinism of the messianists is directed towards all non-Jews. The 1973 Yom Kippur War, for instance, was in Amital’s view not directed against Egyptians, Syrians and/or all Arabs but against all non-Jews. The war was thus directed against the great majority of citizens of the United States, even though the United States aided Israel in that war. This hatred of non-Jews is

 

 

 

 

 

 

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not new but, as already discussed, is derived from a continuous Jewish cabbalistic tradition. Those Jewish scholars who have attempted to hide this fact from non-Jews and even from many Jews have not only done a disservice to scholarship; they have aided the growth of this Jewish analogue to German Nazism.

 

The ideology of the Rabbis Kook is both eschatological and messianic. It resembles in this respect prior Jewish religious doctrines as well as similar trends in Christianity and Islam. This ideology assumes the imminent coming of the Messiah and asserts that the Jews, aided by God, will thereafter triumph over the non-Jews and rule over them forever. (This, it is alleged, will be good for the non-Jews.) All current political developments will either help bring this about sooner or will postpone it. Jewish sins, most particularly lack of faith, can postpone the coming of the Messiah. The delay, however, will not be of long duration, because even the worst sins of the Jews cannot alter the course of redemption. Sins can nevertheless increase the sufferings of Jews prior to the redemption. The two world wars, the Holocaust and other calamitous events of modem history are examples of punishment. The elder Rabbi Kook did not disguise his joy over the loss of lives in World War I; he explained that loss of lives was necessary “in order to begin to break Satan’s Power.” The followers of the elder Rabbi Kook’s pronouncements often have detailed in depth such explanations. Rabbi Dov Lior, one of the best-known rabbis of the aforementioned Gush Emunim rabbinical council and the rabbi of Kiryat Arba, for instance, argued that Israel’s failure in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon was due to the lack of faith manifested in the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt and the returning of “the inheritance of our ancestors [Sinai] to strangers.” Lior also explained in an article about him, published in the Hadashot Supplement of December 20, 1991, that the capture by the Syrians of two Israeli diplomats stationed in Junieh, Lebanon, in May 1984, was “a just punishment for the maltreatment in detention of our boys from the Jewish underground.” In the Hadashot article Lior added “I do not know what sufferings can yet befall all the Jews” for this crime.

 

Explanations that may appear to the uninitiated to be outlandish and bizarre

 

 

 

 

 

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are sometimes the most readily acceptable to Gush Emunim followers. This is especially the case when these followers believe redemption is near at hand. They believe that Satan, as described in the Cabbala, is rational and well-versed in logic; they believe further that the power of Satan and of his earthly manifestation, the non-Jews, can at times only be broken by irrational action. Gush Emunim thus founded settlements on the exact days of United States Secretary of States James Baker’s recurrent arrivals in Israel not merely to demonstrate Gush Emunim power but also as part of a mystical design to break the power of Satan and its American incarnation. In the past, different Jewish religious movements, for example, the movement of the false Messiah Shabtai Zvi in 1665 and 1666 and early Hassidism, had employed similar logic. Certain Christian and Islamic movements also employed analogous logic at certain times.

 

Gush Emunim ideologues, especially Rabbi Kook the elder, not only derived their ideas largely from Jewish tradition but were also innovative. How they developed the Messiah concept is illustrative. The Bible anticipated only a single Messiah. Jewish mysticism anticipated two Messiahs. According to the Cabbala the two Messiahs will differ in character. The first Messiah, a militant figure called “son of Joseph,” will prepare the material preconditions for redemption. The second Messiah will be a spiritual “son of David” who will redeem the world by spectacular miracle-making. (Gush Emunim followers believe that miracles occur at various times.) The cabbalistic conception is that the two Messiahs will be individuals. Rabbi Kook the elder altered this idea by anticipating and advocating that the first Messiah will be a collective being. Kook identified his group of followers as the collective “son of Joseph.” Gush Emunim leaders, following the teaching of Rabbi Kook the elder, continue to perceive their rabbis, and perhaps all followers as well, as the collective incarnation of at least one and perhaps two divinely ordained Messiahs. Gush Emunim members believe that this idea should not be revealed to the uninitiated until the right time. They believe further that their sect cannot err because of its infallible divine guidance.

 

Rabbi Kook’s second innovation concerned the relationship of the first Messiah to ignorant non-believing Jews, both secular and religious. Rabbi

 

 

 

 

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Kook derived this concept from the biblical prophecy that the Messiah “bringing salvation” will be “riding upon an ass and upon a colt, the foal of an ass” [Zechariah 9:9]. The Cabbala regarded this verse as evidence for two Messiahs: one riding upon an ass and the other upon a colt. The question here was: How could a collective Messiah ride upon a single ass? Kook answered the question by identifying the ass with Jews who lacked wisdom and correct faith. Kook postulated that the collective Messiah would ride upon these Jews. This meant that the Messiah would exploit them for material gains and would redeem them to the extent that they could be redeemed. The idea of redemption through contact with a spiritually potent personality has been a major theme common to all strands of Jewish mysticism. It has been applied not only to humans and their sins but also to animals and inanimate objects. In Israel this idea is still a part of religious education. Popular books for religious children contain many stories that allegedly illustrate this point. One of the most repeated stories is about a virtuous wild duck that is caught, killed and made into a succulent dish for a holy rabbi. This duck is considered to be redeemed by its being eaten by the holy man. The Gush Emunim innovation here has been to apply this not only to non-believing Jews who are redeemed by following the collective Messiah but also to all conceivable material objects, ranging from tanks to money. Everything can be redeemed if touched or possessed by Jews, especially messianic Jews. Gush Emunim members apply this doctrine to the conflict in the Holy Land. They argue that what appears to be confiscation of Arab-owned land for subsequent settlement by Jews is in reality not an act of stealing but one of sanctification. From their perspective the land is redeemed by being transferred from the satanic to the divine sphere. Gush Emunim, so its followers believe, is by virtue of exclusive access to the total and only truth more important than the remainder of the Jewish people. Gush Emunim rabbis utilize the following analogy of the messianic ass: given its lowly status in the hierarchy of beings, the ass must remain ignorant of the noble purpose of its divinely inspired rider. This is the case in spite of the fact that the ass surpasses the rider in size and sheer power. The divine rider in this analogy leads the ass toward its own salvation. Because of his noble purpose the rider may have to kick the ass during the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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course of the journey in order to make sure that the ass does not stray from the ordained path. In the same way, the Gush Emunim rabbis assert, this one messianic sect has to handle and lead the ass-like Jews, who have been corrupted by satanic Western culture with its rationality and democracy and who refuse to renounce their beastly habits and embrace the true faith. To further the process, the use of force is permitted whenever necessary.

 

The final innovation of Rabbi Kook the elder contributed most decisively to the popularity and political influence of his early followers and subsequently of Gush Emunim. During the period of redemption this innovation affected the conduct of the elect in relation to worldly concerns and contacts with other Jews and non-Jews. Rabbi Kook taught that the elect should not stand aloof from the rest of the world, as Jews had often done in the past. Realizing that other people were sinful and even satanic in nature, the elect had to attempt to bridge the gap between themselves and the others by actively involving themselves in society. Only by so doing would the elect have any chance to sanctify others. The elect should provide an example, exert influence politically and increasingly make contact with other people. Since the 1920s this doctrine has greatly influenced the behavior of those affiliated with the NRP. After being established in 1974, Gush Emunim vigorously reasserted this doctrine in spite of great resentment of the public. Unlike Orthodox Jews previously, Rabbi Kook’s followers began to dress like secular Jews and only distinguished themselves outwardly by wearing skullcaps. To date they have followed the Israeli secular clothing fashions of the 1950s. In their schools they introduced portions of secular teaching into their curricula. They permitted their people to enroll in Israeli secular universities. They additionally established the religiously oriented Bar-Ilan University. Although restricting the Bar-Ilan teaching staff to religious Jews, Gush Emunim sought to expand the university’s scope of instruction to include all the usual academic disciplines. The Haredim have consistently resented and viewed with abhorrence these pursuits of what they regard as secularization. Rabbi Kook insisted that each Jew had a religious duty to fight and to train to fight. NRP members have faithfully followed this teaching. Many Gush Emunim members have been and still are officers of the Israeli army’s select units; their proportion in such units has continually

 

 

 

 

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increased. Gush Emunim religious school students have gained renown for their excellent combat qualities, their high motivation to fight, their relatively high casualty rate during the Lebanon war and their willingness to beat up Palestinians during the Intifada.

 

Gush Emunim has won broad public sympathy in Israeli Jewish society because of its attitude towards army service. This contrasts sharply with the societal antagonism directed against the Haredim for their dodging of military service. The doctrine of sanctity, attributed by the two Rabbi Kooks to almost every Zionist enterprise, contributed even more to the widespread public sympathy for and support of Gush Emunim. Tal contrasted the religious Zionist outlook of Rabbi Kook the younger and Gush Emunim with that of the secular left. Tal defined the secular left’s Zionist outlook as a “poetic, lyrical notion, according to which the return to the soil, life within nature, the agricultural achievements, the secular creativity [are essential parts].” The two Rabbi Kooks, while acknowledging that the secular left’s notion unwillingly served the coming of messianic redemption, emphasized “the military victories upon holy soil and the Jewish blood spilled on this soil.” Rabbi Kook the younger, together with other Gush Emunim leaders, went further, according to Tal, by defining “the State of Israel as the kingdom of Israel and the kingdom of Israel as the kingdom of heaven on earth.” Followers of Rabbi Kook still refer to Israel as the “earthly support of the Lord’s throne.” Israel Harel, one of the most important Gush Emunim leaders, used this expression to make a political point in his weekly column in Haaretz on September 12,1996. Quoting an early essay by Rabbi Kook the elder, Harel wrote that the State of Israel was “the base of the Lord’s throne in this world” and thus is and should be completely different from states “considered by Locke, Rosseau and others.” For such people as Harel, total holiness envelops and justifies everything Israel does within the context of divinely inspired guidance. Tal wrote that from this vantage point “every action, every phenomenon, including secularism will one day be engulfed by sacredness, by redemption.” It is not inconceivable that this type of sacredness could lead to the exploding of nuclear bombs in order to end the power of Satan and to establish “the base of the Lord’s throne in this

 

 

 

 

 

 

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world.”

 

 

In many respects Gush Emunim members and the majority of NRP supporters have continued to resemble the early Zionist pioneers. This fact has boosted their public image. They have helped to promote this image by presenting themselves to the uninitiated as successors of the pioneers of the 1920s and 1930s who are still cherished in the Jewish national memory and lauded in Israeli education. As previously indicated, Gush Emunim members, except for their miniscule skullcaps, continue consciously to emulate the dress and mannerisms of the early pioneers. The almost exclusively Ashhenazi background of both the early pioneers and the Gush Emunim settlers help this emulation. All Gush Emunim rabbis are Ashkenazi. The accepted Israeli standards of religious education, discussed in Chapter 3, are largely responsible for the absence of Oriental Jews among Gush Emunim rabbis. Although unwillingly to join, many Oriental Jews have supported and continue to support Gush Emunim. The Likud constituency has to date consistently supported Gush Emunim. By contrast, most members of the Labor Party supported Gush Emunim until the end of the 1970s but changed after Gush Emunim opposed the peace treaty with Egypt and demanded that Lebanon be annexed ”as a part of the heritage of our ancestors, the tribes of Asher, Naphtali and Zebulun.” Gush Emunim infuriated many Labor supporters by continuing to advocate other extreme hawkish policies and by fiercely opposing Sharon’s 1982 alliance with the Lebanese Falangists, who were Christians and therefore considered to be idolaters. Gush Emunim’s position in 1982 was that Jews in their battles and conquests should only rely upon God’s help. Any alliances with non-Jews could incur God’s wrath and lead to His withholding help. Such ideas were, even for extreme Labor Party hawks, unacceptable.

 

Gush Emunim and NRP politics must be understood within the context of ideology. The ideology makes clear what members of these groups wish to accomplish. Books written in English have unfortunately failed to discuss adequately this ideology. Lustick’s book, For the Land and the Lord, which discusses Gush Emunim’s outward political behavior, is the prime example. Lustick relied to a great extent upon the writings of Harold Fisch for his

 

 

 

 

 

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analysis of Gush Emunim’s political ideology. Fisch, a professor of English literature who seemingly has only limited competence in the Talmud and Cabbala, has mostly written for English-speaking readers and has primarily concentrated upon Christian fundamentalists in the United States. Lustick also relied somewhat upon the writings of Rabbi Menachem Kasher. Kasher was a highly respected talmudic scholar who wrote in Hebrew and influenced potential Gush Emunim initiates. His messianic tracts are well-known to many Gush Emunim and Yeshiva students. Lustick only briefly quoted Kasher twice and then obfuscated what he did quote. In our book we have relied more upon what Kasher wrote and have additionally utilized other Gush Emunim literature.

 

Gush Emunim activists live in a homogeneous West Bank society that they control. This society is mostly protected against “contamination” by rival detested ideologies, especially those that stem from Western culture and have been to some extent influenced the secular part of Israeli Jewish society. The possibility clearly exists that the Gush Emunim homogeneous society and its NRP supporters can increase their political power and influence within Israeli society. The ideology of the two Rabbis Kook is the determining force of NRP and Gush Emunim political action. The fundamental political tenet of Gush Emunim is that the Jewish people are unique. Gush Emunim members share this tenet with all Orthodox Jews, but they interpret it somewhat differently. Lustick discussed this tenet by focusing upon the Gush Emunim denial of one classical secular Zionist theme. Lustick correctly pinpointed the two assumptions of this theme, the first being that “Jewish life had been distorted on both the individual and the collective levels by the abnormality of diaspora existence.” Second, only by undergoing a “process of normalization,” by emigrating to Palestine and by forming a Jewish state can Jews become a normal nation. Quoting Fisch, Lustick stated that for Gush Emunim this classical idea “is the original delusion of the secular Zionists.” The Gush Emunim argument is that secular Zionists measured that “normality” by applying non-Jewish standards that are satanic. The secular Zionists focused upon certain nations that they considered “normal” and asserted that the non-Jews in these normal nations

 

 

 

 

 

 

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were more advanced than were most diaspora Jews. Because of this, so argued the secular Zionists, Jews should try to emulate those non-Jews by becoming a “normal” people in a “normal” nation state. The Gush Emunim counter argument is: “Jews are not and cannot be a normal people. Their eternal uniqueness … [is] the result of the covenant God made with them at Mount Sinai.” Lustick further explained this Gush Emunim position by quoting one of the group’s leaders, Rabbi Aviner: “‘While God requires other normal nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.”‘ Haredi rabbis often cited this idea in their writings, but they strictly reserved its glaring consequences for the yet-to-come messianic age. The Halacha supports this reservation by carefully distinguishing between two situations in discussing codes of justice and righteousness. The Halacha permits Jews to rob non-Jews in those locales wherein Jews are stronger than non-Jews. The Halacha prohibits Jews from robbing non-Jews in those locales wherein the non-Jews are stronger. Gush Emunim dispenses with such traditional precautions by claiming that Jews, at least those in Israel and the Occupied Territories, are already living in the beginning of the messianic age.

 

Lustick failed to explain adequately the messianic age considerations and the distinctions between Jews and non-Jews. Harkabi’s treatment was better. In discussing the halachic teaching and the Gush Emunim position regarding murders, Harkabi explained that the murder of a Jew, particularly when committed by a non-Jews, is in Jewish law the worst possible crime. He then quoted the Gush Emunim leader, Rabbi Israel Ariel. Relying upon the Code of Maimonides and the Halacha, Rabbi Ariel stated: ” A Jew who killed a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment and has not violated the [religious] prohibition of murder.” Harkabi noted further that this should be remembered when “the demand is voiced that all non-Jewish residents of the Jewish state be dealt with according to halachic regulations.” Gush Emunim rabbis have continually reiterated that Jews who killed Arabs should not be punished. Gush Emunim members not only help such Jews who are punished by Israel’s secular courts but also refuse to call those Jews “murderers.” It logically follows that the religious settlers and their followers emphasize the “shedding of Jewish blood” but show little concern about the

 

 

 

 

 

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“shedding of non-Jewish blood.” The Gush Emunim influence on Israeli policies can be measured by the fact that the Israeli government’s policy on this matter has clearly reflected the Gush Emunim position. The Israeli government under both Labor and Likud leadership has refused to free Palestinian prisoners “with Jewish blood on their hands” but has not hesitated to free prisoners “with non-Jewish blood on their hands.”

 

Another practical consequence of such attitudes is Gush Emunim’s impact upon the conduct of the Israeli government in all matters concerning the territories. Gush Emunim continues to encourage Israeli authorities to deal cruelly with Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The refusals of Prime Ministers Rabin, Peres and Netanyahu to advocate the evacuation of even a single Jewish settlement is attributable primarily to the influence of Gush Emunim. Gush Emunim’s influence upon all Israeli governments and political leaders of varying political persuasions has been significant.

 

The Gush Emunim attitude towards Palestinians, always referred to as “Arabs living in Israel,” is important. Lustick mostly avoided this subject. Harkabi dealt with it honestly by extensively quoting the statements of Rabbis Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Shlomo Aviner and Israel Ariel. Kook, Aviner and Ariel viewed the Arabs living in Israel as thieves; they based their view upon the premise that all land in Israel was and remained Jewish and that all property found thereon thus belonged to Jews. Harkabi, who learned this when doing the research for his book, expressed his shock: “I never imagined that Israelis would so interpret the concept of historical right.” Harkabi listed in sub-chapters of his book the numerous applications and extensions of this doctrine. He pointed out that for Gush Emunim the Sinai and present-day Lebanon are parts of this Jewish land and must be liberated by Israel. Rabbi Ariel published an atlas that designated all lands that were Jewish and needed to be liberated. This included all areas west and south of the Euphrates River extending through present-day Kuwait. Harkabi quoted Rabbi Aviner: “We must live in this land even at the price of war. Moreover, even if there is peace, we must instigate wars of liberation in order to conquer it [the land].” It is not unreasonable to assume that Gush

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Emunim, if it possessed the power and control, would use nuclear weapons in warfare to attempt to achieve its purpose.

 

For Gush Emunim, as Harkabi made clear and Lustick indirectly confirmed, the God-ordained inferiority of non-Jews living in the state of Israel extends to categories other than life and property. Gush Emunim has developed a foreign policy for the state of Israel to adopt. This policy stipulates that Arab hostility towards the Jews is theological in nature and is inherent. The conclusion drawn is that the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be resolved politically. This conclusion is supported by Lustick’s quoting the prominent Gush Emunim leader and former Knesset member, Eliezer Waldman: “‘Arab hostility springs, like all anti-Semitism, from the world’s recalcitrance to be saved [by the Jews]”‘ (pp. 77-9). Lustick also quoted other Gush Emunim leaders who left no doubt about their refusal to enter into political agreements with “present-day Jewish inhabitants of the land who resist the establishment of Jewish sovereignty over its entirety. ” Lustick quoted Fisch who argued that Arab resistance could be attributed to Arabs’ seeking “to fulfill their collective death-wish.” Gush Emunim rabbis, politicians and ideological popularizers have routinely compared Palestinians to the ancient Canaanites, whose extermination or expulsion by the ancient Israelites was, according to the Bible, predestined by a divine design. This genocidal theme of the Bible creates great sympathy for Gush Emunim among many Christian fundamentalists who anticipate that the end of the world will be marked by slaughters and devastation. Gush Emunim has from its inception wanted to expel as many Palestinians as possible. Palestinian terrorist acts allow Gush Emunim spokespeople to disguise their real demand for total expulsion by arguing that expulsion is warranted by “security needs.”

 

Harkabi quoted the views of Mordechai Nisan, a lecturer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that were published in the August 1984 issue of Kivunim, an official publication of the World Zionist Organization (pp. 151-6). According to Nisan, who relied upon Maimonides, a non-Jew permitted to reside in the land of Israel “must accept paying a tax and suffering the humiliation of servitude.” In keeping with a religious text of Maimonides, Nisan, according to Harkabi, demanded that a non-Jew “be held down and

 

 

 

 

 

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not [be allowed to] raise his head against Jews.” Paraphrasing Nisan further, Harkabi wrote: “Non-Jews must not be appointed to any office or position of power over Jews. If they refuse to live a life of inferiority, then this signals their rebellion and the unavoidable necessity of Jewish warfare against their very presence in the land of Israel.” Such views about non-Jews, published in an official publication of the World Zionist Organization, resemble Nazi arguments about Jews. Harkabi commented: “I do not know how many Jews share his [Nisan’s] belief, but the publication of the article in a leading Zionist periodical is a cause for grave concern.”

 

The three following examples of other articles that appeared in Hebrew-language newspapers provide additional analyses of NRP and Gush Emunim attitudes. One of these articles deals with the most extreme group within Gush Emunim, named Emunim (Being Faithful). Established after the formation of the Rabin government in 1992, Emunim is led by Rabbi Benny Alon, the son of retired Deputy President of the Israeli Supreme Court Menahem Alon. Rabbi Alon, quoted by Nadav Shraggai in his September 18,1992 Haaretz article, stated:

 

The method of the mid-1970s will no longer work under a government whose moral profile is defined by the Meretz Party and whose members’ hearts and minds are filled with scorn for the entire land of Israel and for Judaism. They not only want a Palestinian state without any Jews to be established in the very midst of the land of Israel. They also want a secular democratic state to replace the Jewish state of Israel. This government is spiritually rotten.

 

Rabbi Alon then contrasted the 1992 government leaders with the Labor leaders of the mid-1980s and before, who “felt like warm-hearted Jews feel” and were thus responsive to Gush Emunim’s pressures. Alon continued,”But you cannot apply the same methods with the likes of [Meretz MK] Dedi Tzuker or [Meretz member] Moshe Ainirav who coordinate their deeds with our enemies.” In preparing his September 18, 1992 Maariv article, journalist Avi Raz questioned Alon further and discovered Emunim’s tactics: “Emunim

 

 

 

 

 

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wants to discredit Rabin [the then prime minister] by forcing him to rely [for a Knesset majority] on the MKs from the Arab parties and thus to destroy the legitimacy of his government.” Rabin and Peres made concessions but nevertheless insisted upon expanding Jewish settlements. In his article Raz quoted Alon further:

 

From the spiritual point of view Rafael Eitan is wrong and should be criticized when he justifies Jewish settlements on the basis of helping Israeli’s security. Security considerations in favor of the settlements are not the point. As I see it, politics rest upon spirituality. A body politic needs a soul. Israel’s security and even the survival of the Jewish nation are no more than material dimensions of the spiritual Jewish depth. When we say that we must prevent the formation of a Palestinian state in order to save the Jewish state from extinction, we are not talking about spiritual things.

 

As Raz observed: “Blessed with profound spirituality, Alon and his associates go to the United States for five days in order to request Christian fundamentalists to support financially their activities.” Alon and his associates succeeded in acquiring some of this requested funding. As Jewish fundamentalists who abominate non-Jews, they forged a spiritual alliance with Christians who believe that supporting Jewish fundamentalism is necessary to support the second coming of Jesus. This alliance has become a significant factor in both U.S.and Middle Eastern politics.

 

The second example concerns the policies of Gush Emunim itself under the Labor and Meretz government of the 1990s. In his October 5, 1992 Haaretz article, Danny Rubinstein quoted Gush Emunim leaders who believed the goal of Rabin’s policies was “to destroy root and branch the [Jewish] settlements in the territories and all accomplishments of Zionism.” Rubinstein carefully distinguished between the secular Golan Heights settlers and Gush Emunim. The Golan Heights settlers claimed that Rabin’s policies were mistaken, because peace with Syria could be reached on Israeli terms. Gush Emunim claimed that “the Washington negotiations [with

 

 

 

 

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the PLO] amount to nothing else than a dialogue of human beings with a herd of ravenous wolves, aiming solely at turning the entire land of Israel into the entire land of the Arabs.” This does not mean that Gush Emunim declined to take money for its own purposes from the government that negotiated “with a herd of ravenous wolves.”

 

In his October 14, 1992 Haaretz article, Nadav Shraggai discussed a symposium, organized and underwritten by the ministry of religion in conjunction with the ministry of education, headed by Shulamit Aloni. The symposium’s theme was: “Is autonomy for resident aliens in the Holy Land feasible?” Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the symposium’s major speaker, explained: “‘Autonomy is tantamount to a denial of the Jewish religion.”‘ According to Goren, the Halacha considers the denial of Judaism to be the gravest Jewish sin and enjoins pious Jews to kill those infidels who deny Judaism. Rabbi Goren likened such infidels to those people who advocated autonomy. This indicated that an attempt to assasinate Rabin would occur for religious reasons. Goren argued further that Judaism prohibits “granting any national rights to any group of foreigners in the land of Israel.” Goren also denied that a Palestinian nation existed. He asserted: “Palestinians disappeared in the second century BC, and I have not heard of their being resurrected.” Goren reassured his audience that, undeterred by widespread infidelities,”the process of redemption, already underway for one hundred years, cannot be reversed when Divine Providence awaits us all the time.” Another symposium participant, Rabbi Aviner, concurred with Goren that Judaism forbade granting even a small amount of autonomy to the Palestinians. Rabbi Zalman Melamed, chairman of the Committee of the Rabbis of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, made the same point even more clearly: “No rabbinual authority disputes that it would be ideal if the land of Israel were inhabited by only Jews.” Rabbi Shlomo Min-Hahar extended the argument to Muslims and Christians specifically by claiming: “The entire Muslim world is money-grubbing, despicable and capable of anything. All Christians without exception hate the Jews and look forward to their deaths.”

 

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symposium, during which rabbinical leaders delivered such arguments. Prime Minister Rabin and the ministers of religion and education approved and did not utter publicly negative criticism of any of the views expressed. Rabin’s approval might be understood as a part of his deliberate encouragement of political programs at variance with what he claimed to favor. Minister of Education Aloni’s approval can be understood rationally only as another manifestation of her weakness, carelessness and foolishness. Both Rabin and Aloni visited Germany shortly before this symposium and fiercely condemned publicly the “German hatred of foreigners.” They carefully avoided mentioning racist statements and recommendations made by rabbis in Israel about how foreigners should be treated. They did not mention, let alone condemn, Rabbi Melamed’s advocacy of transfer, that is, the total expulsion of all non-Jews from the land of Israel. Such mention might have complemented their denunciation of German xenophobia.

 

The third example, also taken from the Hebrew press, stems from a book of responsa, published in 1990. The book, Intifada Responses, written by the important Gush Emunim rabbi, Shlomo Aviner, provides in plain Hebrew halachic answers to the questions of what pious Jews should do to Palestinians during situations that arise at times similar to the Intifada. The book is divided into brief chapters that contain answers to questions. The answers do not relate to Israeli law. Quotations from the first two chapters (pp. 19-22) illustrate the essence of the questions and answers contained in this book. The first exemplary question in Chapter 1 is: “Is there a difference between punishing an Arab child and an Arab adult for a disturbance of our peace?” The answer begins by cautioning people not conversant with the Halacha that comparisons should not be made between Jewish and Gentile underage minors; “As is known, no Halachic punishments can be inflicted upon Jewish boys below the age of thirteen and Jewish girls below the age of twelve … Maimonides wrote that this rule applied to Jews alone … not to any non-Jews. Therefore, any non-Jews, no matter what age, will have to pay for any crime committed.” In providing his answer, Rabbi Aviner proceeded to quote another ruling by Maimonides that warned Jews not to punish a non-Jewish child who can be presumed to be “short of wisdom.”

 

 

 

 

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Aviner concluded that determining whether a non-Jewish child is to be regarded as an adult depends upon whether that child, even if younger than thirteen, has sufficient understanding. According to what Aviner wrote in his book, any Jew is capable of judging whether a non-Jewish child should in this sense be considered and punished as an adult. The second exemplary question is: “What shall we do if an Arab child intends to threaten a [Jewish] life?” Rabbi Aviner explained that all prior responsa dealt only with the actual commissions of crimes by non-Jewish children. He explained in this answer that if a non-Jewish child intended to commit murder, for example, by throwing a stone at a passing car, that the non-Jewish child should be considered a “persecutor of the Jews” and should be killed. Citing Maimonides as his authority, Aviner maintained that killing the non-Jewish child in this instance is necessary to save Jewish life.

 

In the second chapter of his book Rabbi Aviner posed and answered a single question; “Does the Halacha permit inflicting the death penalty upon Arabs who throw stones?” His answer was that inflicting such a punishment is not only permitted but is mandatory. This punishment, moreover, is not reserved for stone throwers but can be invoked for other reasons. Aviner asserted that a rabbinical court or a king of Israel “has the power to punish anyone by death if it is believed that the world will thereby be improved.” The rabbinical court or king of Israel can alternatively punish non-Jews and wicked Jews by beating them mercilessly, by imprisoning them under the most severe conditions and/or by inflicting upon them other extreme suffering. Gush Emunim spokespeople have argued that this power of the rabbinical court and king of Israel can devolve to the Israeli government, provided that government abides by the correct religious rulings. The punishments, mentioned here, should be invoked if the authorities believe that such punishment will deter other wicked people. Aviner made clear his preference was to invoke the death penalty and/or severe flogging upon any non-Jew found guilty of intending to throw stones at Jews.

 

The discussion in this chapter should distinguish qualitatively the Gush Emunim-NRP form from the Haredi form of Jewish fundamentalism. The

 

 

 

 

 

 

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greater potential danger clearly rests with the Gush Emunim and the NRP, because their members have involved themselves in the state in order to sanctify Israel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes

 

 

 

1. 1. Pollard, an American Jew very devoted to Israel, was in the 1980s a highly placed employee of U.S.Naval Intelligence. He gave many intelligence secrets (not only concerning Middle Eastern affairs) to Israel. He received a severe prison sentence in the U.S. Many American and Israeli Jews, and since the mid-1990s also the Israeli government, have tried to persuade the U.S.President to reduce his sentence or give him a pardon. However, these attempts have been unsuccessful, due to the strong opposition of U.S.intelligence chiefs.

 

 

 

 

 

Web Editor’s Note

 

This document is reproduced as published. No changes to the text have been made. Reprinted in accordance with U.S. copyright law.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter 6: The Real Significance of Baruch Goldstein by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinksy

 

 

 

Chapter Six

 

 

The Real Significance of Baruch Goldstein

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The story of the massacre committed by Baruch Goldstein in the Patriarchs’ Cave in Hebron on February 25, 1994, is well known. Goldstein entered the Muslim prayer hall and shot worshippers mostly in their backs, killing 29, including children, and wounding many more. In this chapter we shall not describe that massacre; rather we shall focus upon Goldstein’s career prior to the massacre and upon the reactions of the Israeli government and fundamentalist Jews to the massacre a short time after it occurred. This should provide a vivid illustration of Jewish fundamentalism. We shall extend our discussion of some details until the summer of 1998.

 

One important background fact about Goldstein exemplifies the influence of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel: long before the massacre, Goldstein as an army physician repeatedly breached army discipline by refusing to treat Arabs, even those serving in the Israeli army. He was not punished, either while in active or reserve service, for his refusal because of intervention in his favor. Political commentators discussed this story in the Hebrew press even though not a single Israeli politician referred to it. This story deserves detailed exploration in our analysis of Jewish fundamentalism.

 

In his March 1, 1994, Yediot Ahronot article, Arych Kizel, a regular Davar correspondent, wrote that Goldstein, shortly after immigrating to Israel and as a conscript assigned to an artillery battalion in Lebanon as a doctor, refused to treat Gentiles. According to Kizel, Goldstein, after refusing to treat a wounded Arab, declared: “I am not willing to treat any non-Jew. I recognize as legitimate only two [religious] authorities: Maimonides and Kahane.” Kizel further reported:

 

Three Druze soldiers who served in Goldstein’s battalion approached their commander and asked for another doctor to be stationed in their battalion, because they were afraid that Goldstein would refuse

 

 

 

 

 

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to treat them in case they were wounded. Because of their request Goldstein was reassigned to another battalion. He continued to serve as a military doctor both in the conscript army and in the reserves. After some years he was reassigned to the regional Hebron brigade of the central command where he thereafter served his reserve stint. Immediately after receiving this assignment, he told his commanders that his religious faith would make it impossible for him to treat wounded or ill Arabs; he asked to be reassigned elsewhere. His request was granted, and he was reassigned to a reserve unit serving in South Lebanon.

 

Amir Oren, who subsequently became the military correspondent of Haaretz, provided the most complete story of Goldstein’s relations with the Israeli army and the entire Israeli political establishment in his March 4 Davar article. According to Oren, after the 1984 elections and the subsequent formation of the national unity government, then Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and then Chief of Staff General Moshe Levy learned about Goldstein’s refusal to treat non-Jews in Lebanon. Oren wrote:

 

When Goldstein’s refusal to treat non-Jewish patients became evident to his commanders, both the artillery corps and medical corps commanders quite naturally wanted to court-martial him and thus get rid of him.

 

They took it for granted that this could be easily done, because Goldstein had graduated only from the army’s course for medical officers. [Goldstein did not have combat officer training, which is normally a prerequisite for admission to the course for medical officers.] The two corps [commanders] also knew that Goldstein, while attending the army’s course for medical officers, had become notorious as an anti-Arab extremist.

 

According to other Hebrew press reports, some of Goldstein’s trainee colleagues demanded that he be dismissed from the course; their demand

 

 

 

 

 

 

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was refused. Oren related: “(Goldstein) was already then protected by highly placed people in senior ministries. Those patrons requested that Goldstein be allowed to serve in Kiryat Arba rather than in a combat battalion.” The situation then developed into “a bone of contention between the commander of the army’s medical corps and its chief rabbi.” Oren continued:

 

In the end the issue of what to do with an officer who openly refused to obey orders by invoking Halacha has never been resolved, even if that officer openly refused to provide medical help both to Israeli soldiers and POWS. Can we avoid being stunned by the army’s failure to court-martial Goldstein? Why was no order to court-martial him ever issued by the entire chain of the army command? That chain of command included the commander of the northern command, Reserve General Orri Or [a Labor MK and later in 1994 the chairman of the Knesset Committee for Foreign and Defense Affairs], and General Amos Yaron, who now is the commander of the manpower department. Why did they refuse to decide without first consulting the chief rabbi? The already embarrassed medical corps [commanders] now [after the massacre] admit that they were scared by publicity that might have propelled the religious parties and religious settlers’ lobbies to make things more of a mess than ever before. The fear of publicity time after time prompted the army commanders to give in to all kinds of Goldsteins, rather than to denounce their views and court-martial them.

 

 

 

Many sources corroborated Oren’s hinting that this Goldstein situation did not constitute a unique case. The story told by Oren revealed the pervasiveness of the religious parties’ influence in the Israeli army. Jewish orthodoxy’s stance against non-Jews, as openly advocated by Goldstein’s idolized leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane, was—and still is—an essential position held by the major religious parties. As such, this stance has had a strong impact upon the Israeli army. Had Rabin and the army commanders

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter 6: The Real Significance of Baruch Goldstein by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinksy

 

mentioned by Oren, moreover, felt no affinity whatsoever with Kahane’s and Goldstein’s views, they would not have given in to the religious parties with such abandon and thus sacrificed all consideration of military discipline.

 

Israeli policies, directed towards Palestinians, other Middle East Arabs (perceived by Zionists as non-Jews) and people of other nations, are only explainable by assuming that they are based upon anti-Gentile feeling. The anti-Gentile feeling is strongest among the most religious Jews but exists as well in this secular milieu. This is the reason why support for Goldstein in 1984 and 1985 had a sequel in the excuses by many Israeli leaders for the slaughter. These excuses were thinly disguised by mostly hypocritical expressions of shock.

 

Goldstein’s refusal to give proper medical treatment to non-Jews continued after he was transferred to Kiryat Arba. In his February 27,1994 Yediot Ahronot article, Nahum Barnea wrote:

 

The senior Israeli army officer in the Hebron area told me about his two encounters with Baruch Goldstein. The second time he saw him was in the company of Kach goons who were abusing President Ezer Weisman during his visit to Kiryat Arba. The first time he encountered Goldstein was after an Israeli soldier had wounded a local Arab in his legs. The Arab was brought to an army clinic for treatment, but Goldstein refused to treat him. Another army physician had to be summoned to substitute for Goldstein. The officer did not explain why Goldstein was thereafter not demoted in rank but was rather allowed to keep performing his duties in the reserves. Incidentally, his misconduct also constituted a violation of the oath he had taken upon becoming a doctor, but for this the Israeli army cannot be blamed.

 

 

 

Barnea made clear that the entire Israeli establishment, not just the army, was responsible for the leniency granted to Goldstein for his misdeeds. The leniency lasted until the massacre. Only after the massacre did the official

 

 

 

 

 

 

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line change to shock, coupled with assertions that Goldstein had acted alone. Thus, during the first three hours after the slaughter Rabin and his retinue insisted either that Goldstein was a psychopath or that he was a devoted doctor who happened to suffer a momentary derangement. Barnea reported: “Within hours a whole edifice of rationalization was built, according to which Goldstein had allegedly been under unbearable mental pressure, because he had to attend so many wounded and dead [persons], including Arabs.” The men who propagated this lie knew that Goldstein had refused to treat Arabs. Barnea continued: “Thus, the Arabs were made guilty for what he could not avoid doing. The implication was that the Arabs assaulted him rather than the other way around and that he really acted for the benefit of the Arabs by letting them finally realize that Jewish blood could not be shed with impunity.” This brazen lie was maintained as long as possible before being abandoned without apology. The propagation of such a lie reveals the influence of Jewish fundamentalism upon the secular parts of the Israeli establishment.

 

Goldstein represented Jewish fundamentalism in the extreme. Some of the Gush Emunim leaders at the time of the massacre were only a bit less extreme. Barnea compared Goldstein’s attitude toward non-Jews with that of Rabbi Levinger, the Gush Emunim leader whom he interviewed on the day of the massacre:

 

Levinger was in a good mood; after arguing about how religious settlers should respond to the massacre, he shortly before had won the three hour debate at a session of the Kiryat Arba municipality. The secretary of the Council of Judea, Samara and Gaza District, Uri Ariel, [who became director of the prime minister’s office in 1998] proposed condemning the massacre. Levinger staked his authority behind the proposal that the [Israeli] government should instead be condemned [for putting Goldstein] under unbearable mental pressure [propelling him to action].

 

In the discussion the terms “murder,” “massacre” or “killing” were avoided;

 

 

 

 

 

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instead the terms used were “deed,” “event” or “occurrence.” The reason is that according to the Halacha the killing by a Jew of a non-Jew under any circumstances is not regarded as murder. It may be prohibited for other reasons, especially when it causes danger for Jews. In many cases the real feelings about a Jew murdering non-Jews, expressed in Israel with impunity, correspond to the law. Levinger told Barnea that the resolution “expresses in passing” the sorrow about dead Arabs “even though it emphasizes the responsibility of the government.” When asked by Barnea whether he felt sorry, Levinger answered: “I am sorry not only about dead Arabs but also about dead flies.”

 

Goldstein on principle had refused to treat non-Jews for many years before the massacre. He worked as the municipal doctor of Kiryat Arba and treated Arabs only when he could not avoid doing so. Barnea quoted one of Goldstein’s colleagues from the Kiryat Arba clinic who recalled that “whenever Goldstein arrived at a traffic accident spot and recognized that some of the injured were Arabs, he would attend to them but only until another doctor arrived. Then, he would stop treating them. ‘This was his compromise between his doctor’s oath and his ideology,’ said his colleague.”

 

The Halacha enjoins precisely the behavior of Goldstein’s refusing to attend non-Jews. The Halacha dictates that a pious Jewish doctor may treat Gentiles when his refusal to do so might be reported to the authorities and cause him or other Jews unpleasantness. There is reason to believe that whenever doctors as pious as Goldstein were forced to treat Arabs they behaved as did Goldstein. In his previously cited Yediot Ahronot article, Arych Kizel added that the Israeli army found that Goldstein’s conduct did not require any disciplinary measures. A Maariv correspondent wrote in his March 8, 1994 article that Goldstein’s military service record was sufficiently distinguished to earn him a ceremonial promotion from the rank of captain to that of major. The president of Israel would have officially awarded this promotion on April 14, 1994, Israel’s independence day. Only Goldstein’s death, which occurred at the time of the massacre, prevented what would have been a revealing promotion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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An even greater example ofJewish fundamentalism’s influence upon the secular part of the Israeli establishment can be detected in the official arrangement of Goldstein’s elaborate funeral at a time that the deliberate character of the massacre could not be denied. The establishment was affected by the fact, widely reported in the Hebrew press but given little place in the foreign press, that within two days of the massacre the walls of religious neighborhoods of west Jerusalem (and to a lesser extent of many other religious neighborhoods) were covered by posters extolling Goldstein’s virtues and complaining that he did not manage to kill more Arabs. Children of religious settlers who came to Jerusalem to demonstrate sported buttons for months after the massacre that were inscribed: “Dr. Goldstein cured Israel’s ills.” Numerous concerts of Jewish religious music and other events often developed into demonstrations of tribute to Goldstein. The Hebrew press reported these incidents of public tribute in copious detail. No major politician protested against such celebrations.

 

President Weizman expressed more extravagantly than others his sorrow for the massacre. Weizman, as reported by Uzi Benziman in his March 4, 1994 Haaretz article, was also engaged in lengthy and amiable negotiations with Goldstein’s family and Kach comrades concerning a suitably honorable funeral for the murderer. Kiryat Arba settlers, many of whom had already declared themselves in favor of the mass murder in radio and television interviews and had lauded Goldstein as a martyr and holy man, demanded that General Yatom, the commander responsible for the Hebron area, allow the funeral cortege to parade through the city of Hebron, in order to be viewed by the Arabs even though a curfew existed. Yatom did not object outright to the demand but opposed it as something that could cause disorder. Tzvi Katzover, the mayor of Kiryat Arba and one of the most extreme leaders of the religious settlers, telephoned Weizman and threatened that the settlers would make a pogrom of Arabs if their demands were not met. Weizman responded by telephoning the chief of staff and asking why the army opposed the demand of the settlers. According to Benziman, Chief of Staff Barak answered: “The army was afraid that Arabs would desecrate Goldstein’s tomb and carry away his corpse.” In further

 

 

 

 

 

 

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negotiations involving Barak, Yatom, Rabin, Kach leaders and Kiryat Arba settlers, Weizman assumed the consistent position, as stated by Benziman, that “the army should pay respect to the desires and sensibilities of the settlers and of the Goldstein family.” Ultimately, the negotiated decision was that a massively attended funeral cortege would take place in Jerusalem and that the police would close some of the busiest streets to the traffic in Goldstein’s honor. Afterwards, the murderer would be buried in Kiryat Arba along the continuation of Kahane Avenue. According to Benziman, Kach leaders at first rejected this compromise. General Yatom had to approach the Kach leaders in person and beg them abjectly for their agreement, which he finally secured. Yatom also had to obtain consent from the notorious Kiryat Arba rabbi, Dov Lior. As reported in the March 4, 1994, issue of Yerushalaim Lior declared: “Since Goldstein did what he did in God’s own name, he is to be regarded as a righteous man.” Benziman explained the conduct of Weizman and his entourage: ” After the fact the officials of the presidential mansion justify those goings on by the need to becalm the settlers’ mood.” After the funeral the army provided a guard of honor for Goldstein’s tomb. The tomb became a pilgrimage site, not only for the religious settlers but also for delegations of pious Jews from all Israeli cities.

 

The details of Goldstein’s funeral as arranged through the office of President Weizman are significant. The facts below were taken mostly from the Ilana Baum and Tzvi Singer report, published in Yediot Ahronot on February, 28 1994. The funeral’s first installment took place in Jerusalem. Among the estimated thousand mourners only a few were settlers from Kiryat Arba. Baum and Singer noted: “Without having met Goldstein personally, other mourners most of whom were Jerusalemites, were enthusiastic admirers of his deed. Many more were Yeshiva students. A large group represented the Chabad Hassidic movement, another group [consisted of anti-Zionist] Satmar Hassids.” Other Hassidic movements were also well represented. (Not mentioned in the English-language press, Goldstein, a follower of Kahane, was also a follower of the Lubovitcher rabbi.) Baum and Singer continued:

 

People awaiting the arrival of the corpse could be

 

 

 

 

 

 

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heard repeating: “What a hero! A righteous person! He did it on behalf of all of us.” As usual in such encounters between religious Jews, all the participants tuned into a single, collective personality, united by their burning hatred of the Israeli media, the wicked Israeli government and, above all else, of anyone who dared to speak against the murder.

 

Before the start of the procession well-known rabbis eulogized Goldstein and commended the murder. Rabbi Israel Ariel, for example, said: “The holy martyr, Baruch Goldstein, is from now on our intercessor in heaven. Goldstein did not act as an individual; he heard the cry of the land of Israel, which is being stolen from us day after day by the Muslims. He acted to relieve that cry of the land!” Toward the end of his eulogy Rabbi Ariel added: “The Jews will inherit the land not by any peace agreement but only by shedding blood.” Ben-Shoshan Yeshu’a, a Jewish underground member, sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and amnestied after a few years spent under luxurious hotel conditions, lauded Goldstein and praised his action as an example for other Jews to follow.

 

Border guards, police and the secret police protected the funeral cortege. Baum and Singer related:

 

An entire unit of border guards precede the cortege; they were followed by young Kahane group members from Jerusalem who continuously yelled: “death to the Arabs.” While obviously intending to find an Arab to kill, they could not spot one. Suddenly, a border guard noticed an Arab approaching the cortege behind a low fence. The border guard immediately jumped over the fence, stopped the Arab and, using force, led him away to safety before anyone could notice. He [the border guard] thus saved him [the Arab] from a certain lynching.

 

Behind the young Kahane group members was a coffin, which was surrounded by leaders of Kahane splinter groups, some of whom were

 

 

 

 

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wanted by the police. (The police and the secret police claimed later that they did not recognize these wanted leaders. The press correspondents easily recognized them.) Baum wrote:

 

Tiran Pollak, a Kahane group leader wanted by the police, granted me an interview near the coffin. “Goldstein was not only righteous and holy,” he told me, “but also a martyr. Since he is a martyr, his corpse will be buried without being washed, not in a shroud but in his clothes. The honorable Dr. Goldstein has always refused to provide medical help to Arabs. Even during the war for Galilee he refused to treat any Arab, including those serving in the army. General Gad Navon, the chief rabbi of the Israeli army, at that time contacted Meir Kahane to ask him to persuade Baruch Goldstein of blessed memory to treat the Arabs. Kahane, however, refused to do so, because this would be against the Jewish religion.” Suddenly the crowd began yelling: “Death to the journalists.” I looked around and realized that I was the only journalist inside the crowd of mourners. I clung to Tiran Pollak and begged him to “please protect me.” I was scared to death that the crowd might recognize me as a journalist.

 

Military guards transported Goldstein’s coffin to Kiryat Arba through Palestinian villages. A second round of eulogies was delivered in the hall of the Hesder Yeshiva Nir military institution by a motley of religious settlers, including the aforementioned Rabbi Dov Lior. Lior said: “Goldstein was full of love for fellow human beings. He dedicated himself to helping others.” The terms “human beings” and “others” in the Halacha refer solely to Jews. Lior continued: “Goldstein could not continue to bear the humiliations and shame nowadays inflicted upon us; this was why he took action for no other reason than to sanctify the holy name of God.”

 

Tohay Hakah reported in Yerushalaim on March 4,1994 upon another Lior eulogy of Goldstein a few days after the funeral. He recalled that Lior several

 

 

 

 

 

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years ago was excoriated in the press for recommending that medical experiments be performed on the live bodies of Arab terrorists. The outcry against this recommendation influenced the attorney general to prevent the otherwise guaranteed election of Lior to the Supreme Rabbinical Council of Israel. The attorney general, however, did not interfere with Lior’s current rabbinical duties. The press reported upon other eulogies, delivered not only in religious settlements but in religious neighborhoods of many Israeli towns during the days immediately following the slaughter. The Hebrew press reportage of these eulogies suggests that the most virulent lauding of Goldstein and the calling for further massacres of Arabs occurred in the more homogeneous religious communities.

 

The approval of Goldstein and his mass murder extended well beyond the perimeters of the religious Jewish community. Secular Israeli Jews, especially many of the youth, praised Goldstein and his deed. That Israeli youth were even more pleased by the massacre than were the adults is well-documented. The concern here nevertheless will be with the adult population, which in many ways is the most significant. According to Yuval Katz, who wrote an article published in the March 4, 1994 issue of Yerushalaim, it is not true that “with the exception of a few psychopaths, the entire nation and its politicians included, has resolutely condemned Dr. Goldstein, even though, luckily for us, all major television networks in the world were last week still deluded by this untruth.” Katz told how a popular television entertainer, Rafi Reshef, who was not controlled as tightly as the moderators in sedate panels, “could this week announce the findings of some reliable polls.” Katz continued:

 

It is important that according to one poll about 50 per cent of Kiryat Arba inhabitants approve of the massacre. More important is another poll that showed that about 50 per cent of Israeli Jews are more sympathetic toward the settlers after the massacre than they were before the massacre. The most important poll established that at least 50 per cent of Israeli Jews would approve of the massacre, provided that it was not referred to as a massacre

 

 

 

 

 

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but rather as a “Patriarch’s Cave operation,” a nice-sounding term already being used by religious settlers.

 

Katz reported that the politicians and academics interviewed by Reshef failed to grasp the significance of those findings. Attributing them to a chance occurrence, they refused to comment upon them. He tended to excuse them:

 

I presume that those busy public figures, along with everybody else who this week exerted himself to speak in the name of the entire nation simply did not have time to walk the streets in the last days. Yet, with the exception of the wealthiest neighborhoods, people could be seen smiling merrily when talking about the massacre. The stock popular comment was: “Sure, Goldstein is to be blamed. He could have escaped with ease and have done the same in four other mosques, but he didn’t.”

 

The impression of many other Israelis corresponded to the Reshef findings. People were rather evenly divided into two categories: in one category the people were vociferous in cheering the slaughter; in the other category the people mostly remained silent and condemned the massacre only if encouraged to do so. Katz continued:

 

Therefore, this was the right time to draw finally the obvious conclusion that we, the Jews, are not any more sensitive or merciful than are the Gentiles. Many Jews have been programmed by the same racist computer program that is shaping the majority of the world’s nations. We have to acknowledge that our supposed advancement in progressive beliefs and democracy have failed to affect the archaic forms of Jewish tribalism. Those who still delude themselves that Jews might be different than [people of] other nations should now know better. The spree of bullets from Goldstein’s gun was for them an occasion to learn something.

 

 

 

 

 

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The wise comments of Katz were not heeded in Israel except by a minority. It may be that had more Israeli Jews paid attention and heeded the words of Katz the murder of Yitzhak Rabin would have been averted. In the view of this book’s authors, the important difference between the real shock caused by Rabin’s murder and the lack of shock caused by Goldstein’s massacre lies in the fact that Goldstein’s victims were non-Jews.

 

Although less direct than Katz, many other commentators in the Israeli Hebrew press have focused upon that part of the Israeli Jewish public who were shocked by the rejoicing over the massacre of innocent people and disturbed by the apologia offered by many politicians and public figures. Some of those people who were shocked described the backers of and apologists for Goldstein as “Nazis” or “Nazi-like.” These same people, who can be considered moderate hawks rather than Zionist doves, had before the massacre reacted negatively to the use by a few Israeli Jewish critics of such terminology in describing a part of the Israeli Jewish population. These “moderate hawks” had habitually labelled many Arab organizations, such as the Abu Nidal group and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, “Nazi” or “Nazi-like.” They did not repudiate their views about these Arab organizations; they merely concluded that some Jewish individuals and organizations also merit being so labelled on equal terms with some Arabs. The prestigious journalist, Teddy Preuss, reflected upon all of this in a most severe but substantially representative manner in his March 4, 1994 Davar article:

 

Compared to the giant-scale mass murderers of Auschwitz, Goldstein was certainly a petty murderer. His recorded statements and those of his comrades, however, prove that they were perfectly willing to exterminate at least two million Palestinians at an opportune moment. This makes Dr Goldstein comparable to Dr Mengele; the same holds true for anyone saying that he [or she] would welcome more of such Purim holiday celebrations. [The massacre occurred on that holiday.] Let us not devalue

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Goldstein by comparing him with an inquisitor or a Muslim Jihad fighter. Whenever an infidel was ready to convert to either Christianity or Islam, an inquisitor or Muslim Jihad fighter would, as a rule, spare his life. Goldstein and his admirers are not interested in converting Arabs to Judaism. As their statements abundantly testify, they see the Arabs as nothing more than disease-spreading rats, lice or other loathsome creatures; this is exactly how the Nazis believed that the Aryan race alone had laudable qualities that were inheritable but that could become polluted by sheer contact with dirty and morbid Jews. Kahane, who learned nothing from the Nuremberg Laws, had exactly the same notions about the Arabs.

 

Really, Kahane had the same notions about non-Jews. Although less scathing than Preuss, other Israeli commentators suggested the same consideration.

 

In contrast to the above criticism were the even more numerous comments about the harm caused to Israeli Jews by the Goldstein massacre. The lament in the February 28, 1994 Haaretz Economic Supplement, for example, was headlined: “Goldstein’s massacre caused distress on the Tel-Aviv stock market.” Other papers voiced similar sentiments. More importantly, Shimon Peres and other senior dovish politicians presented a typical political apologia in their criticism of the massacre, which they delivered in a meeting of the Knesset Committee for Foreign and Defense Affairs. Specific detail of this meeting is included below to illustrate the real opinions of most Israeli politicians and their general disregard of a major massacre of non-Jews except as it affected the interests of Israel and its allies. A March 8, 1994 Haaretz article reported the discussion at this meeting. Peres wasted no time expressing heartfelt shock about the murdered Palestinians but spoke instead about the harm to Israel caused by the “pictures of corpses that the entire world could watch.” Peres did not condemn the armed religious settlers for their public rejoicing and shooting; he deplored the harm caused to Israel and to themselves by the pictures of them. As quoted in Haaretz, Peres added: “The events in Hebron also

 

 

 

 

 

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adversely affected the interests of President Mubarak and King Hussein, and even more of the PLO and its leadership.” Peres then went on to say: “We have had Jewish Kibbutzim located in the midst of Arab inhabited areas for 80 years, and I cannot recall a single instance of such a slaughter nor of firing at Arab buses nor of maiming Arab mayors.” At this point in the discussion senior Likud politicians interpolated Peres. As reported in

 

Haaretz:

 

 

The first to interrupt Peres’ speech was Sharon. “Kibbutzim are dear to me no less than to you, but there have been many cases when somebody from a kibbutz would go out to murder Arabs.” Peres answered: “The two cases are not comparable, because in the case under discussion the murderer was supported by a whole group of followers.” Benny Begin [answered]: “Why are you always talking in generalities?” Peres [responded] : “I am not. I only maintain that in order to pursue the peace process we need the PLO as a partner, and now this partnership is in straits and we need to help the PLO.” Sharon [answered]: “You mean that we should help that murderer [Arafat].” Peres, angrily banging the table [responded]: “And what about Egyptians with whom you, Likud, made peace? Didn’t Egyptians murder Jews? Really. What’s the difference between war and terrorism? Does it make any difference how 16,000 of our soldiers were killed? Everywhere, states are making deals with terror organizations.” Netanyahu [spoke]: “No state exists that has made a deal with an organization still committed to its destruction. The PLO has not rescinded the Palestinian Covenant. You are dwelling upon the crime committed in Hebron not in order to reassure people [Jews] living there but in order to advance your plan to establish a Palestinian state.” Peres [answered]: “It is you and your plans that will lead to the formation of a Palestinian state, because it is you, the Likud, that created the PLO in Madrid. It is you who conceived the autonomy in the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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first place, contrary to all our [previously pursued] aims.” Netanyahu [stated]: “Autonomy is not the same thing as state.” Peres [continued]: “But it is Sharon who is first to say that autonomy is bound to lead to a Palestinian state… I am not less steadfast than are you; this is why I have elaborated the most restrictive possible interpretation of autonomy in Oslo, in relation to its territory, power and authorities. This is why we are against international observers and consent only to the temporary presence of representatives from the countries contributing money. And regarding the Palestinian Covenant, they have renounced it publicly, but they find it difficult to convene their representative bodies to ratify this renunciation.” Begin [answered]: “Let me remind you that the PLO has not undertaken publicly to rescind the Palestinian Covenant.” Peres [answered] : “I don’t give a damn about you and/or your legalistic verbiage! Arafat said that he renounced the Palestinian Covenant and for me Arafat is the PLO.”

 

 

 

The above passage shows, among other things, that knowledge of Israeli politics and more generally Jewish affairs can be best attained by using the original sources of what Jews say among themselves.

 

The continuing process of Goldstein’s elevation to the rank of saint by groups of Israeli Jews and his worship as such began soon after the massacre. In his February 28, 1994 Haaretz article, Shmnuel Rosner recounted a sermon delivered on the Sabbath after the massacre by Rabbi Goren, the former chief military rabbi and chief rabbi of Israel. Rosner wrote: “Goren’s conclusion was that next time an authorization would be needed for a massacre. The authorization should come from the community ‘not from the [present] illegal government.”‘ Rosner observed that the audience liked Goren’s sermon but would have preferred, as would numerous other Israeli Jews, that the army rather than Goldstein had committed the massacre.

 

In the days and weeks after the massacre, appreciation of Goldstein and his

 

 

 

 

 

 

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deed spread throughout the Israeli religious community and among its supporters in the United States. The initial expressions of that appreciation may be most significant, because they were spontaneous and because they illustrated the influence, even beyond the messianic community, of an ideology that approved indiscriminate killing of Gentiles by Jews. Avirama Golan described in her February 28, 1994 Haaretz article how news about Goldstein on the day of the massacre became known in the overwhelmingly Haredi city of Bnei Brak and how the next day a religious Jewish crowd reacted with praise of Goldstein during a mass entertainment event. The massacre occurred on Purim, the festival during which religious Jews are merry and sometimes drink alcoholic beverages to the point of drunkenness. Bnei Brak streets were filled to capacity by joyful celebrants that day; a special security force, comprised of religious veterans of the Israeli army’s elite units, had been hired by the mayor to enforce order and modesty. Golan described the response in the streets to the spreading news of the massacre:

 

A hired security guard, with a huge gun in his belt, a black skullcap on his head, and special insignia of “Bnei Brak Security Team ” on his chest, stared at a fundraising stall. Then he noticed his pal across the street. “A Purim miracle, I’m telling you, Purim miracle,” he shouted at the top of his voice. “That holy man did something great. 52 Arabs at one stroke.” However, the fundraiser, a slim yeshiva student, was skeptical. “That’s just impossible,” he said. “Those must be just stories.” But the people standing around confirmed the news. “It was on the radio,” they said. “Where?” “In the Patriarchs’ Cave in Hebron.” The yeshiva student turned pale. “I don’t mind the Arabs, but it is us who will pay the price,” he said. “What are you talking about?” the security guard shouted, “It’s a Purim miracle. God has helped.” People around the stall formed two groups: on the one hand those who said that God Himself ordained a well-deserved punishment of the Arabs; on the other, those who remained silent throughout. The fundraiser went on writing receipts and shaking

 

 

 

 

 

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his head. “Oh,” he said, “nothing really happened.” The Bnei Brak functionary’s wife said that dozens of visitors who, as is customary on Purim, visited their home that morning, were shocked. “By the murder?” somebody asked. “To tell you the truth, not exactly by the murder. About what may now happen to the Jews.”

 

Jumping to the evening of the next day, Golan continued: “Masses of religious Jews were expected to come to Yad Eliahu Stadium [the biggest in Israel] to be entertained by the famous religious jazz singer, Mordechai Ben-David. For months before the massacre, this evening had been planned as a demonstration intended to save the land of Israel from Rabin, Peres and other Jewish infidels.” All factions of the religious community were represented in the crowd. Golan again continued:

 

The first part of the evening passed quietly and even rather dully. Only after the intermission, some minutes before the star of the evening was to appear, the crowd went on a rampage. The master of the ceremony called upon a Kiryat Arba resident to address the crowd. He started by praising that “righteous and holy physician, Dr. Goldstein, who rendered us a sacred service and got martyred in the process.” The speaker called upon the audience to mourn him. By and large, the audience remained silent. Some applauded. Only a single individual, wearing a small beard and a knitted skullcap, stood up and yelled: “I disagree; that was a cold-blooded murder!” Instantly he was physically assaulted. Many in the crowd yelled: “Kick the infidel out of the hall!” The tempers calmed down only when Ben-David finally appeared on the stage and began singing. Outside after the performance some people reminisced that more Gentiles had been killed by the Jews in Susa during the original Purim [75,000]. They, therefore, reasoned that this was the right time to kill a comparable number of Gentiles in the holy land.

 

 

 

 

 

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No wonder that Dov Halvertal, a member of the almost defunct faction of the NRP doves, told Golan: “This Purim joy epitomizes the moral collapse of religious Zionism… If religious Zionism does not undertake soul-searching right now, I doubt if it will ever have another opportunity.”

 

Subsequent developments showed that neither the religious Zionists nor other factions within the Jewish religious community were or are in any mood to engage in soul-searching. On the contrary, the appreciation of Goldstein and the feeling that Jews have a right and duty to kill Gentiles who live in the land of Israel are growing. In his March 23, 1994 Haaretz article, Nadav Shraggai discussed the visit of a delegation of all Israeli branches of the Bnei Akiva, the large youth movement affiliated with the NRP, to Kiryat Arba and Hebron, which was then under a curfew selectively applied to its Arab inhabitants. The purpose of this visit was to “encourage Jewish settlers.” Yossi Leibowitz, a settler leader from Hebron, as described by Shraggai, “beaming with satisfaction visible in his face asked the delegation: ‘Have you already visited the tomb of holy Rabbi Doctor Goldstein?'” The visitors rejected the suggestion but did not utter one word of rebuke to the worshippers of the new saint. They then had to withstand a flurry of abuse from their local Bnei Akiva comrades who argued that their refusal to pay homage to Goldstein amounted to support of the left. Local rabbis affiliated with the NRP seconded the denunciation. Rabbi Shimon Ben-Zion, a senior teacher in the local Hesder Yeshiva and hence a state employee, delivered a eulogy of Goldstein and of what he called “his act.” He added: “[If the government] keeps bowing low to Arabs, all of whom are murderers, [and if] the Jews fail to establish a firm rule over the land of Israel [there will be] more Goldsteins.” Most visitors made counter-arguments; they were nevertheless influenced by their hosts’ arguments; they came to believe that their duty to support the Jewish settlers in Hebron was more important than any minor disagreements about Goldstein’s sainthood.

 

Gabby Baron reported in the March 16, 1994 Yediot Ahronot:

 

 

Deputy Minister of Education Mikha Goldman was

 

 

 

 

 

 

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physically assaulted yesterday after delivering a welcoming speech at a meeting of Jerusalem’s district teachers in the Binyaney Ha’umah hall in that city. He managed to avoid being hurt. His speech infuriated dozens of religious teachers, because he talked about his visit to Kiryat Arba and the shock he experienced when finding how enthused the religious school children were by the massacre in the Cave of the Patriarchs. A virtual riot erupted in the hall, which was filled by about 5000 Jerusalem district teachers, as soon as he spoke about it. Dozens of religious teachers jumped onto the podium. A female teacher who managed to reach it [the podium] picked up a flowerpot from the speaker’s table; she was ready to hurl it at him when at the last moment she balked. All the religious teachers assembled in rage in front of the podium and decried the deputy minister as “a fascist.” Goldman insisted upon continuing his speech. When he ended, he had to leave the building under heavy guard, thanks to which the pursuing teachers were unable to injure him.

 

Neither Education Minister Arnnon Rubinstein nor Prime Minister Rabin uttered a single word in condemnation of the incident.

 

On April 5, 1994, Israeli radio reported that Rabbi Shimon Ben-Zion had distributed a leaflet among the Kiryat Arba and Hebron settlers requesting financial contributions for a book about “Saint Baruch Goldstein.” On April 6, Yediot Ahronot published the text. The book refers to Goldstein as “Rabbi Doctor Baruch Goldstein of blessed memory, let the Lord avenge his blood.” The Kiryat Arba municipal council backed the ideas of Ben-Zion. In his April 5, 1994 Haaretz article, Arnnon Barzilay reported that two days earlier Gush Emunim leaders, including Mayor Benny Katzover, had an amicable talk with Prime Minister Rabin who apologized to them for his past outbursts against them and promised never to repeat them. (The outbursts anyway were intended for consumption of the Israeli “doves,” Arafat and the Western media.) The two sides agreed to cooperate closely in the future. Thus, Rabin understandably found it ill-advised to say anything about Rabbi Ben-Zion’s

 

 

 

 

 

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idea.

 

 

About one year later the Kiryat Arba municipality obtained a permit from the Civil Administration of the Occupied Territories to build a large and sumptuous memorial on Goldstein’s tomb, which has become a place of pilgrimage. Thousands of Jews from all Israeli cities, and even more from the United States and France, have come to light candles and pray for the intercession of “holy saint and martyr,” now in a special section of paradise close to God and able to obtain for them various benefits, such as cures for diseases from which they suffer, or to grant them male offspring. The visitors have donated money for Goldstein’s comrades. No Orthodox rabbi has criticized this.

 

The well-publicized worship of the new saint has brought increasing opposition from secular Jews. (The opposition of Palestinians, especially those living in Hebron, to the hero-worship of Goldstein and to the monument to this mass murderer are not within the scope of this book but should be obvious.) After a long campaign in the press, Knesset members passed a piece of legislation in May, 1998, that prohibited the building of monuments for mass murderers and ordering removal of existing ones. The Israeli army should have removed the monument immediately after passage of the law in the Knesset. Instead army spokesmen announced that negotiations over the Goldstein monument were on-going with Goldstein’s family and local rabbis.

 

The book in praise of Goldstein, titled Blessed the Male, was published in 1995 and sold in many editions. Most of the readers were from the religious public. The book contained eulogies of Goldstein and halachic justifications for the right of every Jew to kill non-Jews. Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, the then head of the Kever Yosef (tomb of Joseph) Yeshiva, located on the outskirts of Nablus, wrote one chapter of that book. The essence of Rabbi Ginsburgh’s views were presented in Chapter 4. His and other such ideologies, even if expressed more cautiously, explain Goldstein’s massacre, the considerable support Goldstein and later his followers have received from religious Jews and the ambiguous attitude of Israeli

 

 

 

 

 

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governments to this crime. Those people, especially Germans, who were silent and did not condemn Nazi ideology before Hitler came to power are also, at least in a moral sense, guilty for the terrible consequences that followed. Similarly, those who are silent and do not condemn Jewish Nazism, as exemplified by the ideologies of Goldstein and Ginsburgh, especially if they are Jews, are guilty of the terrible consequences that may yet develop as a result of their silence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chapter 7: The Religious Background of Rabin’s Assassination by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

Chapter Seven

 

 

The Religious Background of Rabin’s

Assassination

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PRIME MINISTER YITZHAK RABIN was murdered for religious reasons. The murderer and his sympathizers were and still are convinced that the killing was dictated by God and was therefore a commandment of Judaism. Comprehensive surveys, published in the Hebrew press, of people in religious neighborhoods and especially religious settlements indicated great sympathy for the murder. The polarization of approval and disapproval in the Israeli Jewish community over the killing of the prime minister of the Jewish state has increased since the time of the murder. Many Israeli Jews, significant numbers of Jews living outside Israel and most non-Jews do not possess sufficient knowledge of Jewish history and religion to put this kind of an assassination into its proper context. In this chapter we shall attempt to provide the historical-religious background necessary for an understanding of the Rabin assassination.

 

Jewish history has been replete with religious civil wars or rebellions accompanied by civil wars in which horrifying assassinations were committed. The Great Rebellion (AD 66-73) of Jews against the Romans that culminated in the destruction of the Second Temple and in mass suicide in Masada is exemplary. The defenders of Masada were, as many present-day visitors to the Masada site are seemingly unaware, a band of assassins called Sikarikin, a name taken from the word for a short sword that group members hid under their robes and used to kill their Jewish opponents in crowds of people. In the Talmud the word means terrorists or robbers and is applied only to Jews. Neither Masada nor this particular group are mentioned in the Talmud or in any part of the traditional writing preserved by Jews. Actually the Sikarikin were an ancient Jewish analogue to modern-day terrorists. Their suicide activity resembled the terrorist behavior of the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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suicide bombers who are so abhorred in the state of Israel. The Sikarikin escaped to Masada not from the Romans but from their Jewish brethren. Shortly after the rebellion against the Romans began, the Roman army that was advancing to Jerusalem was initially defeated and had to withdraw. The Sikarikin attempted forcefully to establish their leader, Menahem, as absolute king. The Jews of Jerusalem then attacked and defeated the Sikarikin in the temple itself, killing most of them including Menahem. The remaining Sikarikin escaped to Masada where they stayed during the rebellion; they did not fight the Romans but instead robbed neighboring Jewish villages. Three years after the Sikarikin defeat, the Roman army, commanded by Titus, approached Jerusalem for the final onslaught. (Titus’ chief of staff, Tiberius Julius Alexander, was a Jew, the nephew of the great philosopher, Philo.) Jerusalem was divided into three parts; each part was under the command of a different leader; the leaders had already been fighting with one another for two years. The Roman Empire at that time was then concerned about a civil war. One of the leaders, Eliezer the Priest, commanded the Temple and used it as his stronghold. On Passover eve in the year AD 70, another rebel leader, Yohanan of Gush Halav, utilized brilliant strategy to overcome Eliezer. He dressed his soldiers as pious pilgrims who seemed to be coming to the temple for the Passover sacrifice. After being admitted to the temple by the gullible Eliezer without a body search, they, after guessing correctly that Eliezer and his men would not carry arms in a place so holy, pulled out their swords and slaughtered all their opponents. The well-known Masada terrorists became Jewish and Israeli national heroes, as did the Jerusalem Jews who killed most of the Sikarikin. Yohanan of Gush Halav also became a national hero, but Eliezer the Priest, perhaps because he was killed by Jews, was completely forgotten. In these and in many similar incidents in Jewish history, killing was allegedly committed for the greater glory of God. Yigal Amir, Rabin’s assassin, made such an allegation.

 

The violence between Jews did not end with the loss of Jewish independence and the ceasing of Jewish rebellions. (The last Jewish rebellion occurred in AD 614.) From the Middle Ages until the advent of the modern state, Jewish communities enjoyed a great degree of autonomy.

 

 

 

 

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The rabbis who headed and had the authority in these communities were most often able to persecute Jews mercilessly. The rabbis persecuted Jews who committed religious sins and even more harshly persecuted Jews who informed upon other Jews to non-Jews or in other ways harmed Jewish interests. The rabbis generally tolerated violence committed by some Jews against other Jews, especially against women, so long as the Jewish religion and their own interests were not harmed. The relevancy of this aspect of Jewish history to the Rabin murder is obvious. The assassin, Yigal Amir, is a talmudic scholar who was trained in a yeshiva that inculcated its students to believe that this violence committed by rabbis over a lengthy time period was in accordance with God’s word.

 

Long before Rabin’s assassination, scholarly studies of Jewish history, written in Hebrew, recorded the violence mentioned above. The assassination aroused so much public interest in this topic that the Hebrew press published numerous articles either written by or resulting from interviews with distinguished Israeli scholars. Rami Rosen’s November 15, 1996 Haaretz Magazine article, titled “History of a Denial,” is an excellent and representative example. Although Rosen interviewed several distinguished historians, he relied primarily upon the views of Professor Yisrael Bartal, the head of the department of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Bartal began his statement:

 

Zionism has described the diaspora Jews as weak people who desire peace and abhor every form of violence. It is astonishing to discover that orthodox Jews are also providing similar descriptions. They describe past Jewish society as one not interested in anything other than the Halacha and the fulfillment of the commandments. The entire Jewish literature produced in eastern Europe, however, teaches us that the reverse is true. Even in the nineteenth century the descriptions of how Jews lived are filled with violent battles that often took place in the synagogues, of Jews beating other Jews in the streets or spitting on them, of the frequent cases of

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pulling out of beards and of numbers of murders.

 

 

Citing the authorities interviewed, Rosen explained that many murders were committed for religious reasons. It was usual in some Hassidic circles until the last quarter of the nineteenth century to attack and often to murder Jews who had reform religious tendencies, even if small ones. These Hassidic Jews also attacked one another because of frequent quarrels between different holy rabbis over spheres of influence, money and prestige. After having learned the opinions of the best Israeli scholars, Rosen asked:

 

Were Yigal Amir, Baruch Goldstein, Yonah Avrushmi [who threw a hand grenade into a Peace Now demonstration, killing one and wounding a few people] and Ami Poper [who killed seven innocent Palestinian workers and was adopted as a great hero by extremists] parts of the Jewish tradition? Is it only by chance that Baruch Goldstein massacred his victims on the Purim holiday?

 

Rosen answered his own question:

 

 

A check of main facts of the [Jewish] historiography of the last 1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians [by Jews]; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually took place on Purim; cruel murders within the family; liquidation of informers, often done for religious reasons by secret rabbinical courts, which issued a sentence of “pursuer” and appointed secret executioners; assassinations of adulterous women in synagogues and/or the cutting of their [the women’s] noses by command of the rabbis.

 

Rosen included in his long article many well-documented cases of massacres of Christians and mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus on Purim, most of which occurred either in the late ancient period or in the Middle Ages. (Some isolated cases occurred in sixteenth-century Poland.)

 

 

 

 

 

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From the eleventh century until the nineteenth century, Ashkenazi Jews were more violent and fanatical than were the Oriental Jews, although the fanaticism of the Spanish Jews during both Muslim and Christian rule was exceptional. Jewish historians have not yet determined the causes of those differences. The influence of Christian fanaticism on the Jews may have been a cause. The Jews who lived in Spain may have been influenced by the fact that Muslim Spain was more fanatical than the rest of the Muslim world.

 

The violence perpetrated against women for centuries and other aspects of internal group violence influenced the developing character of traditional Jewish society. This character set the contextual framework for Rabin’s assassination. Citing a few case examples here may further understanding of this character. Rabbi Simha Asars book, The Punishments After the Talmud Was Finalized: Materials for the History of Hebrew Law Jerusalem, 1922) is a marvelous source of information. Rabbi Asaf, who subsequently became a professor at the Hebrew University and in 1948 was one of the first nine judges of the Israeli Supreme Court, was a distinguished scholar and a religious Jew. Convinced that a Jewish state would be established, he wrote his book in order to show that a sufficient number of legal cases existed in the history of punishments inflicted by Jewish religious courts to provide precedents.

 

Although some variances in halachic interpretation and in practice existed, violence against women, as defined in any reasonable and modern way, was routinely practiced for centuries in most Jewish communities. Some rabbis allowed the Jewish husband to beat his wife when she disobeyed him. Other rabbis limited this “right” by requiring that, prior to the beating, a rabbinical court, after considering the husband’s complaint, had to issue an order. Presumably as an extension of this husband’s right, rabbinical courts in Spain ordered the cruellest punishment for Jewish women suspected of fornication, prostitution and adultery and a much lighter punishment for Jewish male fornicators. In the early fourteenth century a local Jewish notable asked the famous Spanish rabbi, Rabenu¹ Asher, whether it was correct punishment to cut the nose of a Jewish widow, made pregnant by a

 

 

 

 

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Muslim. The notable added that, although the evidence itself was not conclusive, the pregnancy was well-known in the city. Rabenu Asher answered: “You have decided beautifully to cut her nose in order that those committing adultery with her will find her ugly, but let this be done suddenly so that she will not become an apostate [before her nose is cut]” (Asaf, p. 69). In a case wherein a male fornicated with Muslim women, Rabbi Yehuda, the son of Rabenu Asher, ordered only excommunication or imprisonment (Asaf, p. 78). This same punishment was prescribed when male Jews owned a Muslim female slave with whom other male Jews fornicated. The rabbis regarded the commission of adultery of Jewish women with Jewish men as less serious. In such a case one rabbi ordered that the woman’s hair be shorn and that she be officially excommunicated in the synagogue in the presence of other women (Asaf, p. 87). The Sephardic Jews of Jerusalem sheared women’s hair as punishment for such sexual sins still in the nineteenth century. In some recorded cases the punishment was based upon the belief that the sexual sins of Jews, especially those committed by women, prevented rain from falling. The rabbis supposed that the rain would fall if Jewish women sinners were punished. Enlightened Hebrew press commentators at the time humorously noted that the rain did not fall even after women had been punished. In places where more modern attitudes prevailed, however, Spanish and Portuguese Jews desisted from these ancestral customs. Asaf quotes the elders of the Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg in the late seventeenth century who, although having publicly accused members of their community of having intimate relations with non-Jewish women, expressed their regret that they could not punish them. Asaf pointed to the reason: “In every such case they must get permission from the town judges” (p. 95). The Jewish community, Asaf wrote, could only inflict religious sanctions, such as telling two brothers that they could not enter the synagogue until they had dismissed a notorious servant from their home (p. 97).

 

 

 

The Jewish rabbinical authorities in some eastern parts of Europe could inflict somewhat tougher punishments. These punishments, however, were less severe than those that had been imposed in Spain. The heads of the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Jewish community in Prague decided in 1612 that all Jewish prostitutes had to leave the town by a certain date or be branded after that date with a hot iron (Asaf, p. 114). The prostitutes’ main offence was that they were seen drinking non-kosher wine with some unnamed notables of the community. The most tolerant communities were those in Italy who, as Asaf recorded, gave full encouragement to the prostitutes, because they saved “bachelors and fools from the worse sins of adultery or of cohabitation with non-Jewish women.”

 

In his previously mentioned article, Rosen recorded research of new Jewish historians showing that Italian Jews copied the Renaissance custom according to which a husband or brother can kill his wife or sister with impunity if he suspects her of adultery. To remove the resultant blemish upon the honor of an insulted husband, Jews committed many of these murders in the synagogue during prayer in order to obtain publicity. A Jew, named Ovadia, from Spoleto, for instance, murdered his wife in the synagogue and, after explaining his reasons, received no punishment. The Italian authorities put Ovadia on trial and fined him, but the Jews did not believe he had done anything wrong. Soon thereafter, he remarried another Jewish woman. Brothers in other cases murdered suspected women. Referring to his research, Rosen cited one such case in Ferrara in the mid-sixteenth century. The murderer brother worked for a charity organization that was affiliated with the congregation; he was able to continue in his job after the murder. Rosen determined and reported that in such cases the rabbis usually did not react.

 

Jewish autonomy before the rise of the modern nation state allowed rabbis to engage in a wide spectrum of persecution, of which violence against women was but one category. The rabbis employed various types of violence against Jews who committed religious or other sins. Jewish fundamentalists, wanting to revive a situation that existed before the hated modern influences allegedly corrupted the Jews, emphasized this violence. The centrality of violence in the Halacha played an important role in the development of Orthodox Judaism. Orthodox Judaism historically had a double system of law. There was, on the one side, a more normal system of

 

 

 

 

 

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law, but there was, on the other side, been a more arbitrary system of law employed in emergencies. These emergency situations most often occurred when rabbis had great communal power. The rabbis, alleging that heresy and infidelity were at dangerously high levels, often suspended the normal system of laws, at least in the area of guarding the beliefs of the community, and used emergency powers to avert God’s wrath. A relevant example for our study concerns the death penalty. In the normal system of law, the halachic application of the death punishment against a Jew was almost impossible to carry out, as opposed to its much easier application against a non-Jew. Even inflicting less severe punishment against Jews, such as thirtynine lashes, was difficult. The normal talmudic alternative to the death penalty for Jews who killed other Jews was release of the Jewish murderer without further punishment. The Talmud posits another alternative. This alternative, as described by Maimonides in his commentary, Laws of the Murderer and of Taking Precautions, chapter 4, rule 8, is that Jewish murderers, absolved of the death punishment by a rabbinical court, could be “put into a small cell and given first only a small amount of bread and water until their intestines narrowed and then [fed] barley so that their bellies would burst because of the illness.”

 

Rabbinical judges experienced difficulty in inflicting punishment when Jewish autonomy was limited by secular authorities. Only those rabbinical judges who were appointed by what was called “laying of hands,”² for example, could at first inflict flogging limited to thirty-nine lashes. Rabbis later devised a new more arbitrary way of inflicting punishment called “stripes of rebellion.” The new method, which could be used by any rabbi, included harsher punishments. The number of lashes, for example, was unlimited. The cutting of limbs and unlimited imprisonment time were added. After the talmudic period and following the declines of the Roman and Sassanid Empires and of the Muslim caliphates, Jewish communities in many places became more autonomous and thus the opportunities for rabbis to impose more severe punishments increased.

 

The Jewish religious authorities perpetrated most of the violence against Jews who were considered to be heretics or religious dissenters. The

 

 

 

 

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punishments imposed had to be warranted by the Talmud, or at least by interpretation of the Talmud. The Talmud was composed under the rule and authority of two strong empires, the Roman and the Sassanid; both of these empires limited the powers of Jewish autonomy much more than did subsequent medieval regimes. Talmudic sages frequently complained that under the rule of these two empires, they did not have the power to punish Jewish criminals with death but rather only with flogging. The few cases in which talmudic sages attempted to execute a Jewish criminal prompted strict official investigations. One of these few cases, mentioned in the Palestinian Talmud, concerned a Jewish prostitute in the third century who was finally executed. Apparently because execution was so difficult to enforce, the Talmud does not order a death punishment for Jewish heretics but does enjoin pious Jews to kill them by employing subterfuges. The major halachic codes, although emphasizing that the death punishment should be inflicted only if execution was possible, contain such prescription. The paradigmatic expression of this command in the codes comes ironically under the section devoted to saving life. The question is posed: What is a pious Jew to do when he sees a human being drowning in the sea or having fallen into a well? The talmudic answer, still accepted by traditional Judaism, is that the answer is dependent upon the category to which the human being belongs. If the person is either a pious Jew or one guilty of no more than ordinary offences, he should be saved. If the person is a non-Jew or a Jew who is a “shepherd of sheep and goats,” a category that lapsed after talmudic times, he should neither be saved nor pushed into the sea or well. If, however, the person is a Jewish heretic, he should either be pushed down into the well or into the sea or; if the person is already in the well or sea, he should not be rescued. This legal stipulation, although mutilated by censorship in certain editions of the Talmud and even more in most translations, appears in Tractate Avoda Zara (pp. 26a-b). Maimonides also explained this stipulation in three places: In the Laws of Murderer and Preservation of Life, Maimonides contrasted the fate of non-Jews with that of Jewish heretics. In the passages from Laws of of Idolatry Maimonides only discussed Jewish heretics. In Laws of Murderer and Preservation of Life (chapter 4, rules 10-11), he wrote:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The [Jewish] heretics are those [Jews] who commit sins on purpose; even one who eats meat not ritually slaughtered or who dresses in a sha’atnez clothes (made of linen and wool woven together) on purpose is called a heretic [as are] those [Jews] who deny the Torah and prophecy. They should be killed. If he [a Jew] has the power to kill them by the sword, he should do so. But if he has not [the power to do so], he should behave so deceitfully to them that death would ensue. How? If he [a Jew] sees one of them who has fallen into a well and there is a ladder into the well, he [should] take it away and say: “I need it [the ladder] to take my son down from the roof,” or [he should say] similar things. Deaths of non-Jews with whom we are not at war and Jewish shepherds of sheep and goats and similar people should not be caused, although it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death. If, for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued. As it is written: “Neither shall you stand against the blood of your fellow” (Leviticus 19: 16) but he [the non-Jew] is not your fellow.

 

In Laws of Idolatry, chapter 2, rule 5 Maimonides stated:

 

 

Jews who worship idolatrously are considered as non-Jews, in contrast to Jews who have committed [another] sin punishable by stoning; if he [a Jew] converted to idolatry he is considered to be a denier of the entire Torah. [Jewish] heretics are also not considered to be Jews in any respect. Their repentance should never be accepted. As it is written: “None that go into her return again, neither [do] they hold the paths of life” (Proverbs 2: 19). [This verse is actually a reference to men who frequent “a strange woman,” that is, a prostitute.] In regard to the heretics who follow their own thoughts and speak foolishly, it is forbidden to talk with or to answer them, as we have said above [in the first section of the work] so that they may ultimately contravene maliciously and proudly the most important parts of the Jewish religion and say there is no sin [in doing this]. As it is written: “Remove your

 

 

 

 

 

 

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way far from her and come not near the door of her house.” (Proverbs 5:8).

 

 

The last verse refers again to men who “frequent a strange woman”, that is, a prostitute. The commentators explained that this passage meant that a truly repentant idolatrous Jew is accepted by the Jewish community, but a heretic is not accepted. A heretic who wants to repent, however, may do it alone. The main reason for this difference is seemingly that an idolatrous Jew, including one who converts to Christianity, accepts another religious discipline, while a heretic follows his own views and is thereby considered to be more dangerous. In chapter 10, rule 1 of Laws of Idolatry, Maimonides, after explaining the extermination of the ancient Canaanites and again asserting that no Jews should be killed, said: “All this applies to the seven [Canaanite] nations, but Jewish informers and heretics should be exterminated by one’s own hand and put into hell, because they cause trouble to Jews by removing their hearts from being true to the Lord, like Tzadok, and Beitos [the alleged founders of the Sadducean sect] and their pupils. Let the name of the wicked perish. ” In his next rule Maimonides asserted that non-Jews should not be healed by Jews except when danger of non-Jewish enmity exists. In his Fundamental Laws of Torah, the first treatise of his codex, chapter 6, rule 8, Maimonides, after explaining that Jews are forbidden to burn or otherwise to destroy the holy script and that they may not even damage any Hebrew writing in which one of the seven sacred names of God is written, ruled:

 

If a Torah scroll was written by a Jewish heretic, it should be burned, together with all its sacred names [of God], because the heretic does not believe in the holiness of God and could not write it for God but must have thought that it is like other books. Therefore, given this view, God is not sanctified [by it] and it is a commandment to burn it [the scroll] so that no memory is left of the heretics or to their deeds. But, a Torah scroll written by a non-Jew should be put away with the other holy books that deteriorated or were written by non-Jews.³

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Although he did not instruct Jews to burn heretical books, Maimonides probably based the above passage upon many directives issued by talmudic sages since about AD 100. These directives called for the burning of books by heretics. Indeed, talmudic sages even boasted at times about burning such books themselves. Halachic codes did not so instruct, but rabbinical responsa frequently called for and Jewish history is replete with examples of Jews burning Jewish books. Together with burial of books in cemeteries, this reached a high point in the eighteenth century. Although minimized in many apologetic histories of Jews, especially in works written in English, the burning and the burial in cemeteries of books in the history of Judaism was far more intense than in the histories of either Christianity or Islam.

 

Traditional Judaism also forbade independent thoughts. In his Laws of Idolatry, chapter 2, rule 3, Maimonides, after explaining that a Jew should not think about idolatry, continued:

 

And it is not only forbidden to think about idolatry but [about] any thought that may cause a Jew to doubt one principle of the Jewish religion. [The Jew] is warned not to bring it to his consciousness. We shall not think in that direction, and we shall not allow ourselves to be drawn into meditations of the heart, because human understanding is limited, and not every opinion is directed to the real truth. If a Jew, therefore, allows himself to follow his [independent] thoughts, he will surely destroy the world because of insufficient understanding. How? He may sometimes be seduced to idolatry and sometimes think about the uniqueness of the Lord, sometimes that he exists and other times that he does not; [he may] investigate what is above [in the sky] and what is below [under earth], what is before [the world was created] and what is after [the end of the world]. He may think about whether or not prophecy is true; he may think about whether or not the Torah was given by God. Because such people do not know the [true] logic to be used in order to reach the real truth, they become heretics. It is about that issue that the Torah

 

 

 

 

 

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warned us. As it is written: “And that you seek not after your own heart and after your own eyes that you are using to prostitute yourselves” (Numbers 16:39). [This verse is included in the third passage of “Kry’at Sh’ma,” one of the most sacred Jewish prayers that is said daily in the morning and in the evening.] This means that every Jew is forbidden to allow himself to follow his own insufficient knowledge and to imagine that his own thoughts are capable of reaching the truth. The sages have said: “after your own heart” means heresy; “after your own eyes” means prostitution. This prohibition, even though the sin causes a Jew to lose paradise, does not carry the penalty of flogging [because flogging is inflicted only in cases of deeds].

 

Such prohibitions of any independent thinking (which some Haredim apply to some of Maimonides’ own writings) were common in post-talmudic Judaism and have persisted to date in part of Orthodox Judaism. Orthodox Judaism totally prohibited independent thinking about issues discussed freely by St. Augustine regardless of whatever answers he put forward. Indeed, such issues are almost never mentioned today by Orthodox Jewish scholars.⁴ Many theological problems freely discussed by Thomas Aquinas⁵ were and remain unthinkable in traditional Judaism. (Traditional Judaism today includes not only Orthodox but much of Conservative Judaism as well.) Amazingly, many people, especially in English-speaking countries, still attribute to post-talmudic Judaism the intellectual distinction achieved in numerous countries by many Jews in the past 150 years. This delusion has contributed to the spread of fundamentalist Judaism. In reality, the contrary has been the case. Most of the Jews who attained intellectual distinction were influenced by rebellion against this type of totalitarian system; they negated some of its major tenets.

 

In addition to advocating that heretics be killed, whenever possible, by employing one method or another, traditional Judaism directed that heretics while still alive should under all possible circumstances be treated in a worse manner than non-Jews or Jews who converted to another religion. One

 

 

 

 

 

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socially important example of such directed treatment is the burial of the heretic’s corpse, together with the ceremonies to be observed by the family after the burial. Whereas traditional Judaism permits and sometimes even obliges Jews to bury most Jewish sinners, it strictly prohibits Jews to bury Jewish heretics and/or a few types of Jewish sinners. Tractate Trumot of the Palestinian Talmud, chapter 8, halacha 3, discusses a Jewish butcher in the town of Tzipori in Galilee who sold non-kosher meat. This butcher fell from a roof and was killed. Rabbi Hanina Bar Hama, a sage in the early third century AD, encouraged the Jews of the town to let their dogs eat the corpse. Such behavior was usually not feasible; hence, later authorities were more moderate. Maimonides and later rabbis were content with prohibiting the family of the heretic to mourn his death and ordering the family to rejoice. Maimonides clearly put this in his Laws of Mourning, chapter 1, rule 10:

 

All who separate themselves from public custom [of the Jews], such as those who do not fulfil commandments and do not honor the holidays or do not frequent synagogues or houses of study but rather regard themselves free and [behave] like other nations, and heretics, converts and informers should not be mourned; when they die, their brothers and all other relatives should put on white garments, make banquets and rejoice, since those who hate the Lord, blessed be he, have perished.

 

Most Jews rigorously followed this rule of Maimonides until the beginning of Jewish modernization; some orthodox Jews follow this rule to date.⁶ In the small towns of eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, Jews devised another custom of humiliating burial of heretics and other Jewish sinners. This custom, often mentioned in the contemporary Hebrew and Yiddish literature, was called “ass burial.” It was derived from the biblical verse, Jeremiah 22: 19, where the prophet predicts that King Yohoiakim of Judah “will be buried as an ass.” This custom had three general components. First, members of the Jewish burial society, called the Holy Society and consisting of the fiercest zealots of the town, would first beat the heretic’s corpse. Then

 

 

 

 

 

 

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the corpse would thereafter be put on a cart filled with dung and was in that condition paraded through the town. Finally, the corpse would be buried beyond the fence of the graveyard without religious rites. The two expressions, “ass burial” and “beyond the fence” became proverbial terms in Hebrew and Yiddish and are still used to denote social ostracism. The famous Jewish writer, Peretz Smolenskin (1840-85), wrote a Hebrew novel, titled Ass Burial, which is still read. In his novel Smolenskin told the story of a young Jew in a Russian small town who, because of a petty quarrel with the chief of the Jewish burial society, was declared a heretic. The Jewish congregation hired an assassin who murdered the heretic. The heretic was buried in an ass burial. Smolenskin was the father of the naturalistic style in Hebrew literature. His novels were based upon a close observation of Jewish life as it was in his time.

 

Learned authorities often disagreed on the definition of heretic. Talmudic sages enumerated several kinds of heretics who were called by different names. The Talmud emphasized one type of heretic, called “apikoros” apparently named after followers of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus. In Tractate Sanhedrin, page 99b of the Talmud, the Apikoros were designated as all Jews who were disrespectful to rabbis. One talmudic sage asserted that a Jew who was disrespectful to another Jew in the presence of a rabbi was a heretic. Rabbi Menahem Ha’Meiri, in commenting upon the above passage, said that a Jew who called a rabbi by his name without using the honorific title was a heretic. The prevalent opinion until the twentieth century was that Jews who were disrespectful to rabbis were not heretics but were only “like heretics.” Real heretics were those who denied the validity of the Talmud as religious authority. This definition did not lessen the punishment of heretics and other sinners, when feasible to employ under emergency laws. This definition lessened the duty, imposed by the Talmud, of separating many Jews who paid taxes from the congregation. In the first half of the twentieth century, two famous rabbis, Rabbi Hazon Ish and Rabbi Kook the elder both ruled that laws regarding heretics “do not apply because visible miracles do not occur.” To what extent the Hazon Ish-Kook opinion is followed today is difficult to determine. At this point in our discussion, nevertheless, the focus is upon pre-modern times.

 

 

 

 

 

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Our survey of punishments, inflicted under emergency Jewish laws upon Jewish heretics and other sinners, begins with pronouncements by the last Jewish rabbis whose authority was and still is universally acknowledged. These rabbis were the heads of yeshivot in Iraq until about 1050; they were named “Ge’onim.” (In the singular each of them bore the name “Ga’on,” which in Hebrew means “genius.”) The Ge’onim left many responses to questions addressed to them from all parts of the Jewish world. These questions were concerned with how Jews, especially Jewish communities, should behave. In his previously mentioned book (1922), Rabbi Simha Asaf quoted a collection of such responses ordering that a Jew who violates the sabbath should be flogged and should have his hair shaved (p. 45). Rabbi Paltoi Ga’on, as noted by Asaf, in AD 858 answered the more difficult question: Should a Jew who sinned on either the Sabbath or a holiday be flogged on that sacred day if the danger exists that he may escape before the Sabbath or the holiday ended? Rabbi Paltoi answered by reminding his questioners that the congregation had a prison and that the sinner could be imprisoned on the Sabbath or on the holiday and then flogged afterwards. Rabbi Paltoi, nevertheless, after acknowledging that the act of flogging violated the Sabbath in certain ways, concluded that the concern about the Sabbath or holiday violations should not prevent the flogging of Jewish sinners on the sacred day (Asaf, p. 48). Rabbi Tzemach Ga’on, who lived after Rabbi Paltoi, was asked what to do with a Jewish priest who married a divorced woman, which as noted by Asaf is forbidden to priests (p. 52). Rabbi Tzemach Ga’on expressed the fear that such a sinner, if only flogged, would go to another place and during synagogue services would participate in the priest’s blessing by stretching out over the heads of congregation members his hands with his fingers separated. Rabbi Tzemach Ga’on, therefore, ordered that the last joints of the priestly sinner’s fingers should be cut off, thus identifying and making it impossible for the sinner to participate in the blessing. The last and most famous Ga’on, Rabbi Ha’i, who died in 1042, devoted a long response, cited by Asaf, to an explanation of how Jewish sinners were flogged during his time; he detailed, moreover, how they were specifically flogged by his court. He emphasized that the whip was

 

 

 

 

 

 

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made of hemp and for the worst sinners was especially thick. The sinner was bound “right hand to the right foot and left hand to the left foot. ” The one who flogged him stood near his head. The ceremony began with a reading of the appropriate biblical verses. After the flogging, the sinner stood naked with his dress in his hand and acknowledged the justice of his sentence. Finally, the court asked God to have mercy on him. In other responsa, cited by Asaf on pages 56 and 57, Rabbi Ha’i specified the sins for which Jews should be flogged. Cutting one’s hair on the minor holidays, putting on shoes during the mourning periods and violating the Sabbath were three examples. Asaf pointed out further on pages 58 and 59 that other responsa in the eleventh century provided proofs that the Jews of Egypt flogged sinners in front of the doors of synagogues and that the rabbis of Italy, because of the general political chaos and much greater Jewish autonomy, could and did execute sinners. Asaf specifically recorded the numerous death sentences inflicted by the Babylonian rabbi, Abu Aharon, who immigrated to Italy; for example, Rabbi Abu Aharon sentenced an adulterer to be strangled and a man who committed incest with his mother-in-law to be burned. Asaf illustrated the wide parameters of flogging by reporting that another unnamed Italian rabbi stipulated that if a Jew living in a courtyard area with other Jews sold his flat to a non-Jew, he should be flogged.

 

In Spain, whether under Muslim or Christian rule, Jewish autonomy and the consequent punishment of Jewish sinners were most developed and punishments were recorded in the largest number of cases. On page 62, Asaf quoted Rabbi Samuel the Prince,⁷ who died in 1046: “Spanish Jews were always free of heresy, except in a few villages near the Christian land where suspicion exists of some heretics being harbored in secret. Our predecessors have flogged a part of [those] Jews who deserved to be flogged, and they have died from flogging.” Rabbi Ha’i, as previously mentioned, insisted that the Jew being flogged must acknowledge the justice of his sentence and repent. Refusal to repent, Ha’i and many other rabbinical authorities made clear, compelled more flogging even until death. Spain may have become “free of heresy” at least partially because previous heretics were flogged to death. Rabbi Samuel’s boast was confirmed to

 

 

 

 

 

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some extent, according to Asaf on page 63, by the story of the Jewish philosopher and historian, Rabbi Avraham Ibn Daud who, in his book

 

Shalshelet Ha’kabalah (Chain of Tradition), told how the Karaites, when they began to spread, were humiliated and expelled from all the towns of Castile except for one.⁸ Somewhat later, after Rabbi Daud’s death, Maimonides moderated the flogging punishment. In his commentary on the Mishnah, Tractate Khulin, quoted by Asaf on page 64, Maimonides maintained that Jews who committed sins which would normally result in the death penalty should “now only be flogged and excommunicated but their excommunication should never be removed.”

 

The Jewish sins punished with the greatest cruelty, apart from informing which will be separately discussed below, were acts of disobedience to the will of and/or physical attacks upon rabbis. Such acts were not rare occurrences. Asaf on page 67 quoted the late thirteenth-century responsa of Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet, the famous rabbi of Barcelona. Rabbi ben Aderet endeavored to show that any rabbi can “together with the elders” sentence Jews who oppose the rabbi’s authority and are “notorious for their wickedness”, not only to flogging but to the more severe punishments of having their hands or feet cut off or of being killed. Many other rabbinic responsa dealt in detail with such severe punishments. Asaf reported on page 72 that the previously mentioned Rabenu Asher was angry with Rabbi Moshe of Valencia for ruling against a usual custom and thus Asher’s own authority in a matter of sabbath observance. From Toledo, Asher wrote to Rabbi Yitzhak of Valencia and ordered him to condemn the offending Rabbi Moshe to death unless he (Rabbi Moshe) did not repent after being fined and excommunicated. Rabenu Asher also dealt with the financial aspect of inflicting the death penalty. In his responsa to “the holy community of Avila,” as reported by Asaf on page 74, the execution of the wicked was compared to the building of city walls; executions supposedly defended the purity of Judaism just as the walls defended their physical safety. Thus, just as every Jew could be compelled to pay taxes for the upkeep of the walls, every Jew could be compelled to pay for the execution of the wicked Jews.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Our final example from Spain is a summary of the responsa of Rabbi Yehuda, the son of Rabenu Asher. This responsa, quoted by Asaf on page 77, is important not only because it documents the use of violence but also because it describes the normal procedure in emergency cases of halachic decision making in cases brought before the rabbinical court. The elaborate display of reasoning in Jewish emergency law, differing totally from Halacha, is well illustrated in this responsa.

 

A cornerstone of the normal halachic procedure, based upon the Bible and employed in all cases brought before the rabbinical court, is that, in the absence of written documents that are used only in civil cases, every judgment must be based upon the testimony of two or more male Jewish witnesses. The testimony of each of the two witnesses must be exactly the same as determined in direct interrogation. In the illustrative example presented in his responsa, Rabbi Yehuda cited a case of a Jew who beat another Jew so severely that, as a consequence of this, the latter died. Two witnesses, Moshe and Avraham (family names not given), saw the beating. Two other witnesses, Yoseph and Yitzhak, saw only the beginning of the beating; they then left and thereafter returned to see the beaten man lying on the ground with blood pouring from his head. After giving thanks to God for “inspiring the kings of the earth to give Jews the power to judge [their offenders] as we are judging now,” Rabbi Yehuda explained how the principles of current Jewish law that are not all according to Halacha have to be applied in the case under consideration. Rabbi Yehuda, as quoted by Asaf, decided:

 

If only the testimony of Moshe and Avraham is found to be valid, the offender should be executed. If only one of their testimonies is found to be valid together with finding the testimony of either Yoseph or Yitzhak to be valid, the offender’s hands should be cut off. If the testimony of either Moshe or Avraham is found to be valid but the testimony of both Yoseph and Yitzhak is found to be invalid, the offender’s right hand should be cut off. If the testimony of both Moshe and Avraham is found to be invalid but the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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testimony of both Yoseph and Yitzhak is found to be valid, the offender’s left hand should be cut off. If all the testimonies are found to be invalid, the offender should be exiled from the city because the fact that he killed [the victim] became notorious.

 

In other European countries, Jewish autonomy and thus its consequences were less powerful than in Spain. Perhaps this was because the other states, in spite of their feudal nature, were stronger than the Spanish kingdoms before the latter part of the fifteenth century. In England, where royal power was especially strong and where Jews settled only after England’s conquest by William I, there were, so far as we know, no cases of rabbis’ flogging or otherwise punishing Jews for religious offenses. In continental Europe, where Jewish autonomy depended more on the feudal lords than on the king or emperor, however, there were significant numbers of cases. In fourteenth-century Germany, for example, the famous rabbi, Yosef Weil, according to Asaf on page 102, recorded in his book of responsa that Rabbi Shimon from Braunschweig asked him whether it was permitted to put out the eyes of a Jew who violated the Sabbath and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Rabbi Weil answered that it was permitted and referred to talmudic evidence for his permission. In another case, reported by Asaf on page 104, the famous Rabenu Tam who lived in northern France in the twelfth century ordered that in the case of a Jew who beat another Jew the punishment should be the cutting off of the offender’s hand rather than the usual punishment of flogging. Asaf recorded on page 103 that another rabbi had seen his father inflicting the punishment of flogging. Flogging was used in general in Germany as a punishment for lesser religious sins; the cutting of limbs was rare. The use of flogging even diminished with the passage of time; fines, excommunications and obligatory fasts were used by German Jews as almost the only punishments.

 

In the countries east of Germany, especially in Poland and after 1569 in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where Jewish autonomy was extensive, punishments inflicted by rabbis almost equalled those inflicted in Spain. Every Jewish community had its own prison and stocks, called “kuneh” in

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Yiddish, that were placed in the entrances to major synagogues. The stocks consisted of iron bars to secure the sinner’s arms, compelling him to stand facing entering members of the congregation who would spit at him, slap his face and/or take other physical action against him. Flogging was freely practiced in the synagogue, usually during the reading of the law in the midst of the morning prayer. Asaf reported on page 122 that the famous sixteenth-century rabbi, Shlomo Luria, assured his questioners that a well-flogged sinner would not sin again and that the number of stripes in flogging should be determined by the court according to what is decided as fitting the sin. In serious cases the inflicted penalties were mutilation and death. A generation after Rabbi Shlomo Luria, another famous rabbi, Maharam (our teacher Rabbi Meir) of Lublin, according to Asaf on page 123, wrote about a case of a Jewish murderer caught by Polish authorities. Maharam insisted that such an offender should be executed by the rabbinical or Polish authorities. Maharam warned the rabbis against substituting mutilation for execution:

 

I recall what occurred when I was young, in the time of Rabbi Shekhna R.I.P. In his time there was a most wicked Jew; the great rabbi permitted [the community] to put out his eyes and cut off his tongue. After having this done to him, he converted to Christianity, married a non-Jewish woman and had children. He and his [family members] were always enemies of the Jews.

 

 

 

In the seventeenth century, mutilation as a punishment, instead of death or flogging, tended to disappear among Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Expulsion from the town appeared as a new punishment. The autonomous Jewish community of a given town could determine which Jews would reside in the town. The privilege of residence was usually granted automatically only to the children of the old residents, their wives and the rabbis. All other Jews had to apply to the community authorities and receive, often after a payment and/or for a limited time, their residence rights. One of the cruellest punishments that a Jewish congregation could inflict, therefore, was expulsion, because an expelled Jew would have great difficulty acquiring residence rights elsewhere. This punishment,

 

 

 

 

 

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nevertheless, was increasingly employed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When Russia, Prussia and Austria thereafter divided Poland, these three conquering powers limited the autonomy of Jewish communities and forbade them to expel their members from towns. The expulsions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often immediate, regardless of the time of year, and were many times used as a weapon in religious disputes, such as the quarrel between the Hassids and their opponents, the Mitnagdim. The Union of Jewish Congregations in Lithuania, according to Asaf on page 127, ordered immediate expulsion from the town in addition to physical and financial punishment for any Jew who “behaved with contempt toward the rabbi.” In another rule, cited by Asaf on pages 127 and 128, the Union ordered congregations to expel Jews who had previously been expelled from another town. The expelled Jews were usually compelled to sign a document, similar to the one quoted by Asaf on page 132, from the city of Krakow, stating that if they stay in the town for even one night they must accept any punishment imposed upon them by the community leaders, including “mutilation of ear or nose or of other places.” In another case, cited by Asaf, a young Jew, who was expelled from Krakow for having taken part in a theft committed in the house of a notable, was sentenced to be flogged in front of the door to the synagogue; the youth additionally had to sign a declaration that if found again in Krakow he knew that “his two ears would be cut off, in addition [to his receiving] other punishments.” The kuneh or stock was also used in this period as punishment especially for heretics but also for sinners who committed minor offences. In 1772, when the leaders of the Jewish community of Vilna began their struggle against the Hassidic movement, they first punished the Hassids in their town. Before the eve of the Sabbath prayer all Hassidic writings were burned near the kuneh so that the congregation members would see the ashes when they came to the synagogue. Before the burning the chief Hassid of Vilna, Meir Issar, was flogged privately in the “hall of the community.” Following the flogging, Issar had to confess his sin, strictly following the formula prepared by the rabbinic court, in the synagogue during morning Sabbath prayers. He was then imprisoned for one week in the castle of Vilna. The chief rabbinic authority at that time, Haga’on Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna, additionally wanted to put Issar in

 

 

 

 

 

 

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the kuneh, but the community leaders, apparently because Issar’s family was important, refused. This story, mentioned by Asaf on page 139, was included in the detailed, Hebrew-language histories of this period.⁹

 

The story of Meir Issar is a typical example of persecution by Jewish authorities in eastern Europe of a Jewish religious dissident at the end of the eighteenth century. Fanaticism, religious disputes interposed with excommunications, burning of or sometimes burial in cemeteries of books and popular riots against heretics and dissenters characterized many European Jewish communities throughout most of the eighteenth century, with the exception of those in England and Holland. Towards the end of the century the zealotry decreased, first in Germany and Italy and then in the larger towns of eastern Europe; it continued during much of the nineteenth century among the bulk of the Jewish population in eastern Europe who lived in smaller towns. The great majority of Jewish immigrants to the United States, Britain and a few other places in the nineteenth century, having come from areas in which religious persecution of Jews by other Jews had been widely practiced for a long time, suddenly arrived in countries in which such persecution could not, at least not to nearly the same extent, be carried out.¹⁰ The wish of many eighteenth-century Jews to persecute was seemingly greater than their actual ability to do so. An incident in the history of the Frankist heresy, which erupted in Poland in 1756 and continued for some years thereafter, provides a good example. When leaders of the autonomous Jewish community in Poland learned of this heresy, one of them, Rabbi Baruch from Greece, wrote a long letter to his friend in Germany and one of the greatest rabbis of that generation, Rabbi Ya’akov Emden.¹¹ In his letter Rabbi Baruch described the proceedings and aims of the main council of Jewish autonomy held in September, 1756, in Konstantinov. The council was called the “committee of four lands,” a name which referred to the four main Polish provinces. Rabbi Baruch reported details of the heresy and wrote that the committee of four lands decided “to bring the matter before the great Lord who rules over their [the Christian] faith, the Pope in Rome” and to struggle against the heresy. Rabbi Baruch wrote further that the committee asked “the help of [Polish] bishops so that the cursed ones would be condemned to be burned at the stake.” Meir

 

 

 

 

 

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Balaban, the distinguished historian of Polish Jewry, remarked that the wish to see hundreds of “the cursed ones” bummed at the stake by the Christian authorities, who at that very time were persecuting Polish Jews, indicated the depth of the hatred of the heretics felt by the Jewish leadership.¹² The committee’s attempt failed. Rabbi Baruch went so far as to try to involve his patron, the powerful Minister Bruhl who was the favorite of the Polish King August III in this matter. Rabbi Baruch wanted Bruhl to arrange an interview for him with the papal nuncio in Warsaw. The Pope of that time period, Benedict XVIII, would almost certainly not have agreed to have a mass burning, but the heretics anyway obtained the help of powerful bishops and magnates and even of Countess Bruhl, the wife of the minister. The result was that the Jewish leaders could not, as they wanted to, pursue the persecution.

 

It may be instructive to compare the Frankist heresy incident with what Baruch Spinoza had to endure in Holland about a hundred years earlier. Because of the relatively tolerant and more modern Dutch regime, the Jewish community of Amsterdam could only excommunicate Spinoza. As much as members of that community desired to do so, they could not flog or kill Spinoza; they could not compel Spinoza to make public confession in the synagogue that he had sinned in his commentaries and statements about Judaism. The Jewish community could only excommunicate Spinoza and forbid him from attending the synagogue. A few years before Spinoza’s excommunication, the Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated Uriel D’ Acusta for similar reasons. D’ Acusta, however, was not endowed with Spinoza’s firmness and could not stand his exclusion from the synagogue and from Jewish community life. D’ Acusta asked the rabbis to reinstate him. The rabbis sentenced him not only to the usual confession but also to lie at the synagogue entrance so that congregation members could trample on him before praying to God. D’ Acusta accepted the conditions and, after both confessing and being trampled upon, was duly forgiven. He, however, again came thereafter to have heretical views. Fearing another excommunication and something even worse than being trampled underfoot as a recurrent sinner, he committed suicide. A comparison between the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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fates of Spinoza and D’ Acusta suggests two lessons for contemporary Jews who do not wish to submit to the tyranny often prevalent in Jewish orthodoxy: 1) An intellectual compromise with Jewish orthodoxy is no more possible than is an intellectual compromise with any other totalitarian system, 2) An apologetic approach to the Jewish past, which is in reality false beautification and falsification of one part of Jewish history and is intended to remove the horrors and persecutions that Jews suffered at the hands of their own authorities and rabbis, only increases the dangers of a developing Jewish “Khomeinism.” In Israel such compromise increases the danger of a Jewish state that could become dominated by rabbis who will not hesitate to punish other Jews as did their revered predecessors when not prevented from doing so by an outside power.

 

We have seen that formal and legal infliction of severe punishments depended upon the amount of Jewish autonomy that existed in specific places at specific times. Russia, Prussia and Austria, as previously noted, after their conquest of Poland, abolished Jewish autonomy and subjected Jews to the ordinary criminal law of their countries. As bad as that criminal law was, it was on balance better and more humane than the Jewish law as applied by the rabbis.¹³ Jewish communities that were suddenly deprived of their power to persecute heretics found it difficult to accustom themselves to a new situation. The relatively lax police supervision that existed in Tsarist Russia during most of the nineteenth century allowed Jewish authorities to persecute religious innovators through riots, which were similar to what were called “pogroms” when committed by non-Jews against Jews. Until 1881 in Russia, the number of riots by Jews against other Jews probably exceeded the number of pogroms by non-Jews against Jews. The previously persecuted Hassids were the major and worst persecutors; they were especially active against the emerging Hebrew press of that time that appeared before the rise of the Yiddish press. The Hebrew press antagonized the Hassids mainly by reporting and protesting against the religious persecution by rabbis and their followers. In order to avert persecution by Jewish rioters, most of the Hebrew papers were printed and issued in St. Petersburg or behind the Prussian border, where the police were strong and the small Jewish communities mostly consisted of educated

 

 

 

 

 

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individuals.

 

 

The history of Jews in Russia until 1881 includes a great deal of persecution of Jews by Jews. The two following typical examples, one major and one minor, are illustrative: The major example is taken from the long article by David Asaf,¹⁴ published in Zion (1994, number 4), the quarterly journal of the Israeli Historical Association. Asaf described the riot in Uman in the Ukraine, where one of the more famous Hassidic rabbis, Nahman of Braslaw, was buried and where his followers who came on pilgrimage to his tomb on the Jewish New Year were attacked and beaten year after year for decades by other Hassids. The annual beatings finally culminated in 1863 in an especially nasty attack by a coalition of Hassidic sects that was described by a contemporary Jewish writer in the Hebrew press of that time. The writer of the article noted the similarity between this Hassidic “pogrom ” and those committed by the anti-Semites. He described how Hassids smashed the holy cupboard (Aron Ha’kodesh in Hebrew) where the scrolls of law were stored. The attacking Hassids considered the place to be heretical in and of itself; the alleged heretics were beaten and stoned; when they fainted, they were attacked again. The attackers used the occasion to beat the modernized Jews of the place as well, including women who wore what was considered to be immodest clothing. Fearful of other attacks, the Breslaw Hassids hired a company of Russian soldiers to defend themselves from other Hassids. The following year the collapse of the Hassidic coalition and another Jewish attack upon Jews in the town of Rzhishchev (south of Kiev) gave the Breslaw Hassids a temporary respite. The Rzhishchev riot erupted when a holy rabbi from another place had the temerity to visit Rzhishchev, where another holy rabbi resided, to collect money. As Asaf wrote in his article: “Of course, the Hassids of the local holy rabbi cursed and stoned the invader and he was almost killed.” Many of the Hassids were wounded. The two holy rabbis then proclaimed that ritual slaughterers of each side were not kosher; each rabbi also proclaimed that the prayers of the other side were “an abomination to God.” Scuffles ensured. The holy rabbi of Rzhishchev was denounced by his colleague as a forger of banknotes. A police investigation followed. Although the Breslaw Hassids attained a

 

 

 

 

 

 

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respite, they were, as Asaf showed, attacked periodically by other Hassids until 1914.

 

A minor example occurred in the town of Vyshegrad in 1886 and was recorded in the contemporary Hebrew press. Quoting research of new Jewish historians, Rosen in his previously cited article wrote:

 

Hassids of Vyshegrad were opposed to the new cantor [of the synagogue] because his clothes are clean and he puts rubber shoes over his ordinary shoes. They therefore rioted in the synagogue against this cantor and beat their opponents until blood flowed. The police came quickly to separate the two sides. The rabbi who incited the riot was then arrested by soldiers and brought to the government house to explain the riot. The actual rioters will be criminally prosecuted.

 

After 1881 the situation in Russia began to change and Jewish attacks upon Jews decreased for several apparent reasons. First, in 1881 the government instigated Russian and Ukrainian pogroms began, and mass emigration of Jews from Russia began. In addition police supervision was tightened under the regime of Alexander III, who ascended to the throne after revolutionaries assassinated his father, Alexander II. Attacks by Jews against Jews, although diminished, nevertheless continued in Russia until 1914.

 

In Polish areas ruled by Austrian police, supervision was stronger and therefore direct attacks by Jews against other Jews apparently ceased. Orthodox Jews employed some secret forms of religious persecution against modern Jews, who called themselves “maskilim” (enlightened). In extreme cases, Jewish servants of the maskilim were suborned to kill their employers or other methods of assassination were employed. In his article Rosen related:

 

Because of the approaching anniversary of Rabin’s assassination, Professor Ze’ev Gris of the department of Jewish thought at Ben-Gurion

 

 

 

 

 

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University [in Be’er Sheva] sent us a story about what happened in Lemberg (now Lviv) in the nineteenth century. [In 1848 Lemberg was part of Austria.] A rabbi, named Avraham Cohen was assassinated by Jews for religious reasons. This was part of a confrontation between enlightened Jews, although relatively moderate since they kept the commandments, and the fanatical Hassids. An article about this was once published by the Hebrew press in Palestine in Davar one year after [the Labor leader] Arlozorov [was assassinated]. [The article] was severely attacked by the right wing Hebrew press of that time.

 

Rosen also quoted Professor Bartal who believed the attacks of the Hassids in the general confrontation to be the forerunner of the massacre committed by Baruch Goldstein. Bartal commented further that the maskilim usually only attacked the Hassids or other orthodox religious Jews by employing satire.¹⁵ Only if provoked beyond endurance, Bartal asserted, would the maskilim attack or defend themselves by using physical violence.

 

Rosen’s account of the poisoning assassination of Rabbi Cohen, as taken from what Professor Gris wrote, is worth relating:

 

In Lemberg in the 1840s hundreds of maskilim, after looking for a rabbi to head their congregation, found Rabbi Avraham Cohen, who was the rabbi in the small Austrian town of Hohenmass. Avraham Cohen was born in Bohemia to a poor Jewish peddler, but he became highly educated. After finishing his Yeshiva studies and receiving the authorization to become a rabbi, he went to study at and earned a degree from Prague University. The historian, Dr Ze’ev Aharon Eshkoli, who researched the story of Rabbi Cohen, published his account in 1934; he wrote that Cohen was a moderate but as “one educated in the German style of those times he was considered a modernist.” In 1844, Cohen was appointed rabbi of the Lemberg congregation of

 

 

 

 

 

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maskilim; two years later he was the rabbi of all maskilim in the district of Lemberg. In this role he tried to introduce changes in Jewish life, but he soon encountered furious opposition of “the religious fanatics,” as Eshkoli defined them. Cohen, for example, initiated the opening of Jewish schools that would serve as alternates to yeshivot, and he attempted to abolish the tests of Jewish religious subjects that Orthodox rabbis imposed upon all young Jewish couples at their betrothal. Cohen’s most important initiative, according to Eshkoli, was his attempt to abolish the taxes on kosher meat and sabbath candles, which Lemberg Jews paid to [Austrian] authorities. These taxes were burdensome for poor Jews but were sources of income for many Orthodox notables. The method [of taxation] was as follows: A rich Jew for a certain lump sum obtained from the authorities the right to impose the tax on the Jews, from whom he took a much greater sum supposedly for his efforts. Five tax gatherers, all very pious, headed the opposition to Cohen. Their leader was Rabbi Hertz Berenstein, who came from a noted rabbinical family; the second was Rabbi Tzvi Orenstein, the son of the former Orthodox rabbi of Lemberg. In 1846, Cohen sent a memorandum to the emperor [of Austria] pointing out the injustice involved in the gathering of those taxes. Because of his connection with the authorities, he was twice invited to talk with the emperor. The five tax gatherers also sent a memorandum pointing out that the tax gathering provides a livelihood for thousands of Jewish families. The Austrian authorities, nevertheless, accepted Cohen’s request and abolished those taxes in March, 1848.

 

The abolition of those taxes may not primarily have been due to Cohen’s request. The 1848 revolution, which began in Vienna as a reaction against Hapsburg absolutism, probably prompted the tax abolition. Austrian liberals viewed those taxes as discriminatory and opposed them; they were supported by the enlightened Jews. Orthodox Jews, especially their rabbis,

 

 

 

 

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were the firm allies of absolutism and reaction, not only in Austria but throughout Europe and the Middle East. Rosen continued his story about Rabbi Cohen’s misfortune:

 

Whether for reasons of ideological opposition to Cohen or for economic reasons or for both, the five Jewish notables in 1848 began a total struggle against Rabbi Avraham Cohen. First, they put placards in the synagogues that incited Jews to spit in his face and stone him. When the persecution increased, Cohen’s friends asked him to agree to his being guarded all the time; he refused, saying that he did not believe that Jews would kill him. The next step involved placards saying plainly that the “law of pursuer” [to be explained below] applies to Rabbi Cohen. [One placard said], for example: “He is one of those Jewish sinners for which the Talmud says their blood is permitted” (that is, every Jew can and should kill them). Another placard asked: “Will a Jew be found who will liberate us from the rabbi who destroys his congregation?” The fanatics first decided that the assassination would take place during Purim in 1848; they even cast lots to determine who would have the honor of murdering the rabbi, but their plans went awry. A month later during Passover of 1848 a crowd of Jews stoned Rabbi Cohen’s home; only a large number of policemen saved him. On September 6, 1848, however, Avraham Bar-Pilpel, a Jewish assassin, successfully entered the rabbi’s home unseen, went to the kitchen and put arsenic poison in the pot of soup that was cooking. Shortly thereafter, Rabbi Cohen and his family ate the soup; Rabbi Cohen and his little daughter died. The Hassids and their leaders did not attend the funeral; they celebrated. No Orthodox rabbi, moreover, uttered one word of condemnation, neither of murderous incitement before the murder nor of the murder itself. Many nationalistic Jews who were not Orthodox shared in being silent. The Jewish historian Graetz, author of

 

 

 

 

 

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the first history of the Jews, omitted this story from his history, which, by the way, [was published] later. Orthodox Jews took the murdered rabbi’s corpse from the section of the notables of the cemetery and buried it in another section. Professor Ze’ev Gris says: “My conclusion is, and I am sorry for it, that there is nothing new in Judaism.” The de-legitimization, incitement, writing on the wall and especially the silence of the rabbinical leadership of Galicia of those times–everything was exactly the same as it was before the assassination of Rabin.

 

Was the murder of Rabbi Avraham Cohen an exceptional case? In December, 1838, the governor of southwestern Russia, General Dimitri Gabrielovitch Bibikov, issued a circular to district governors under his authority. He asked them to look carefully into what was happening in the synagogues and in Jewish houses of study. “In those places,” he wrote, “Very often something happens that leaves dead Jews in its wake. Such crimes are especially grave since they occur in places dedicated to prayer and study of religious principles. They also are characteristic of autonomous judgment by the rabbinical courts, executed by their false views about extermination of ‘informers,’ who reveal crimes of their co-religionists. The rabbis often succeed in obscuring the [official] investigation to such an extent that not only the identity of the assassins but even the identity of the victim remain unclear.”

 

Many Israeli new historians believe that the forms of violence committed against both heretics and informers are intimately connected.

 

Two additional halachic laws are of special importance both generally and specifically when related to the Rabin assassination. These two laws, employed since talmudic times to kill Jews, were invoked by the assassin, Yigal Amir, as his justification for killing Prime Minister Rabin and are still emphasized by Jews who approved or have barely condemned that

 

 

 

 

 

 

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assassination. These are the “law of the pursuer” (din rodet) and the “law of the informer” (din moser).¹⁶ The first law commands every Jew to kill or to wound severely any Jew who is perceived as intending to kill another Jew. According to halachic commentaries, it is not necessary to see such a person pursuing a Jewish victim. It is enough if rabbinic authorities, or even competent scholars, announce that the law of the pursuer applies to such a person. The second law commands every Jew to kill or wound severely any Jew who, without a decision of a competent rabbinical authority, has informed non-Jews, especially non-Jewish authorities, about Jewish affairs or who has given them information about Jewish property or who has delivered Jewish persons or property to their rule or authority. Competent religious authorities are empowered to do, and at times have done, those things forbidden to other Jews in the second law. During the long period of incitement preceding the Rabin assassination, many Haredi and messianic writers applied these laws to Rabin and other Israeli leaders. The religious insiders based themselves on later developments in Halacha that came to include other categories of Jews who were defined as “those to whom the law of the pursuer” applied. Every Jew had a religious duty to kill those Jews who were so included. Historically, Jews in the diaspora followed this law whenever possible, until at least the advent of the modern state. In the Tsarist Empire Jews followed this law until well into the nineteenth century.

 

The land of Israel has been and still is considered by all religious Jews as being the exclusive property of the Jews. Granting Palestinians authority over any part of this land could be interpreted as informing. Some religious Jews interpreted the relations that developed between Rabin and the Palestinian Authority as causing harm to the Jewish settlers. In this sense, Rabin had informed. Influential rabbis, such as the Gush Emunin leader, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, publicly denounced as informers Rabin, some Labor and Meretz ministers and some Knesset members. Professor Asa Kasher of Tel-Aviv University, a widely respected person in Israel, tried to enlighten the public by writing a letter to the editor of Haaretz about the exact meaning of the term employed by Levinger and about the danger of assassination implied therein. His warnings were disregarded by everyone, including Rabin and the editors of Haaretz. Shabak, the branch of the Israeli secret police

 

 

 

 

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responsible for domestic affairs and the body responsible for guarding Rabin, also ignored the dangers implicit in a possible, and obviously probable, application to Rabin of the law of the informer. Shabak insisted until the actual happening that the danger of murder came only from Muslim extremists. Interestingly, by the end of August 1998, the Israeli media was filled with Shabak’s warnings that Jewish religious fanatics intended to assassinate Netanyahu, Defense Minister Mordechai and other ministers because of their agreement in principle to Israeli withdrawal from an additional 13 per cent of the West Bank. These warnings were based upon the same fundamentalist logic that led to the assassination of Rabin; they indicated some of the danger posed by Jewish fundamentalism.

 

Rabin’s murder followed logically from the religious premises of the 1984 Jewish underground. Members of the underground were then apprehended planting bombs under Arab buses near Jerusalem on a Friday. The bombs had timing devices so that they would explode after the Sabbath eve had commenced when under Jewish religious law, travel on a bus was prohibited and sinful. At that time, before the Intifada, many Israeli Jews rode in Arab buses. The only category of people not likely to use these buses when the bombs were due to explode were religious Jews. The pious members of the Jewish underground sought prior rabbinical approval for all their actions. Peres, Rabin and Shamir, acting together in accordance with the agreement that the national unity government then in power had devised, ordered the police to stop investigating the extremist rabbis. Not one rabbi opposed the religious reasoning that led to the planting of these bombs. The conclusion is inescapable that some rabbis approved and others did not oppose wanton killing of non-religious Jews, presumably because of their heretical opinions. Yediot Ahronot in its November 16, 1995, issue alleged that Rabbi Nahum Rabinowitz proposed the planting of mines and explosive devices around settlements threatened with evacuation by the Israeli army. This proposal followed the same line of reasoning. When asked about the danger inherent to lives of Jewish soldiers in his proposal, Rabbi Rabinowitz answered: “If they obey the order to remove a Jewish settlement, then they are wicked Jews” and as such, he implied, they deserve death. This should be seen

 

 

 

 

 

 

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within the context of the twofold hatred of non-Jews and secular Jews that settlement rabbis had preached for some time.

 

The reason for the willful ignorance of this danger, shared by many Israeli Jews, including Rabin himself, was in our view Jewish chauvinism, which is so prevalent among Jews. The chauvinists falsify the history of their nation in order to make it appear better than it really was. They also falsify the current situation by claiming that their nation is the best. This claim, often made by too many Jews, is especially dangerous when reinforced by a combination of religious fanaticism and willful ignorance. Jewish chauvinism is especially virulent, because the identification between Jewish religion and Jewish nationality has prevailed for so long and still prevails among many Jews. It should not be forgotten that democracy and the rule of law were brought into Judaism from the outside. Before the advent of the modem state, Jewish communities were mostly ruled by rabbis who employed arbitrary and cruel methods as bad as those employed by totalitarian regimes. The dearest wish of the current Jewish fundamentalists is to restore this state of affairs.

 

The information in the Talmud itself about killing and punishing Jewish informers is scanty and is anecdotal in nature. Fear of Roman and Sassanid authorities was at least partially responsible for this. The same situation existed during the time of the Ge’onim of Iraq, who lived from about AD 750 to 1050 under the strong rule of the Abassid Caliphate. The responsa of the Ge’onim rarely deal only with informers and impose at most only religious penalties. Rabbi Paltoi, according to Asaf on page 49 of The Punishments, stated in the mid-ninth century that an informer is not only a Jew who actually informs but one who during a quarrel in public with another Jew says that he will inform. Paltoi, nevertheless, imposed the mild penalty of designating such a person “wicked” and thus incapable of giving either an oath or testimony. In Muslim Spain, after the dissolution of the strong Ummayad Caliphate in the early years of the eleventh century, the situation was different, and informers were frequently executed. In Alicena, a city mostly inhabited by Jews in the mid-eleventh century, Rabbi Yosef Halevi Ibn Ha’migash, a famous scholar, according to Asaf on page 63 of The

 

 

 

 

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Punishments, ordered Jews to stone an informer during the Ne’yila prayer on Yom Kippur, which that year fell on the Sabbath. Stoning is usually considered to be a severe violation of both Yom Kippur and the Sabbath. The Ne’yila prayer, moreover, said only once a year at the close of Yom Kippur, is probably the most holy prayer in the Jewish calendar. The choice of that particular time must have been dictated by the need to explain to all Jews that the duty of killing a Jewish informer is more important than other religious considerations. Indeed, Maimonides wrote in his authoritative commentary to the Mishnah, as quoted by Asaf in The Punishments on page 63: “It happens every day in the west [Spain and North Africa] that informers who allegedly informed about money of the Jews are killed or are [themselves] informed against to non-Jews so that they [the Jewish informers] would be either killed or beaten by them [the non-Jews] or given to the wicked.” This rule, widely quoted by later authorities, established an important precedent: informing is permitted, even enjoyed, when done by communal Jewish authorities in cases that they consider essential. Only individual Jews should be killed if they inform.¹⁷

 

In another part of his commentary Maimonides said that the obligation to kill both informers and heretics is a tradition that is applied in all cities of the west. After the reconquest of most of Spain by the Christians, except for the kingdom of Grenada, killings of informers continued and actually intensified in the kingdoms of Granada, Castile and Aragon. The number of cases recorded in the Spanish responsa is very large. The following few examples are representative: Rabenu Asher, as quoted by Asaf in The Punishments on page 73, answered a question about a Jew who was a notorious informer; the rabbinical court investigated the case. Rabenu Asher answered that the killing of informers does not need witnesses but only the expression of opinion by other Jews that a given person is indeed an informer. “Had we needed to take testimony of witnesses before the accused,” Rabenu Asher opined, “we would never be able to convict them [the informers].” (This same reasoning was employed by the Inquisition, by modern totalitarian states and by the Israeli conquest regime in the territories occupied since 1967.) Rabenu Asher immigrated to Spain from northern France when

 

 

 

 

 

 

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already a famous rabbi; he was probably familiar with Ashkenazi customs as well as with those of Spanish Jews. Hence, he could probably comment with knowledge and sophistication that common practice in the diaspora was to punish with death an informer who informed three times on the Jews or their money. This was necessary, Rabenu Asher maintained, so that the number of informers among Jews would not increase. After reflecting upon all of this a bit more, he concluded that killing the informer as a punishment was a good deed. It would emphasize that all the Lord’s enemies should perish.

 

In another responsa, cited by Asaf on page 74, Rabenu Asher dealt with a Jew, called either Avraham or Alot. Some Jews had charged that he had informed several times. Rabenu Asher insisted for all to know that the informer could be punished even on Yom Kippur when it falls on the Sabbath; he said that this had occurred in Germany and France. Rabbi Yehuda, the son of Rabenu Asher, opined, according to Asaf on page 79 of The Punishments, “[In the case of a Jew who had been an informer for years] every one who kills him will be rewarded by God. A Jew who could kill the informer and did not can be punished for all that the informer did as if he did it himself.” In another case Rabbi Yehuda explained that the Jews themselves should kill the informers lest non-Jewish judges would refuse to inflict death penalties for informing. In some cases Jewish congregations literally bought the life of an informer from the king and then executed him publicly. This occurred for instance, in Barcelona in April, 1279. Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet, according to Asaf in The Punishments on pages 65 to 67, reported this in his responsa. A Jew, named Vidalan de Porta, who belonged to a noble family, informed to King Pedro II of Aragon, who was also the Count of Catalonia. After being requested by the Jewish inhabitants of Catalonia, the king agreed (probably for a payment) to deliver him to the Jewish authorities of Barcelona, who had previously sentenced de Porta to death. Jews in Barcelona led him “to the street before the cemetery in Barcelona, and they opened the veins of both his arms. He bled to death.” Three years after the execution, brothers of the victim protested against it. Rabbi Shlomo ben Aderet defended the verdict by noting that such verdicts were often carried out in Aragon and Castile. He also wrote to Germany seeking and receiving support for the verdict from the most important rabbi

 

 

 

 

 

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of that time, Meir of Rothenburg (Maharam). The law of the informer is clearly apparent in an anonymous Spanish responsa, important because it was quoted by the famous sixteenth-century Polish rabbi, Shlomo Luria. This is cited by Asaf in The Punishments on pages 83 to 87: “He [the informer] is not only killed by decision of the [rabbinic] court, but any Jew who himself is first to kill him will be rewarded by God.” This same statement appeared in numerous rabbinical responsa.

 

Spanish Jews killed and/or mutilated informers as late as the fifteenth century. Jews in other communities, especially in North Africa and Portugal, who were influenced by Spanish Jews did likewise. Rabbi Shimon, the,son of Rabbi Tzemach, who emigrated from Spain and went to Algiers in the early fifteenth century wrote in a responsa, as reported by Asaf on page 88 of The Punishments, about the sacred duty to kill an informer. In another responsa, according to Asaf on page 89 of The Punishments, Rabbi Shimon recognized that killing was not always possible. He advised in such cases that the informer should be branded on his brow or flogged but in any case should have his name as an informer publicized in all communities.

 

Information about the killing of reformers in early Ashkenazi communities in northern France and Germany is sparse before and non-existent after the thirteenth century. This was probably due to lesser Jewish autonomy and to the stronger power of non-Jewish states. Rabenu Asher, as previously mentioned, testified that in his time the killing of informers in Germany was common. He presented little evidence. Rabenu Tam, one of the chief rabbi of northern France, according to Asaf in The Punishments on page 107, reported that an assembly of French rabbis, held in Troyes, debated the problems “caused by the criminals of our nation,” who either secretly or openly informed, and by the Jews who brought their cases against other Jews to non-Jewish judges, thereby flouting the exclusive authority of rabbinical courts. The only explicit punishment inflicted upon those criminals was excommunication, which included a prohibition against speaking to them. The rabbis tempered the prohibition somewhat by stating that those Jews who feared the anger of the king or the feudal lords could speak to the

 

 

 

 

 

 

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excommunicated informers but could not use such permission as merely an excuse to do so. Some rabbis said that an obscure ancient rule against informers could in addition be inflected. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, according to Asaf on page 107 of The Punishments, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg wrote that Jews could kill or mutilate, by cutting out the tongue of an informer, who remained in a state of permanent excommunication. In only a few known informer cases in Germany in this time period were killing or mutilation inflicted. One such case concerned an informer in Strasbourg in the early fourteenth century. As reported by Asaf on page 108 of The Punishments, Rabbi Samuel Switzstat of Strasbourg sentenced an informer to death. The Jewish community applied to a non-Jewish judge who ordered the informer to be drowned in the Rhine. Some of the informer’s friends then appealed to some powerful feudal lords and through them to the emperor. The friends testified in non-Jewish courts and gave signed testimony, apparently written in Latin. They testified that Rabbi Shlitzstat sent a letter to the Jews in which he said the informer should be killed. They also testified that he collected money from the Strasbourg and nearby Jewish communities to insure the drowning. The implication here was that the judge who gave the order to drown was bribed. The result in this case was that Rabbi Shlitzstat had to hide from the authorities for several years and thereafter escaped from Germany to go to Iraq. He told the president of the Iraqi Jewish community, David son of Hodaya, about the inequities of the Jews who had persecuted him. David son of Hodaya then solemnly excommunicated the offenders in writing. Rabbi Shlitzstat returned to Germany with the excommunication order. What happened upon his return, that is, the end of the story, is not known. From that time rabbinical sources reveal nothing about killings but much about excommunication of informers.

 

Detailed information about Ashkenazi Jews in sixteenth-century Poland is available. These Polish Jews, as previously indicated, enjoyed extensive autonomy in the relatively weak Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Because of this, killings and other punishments of Jewish informers, for which evidence is abundant, were commonplace. Rabbi Shlomo Luria, as Asaf made clear on page 122 of The Punishments, stipulated that informers should be killed. He added:

 

 

 

 

 

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It is better to kill than to mutilate them, for example by cutting out their tongues, so as to remove the evil from our midst. It is also not only probable but nearly certain that a [mutilated] Jew would convert and, in order to take revenge, would tell incorrect things about Jews. I saw myself that by only mutilating them [the informers] Jews have greatly suffered.

 

After the early seventeenth century, Polish rabbis and the Jewish autonomous authorities tended to employ more cautious language when writing about killing Jewish informers. In a case of a certain Jewish informer who had been expelled from the town of Pinsk and from all Lithuania but who appeared in Lubavitch, the Committee of Lithuanian Jews in its ruling used the Hebrew phrase “hatarat dam” (“allowing the shedding of blood”). Asaf on page 128 and 129 of The Punishments discussed this ruling. This phrase, which became common in such rulings thereafter, was a bit less direct than an actual order to kill an informer. In this same case the Committee of Lithuanian Jews, after ruling that Jews who revealed Jewish secrets should be excommunicated even on Yom Kippur, stipulated, as reported by Asaf:

 

In case of anybody who informs, even about Jewish money, and certainly in cases of bodily harm, every Jew knows the law and therefore there is no need to make any rules. We only are warning, we order every Jew who sees or hears such action, whether it concerns him or not, within three days to tell it to two notables of the town who are not connected to the informer. Otherwise he [that Jew who sees of hears such action] will be excommunicated himself, and the punishment of the informer will be applied to him. The two notables will then do what they should do. But if the informer is powerful and for the time being they [the notables] cannot do anything to him, the rabbis and notables will write his name in the Chronicle [of the town] so that his [the informer’s] sons will not be circumcised, no one will marry his

 

 

 

 

 

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daughters and he will be excluded from all sacred matters. The good chief rabbis will also keep watch so that the verse “and when I shall avenge” [a verse occurring several times in the Pentateuch that supposedly means that God’s revenge has been delayed but will come] would apply to him.

 

Again, the language employed is more cautious and indirect than a direct order to kill an informer or a Jew who did not report an informer. The last sentence of the ruling is especially relevant.

 

A second Polish example is found in the preserved chronicle of the Jewish community in Krakow. This is discussed by Asaf on page 133 of The Punishments. This chronicle condemns Yisrael, son of Rabbi Aharon Welitshker, for informing on the Jews in regard to financial matters, robbing, using violence and committing religious offences that cannot be written. The condemnation continued:

 

We, the notables of the community and we the most honorable [rabbinical court], let the Lord guard them, considered the honor of his family and lessened his punishment. We therefore condemn him only to be excommunicated in all the synagogues and be incapable of either bearing testimony or swearing [in rabbinical court]. An iron collar should be put on his neck. He must also give back what he took by robbery, whether it was stolen from individuals or from communities. His property should be confiscated wherever found.

 

Additionally, he was ordered expelled from the town; not one of his descendents was ever allowed to live in that town. This tempered verdict was issued in the spring of 1772.

 

The third Polish example is taken from the preface to a talmudic book, Taharat Kodesh, published in 1733 and written by Rabbi Benyamin, son of the important Polish religious leader, Rabbi Matattya. This book, to which Asaf referred on page 133 of The Punishments, showed that informers

 

 

 

 

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increased in number over a period of time, in spite of killings and other ferocious punishments meted out to them. Rabbi Benyamin bitterly complained about the large number of Jewish informers in his time and added that many Jews helped or flattered them. He asked Jews to avoid the informers. His proposed remedy was “to allow their blood [to be shed] so that we shall exterminate them totally.” Rabbi Benyamin additionally prohibited accepting money from them for charitable purposes. He added that in an unspecified distant country the Jews had succeeded in exterminating the informers and thereby were secure in spite of their spending a goodly amount of money for their security. Rabbi Benyamin’s recommendations were not cautious. More importantly, the Tsarist police investigations of the killing of Jewish informers and the many testimonies of enlightened Jews in the nineteenth century show that the problem of Jewish informers was not solved by these recommendations.

 

After the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between Russia, Austria and Prussia, finalized in 1795, and after the resultant abolition of autonomy of Jewish communities by the three conquering powers, violence inflicted by Jews, especially by Jewish authorities, on other Jews rapidly declined. Violence virtually disappeared in the Prussian part of Poland and remained at about the same level in the areas ruled by Russia. In the Russian area, violence, when practiced however, was often secret. In the area ruled by Austria (Galicia) the situation was a bit more complex; Jewish violence such as assassinations of modernist rabbis occurred under certain conditions.

 

The different levels of inter-Jewish violence in the three parts of divided Poland should be ascribed to the different levels of modern influences after the division. The Jews in the Prussian part of Poland were in an efficient absolutist monarchy, equipped with a good police and civil administration that were greatly influenced by modernist tendencies. The first partition of Poland occurred when Frederic II, the Great, the friend of Voltaire and other French philosophers of the age of the Enlightenment, ruled Prussia. The influences of the Enlightenment, at least in the ranks of Prussian

 

 

 

 

 

 

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administrators, remained strong for at least a generation after the death of Frederic II in 1786. Probably of equal importance was the fact that the Jewish Enlightenment began in Prussia, which possessed even before the partition of Poland a strong community of enlightened Jews, centered on Berlin, who at that time expressed themselves as much in Hebrew as in German. These enlightened Jews could thus be immediately understood by the majority of male Jews in areas annexed to Prussia.

 

The Jews in the Russian area of Poland were by contrast in a more backward regime that had a weak and inefficient administration in spite of the thin veneer of the Enlightenment provided by Catherine II, the Great. Russia had also been a country without Jews for hundreds of years. The first Jews allowed to live in the Tsarist Empire were the Jews who lived in the annexed Polish territory. The notorious “Pale,” the only area of Russia where Jews, with a few exceptions, were allowed to live until 1917, was simply the area of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth annexed to Russia. The “old Russia” kept its “purity” of being forbidden to Jews. Because of the absence of Jews, Russians, especially Russian Church leaders, had a strong tradition of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism in Russia in 1800 was worse than in any other country at that time. The Tsarist regime, moreover, at the beginning of the Polish takeover introduced special taxes on Jews, in force until 1905, as well as other discriminations against Jews. The absence of large towns and cities, except for St. Petersburg and Moscow which were forbidden to Jews, and the undeveloped state of education enabled most Jews annexed to Russia to continue their old customs, especially in the smaller communities, until the 1880s. The old customs included the persecution of heretics and the killing of informers. Nevertheless, the small but growing group of enlightened Jews found it easier to oppose these and other old customs under Russian rule than under the conditions of Jewish autonomy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russian rule, even with its deficiencies, afforded the enlightened Jews somewhat more protection than they previously had, enabling them at least to testify about killings of informers.

 

The Jews in the territories annexed by Austria were in an intermediate

 

 

 

 

 

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situation between Prussia and Russia. After 1848 and especially after 1867, when Austria granted a limited form of constitution and other civil liberties, the Jewish situation in Austria came to approximate more the Prussian and after the unification of Germany in 1871, the German model.¹⁸ Austria and the Hapsburg dynasty had strong anti-Semitic tendencies that were prominent under Maria Theresa (1740-80), who was probably the most anti-Jewish ruler of eighteenth-century Europe and who was responsible for the largest expulsion of Jews before the Nazi era: she expelled about 70,000 Jews from Prague and other Bohemian towns in 1745. Maria Theresa had to reverse her decree and allow Jews to return within a short time because of the strong protests of her allies, Britain and Holland, upon whose subsidies she depended in the War of Austrian Succession. Her successor, Joseph II, reversed her policies and in 1782 issued a decree granting limited, but still significant, rights to Jews. He did this in the face of considerable opposition.¹⁹ After Joseph’s death in 1790, the two tendencies fluctuated until Emperor Franz Joseph decided to adopt a pro-Jewish policy in 1867.

 

The new Israeli historians have presented evidence showing that until the 1880s the killings of Jewish informers by Jews in the Tsarist Empire were numerous. In his article dealing with the new Israeli historians Rosen quoted the writer, Shaul Ginzberg, who wrote in his autobiography that during the nineteenth century hundreds of Jewish informers were drowned in the Dnieper, the largest river flowing in the “Pale.” These informers were charged and convicted under the law of the informers simply because they were suspected of informing the authorities about something. Rosen wrote: “Like Avraham Cohen, some of them acted because of ideological reasons such as the wish to bring the Jewish community to a modern way of life.” Dr. David Asaf researched some of those affairs and said: “Some of the informers were professionals who gave the authorities information about tax concealment, but even in such cases, judging them by what amounts to rabbinical martial courts and their execution by what amounts to lynching help us to understand the conflict between the enlightened Jews and the Orthodox, particularly the Hassids.” As previously shown, a Jewish informer was condemned to death in secret without being able to say anything in his

 

 

 

 

 

 

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own defense. This mode of execution was employed for hundreds of years until the recent time.²⁰ Rosen asked Asaf if the Jewish community regarded those informers as traitors. Asaf responded:

 

They were not so regarded by the enlightened Jews. More than this, the enlightened Jews wanted the Jews to be citizens of the state. This included in their view paying taxes and serving in the army. Giving information to authorities was in many cases a necessary thing in their view. If you compare the situation to the one existing [in Israel) now [one year after the assassination of Rabin] then, with some changes, the present conflict is similar to what went on then.

 

To show what was involved, Asaf recounted an affair he had researched involving a famous Hassidic rabbi from the town of Rozin, Israel Friedman, who was known as the “holy man of Rozin.” Friedman as a major Hassidic personage was important, because the Hassidic movement played a major role in those assassinations. Asaf related, as reported by Rosen:

 

Friedman was one of the greatest Hassidic leaders. In Jewish history books he is represented as a person of small scholarly knowledge but also as a man of power who enjoyed the delights of life. He was instrumental in the issuing of the law of the pursuer against some informers from the town of Oshitz in the Podolia district of the Ukraine. In February, 1836, a corpse of one of the persons, Yitzhak Oxman, was found beneath blocks of ice on the frozen river. The corpse was so mutilated, apparently as a result of torture, that it was difficult to identify. Only some time thereafter, when the corpse was taken out of its grave, were new witnesses able to identify it. The corpse of the other murdered person, Shmuel Schwatzman, disappeared. We now know that he was strangled while praying in the synagogue. His corpse was cut into pieces and burned in the oven that heated the community bath.

 

 

 

 

 

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Following a police investigation, in which even Tsar Nicolai I was interested, it was established that the Jews of the community where the murder was committed, including relatives of the murdered persons, knew perfectly well what had taken place and how it was carried out. Everyone stayed silent either because of strong discipline or because of fear. This case was one of the few in which a secret rabbinical court, which issues unwritten verdicts of the law of the pursuer and death punishments, was discovered. Yosef Perl, one of the chiefs of the enlightened Jews of Galicia, secretly supplied information to the Russian authorities in order to bring about the conviction of Rabbi Yisrael of Rozin.

 

Asaf, who also described other Hassidic murders, said that Perl, who hated the Hassids, acted for reasons that he believed to be ideological. Rosen, in interviewing the new historians, discovered that the various Hassids also struggled violently with one another mainly because of economic interests. He wrote: “Since the Hassids gave money to their holy men and some of the latter adopted a nineteenth century way of life that rivalled the luxuries of contemporary kings, they were interested in the places from which their incomes came.”

 

Pre-modern Judaism was characterized by many cases of inter-Jewish violence, of which the few cases mentioned above are merely representative. These few cases, however, are sufficient to show that Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, both in its messianic and Haredi forms, is a reversion to a situation that existed before the onset of modernization and the loss of the type of Jewish autonomy with its arbitrary powers that allowed killing or otherwise severely punishing informers. What occurred in Jewish fundamentalism is not dissimilar to what occurred in other forms of fundamentalism. Some innovations have been made, largely to disguise true intent. The predominant wish ideologically is to return to the supposedly “good times” when everything was seen and kept in proper order. In the case of the Jewish messianic variety of fundamentalism, the idea is to use modern methods to achieve the power to re-establish the traditional way of

 

 

 

 

 

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life in an effectual manner. The dangers of Jewish fundamentalism being established in Israel as at least part of the ruling power are great. For non-Jews in the Middle East, the Arabs and especially the Palestinians, the main danger is in and with the messianic variety of Jewish fundamentalism. This is most apparent in the role of the Jewish religious settlers in the Occupied Territories. For Israeli Jews who will not accept the tenets of Jewish fundamentalism, however, all varieties are dangerous. The Jewish fundamentalist attitude towards heretics is much worse than is the attitude towards non-Jews. This is analogous to the situation in other religions. A contemporary example is the attitude of the Iranian regime to Baha’ists, regarded as Muslim heretics, which is much worse than the attitude towards Christians and Jews. Our firm belief is that a fundamentalist Jewish regime, if it came to power in Israel, would treat Israeli Jews who did not accept its tenets worse than it would treat Palestinians. This book is an attempt to provide wider understanding of Jewish fundamentalism and hopefully help avert the danger from becoming a reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes

 

 

 

 

1. 1. “Rabenu” is the Hebrew word for “our rabbi.” It was an honorary title given only to a few of the most famous rabbis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2. 2. Before and during talmudic times, rabbis in the Holy Land who were empowered to teach authoritatively and to serve as judges were appointed by “laying of hands.” A rabbi, already so appointed, laid his hands on the head of a candidate and pronounced a sacred formula designed to transmit a sacred power, supposedly derived from Moses although not mentioned in the Bible. Rabbis in other countries never were given this form of appointment. Even if diaspora rabbis came to the Holy Land and after a long stay of study received the “laying of hands” appointment, they were forbidden to transmit it to other diaspora rabbis not in the Holy Land. The students of diaspora rabbis, who themselves became rabbis but did not go to the Holy Land, were, therefore, unable to judge in many matters under the normal law. The last Palestinian rabbis with powers derived from “laying of hands” seemingly disappeared in the tenth century without leaving successors.

 

3. 3. This rule, which was never abrogated, seemingly applies to Torah scrolls used by Conservative and Reform rabbis. Many Orthodox rabbis in Israel have proclaimed that Reform and Conservative rabbis are heretics. Some of these Orthodox rabbis have publicly stated that Reform Jews are worse than heretics.

 

4. 4. One example of these freely discussed issues is: After the Great Flood, how did animals who could not swim well and far reach islands in the Mediterranean?

 

5. 5. One example of such theological problems is: What is God by his very nature incapable of doing?

 

6. 6. Israel Shahak, one of the authors of this book, was present as a child in Warsaw, Poland, in early 1939 at a funeral of a Jewish heretic, the second cousin of his father. (He also heard this story confirmed by family members later.) At the funeral the immediate family members, including the father, put on the white garments that pious Jews wear on the holidays and rejoiced.

 

One of Shahak’s friends who came from Alexandria, Egypt, after hearing this story, recalled a similar Jewish funeral in Alexandria in the early 1940s with

 

 

 

 

 

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the family dressed in white.

 

 

7. 7. Rabbi Samuel the Prince was so called, because he was a minister and a general in the kingdom of Granada.

 

8. 8. The Karaites denied the authority of the Talmud and only accepted the Rabbi Yoseph ben Faruj, who was made the head of the Jews in Spain and given the title of Prince, expelled the Karaites.

 

9. 9. A punishment considered to be similar to the kuneh was the putting of an iron collar on the neck of a Jewish criminal. The criminal then would have to walk or pace with this iron collar.

 

10. 10. This important background is unfortunately not mentioned in the major historical studies of the Jews in the United States or in other countries to which Jews immigrated in the nineteenth centuty. The background is likewise not mentioned in those romantic, apologetic works that purport to describe the lives of first-generation Jewish immigrants. Many characteristics of the Jews in the United States and elsewhere were probably affected by this background.

 

11. 11. This letter is described and partially quoted in Meir Balaban, The History of the Frankist Movement (Tel-Aviv, 1934 in Hebrew, p. 128). The letter was published in full in Rabbi Yaakov Emden’s Sefer Hashimush, a collection of documents about various heresies (part B, document B).

 

12. 12. Ibid.

 

 

13. 13. This important point is seldom acknowledged in the histories of Jews written in English.

 

14. 14. David Asaf should be distinguished from Rabbi Simha Asaf who wrote

 

The Punishments After the Talmud was Finalized: Materials for the History of Hebrew Law Jerusalem, 1992).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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15. 15. Two most important sources should be consulted to gain an understanding of these satires and the nature of the Hassidic movement against which they were directed. The first source is Yitzhak Erter’s satire, Metempychosis (Gilgul Nefesh in Hebrew). Erter, who died in 1852, was regarded as the best Hebrew satirist of his time; his works were widely read and were republished again and again, the last time in 1996 in Israel. In his satire, Ertel dealt with the Hassidic belief in metempsychosis and the help given by holy rabbis to the soul as it passes from a human body to an animal and then back again. The author meets a soul of a recently deceased Jew that tells him about its seventeen changes of abode. In one of those adventures, the soul inhabited a body of an intriguing zealot who died of chagrin when one of his intrigues failed; the soul then passed into the body of a fox with an especially beautiful and long tail. The tail caused the fox to be noticed by fox hunters and killed. Because a blessing of a holy rabbi was not said at the moment of death, however, the soul became a disembodied ghost. A Hassid bought the fur made of the fox’s tail and in turn made it into a collar for a coat that he offered to his holy rabbi. A miracle occurred when the holy rabbi put on the coat and the fur touched his (the rabbi’s) holy flesh. Erter wrote: “The fox’s late soul was born again in a body of another holy rabbi, a person as clever and deceitful as a fox. “

 

The second source is an earlier work, The Discoverer of Secrets (Megaleh Temirin in Hebrew), published anonymously in 1819 by Yosef Perl, the most enlightened Jew in Galicia at that time. The book purports to consist of letters written (in atrocious Hebrew, imitated from the bad style and grammar common in Hassidic books) by one Hassid to another and supposedly edited by another Hassid who found the letters and added learned references from major Hassidic books for every absurdity piously related by the correspondents. In Letter 150, one of the Hassids related that his holy rabbi died and that his widow earned a great amount of money by selling his garments to Hassids. Clothes of holy rabbis have sacramental value and absolve even the greatest sins if worn. Putting on a shirt of a holy rabbi; for example, absolves a person of the sin of murder, while putting on a holy rabbi’s trousers absolves a person of adultery. The supposed editor of this book added several authentic references from Hassidic books to

 

 

 

 

 

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substantiate this belief among Hassids of his time. Such beliefs continue to be common among Hassids of today.

 

Unfortunately many of the books written specifically about Hassidism and almost all general Jewish histories written in English do not mention such beliefs.

 

16. 16. “Moser,” the Hebrew word for informer, is a terrible insult for Jews, similar to the word “collaborator” for Palestinians.

 

17. 17. This was feasible if the Jewish community was united in facing a single informer or heretic or even a few of them. Difficulty arose when the community was split; each group then thought the other was heretical and should be reported to the authorities. This happened often in Jewish history. The consequences of such quarrels in which the non-Jewish authorities became involved were sometimes localized but other times spread to and disturbed Jewish communities in several countries. One such controversy involved Maimonides, a most severe critic of heresy who in this case was accused of being a heretic himself. Maimonides’ position as a doctor to Al-Abdal, the brother of Saladin and the governor of Egypt, and as the supervisor of Egyptian Jews, prevented any significant Jewish attacks upon him in Muslim countries. Some Iraqi rabbis, who presumably enjoyed the patronage of the Khalif A-Nasir (1180-1225), made cautious accusations against him. Even after his death, Maimonides’ position as supervisor of Egyptian Jews, which was inherited by his descendants for six generations, greatly fortified his position in all Muslim countries. In Christian Europe, however, Maimonides was repeatedly accused of being a heretic. Rabbi Shlomo of Montpellier from southern France first made this charge in the 1220s. Some rabbis and notables defended him; others opposed him. The anti-Maimonidean faction informed the Christian inquisitors, who were busy persecuting the Albigenses in southern France, that the philosophical, as well as some halachic, writings of Maimonides also offended Christianity. The inquisitors probably knew neither Hebrew nor Arabic, the languages in which the supposedly offending books were written, but they collected and burned some of them publicly. The pro-Maimonidean faction appealed to

 

 

 

 

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feudal lords, who captured some of the anti-Maimonidean Jews and delivered them to their Jewish enemies, who punished them as informers by cutting out their tongues. The controversy, nevertheless, continued until about 1300. This controversy probably still exists. In spite of the enormous prestige Maimonides enjoys among Orthodox Jews as the first codifier of the Halacha and as the leading philosopher of Judaism, he remains suspect among the Haredim. Most Haredi rabbis keep the philosophical writings of Maimonides away from most of their pupils. Maimonides, in the opinion of some scholars and in the view of this book’s writers, was in some ways a heretic according to his own definition of the term. The obscure writing of his philosophy makes his heresies difficult for most readers to perceive. On this point, see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Chapters 2 and 3. Strauss compared the style of writing employed by some writers under the Communist regimes of the 1950s with the style employed by Maimonides and other Jewish medieval thinkers. Both groups used a comparable style to obscure some points from many readers because of fear of persecution by zealots, while at the same time giving hints that could be understood by sophisticated readers.

 

18. 18. This situation, which endured until the rise of Nazism, made the Jews of eastern Europe strong German sympathizers and contributed tO the rise of modern Polish anti-Semitism. Contrary to what Goldhagen has propagated, Jews of eastern Europe, even during World War I, regarded the Germans and the German occupying army as philo-Semitic. They had good reasons for holding this view.

 

19. 19. In addition to the standard works of Jewish history, see Ernst Wangermann, The Austrian Achievement 1700-1800 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Wangermann noted outbursts of anti-Semitic violence in the period after the limited tolerance granted by Joseph II. He also noted that a conservative member of the Council of State, critical of the Jews of Vienna for beginning to dress in a modern way, remarked: “[The sight ot] young Jewish men, contrary to all custom going in public dressed indistinguishably from Christians… some even with swords at their sides [presages dissolution

 

 

 

 

 

 

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of society]. ” Cardinal Migazzi, the Archbishop of Vienna and the leader of the Catholic Conservative Party, was one of the people who most warned against any toleration for Jews. After the death of Joseph II and at the request of some rabbis, the Austrian government instituted strict censorship of Jewish books and prohibited the printing and import of all books of the Cabbala. Eliezer Falklash, the rabbi of Prague and the personal friend of the censor appointed to carry out this “holy work,” addressed a long responsa to the censor on this subject. Rabbi Falklash in his responsa praised the order and applauded the Emperors Leopold II and Francis II for upholding the purity of the Jewish religion. See Shmuel Vertes, Enlightenment and False Messianic Tendencies: History of a Struggle Jerusalem: Shmuel Vertes, 1998, in Hebrew).

 

20. 20. This is unknown to many Jews living in English-speaking countries because of censorship and apologetic writing that leaves out negative aspects ofJewish history. In Israel today, the Hebrew press frequently reports the use by Haredim of the law of the informer and the law of the pursuer. On February 18, 1999, for example, Haaretz reported that Israeli prosecutors accused Yosef Prushinovsky, a Haredi Jew who lived in the Mea She’arim quarter of Jerusalem and was on trial for swindling tens of millions of dollars from Haredim around the world, of trying to intimidate Haredi witnesses with these two laws. Prushinovsky allegedly threatened to use these two laws against any Haredi witnesses who dared to testify against him in Israeli secular courts. Many Haredi rabbis have held that testifying in Israeli secular courts, in which Arabs can be judges, constitutes informing to non-Jewish authorities. Haredi Jews, such as Prushinovsky, are thus often able to commit crimes, usually swindling, with legal impunity so long as they do it in their own community and do not steal so much that their pious victims are influenced to commit a grave sin in order to retrieve their money. The same situation is prevalent in some of the Haredi Jewish communities in the United States, but the American press rarely reports the cases or offers any halachic explanation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Web Editor’s Note

 

This document is reproduced as published. No changes to the text have been made.

 

Reprinted in accordance with U.S. copyright law.

 

 

 

Alabaster’s Archive

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Note on Bibliography and Related Matters

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Serious books describing a social phenomenon usually contain a bibliographical listing or essay, detailing and perhaps briefly discussing the primary and secondary sources consulted by the authors. For some years we have read a significant number of books in English and Hebrew that are concerned with Judaism and the state of Israel. In our book we decided to refer only minimally to those books in English; we relied primarily upon the Israeli Hebrew press, basic Jewish religious (and in a few cases literary) texts and some learned Hebrew articles, published in Israeli journals and magazines. We identified these in our text. Our first reason for doing this is that Hebrew sources are, with few exceptions, the most pertinent in dealing with Jewish fundamentalism in Israel. We are nevertheless aware that the number of books that focus on aspects of or background to our topic, published in English and languages other than Hebrew, is large. We wish to offer an explanation about why we did not cite, and most often ignored, much of this voluminous literature.

 

We believe that the great majority of the books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter. The falsification is sometimes a result of explicit lying but is mostly the result of omission of major facts that may create what the authors consider to be an adverse view of their subjects. Many of the books that fit into this category are comparable to much of the literature produced in totalitarian systems, whether religious or secular and whether or not embodied in a state. We do not deny that books on Israel and Judaism published in English have value; they may, and often do, contain correct and valuable information. Books about the USSR under Stalin or his successors written by Stalinists, books about Iran written by followers of Khomeini, books on Christian fundamentalism written by its adherents often contain correct and valuable information. Many other analagous examples exist. What usually makes such books unreliable are not so much the lies but rather the purposeful omissions. Regarding

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Judaism and Israel, the omissions are more blatant and numerous in books published in English outside of Israel than they are in Israel’s Hebrew literature. The omissions pertinent to our subject of Jewish fundamentalism exist for the same apologetic reasons as do the literary omissions in any totalitarian system. The information freely available in Hebrew can and should be used to redress apologia by omissions in English. The coverage in Hebrew of Jewish fundamentalism is more complete and is not riddled with omissions, because, as our book shows, Jewish fundamentalism poses an immediate threat to the beliefs and style of life of a majority of Israeli Jews. Jewish fundamentalism, if it increases in strength, could destroy Israeli democracy; this danger does not exist in the diaspora where Jews, even when supporting the worst aspects of Jewish fundamentalism, benefit from democracy and pluralism. In our view the state of Israel has faults that have been and still are caused by the nature of Zionism and by the open and hidden influences of Jewish fundamentalism. To exchange the present reality of the state of Israel for a Jewish fundamentalist state of either the Haredi or messianic variety would create a far worse situation for Jews, Palestinians and perhaps the entire Middle East. We believe that our book, based primarily upon Hebrew sources, correctly points out this danger for the first time in English.

 

To document our above comments, we shall present a short list of important issues in Israel and in Jewish history of the diaspora before the modern period, which are relevant for Jewish fundamentalism but are nevertheless omitted from the literature in English about Israel and Judaism. We shall first consider two issues, closely connected to Jewish fundamentalism, that are not specifically mentioned in our book. We shall thereafter present some issues that, although discussed in our book, are not mentioned in the voluminous literature in English. During the Labor Party primaries of the 1999 Israeli election campaigns, accusations appeared in the Hebrew press claiming that fraud in the vote counts occurred in Druze and Arab sectors of the party. The use of such expressions should raise concern. Political parties in the United States and Britain do not specify Jewish, non-Jewish or similar sectors. Readers of the Israeli Hebrew press know that an Arab or Druze, that is, a non-Jew who is an Israeli citizen, even if living in Tel-Aviv or

 

 

 

 

 

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Haifa, cannot belong to the Labor Party branch of her or his neighborhood; that person must belong to one of the two sectors that exist for Druze and Arabs respectively. Jews cannot belong to one of those sectors.

 

Consequently, an Arab living in Tel-Aviv votes in the primaries of the Israeli Labor Party only as a member of the Arab sector and not together with her or his neighbors. Other types of sectors also exist, based upon social structure in the Labor Party. The kibbutzim sector is one example. In these other sectors membership fluctuates according to the natural movements of population, not according to racist criteria. A kibbutz member of the Labor Party who leaves the Kibbutz to settle in Tel-Aviv becomes a member of the party branch of that person’s new neighborhood; conversely, a Tel-Aviv member of the Labor Party who joins a kibbutz automatically becomes a member of the kibbutz sector. In contrast, an Arab member of the Labor Party remains an Arab wherever that person lives, confined ethnically or more precisely religiously. Such a proposal for the operation of political parties in the United States or Great Britain would be quickly labeled and condemned correctly as anti-Semitic. Such a proposal would be roundly discussed in the press and in other literature concerned with the United States and/or Great Britain. In the voluminous descriptions in English of Israel, this phenomenon, although known in Israel, is almost never mentioned.

 

The probable reasons for the above omission are most likely the same as those for other similar omissions. The first and most important probable reason is that many Jews and those who sympathize with them wish to avoid comparisons between what rights Jews as a minority in the diaspora demand for themselves and what rights Jews deny to non-Jews in those areas where Jews are a majority and wield the power. We believe that Jewish fundamentalism justifies, explicitly and unconsciously as a believed survival tactic, both the discrimination and its cover-up. As noted in our book, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel influences most of society. Its influence is especially significant in regard to the principles of Israeli state policies, but its hidden and often clear-cut influence upon a majority of Jews in the diaspora is strong. Two additional reasons in our view account for

 

 

 

 

 

 

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omissions of vital facts in the English discussion of phenomena in Israel that could be disturbing to many people. A hidden, and sometimes not so hidden, assumption made in much of the English literature about Judaism and about Israel as a Jewish state is that Jews are morally superior to all other nations. This is the most important belief of Jewish fundamentalists who condemn almost everything “not Jewish” mostly because it is non-Jewish. Any discussion of the fact that many Jews, when they are able, practice the same kind of discrimination against non-Jews that some non-Jews practice against Jews could be detrimental to the theory of Jewish moral superiority. Although we believe this is part of racist theory, which we oppose, we understand that unfortunately human beings, including Jews, often have xenophobic tendencies influenced by historical circumstances. Thus, Jews can and should be viewed within the same context as other human beings and should in this regard work to eradicate Jewish xenophobia by exposing it in its present and past forms. The second reason emanates from writers who are apologists for and from other advocates of the Israeli political left. The Labor Party is Israel has consistently practiced blatant racism. Likud, the most important party of the Israeli right, has not practiced racism so severely and generally as has the Labor Party. As opposed to the Labor Party situation, Arabs have been, and still are, able to be members of Likud in their own neighborhood branches. The idea that the Israeli right wing is in this particular case better than the Labor Party is abhorrent to the dogmatists of and apologists for the left just as in the 1930s the idea that many practices in Great Britain were better than those of Stalin was abhorrent to fellow travelers. The refuge in both cases was and is a consistent omission of facts that do not fit into the dogma.

 

A similar case in point is kibbutz membership in Israel. The kibbutz is one of the most admired, especially by leftist apologists, Israeli phenomena. It is a fact, widely known and discussed in Israel, that only Jews can be kibbutz members. Non-Jews who wish to become kibbutz members must not only acquire the approval of the kibbutz members; they must, as a condition of joining, convert to Judaism. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate has established conversion schools for non-Jews who wish to join kibbutzim. One of the conditions for conversion to Judaism of women in this as in other situations

 

 

 

 

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is that the female convert must be observed naked in a purification bath by three rabbis. Some of the other conditions for conversion of those non-Jews desirous of joining kibbutzim are lighter than are conditions for other potential converts. The Israeli Hebrew press has often focused upon the degree of difference in conversion procedures and has also mentioned repeatedly that to date not one Palestinian has become a kibbutz member. This specific, clearly influenced by Jewish fundamentalism, is almost always omitted in English language books published about and media coverage of Israel. We need not emphasize the wide discussion that would ensue if a British or American institution allowed Jews to become members only if they converted to Christianity.

 

Scholars and news media people who purport to describe Israel authoritatively have, as previously indicated, systematically ignored by omission critical phenomena, discussed in our book. Some examples of this follow. In Chapter 1 of our book we mentioned that the concept of Jewish blood bound together the Israeli secular right wing and religious Jews. This concept, which deems the blood of a killed or wounded Jew to be infinitely greater in value than the blood of a killed or wounded non-Jew, is of supreme importance in Israeli politics. The Netanyahu government in 1998 refused, even when pushed by the United States government, to release Palestinian prisoners who had killed Jews, whether they were soldiers killed in a clash or civilians murdered in a terrorist attack. The Jewish blood concept was the only possible reason. The same Netanyahu government, as well as some previous Israeli governments, have not objected to freeing Palestinian prisoners who had killed other Palestinians. The Palestinians killed were usually presumed to be agents of the Israeli secret police. The same situation has existed in regard to the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon and to the South Lebanese Anny. The main reason for creating those entities, which have prevented a cease-fire occurring between Israel and Lebanon, was the Israeli desire, influenced by Jewish fundamentalism, to save “Jewish blood.” A majority of Israeli Jews have paid little attention to Lebanese, who have been killed, whether they were members of the South Lebanese Army or simply inhabitants of this zone. Bursts of anguish and

 

 

 

 

 

 

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even protests, on the other hand, have accompanied almost every Jewish casualty. Israeli protesters demanding that Israel leave Lebanon have mentioned only the Israeli casualties. Usually, only those Israeli Jews who have openly opposed Jewish fundamentalism in all its aspects, such as Israel Shahak, one of the authors of this book, have mentioned the Lebanese casualties. The politically important distinction between Jewish blood and non-Jewish blood is well-known to most Israelis but is ignored by almost all those who write about Israel and its policies.

 

As also noted in Chapter 1, Rabbi Yoseph, who commands the unquestioned allegiance of ten Shas members of the Knesset, argued in a published article that Israel is not sufficiently strong to destroy Christian churches on its territory and should therefore return some of the occupied territory to the Palestinians. Otherwise, Rabbi Yoseph contended, Jews might be killed in a war that could erupt. We pointed out that most writers who discussed Rabbi Yoseph’s alleged dovish leanings falsified by omitting his reasons for advocating concessions. In addition to emphasizing Israeli weakness, Rabbi Yoseph expressed willingness to command the destruction of idolatrous, Christian churches if Israel and the Jews were sufficiently strong to do this without serious damage to Jews. Rabbi Yoseph thus illustrated the fierce and visible hatred of Christianity and Christians so evident among fundamentalist Jews and, to a lesser extent, among many other Israeli Jews of the political right. Although discrimination against and persecution of Jews in Christian countries has helped to persuade some secular Jews to accept this fundamentalist attitude, it is not the sole explanation. Oriental Jewish rabbis, and to a lesser extent their followers who came from Muslim countries wherein they were generally not persecuted by Christians, have expressed more hate of Christianity and its symbols than the fundamentalist European rabbis and their followers who were persecuted by Christians. In dealing with political factors in our book, we did not specify many of the often petty forms of hatred of Christianity that are officially approved. One case in point is that Israeli educational authorities removed the international plus sign from the textbooks of elementary arithmetic used in the first grades of Israeli schools. Allegedly, this plus sign, which is a cross, could religiously corrupt little Jewish children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Instead of the offending cross, the authorities substituted a capital “T.” This substitution was made some years after Israel became a state; the influence of Jewish fundamentalism was responsible. If this substitution had been made by the Taliban in Afghanistan, by the Iranian regime or by China during the cultural revolution, it would probably have been discussed at length. In contrast, this easily discoverable fact has been omitted in English-language articles and books concerned with Israeli Jewish society and Judaism. This omission is but one piece of the existent evidence that most books of this genre are unreliable.

 

In Chapter 2 we pointed to specific acts of discrimination against and abuse of women perpetrated by Jewish fundamentalists. Seemingly unimpressed by the Israeli Hebrew discussion of and the Israeli Jewish feminist criticism of this discrimination and abuse, writers of English-language books and articles about Israel have rarely mentioned this phenomenon. They have not acknowledged that until modern times most Jewish women were kept illiterate and denied education by command of the rabbis. They and others have condemned abuses of women in Iran and other countries but have refused to specify the even more abusive acts against women in Israel. Jewish feminists have instead celebrated in their writings the few important Jewish women mentioned in the Bible and the one woman mentioned in the Talmud, Bruria, the wife of the second-century AD sage, Rabbi Meir. The diaspora Jewish feminists and other English-language writers have neglected any reference to the disparaging stories about women in talmudic literature; they have also failed to admit that from the time of Bruria until the advent of modern influences upon Jews in western Europe in the seventeenth century not one Jewish woman was sufficiently important to be emphasized as a leading figure in Jewish history. (This can be compared to the numerous women who became leading figures in many areas, including religion, in Western Christendom in the same time period, in spite of Christianity’s well-known discrimination against women.) The inescapable conclusion is that English-language sources are unreliable, not only in the study of the Jewish fundamentalist attitude towards women but also in the more general study of the status of women in historical Judaism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In discussing the topic of Jewish blood in Chapter 2, we quoted both the previously mentioned Rabbi Yoseph and the former chief rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, both of whom ordered pious Jews not to accept blood donations from non-Jews unless their lives were at risk. These two eminent rabbis, as well as others inside and outside of Israel who agree with this view did not invent this opinion. This and other similar opinions, existent from the beginning of blood transfusions, are based upon a talmudic prohibition that does not allow a non-Jewish nurse to breast feed a Jewish child. The cited reason for this prohibition is that the milk from a non-Jewish woman would have an adverse effect upon a Jewish child. In Chapter 2 we quoted the discussion of the Jewish blood topic that was published in 1995 not only in Israel’s most widely read daily Hebrew newspaper but in other Hebrew newspapers as well. We can assume that readers of this book who are not literate in Hebrew and who were not previously told about such discussion in the Hebrew press would be unaware of this prohibition of pious Jews accepting blood transfusions from non-Jews and sometimes even from secular Jews. This prohibition is not to be found in English-language articles or books about Judaism or Israeli Jewish society. (Some fundamentalist Jews may discuss this topic among themselves, but they limit that discussion to their own groupings and do not write about it for publication in English.) It would be absurd to suggest that in the last years of the twentieth century scholars, writers and others from around the world would not discuss and attack an analogous edict, issued by highest ranking Christian Church leaders, prohibiting Christians from accepting blood transfusions from Jews. The prohibition is not a secret; it has been openly discussed in the Israeli Hebrew press. This is yet another example of distortion by omission, which makes English-language coverage of various aspects of Israeli Jewish society unreliable.

 

In Chapter 3 we briefly discussed how followers of Rabbis Yoseph and Shach attempted to use magic against one another. This occurred after the struggle between these two leading rabbis became intense. The political significance here transcended the Yoseph-Shach disputation; the alleged use of magic is part of the deep division between Israel A and Israel B,

 

 

 

 

 

 

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which are defined previously in both our text and glossary. Members of Israel B, following some historic Jewish customs, believe in magic and witchcraft; they often practice it themselves or follow directives supposedly derived from it by rabbis and cabbalists. (Books in Hebrew detailing instructions for spells and witchcraft recipes have been best sellers in Israel for many years.) Individuals who are reputed to achieve success by use of magic frequently obtain political power in Israel. Most Israeli political pundits are agreed that one of the important reasons for Netanyahu’s victory in the 1996 election was the exclusive blessing he received during the campaign from the cabbalist Rabbi Kaduri, and the firm refusals of many Jewish magicians and cabbalists to bless Peres. (Only the Hassidic Belzer rabbi said that he was neutral regarding Peres.) Rabbi Kaduri has remained to date a widely reported, highly visible Hollywood type star in the Israeli Hebrew press. He was at the center of media attention when he descended below the surface of the sea in Eilat in a device, usually used to allow tourists to see underwater sea life, and supposedly instituted spells in order to avert an earthquake that was predicted by scientists. He claimed to have diverted the earthquake from Jews to non-Jews. Many Israeli Jews believed this claim, because the predicted earthquake was light in Eilat but was much more severe in upper Egypt.

 

Another example of the popularity in Israel of magic was evident in the circumstances surrounding the 1999 trial in the District Court ofJerusalem of a major Shas Party politician, Aryeh Der’i. Der’i was convicted and sentenced for taking bribes in spite of tens of amulets hung on his body and blessed by the most outstanding cabbalists, who additionally engaged in other magic ceremonies on Der’i’s behalf. At the same time of this trial a scientific congress on the use of magic and witchcraft in Judaism was held in Jerusalem. Tom Segev, a columnist for Haaretz and one of Israel’s best known authors, wrote that the use of magic by Jews was nothing new in Judaism. In his March 26, 1999, Hebrew-language Haaretz article, Segev transcribed a magical recipe found in a book, composed in talmudic times (AD 200-500) but still popular in the Diaspora in the eighteenth century. This recipe, which was devised to confuse a judge and cause him to acquit unjustly a person who used magic, called for the following: “Slaughter a lion

 

 

 

 

 

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cub with a copper knife. Gather its blood; tear out its heart and put the blood into it. Then, write the names of angels on the cub’s face, and wipe the names with three year-old wine. Mix the wine with the blood. Next, take three heaps of perfume (names omitted). After purifying yourself, stand before the planet Venus at night with the perfume and the blood, which must be put on fire.” This act would supposedly compel the bewitched judge to acquit. Segev reported that the Israeli scientists participating in this Congress believed magic to be “an inseparable part of Judaism—used in past intrigues involving rabbis.” To support this view, Segev quoted a saying in the Palestinian Talmud attributing the large number of High Priests during the Second Temple period to the fact that High Priests often killed one another by using witchcraft. This opinion expressed in the Palestinian Talmud is probably incorrect; the large number of High Priests during this period should most likely be attributed to bribery and other political actions of secular (mostly Jewish) authorities of time connected with making appointments. This opinion, which is not quoted in English-language writings on Judaism, nevertheless indicates the wide use of witchcraft by Jews’ attempting to kill one another in this time period. The typical picture, presented in English-language works, of the pious Jews of the third period of Jewish history is on balance invalid. The picture of the pious Jew of talmudic times, standing at night before a planet and attempting to perform magic rites, is more accurate and can help us understand the reality of Israeli Jewish society better than the fictional description offered by apologists. The use of magic in everyday life is also common in certain Jewish neighborhoods of New York, London, Paris and other cities.

 

 

 

In spite of its obvious political importance and social significance, this aspect of Judaism in modern times remains as widely unreported in English, and thus as unknown to those who do not read Hebrew, as the past use of magic and witchcraft. In all known societies some individuals have indulged, and still do indulge, in magic. The misguided attempt to hide this past and present tendency, which is widespread in Israel, has infested the English-language histories of the Jews. The substitution of apologetics for historical fact renders these history texts at least unreliable and perhaps unfit for study.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Chapters 4 and 5 we dealt with the religious Jewish settlers in territories occupied by Israel since 1967 and with Gush Emunim, the movement that produced the settlers. Despite the attention given to the issues of Israeli settlements in the territories, English-language coverage has almost totally neglected the two major considerations, without which proper understanding of this overall topic is impossible. The first consideration is that the urge to settle has been theologically motivated and is a manifestation of Jewish fundamentalism. In discussions of the obligations that people must obey in countries ruled or influenced by Muslim fundamentalists the religious reasons are highlighted. In most English-language discussions of Jewish religious settlements, however, the religious reasons are usually either totally missing or are replaced with biblical quotations, uttered by the settlers. In our text we showed that the real motivating factors for the religious settlers, some of whom have moved to improbable sites, have minimal connections to the Bible. The real reasons emanate instead from a special idea of Jewish fundamentalism. This idea asserts that the messiah will arrive soon and postulates that the world is already in the messianic age.

 

We began Chapter 4 by asserting that messianic ideology, as a radical part of Jewish fundamentalism, is based upon the differences and opposition between Jews and non-Jews rather than simply between Jews and Arabs (or Muslims). Writers of English-language books, articles and book reviews have rarely mentioned this basic tenet, the major exceptions being those writers who have composed the invalid, out-of-context, virulent and poisonous anti-Semitic literature. The published reviews of Yehoshafat Harkabi’s book, Israel’s Fateful Hour, provide a good illustration of this point. The original Hebrew edition of this book was first published in Israel; the English edition was published thereafter in the United States in 1988. Harkabi’s book received wide attention in the United States because of its analysis of Israeli politics in the 1980s and its emphasis upon differences between the Labor Party and Likud in foreign politics. In one crucial chapter, from which we quoted and paraphrased in our text, Harkabi analyzed some major issues of Jewish fundamentalism and stressed the importance of messianic ideology within that context. Harkabi’s book was extensively

 

 

 

 

 

 

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reviewed in American publications, but only one reviewer in a small circulation progressive publication referred to this crucial chapter. The other reviewers in American publications avoided any mention of this chapter and/ or its substance. Reviewers in Israel emphasized this chapter in their comments. The difference in reviewing between the United States and Israel is telling.

 

In maintaining that differences and opposition exist between Jews and non-Jews, messianic ideology continues to be the primary motivating factor for Gush Emunim and its major supporter, the National Religious Party. Those who have written about Israeli Jewish society and about Judaism but have avoided mention of this have distorted understanding. The significance here is most striking when the broad support, both direct and indirect, for Gush Emunim is considered. About one-half of Israel’s Jewish population supports Gush Emunim. The support, especially monetary, from Jews in the diaspora is also of great importance. Many Orthodox and other Jews as well in New York City and elsewhere have been and are encouraged to assist Gush Emunim by what they read in the largest circulation American Jewish weekly newspaper, the Jewish Press. Published in Brooklyn, the Jewish Press has been and continues to be an editorial advocate of Gush Emunim, often presenting op-ed articles written by leading Gush Emunim spokesmen. New York City and New York State politicians regularly seek backing of the Jewish Press during electoral campaigns. Not only have Jewish Press editorial writers advocated messianic ideology; they have also expressed admiration of Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin. The New York Times, which is read and probably influences many American Jews, has published in-depth analyses of Christian and Muslim fundamentalism but has refrained from presenting similar articles describing Jewish fundamentalism or even advocacies printed in the Jewish Press. Even so-called liberal American periodicals, such as the Nation and the New York Review of Books, which have published editorial comments and articles upholding and advocating Palestinian rights, have neglected to present analyses of Jewish fundamentalism in their own country. Readers of these and most other periodicals in the United States, and in other countries as well, would not know, unless they read books and articles published in

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Hebrew in Israel, that Gush Emunim’s goal is to build a “sacred society” whose nuclei are the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. It is insufficient, if not folly, to advocate Palestinian rights without understanding and referring to the principal cause of the denial of those rights: Jewish fundamentalism in general and the messianic variety in particular.

 

The Goldstein massacre, discussed in Chapter 6, was inadequately covered in the English press. That Israeli Jewish society was divided in its attitude towards the massacre was evident in the Hebrew but not in the English press and literature. Before the massacre, Goldstein’s refusal as a doctor on religious grounds to treat non-Jewish patients, including soldiers serving with him in the army, was, although mentioned briefly, treated lightly in the English coverage. Goldstein clearly derived his views from fundamentalist interpretations of sacred Hebrew texts. The English coverage indicated that he merely followed the teachings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a whipping boy of the American press. In reality, Goldstein’s views were more broadly based and centered in Jewish fundamentalism. Having immigrated to Israel as an adult, Goldstein, prior to his arrival in Israel, had been influenced by the “Lubovitcher Rebbe” and his influential disciple, Rabbi Ginsburgh. His attitude, moreover, was condoned by important, Israeli politicians and the Minister of Defense. Articles in the Hebrew press, to which we referred in our text, discussed these points in depth; the English coverage avoided mention of much of this.

 

In Chapter 7 we showed how well-documented features of Jewish fundamentalism during the past 800 years, the third and longest period of Jewish history, have influenced and continue to influence contemporary Jews in the state of Israel and in the diaspora as well. Both the popular and more scholarly and renowned, standard Jewish histories, written in English, omit most of these features. The historic features of Jewish fundamentalism were manifest in the Rabin assassination and in the reactions to it. Because of omission, distortion and lack of criticism of Jewish fundamentalism, the English-language coverage could not and did not put the Rabin assassination in the correct context and thus was misleading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Important issues are involved here, all of which are omitted in the standard Jewish histories. The first of these, well-known to serious students of the third period of Jewish history and especially to those who have knowledge of Jewish religious law and Orthodoxy, is that, before being affected by outside modern influences, Jewish society was not tolerant. On the contrary, autonomous Jewish authorities persecuted deviants, perhaps more than did Christian and Muslim authorities in their respective religions and certainly more than did pagan, Buddhist and Hindu authorities. The intolerant attitudes and activities, enshrined in the sacred texts of Jewish fundamentalism in all its varieties, influenced the behavior and politics of Jews, especially when they had autonomous power. To oppose the current dangers posed by Jewish fundamentalism, it is first necessary to expose its historical basis. As we have repeatedly stated, most writers of books on Judaism in English have not done this. Influenced by their heritage, many Jews have unfortunately either remained indifferent to the oppression of Palestinians in and by the State of Israel or have at times criticized acts of oppression as posing possible danger to Jews. Some of these individuals, for example, condemn the use of torture as being unconditionally inhumane when used by states other than Israel, but they argue pragmatically that its use by Israeli authorities is not in Israel’s best interest because of worldwide public opinion. Many of these same people in the United States are zealous in advocating and fighting for the separation of religion and state in their own country, but they react differently in regard to Israel. They do not criticize, indeed they most often support, the Israeli Ministry of Religion, which is almost always controlled by Jewish religious parties influenced by Jewish fundamentalism, for allotting only 2 per cent of its budget to non-Jews when nearly 20 per cent of Israel’s citizenry consists of Muslims and Christians. Both in Israel and in the diaspora the relatively few Jews who have attempted to defend non-Jews against discrimination and oppression by Jews have been those who have been influenced by modern theories of justice. The fact that the majority of Jews do not protest against, but actually support, Jewish discrimination against non-Jews, especially in the Jewish state, indicates, at least to some extent, the conscious and unconscious influence of Jewish fundamentalism. We believe that attempts to hide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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historical reality in Judaism and Jewish societies were wrong when Jews were discriminated against and persecuted in most countries. By the end of the twentieth century, when Jews have achieved greater power in many societies than any minority group of comparable numbers and when a Jewish state with nuclear weapons is protected by the United States, falsification by omission of Jewish history is purely adverse and totally unacceptable. The nearly total absence of discussion of the above intolerant aspects of the Jewish past and present in English-language books caused us to dispense with a traditional bibliographical listing or essay.

 

The issue of Jewish normalcy and the exceptions to it require examination. Jews in many instances oppressed their own people as other people did. During the same time period, for example, that rabbis ordered the hands of Jewish offenders to be cut, Spanish judges, as well as judges in most Christian and Muslim courts, did likewise. Rabbis ordered Jewish offenders put into stocks in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth just as non-Jewish authorities used the stock as a feature of regular punishment throughout Europe and in the American colonies. The systematic killing of informers, enjoined by eminent rabbis as a religious duty, has no parallel in other societies. Killing of informers has nevertheless occurred and still occurs in other societies and, as is the case in Sicilian society, is often well known. Scholarly historical works, historical novels and the classical literature in general of many countries and societies depict the sometimes-employed punishment of killing informers. In contrary fashion, the major Jewish historians who have written about the third period of Jewish history, for example, Salo W. Baron, Simon Dubnow and Yitzhak Baer, have omitted such references in their works. Other highly regarded Jewish historians who have focused upon the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Christian Spain and Germany have done likewise. Numerous Israeli scholars, who have written in Hebrew and from whom we quoted and paraphrased in our text, have in contrast displayed more honesty in their scholarship by including examples of the systematic killing by Jews of Jewish informers. Consequently, those readers who are not literate in Hebrew (or have not been told in detail about books in Hebrew about Jewish history) must have distorted perceptions of this aspect of Jewish history. This reflection

 

 

 

 

 

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solidified our resolve not to include a traditional bibliographical listing or essay.

 

The distortions, largely by omission, in the English-language histories of the third period of Jewish history are greater and more severe than are those of the first and second periods. The reason for this is obvious. Because Judaism and Jewish history are so important for the history and theology of Christianity until and shortly after the time of Jesus, Christian historians and biblical scholars, often critical in their writings, dealt with Jewish history and Israelite society during the first two periods. The better Jewish historians of those two periods have felt obligated to follow trends established in scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they have engaged in critical discussion, even while complaining about what they regarded as hostile tendencies of Christians who wrote about Jewish history. Few Christian or Muslim scholars have been or are interested in Jewish history between AD 70 and modern times, the third period. Apologetic writing of Jewish history is not unique. Most national histories include apologetic writings. The writing in English by Jews of Jewish history has remained far more retarded than have the writings of other national histories. A comparison that illustrates this point is the difference between the development of historical writing by American historians of United States history and the lack of development in the writing of Jewish history, especially of the third period. In recent decades standard United States history textbooks have included numerous negative features, previously omitted, of past discrimination and oppression of African Americans, Native Americans, women and other disadvantaged minority groups. As previously reiterated, most books in English of Jewish history, especially of the third period, continue to omit negative features of discrimination and oppression of both Jews and non-Jews by Jews. The harmful effects of these omissions remain.

 

We are finally troubled by the near unanimity in standard English-language Jewish histories regarding issues involving “Jewish interest.” Whereas the Israeli new historians of the 1980s and 1990s have sparked fruitful debate

 

 

 

 

 

 

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about basic issues not only of the past century in regard to Palestine but of the entire course of Jewish history, previous historians who wrote in English have omitted facts and disputations over interpretations of sensitive items.

 

Having already detailed much of this in our bibliographical note, we, in attempting to illustrate our point, shall here present only one additional example. The famous scholar Gershom Scholem, early in his career raised an important intellectual issue about the nature of Judaism; soon thereafter he, together with numerous other scholars, dropped it. This issue then became virtually unknown to people who did not know Hebrew. In his first book in English about Jewish mysticism, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, based upon a previous set of lectures delivered in New York City, first published in 1941 and reprinted many times, Scholem questioned whether Jews who believed in Cabbala had preserved the belief in monotheism that had been previously so characteristic of Judaism. In his seventh lecture towards the end of section five of the book, Scholem, after describing the process, which according to the Lurianic Cabbala takes place by Jewish initiative within God, wrote: “To reconcile this process with the monotheistic doctrine, which was dear to the Kabbalists as it was to every Jew, became the task of the theorists of Kabbalistic theosoply. Although they applied themselves bravely to it, it cannot be said that they were completely successful.” These two convoluted sentences implied that the most popular form of Cabbala, still believed by many Jews in Israel and in the diaspora, is not monotheistic. Actually, Scholem refrained from mentioning that many Jewish opponents of Cabbala, before it became dominant around 1550 and during the Jewish Enlightenment, asked the same question more clearly and expressed more sharply their opposition to the predominant Lurianic form on the ground that it denied monotheism. Since then, scholars who have written in English about Judaism, including Scholem himself in later books, have not, with few exceptions, questioned whether Judaism in all its forms and all times was monotheistic and/or whether many pious Jews were believers in monotheism. (Raphael Patai was one exception. In Chapters 5 to 8 of his book, The Hebrew Goddess, published in 1967, Patai raised this question. Israel Shahak, another exception, did likewise in his more recent book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion.) The scholars who have written in English

 

 

 

 

 

 

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about Judaism have, again with few exceptions, not considered in their books the even more important question of whether Judaism throughout its entire history has had fixed tenets.

 

We are aware that the books we have not put into a bibliography contain useful data. We nevertheless believe that these books are guilty of purposeful omission resulting in grave distortion and do not necessarily deserve to be listed in a bibliography. These books anyway can be easily found in other bibliographies. We append this note in lieu of a traditional bibliography in protest against what too often happens in Jewish studies outside Israel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Glossary of Terms for Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

Glossary of Terms

 

 

 

 

 

 

written by

 

Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

from Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, 1999.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Agudat Israel (“Association of Jews” in Hebrew): A former name of the Askenazi Haredi party now called Yahadut Ha’Torah.

 

Aron Ha’kodesh (“Cupboard of the Holiness” in Hebrew): Place in synagogue where the Scrolls of Law are stored, to be taken out only on specific occasions. Regarded as the holiest place in the synagogue.

 

Ashkenazi (“German” in pre-modern Hebrew): A common name for Jews whose ancestors lived in northern France, England, Germany, Poland, Russia and other countries of central and eastern Europe.

 

Bar Mitzva (“capable of [fulfilling] commandments” in Hebrew): A ceremony usually accompanied by a feast, to celebrate the occasion when a Jewish boy reaches the age of thirteen, is then obliged to fulfill all religious commandments and becomes capable of sinning. According to traditional Judaism the father is responsible for all sins committed by sons below the age of thirteen.

 

Black Panthers: In the context of this book this term refers to a small and ephemeral, but highly publicized, organization of Oriental Jews in Israel during the 1970s, which protested discrimination of Oriental Jews.

 

Bnei Brak: Israeli town near Tel Aviv, inhabited almost only by Haredim, mainly Ashkenazi.

 

Border guards: A paramilitary unit of the Israeli police.

 

Cabbala (“The received [thing]” in Hebrew): The usual name for Jewish mysticism; used especially for the Jewish mystical groups that have developed since the eleventh century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Davar (“Matter,” in Hebrew): A Hebrew newspaper that ceased to appear in the mid-1990s.

 

Degel Ha’Torah (“Flag of the Torah” in Hebrew): A faction of Mitnagdim within the party, Yahadut Ha’Torah.

 

Der’i, Aryeh: Chief politician of the Shas party, born in 1959. In April, 1999, he was convicted for taking bribes and sentenced to four years of imprisonment. The punishment was suspended pending his appeal.

 

(Knesset Link)

 

 

Ga’on (“genius ” in Hebrew): Title of the two chief rabbis in Iraq from about 650 to 1050, each of whom was acknowledged by all Jews as the supreme religious authority. In the last two hundred years also used in a vague manner to designate (or to flatter) any important rabbi.

 

Ge’onim: Plural of Ga’on.

 

Goren, Rabbi Shlomo: An important Israeli rabbi. Appointed by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion as the first Chief Rabbi of the Israeli army. Subsequently a Chief Rabbi of Israel in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Gush Emunim (“Block of Faithful” in Hebrew): The ideological and settling messianic movement (see chapters four and five). Founded in early 1974.

 

Ha’ain Hashvi’it(“the seventh eye” in Hebrew): Bimonthly issued by the Israeli Institute for Democracy and devoted to media criticism.

 

Haaretz (“The land” in Hebrew): The most prestigious Hebrew newspaper, read mainly by the elite. (Homepage)

 

Hadashot(“News” in Hebrew): A radical Hebrew newspaper of the 1980s and early 1990s.

 

Ha’ir(“The town” in Hebrew): A Friday, widely read, Hebrew newspaper of Tel Aviv and neighboring towns with radical tendencies.

 

 

 

 

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Halacha (“Accepted” in Hebrew): The term as two meanings in Hebrew. 1. The entire body of the Jewish religious law. 2. A single regulation of that law. To avoid confusion in this book we used the term only in its first meaning.

 

Where it occurred in our Hebrew sources in the second meaning (for example, in references in quotations to books codifying Jewish religious law), it was translated as “rule.”

 

Haredim (“Fearful” in the meaning “God-fearing” in Hebrew): Name of those Jewish fundamentalists who refuse modern innovations. Haredi is the singular form and is also an adverb.

 

Ha’Shavua(“The week” in Hebrew): An extreme Haredi weekly.

 

 

Heder (“Room ” in Hebrew) : Name for the pre-modern Jewish school system.

 

Hesder (“Arrangement” in Hebrew): Name for religious units in Israeli army that serve by a special arrangement.

 

Israel A and Israel B: Popular Israeli terms designating the two parts of Israeli Jewish society that often oppose each other: the former leaning to the right and the second leaning to the left and less influenced by religion.

 

Karo, Rabbi Yoseph: 1488-1575, the author of Shulhan Aruch, commentaries on Maimonides and other religious works. Regarded as the most important rabbinic authority of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

 

Kashrut (“proper manner” in Hebrew): A set of rules governing the types of food that religious Jews can eat according to the Halacha and the proper manner of their preparation.

 

Kitzur Shulhan Aruch (“abridgment of Shulhan Aruch” in Hebrew): A popular book containing the most necessary rules of Halacha, used in the education of Haredi children and by the uneducated Haredim. Written by

 

 

 

 

 

 

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rabbi Shlomo Gantzfried in early nineteenth century.

 

 

Kollel (“entire” or “inclusive” in Hebrew): An institution for the studying of Talmud by adults who have finished their Yeshiva studies.

 

Kook, Rabbi Avracham Yitzhak Hacohen: 1865-1935, also called and referred to in this book as “Rabbi Kook the elder.” After filling various rabbinic posts he was the Chief Rabbi of Palestine 1920-35. A prolific author, many of whose works were posthumously edited from his notes. The founder of the messianic ideology (chapters four and five). Held in great regard by Gush Emunim followers and to some extent by all Zionists.

 

Kook, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Hacohen: 1890-1982, a son of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook. Called and referred to in this book as “Rabbi Kook the younger.” Took over the leadership of the adherents of messianic ideology after the death of his father. All important Gush Emunim rabbis are his students.

 

Kosher: Yiddish expression used in Hebrew with ironic undertones to refer to food, chosen and prepared according to rules of Kashrut. The proper Hebrew word “Kasher” is used mainly in polite discourse.

 

Kuneh: A Yiddish word meaning a particular type of stocks used by Jews in Eastern Europe. Adopted in Hebrew historical and religious works.

 

Labor: Proper name The Israeli Labor Party. The largest and also the oldest Israeli left party. (Homepage)

 

Likud (“consolidation” in Hebrew): The largest Israeli right party. (Homepage)

 

Lurianic Cabbala: The most important branch of Cabbala since the early seventeenth century. Founded by Rabbi Isaac Luria (1538-72) and his disciples, it has dominated all subsequent Jewish mysticism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Maariv(“eventide” in Hebrew): The Hebrew daily paper with the second largest circulation.

 

Maimonides: Used in this book, following Hebrew usage, in two meanings: 1. Rabbi Moshe son of Maimon, called in European languages Maimonides, 1138-1204, author of many books of commentary on the Halacha. Also, the greatest philosopher of Judaism. 2. The largest codex of Halacha composed by Maimonides; the proper name is “Mishneh

 

Torah” (“second rank Torah”). It includes all commandments and beliefs of Jewish religious law. It is divided into books that are in turn divided into tractates, entitled according to the issues with which they deal; they tractates in turn are divided into chapters and individual rules. In our references following the Hebrew usage, only the tractate, chapter and the number of the rule are given.

 

Maskilim (“the enlightened ones” in Hebrew): Name adopted by the Jews who introduced modern influences into Judaism in late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

 

Mishnah (“repetition” in Hebrew): The basic and easier part of Talmud, often studied by itself and equipped with special commentaries.

 

Mitnagdim (“opponents” in Hebrew): The most extreme right-wing party now represented in the knesset.

 

National Religious Party: Often referred to by its acronym NRP. Represents the fundamentalist Jews in Israel who are not Haredim. (Homepage)

 

Oriental Jews (“mizrahim” in Hebrew): Collective name used at present for Israeli Jews who are not Ashkenazi.

 

Orthodox: In Israel and elsewhere, a common name for Jews who keep the rules of Halacha, or at least most of them. Orthodoxy refers to the behavior and practices of Orthodox Jews. (Contrary to Christianity, Orthodox

 

 

 

 

 

 

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and orthodoxy in Judaism refer mostly to practices and not to beliefs.)

 

 

Palestinian Talmud (called incorrectly in Hebrew “Jerusalem Talmud”): The less authoritative and extensive of the two Talmuds.

 

Pentateuch: The first five books of the Bible, believed to have been written by Moses and regarded as more sacred than the rest of the Bible.

 

Purim: A lesser Jewish holiday that occurs about one month before Passover. It has many features of the carnival but is also characterized by increased hostility to non-Jews.

 

Rabenu (“our rabbi” in Hebrew): An unofficial title given to specially important rabbis.

 

Rebbe (“rabbi” in Yiddish): Kept to this day by the holy men of Hassidic sects as one of their titles. Used in Hebrew in this connotation.

 

Sages: The customary English translation of the Hebrew term “our wise men of blessed memory.” Used primarily to designate all rabbis mentioned in the Talmud, but also to refer more vaguely to all past Orthodox rabbis.

 

Sephardi (“Spanish” in Hebrew): Until the late 1970s used in Israel instead of the term, Oriental Jews.

 

Sha’atnez: A Hebrew word denoting the forbidden mixture of wool and flax in a textile.

 

Shach, Rabbi Eliezer: 1898-, the spiritual leader of the Degel Ha’Torah faction and one of the most influential rabbis in Israel.

 

Shas: The party of Oriental Jewish Haredim. (Homepage)

 

 

Shishi(“Sixth” or “Friday” in Hebrew): Name of a defunct Hebrew weekly.

 

 

Shofar: Ram’s horn used for sacred blowing during some synagogue

 

 

 

 

 

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services and especially on the New Year.

 

 

Sholem, Professor Gershon: 1897-1982, founder of the modern study of Cabbala; wrote many authoritative books on Jewish mysticism.

 

Shulhan Aruch (“prepared table” in Hebrew): A summary of a longer work, Bet Yoseph, by Rabbi Yoseph Karo but shorter than the Maimonides version, because it omits many less important subjects. It is regarded as authoritative by most Orthodox Jews. Usually the differences between the Shulhan Aruch and the Maimonides version are minor.

 

Tal, Professor Uriel: Died in 1985. Professor of German history at Tel Aviv University. [please see Foundations of a Political Messianic Trend in Israel by Uriel Tal for an example of his work—web ed.]

 

Talmud (“study” in Hebrew): Although there are two Talmuds, Palestinian and Babylonian, the term “Talmud” without qualification always refers to the Babylonian Talmud, regarded as the most authoritative text by Orthodox Jews. The Palestinian Talmud (much shorter and inferior in its arrangement) enjoys only a supplementary authority. The basic part of both Talmuds is the Mishnah, a collection of terse laws written in Hebrew. The other part, called “Gemarah ” consists of a discussion of those laws mixed with many legends. The Gemarah is much longer than the Mishnah and is written in both Aramaic and Hebrew. Both Talmuds are divided into sixty tractates. The Babylonian Talmud is always printed in standard editions with the same division of pages so that all references are to the names of tractate and page numbers.

 

Torah Sheba’al Peh (“oral Torah” in Hebrew): Term used, especially by Orthodox Jews, to refer to the sacred Jewish literature other than the Bible.

 

Tractate: A major division of the Talmud. Each tractate has a name, usually roughly describing its main contents.

 

Tsomet (“junction” in Hebrew): Secular right-wing party headed by

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Reserve General Raphael Eitan and allied with Likud. Tsomet has been politically powerful in the early 1990s. (Homepage)

 

Yahadut Ha’Torah (“Judaism of the Torah” in Hebrew): Party of Ashkenazi Haredim, comprised of two almost independent factions: one Degel Ha’Torah and the other a coalition of Hassidic sects.

 

Yated Ne’eman(“faithful tent peg” in Hebrew): Weekly of Degel Ha’Torah.

 

 

Yediot Ahronot(“last news” in Hebrew): The Hebrew newspaper with by far the largest circulation. (Homepage)

 

Yerushalaim(“Jerusalem” in Hebrew): A Hebrew Friday paper published in Jerusalem. Belongs to Yediot Ahronot.

 

Yeshiva (“sitting” or “meeting” in Hebrew): Institution for higher Talmudic studies. The plural is Yeshivot.

 

Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement in English): The most sacred day of the Jewish religious calendar.

 

Yoseph, Rabbi Ovadia: The spiritual leader of the Shas party. [for some interesting papers and photos Rabbi Ovadia Yoseph and his supporters, please see these texts on the Shas Party]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary Psychology

 

http://www.epjournal.net – 2009. 7(2): 208-233

 

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Original Article

 

 

 

Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture

 

Kevin MacDonald, Department of Psychology, California State University – Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, USA. Email: kmacd@csulb.edu (Corresponding author).

 

Abstract: This article develops an evolutionary theory of conflict over the construction of culture that is informed by current knowledge of psychological mechanisms. Psychological mechanisms important for the production of culture include (1) general intelligence (including the ability to engender hypothetical scenarios and means-end reasoning necessary for constructing tools and other exemplars of technology); (2) explicit processing mechanisms (e.g., symbolic representations of the world). Explicit processing allows humans to regulate modular mechanisms in accordance with culturally constructed norms and culturally constructed cost/benefit payoff schedules. It also enables active attempts to construct culture in accordance with explicit perceptions of possible costs and benefits. Because people have different construals of the costs and benefits of particular forms of culture, there is conflict over the construction of culture. Social controls and ideologies are introduced as general cultural categories that are enabled by explicit processing and which are able to regulate and motivate behavior within particular historical contexts, at times in ways that conflict with evolved predispositions. Ideologies are often intimately intertwined with various social controls but are logically and psychologically independent from social controls. Ideologies typically rationalize extant social controls but they also benefit from the power of social controls to enforce ideological conformity in schools or in religious institutions. Because of the control of explicit processing over behavior, this theory predicts that conflicts over culture will often be intense. Discussion deals with the implications of this model for group selection, cultural transmission, gene-culture co-evolution, and the various types of conflicts of interest apparent in conflicts over the construction of culture.

 

Keywords: evolution, culture, explicit processing, ideology, social controls.

 

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Conflict theory of culture

 

 

Introduction

 

A major goal of this article is to argue for a conflict theory of some aspects of human culture. Theories of culture have focused on showing the conditions under which certain norms could have evolved (e.g., a reciprocity norm, Boyd and Richerson, 1988, or a norm of altruistic punishment, Boyd, Gintis, Bowles, and Richerson, 2003). Or they have stressed that random processes of imitation can give rise to some patterns of culture (Bentley, Hahn, and Shennan, 2004; Bentley, Lipo, Herzog, and Hahn, 2007; Shennan, 2006).

 

Here the focus is on within-generation conflicts of interest over the construction of culture as it relates to the control of human behavior in economically advanced societies. This perspective does not require any additional evolvability theory beyond previous work

— in particular, Boyd and Richerson’s (1992) article showing that with punishment anything can evolve. The emphasis on conflict within societies is certainly in keeping with general evolutionary considerations, since, in the absence of genetic identity, all organisms have conflicts of interest. Therefore, it is not surprising that people may have conflicts of interest over the construction of culture. More importantly for the present article is that humans have perceived conflicts of interest over the construction of culture made possible by explicit processing. It is then important to determine whether and to what extent the outcome of cultural conflict may affect biological fitness. This perspective also leads to a complex view of the relationship between human interests as proposed by evolutionary theory versus perceived interests that result from explicit processing.

A conflict theory of culture also fits well with influential non-evolutionary theories of culture such as Marxism. Marxism posits that economically dominant classes construct culture to serve their interests. A conflict theory of culture also accords with common observation of intense conflict over cultural issues (e.g., conflicts within legislative bodies over the teaching of evolution or prayer in public schools; conflicts over regulation of the content of media messages on aggression and sexuality). The idea of Kulturkampf is a well-established and much-studied phenomenon in historical societies (e.g., Ross, 2000).

 

The present approach is compatible with definitions of culture proposed by evolutionists. Culture refers to “information capable of affecting individuals’ behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission” (Richerson and Boyd, 2005, p. 8). Sperber and Hirschfeld’s (2004) definition of culture is similar, but they also emphasize that the information characteristic of culture is of general relevance to group members and that it is represented in people’s minds and expressed in their behaviors and interactions. The present article expands on the mechanism for the production of culture, with the result that there is a greater understanding of the types of information that may be transmitted to others and a greater understanding of how this information may affect behavior — in particular the control function that cultural information may exert over human behavior.

Because of their interest in cultural transmission, evolutionary models of culture have tended to emphasize social learning (e.g., Richerson and Boyd, 2005) and paid less attention to mechanisms underlying the production of culture. Richerson and Boyd (2005) discuss operant conditioning as a mechanism for producing culture, followed by social learning for cultural transmission. Tooby and Cosmides (1992) propose that the mechanisms underlying the production of culture are modular, domain-specific

 

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psychological adaptations interacting with local variation. Sperber and Hirschfeld (1999, 2004) expand on this perspective by showing that cultural variation can arise when artificial culture -specific input meets the domain-specific input requirements of the modules. Thus, the biological kinds module may be expanded beyond personally experienced animals to extinct animals like dinosaurs or imaginary creatures like dragons; moreover, the image of particular animals (e.g., the wolf as a dangerous predator) may be elaborated as a result of social communication.

 

This article expands on these mechanisms of cultural production. It is proposed that the psychological tools required to understand cultural conflict and its role in the control of behavior in economically advanced societies are general intelligence and, in particular, explicit processing. Explicit processing underlies humans’ ability to regulate evolved modular mechanisms related, for example, to aggression, ethnocentrism, and sexuality in accordance with culturally constructed norms and culturally constructed cost/benefit payoff schedules. Moreover, explicit processing enables explicit construals of the costs and benefits associated with different cultural alternatives, and thus motivates behavior that attempts to influence culture. The result is a theory of culture in which humans are creative, intentional originators of culture that serves their perceived interests.

Explicit processing therefore gives rise to the possibility of characteristically human social controls (e.g., bureaucracies, legal systems) and ideologies (religious beliefs, political ideology) that are able to regulate behavior within a particular historical context, at times in ways that conflict with predispositions resulting from human evolved psychology. Discussion deals with the implications of this model for group selection, cultural transmission, and the various types of conflicts of interest apparent in conflicts over the construction of culture.

 

Psychology and the generation of culture: General intelligence and explicit processing

 

General intelligence

 

Human culture far exceeds anything found among animals. Cultural artifacts include a very wide range of technological innovations that cannot possibly be explained by mechanisms that are well known to exist among animals, such as operant and classical conditioning. Moreover, the cultural conflict theory developed below requires that humans at times make plans to influence culture (e.g., advertizing commercial products or promoting political candidates); humans also develop explicit theories of the possible costs and benefits of particular cultural forms and often act accordingly.

Evolutionary theories of culture have considered the possibility that domain general mechanisms of general intelligence are important for the generation of culture (Chiappe and MacDonald, 2005; Geary, 2005; MacDonald, 1991; Richerson and Boyd, 2000; Stanovich, 2004). This section fleshes out this proposal by briefly reviewing particular mechanisms of human intelligence revealed by current research and how they are involved in the production of culture.

Research on general intelligence shows that individual differences in intelligence predict the ability to attain goals in situations of minimal prior knowledge (Chiappe and MacDonald, 2005). For example, fluid intelligence is defined as “reasoning abilities [consisting] of strategies, heuristics, and automatized systems that must be used in dealing with ‘novel’ problems, educing relations, and solving inductive, deductive, and conjunctive

 

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reasoning tasks” (Horn and Hofer, 1992, p. 88). Intelligence therefore taps conscious, explicit problem solving in situations in which past recurrences would be unhelpful, except perhaps by analogy or by induction, to the new situation.

 

One role of the executive functions associated with intelligence in solving novel problems is to manage goals. This involves constructing, executing, and maintaining a mental plan of action during the solution of a novel problem (Carpenter et al., 1990). For example, the Tower of Hanoi problem (in which participants must develop a plan for stacking rings in a particular configuration) requires that one to be able to activate multiple sub-goals and to keep track of the satisfaction of each of the sub-goals (Carpenter, Just, and Shell. 1990, p. 413).

Means-end reasoning and visualizing goals are critical to the production of cultural artifacts in the real world. For example, a hunter faced with conditions where meat or fish is only available seasonally may imagine ways of storing and preserving food for those times of the year when the resource is not available. This implies that the hunter would have to engage in mental time travel by being able to imagine that hunger will recur in the future and that it can be influenced by one’s behavior in the present. The Bischof- Köhler hypothesis proposes that only humans can engage in mental time travel into the future because other species lack the ability to anticipate future need states (Bischof, 1980; Köhler, 1927; Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997). According to this hypothesis, animals may act to pursue current felt needs, but they do not act to anticipate predictable future needs such as assuaging hunger. For example, Cebus monkeys did not attempt to save or preserve food even though it was entirely predictable that they would be hungry the following day (see Roberts, 2002). Nevertheless, it should be noted that Osvath (2009) has described a chimpanzee who stockpiled stones to throw at zoo visitors in anticipation of an agitated mood state that accompanied the throwing activity.

Engaging in this sort of mental time travel requires executive function ability. The hunter would have to suppress the current desire to consume or waste the food and would have to imagine ways of preserving the food in a less appetizing form for later use. This implies executive functions, including response inhibition (i.e., suppressing the urge to eat the food immediately), response preparation (imagining a viable technique to preserve the food), and the ability to integrate action across time in order to attain the goal of food preservation (Wynn and Coolidge, 2003, p. 4). It also implies robust executive processes of working memory — that is, the ability to keep information from various sources (including information from modular mechanisms such as spatial representations [Chiappe and MacDonald, 2005; Geary, 1995, 2005]) active in one’s mind and to combine it in order to solve a problem.

 

Another ability critical to the production of human culture is analogical reasoning. Analogical reasoning, which is correlated with general intelligence, draws parallels between novel problems and similar problems that have been solved in the past by transferring knowledge across conceptual domains (e. g., Chiappe and MacDonald, 2005). Analogical reasoning decontextualizes problems by stripping away irrelevant surface features of problems to focus on commonalities and abstract rules. Analogies require that the concepts and their properties be maintained in active state (implying executive processes of working memory) during the search for abstract similarities between the domains. At the same time, potentially distracting features of the two domains must be controlled (Gentner and Holyoak, 1997). This process may result in new cultural categories

 

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as, for example, when the abstract concept of a wave is expanded from water waves to sound waves to light waves (Holyoak and Thagard, 1995). These new categories are often more abstract than the source and target concepts originally involved (Glucksberg, 2001).

 

The implications for a theory of culture are clear. People are able to imagine alternative scenarios and are able to devise creative, novel solutions to attaining or avoiding these scenarios, and they are able to use analogical reasoning to do so. This process creates new cultural categories as well as new artifacts designed to achieve these solutions.

 

Explicit processing

 

The research on general intelligence discussed above fits into a larger framework, that of explicit processing. Two types of processing, implicit and explicit, may be contrasted on a number of dimensions (e.g., Geary, 2005; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Lieberman, 2007; Satpute and Lieberman, 2006; Stanovich, 1999, 2004; See Table 1). Implicit processing is automatic, effortless, relatively fast, and involves parallel processing of large amounts of information.

 

Table 1. Characteristics of Implicit and Explicit Cognitive Systems

 

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Implicit System                                                 Explicit System

 

Not reflectively conscious                            Conscious

 

Automatic                                                           Controllable

Fast                                                                       Relatively slow

Evolved early                                                    Evolved late

Parallel processing                                          Sequential processing

 

High capacity                                                    Limited by attentional and

working memory resources.

Effortless                                                             Effortful

Evolutionary adaptation                                Acquisition by culture and formal

or acquired by practice                                 Tuition

_________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Implicit processing is typical of modules as originally conceptualized by evolutionary psychologists (Stanovich, 2004). That is, modules are functionally specialized mechanisms that respond automatically to domain-relevant information. When the environment presents long-standing problems and recurrent cues relevant to solving them, the best solution is to evolve modules specialized to handle specific inputs and generate particular solutions (Geary, 2005; Geary and Huffman, 2002; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992). For example, the visual system of monkeys and humans contains numerous areas specialized for responding to different aspects of environmental stimulation (e.g., cells sensitive to horizontal lines or to motion, respectively) (Zeki, 1993). Evolutionary psychologists have proposed a large number of modules, including modules for social exchange (Cosmides, 1989), theory of mind (Baron-Cohen, 1995), fear (Bowlby, 1969; Gray, 1987), folk physics (Povinelli, 2000), and grammar acquisition (Pinker, 1994).

 

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Explicit processing is the opposite of implicit processing: conscious, controllable, effortful, relatively slow, and involves serial processing of relatively small amounts of information. Explicit processing is involved in the operation of the mechanisms of general intelligence described above; that is, it is involved in mental time travel, the creation of hypothetical scenarios, and in planning for future contingencies. Explicit processing is capable of utilizing linguistic input in order to produce explicit representations of context, including hypothetical representations of the possible consequences of actions.

 

The control processes associated with explicit processing are a relatively recent evolutionary innovation and may be uniquely human (Penn, Holyoak, and Povenelli, 2008). Explicit processing is centered in the prefrontal cortex which is at the apex of a hierarchy of processes that enables top-down control of behavior. The trend in primate evolution has been to deemphasize parallel processing typical of modules, “with widely converging and diverging connections between individual neurons,” in favor of a serial, hierarchical design of top-down control of behavior that attempts to match behavior to intentions (Striedter, 2005, p. 340).

A critical point for an evolutionary theory of culture is that explicit processing is able to regulate and control, at least to some extent (depending at least partly on individual differences related to the personality trait of Effortful Control/Conscientiousness), the implicit processing characteristic of evolved modules (MacDonald, 2008). A similar phenomenon can be seen in the area of intelligence research. Humans can control automatic, heuristic processing and make decisions that depend on explicit processing. Controlling heuristic processing requires effortful, controlled problem solving and makes demands on attention and working memory resources. Stanovich (1999) provides evidence that people with higher general intelligence are better able to selectively control heuristic, automatic, socially contextualized processing. For example, people with higher general intelligence are more likely to give the logically correct response on abstract versions of the Wason Selection Task.¹ While the great majority of people respond correctly if the problem is phrased as a social exchange problem (Cosmides, 1989), correct responses on abstract versions of the task are correlated with higher IQ (Stanovich and West, 2000). Correct responses require controlling automatic but illogical responses based on surface linguistic similarities (Stanovich, 1999).

 

Similarly, drawing logical inferences from a syllogism with false premises requires creating counterfactual mental models and inhibiting a natural tendency for concrete thinking. That is, people tend to contextualize problems with as much prior knowledge as is easily accessible, even when problems are formal and the only solution is a content-free rule. The mental models involved in explicit problem solving include explicitly represented information involving language or images (Johnson-Laird, 1983).

 

 

 

 

 

¹ In abstract versions of the Wason Selection Task, subjects are asked how to falsify an “if p, then q” statement. For example, subjects are shown a set of four cards placed on a table each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. The subject is then asked which cards should be turned over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, it has red on the other.

 

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This type of logical reasoning is a critical component of the cultural production of mathematical and scientific knowledge aimed at finding abstract general laws as opposed to the socially bound, concrete, context-bound specificity of much everyday reasoning.

 

Explicit control of implicit processing goes far beyond the sorts of problems encountered in intelligence research to the control of internal feeling states and behavior based on explicit representations of cultural contingencies, including social norms (MacDonald, 2008). The basic logic is as follows: Evolutionary regularities result in affective states as a cue to action (Wilson, 1975). For example, evolutionary theories of fear propose that recurrent cues to danger (intense stimulation such as loud noises, evolutionary dangers such as snakes and heights, and social stimuli such as strangers or being left alone during infancy) are natural cues producing the affective state of fear (Bowlby, 1969; Gray, 1987). These affective states are emotional reflexes—the result of implicit processing utilizing thalamic pathways directly to the amygdala (LeDoux, 2000).

However, these emotional reflexes are subject to effortful control via explicit processing. The inputs to these explicit processing mechanisms include a very wide range of non-recurrent information—that is, information resulting not from evolutionary regularities (as in the prototypical modular mechanisms described by evolutionary psychologists) but from explicit appraisals of costs and benefits. These explicit appraisals are based on representations of context and they are sensitive to rapidly changing and unique cultural contexts rather than contexts that were recurrent over evolutionary time.

As indicated above, general intelligence is associated with the ability to control automatic, heuristic processing, and this ability requires decoupling from experience and forming mental models of hypothetical situations (Geary, 2005). In the effortful control of socioaffective behavior, the mental models typically involve explicit representations of the costs and benefits of behavior, and the prototypical conflict is between the phenomenal output of socioaffective implicit processing (e.g., negative feelings toward racial outgroups) and symbolic representations of the world (e.g., awareness of norms of appropriate attitudes toward racial outgroups). The latter are open-ended—constantly changing as a result of scientific advances, changes in laws and customs, and changes in beliefs and attitudes.

 

This implies that explicitly represented, linguistically formatted cultural representations may operate to control behavior. Consider an example of psychological conflict (see Morsella, 2005), such as a desire for food and a concurrent fear of predation because the food is located in an area frequented by predators. For most animals, such conflict is resolved simply by the summed strength of the competing implicitly processed action tendencies (hunger versus fear). This is a standard ethological account (e.g., Goetz and Walters, 1997; Lorenz, 1981; Tinbergen, 1951), and is consistent with Jeffrey Gray’s (see Gray and McNaughton, 1996) comparator model in which signals from approach and avoidance systems are compared for their relative strength.

For humans, the outcome of such conflicts may also be influenced by explicit appraisals of the context: Is it possible to control or eradicate the predators using a technological innovation? Is eating the food taboo because of religious beliefs? Are there laws against harvesting the food so that taking the food would incur a risk of fines or a prison sentence? Conflict occurs not only because of conflicting signals from modules; there may also be conflicts between the output of modules and symbolic representations of the context.

 

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While evolved modules are adaptations to environmental recurrences over evolutionary time, these symbolic representations are not responses to recurrent environmental features over evolutionary time, nor are they typically constrained by natural selection. For example, the symbolic representations that imbue the food with religious significance or that affect its legal status are not adaptations resulting from environmental regularities over evolutionary time—the formal requirement for adaptations adopted by evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Tooby and Cosmides, 1992).

 

These explicit assessments of costs and benefits need not be true and they need not be adaptive. For example, in the food example, explicitly held religious beliefs may be a reason for performing a certain behavior without the belief being true. Religious beliefs may be manifestly maladaptive, as Richard Alexander (1979) noted in commenting on the Shakers, a group that believed in strict celibacy. Or religious beliefs may be evolutionarily adaptive, as indicated, for example, by the finding that Mormons tend to have high fertility (Mosher, Williams, and Johnson, 1992).

The following briefly considers the interplay between implicit processing and explicit appraisals of cultural context in the areas of aggression and ethnocentrism (see MacDonald [2008] for details).

 

1. Aggression. Affective states resulting from evolutionary regularities place people in a prepotently aggressive state. Thus, Buss’s (2005) evolutionary theory of aggression proposes that evolutionary regularities in the context of mating result in affective cues of sexual jealousy and anger at romantic rivals that are prepotent cues for aggression. However, whether or not aggression actually occurs may also be influenced by explicit evaluation of the wider cultural context, including explicit evaluation of the possible costs and benefits of the aggressive act (e.g., penalties at law, likelihood of detection and arrest given the state of forensic technology, security cameras, etc.)

 

People with sufficient levels of effortful control are able to effectively control their aggression in a manner that is thoughtful and reflective rather than impulsive. Thus Raine et al. (1998) found that impulsive murderers had relatively weak prefrontal control over subcortical regions linked to aggression. In contrast, predatory murderers whose crimes involved planning and deliberation had prefrontal functioning that was more equivalent to normal subjects, while also having high levels of subcortical activity linked to aggression. Results “support the hypothesis that emotional, unplanned impulsive murderers are less able to regulate and control aggressive impulses generated from subcortical structures due to deficient prefrontal regulation” (p. 319). Other data show that non-impulsive criminals take into account a variety of symbolically generated costs and benefits when making decisions on whether to commit criminal acts (see MacDonald, 2008).

These explicitly calculated costs and benefits are not recurrent over evolutionary time but are the result of explicit appraisals of current cultural contexts and producing mental models of possible consequences of behavior. Thus a criminal would be well advised to understand the various technological innovations that make detection easier, such as DNA fingerprinting. The cultural environment related to criminal detection and punishment is constantly changing and can only be appraised using mechanisms of explicit processing.

 

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2. Ethnocentrism. People tend to have implicit negative attitudes toward people of other races and ethnic groups—attitudes that may result from evolutionary adaptations (e.g., social identity mechanisms; see MacDonald, 2008) or from learned associations such as social learning or spreading activation—the standard view of social psychology (e.g., Blair, 2001; Monteith and Voils, 2001). In either case, explicitly represented goals are able to control implicit negative attitudes toward racial outgroups originating in the amygdala (Wheeler and Fiske, 2005). For example, Cunningham et al. (2004) found that White subjects had a stronger subcortical (amygdalar) response to photos of Blacks than Whites if the photos were displayed for a very short period of time (30 msec) insufficient to be represented explicitly in the prefrontal area. But when the photos were displayed for a period (525 msec) sufficiently long to be explicitly represented in the prefrontal area, this difference in reaction to Black and White faces decreased, and the prefrontal region was activated. Results indicate “that controlled [i.e., explicit] processing can moderate, and even override, activity that would otherwise result from automatic processing” (Cunningham et al., 2004, p. 811).

 

Explicit cultural norms related to ethnocentrism and awareness of the costs involved in violating those norms are important input to prefrontal control mechanisms that operate via explicit processing. For example, White subjects who are told they are violating cultural norms of racial egalitarianism inhibit ongoing behavior in an attempt to bring responses more in line with cultural and personal norms (Monteith, Ashburn-Nardo, Voils and Czopp, 2002). That is, explicit information about subjects’ automatic stereotyping that is incongruent with their expressed attitudes leads to longer response times as subjects attempt to bring responses in line with their explicitly expressed attitudes. Explicit control of implicit processing related to ethnocentrism is cognitively costly for subjects with strong implicit biases toward outgroups (Richeson and Shelton, 2003; Richeson, Trawalter, and Shelton, 2005). Moreover, cognitive distractions increase the implicit pro-White bias of White subjects (e.g., Devine, Plant, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, and Vance , 2002). In general, these results indicate that people with strong implicit biases rely on controlled processing resources to manage negative thoughts and stereotypes of the outgroup, but doing so depletes cognitive resources.

 

In conclusion, this discussion gives some indication of a rather complex psychology of culture involving analogical reasoning, means -end reasoning, the creation of mental models, and conflicts between implicit and explicit processing.

 

The perspective sketched here is compatible with evolutionary models of culture that see culture as an independent force in evolution (e.g., Richerson and Boyd, 2005). A major implication is indeterminacy. Rather than determined by universal psychological mechanisms interacting with ecological contingencies (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992), the explicit processing involved in human intelligence and in the regulation of evolved modular predispositions is creative and improvisational. Analogical reasoning and mental models of hypothetical future events are creative products of explicit processing, and they often result in novel artifacts capable of solving the ancient problems of survival and reproduction in novel ways. Or they may be used to write a sonnet or a symphony. These mechanisms also serve as the underpinnings of the artistic imagination capable of creating imaginary people,

 

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relationships, events, and even impossible worlds. Finally, explicit processing enables active attempts to construct culture in accordance with explicit perceptions of possible costs and benefits—the topic of the next section.

 

From psychology to history: Social controls and ideologies

 

Richerson and Boyd (2005, p. 95) point out that historical events are “embedded in a complex, historically conditioned frame, and all causes of events are local to that frame.” This is quite correct. Nevertheless, equipped with an understanding of the psychology of explicit processing, it is possible to pinpoint two deeply interwoven but independent processes that are of general importance for developing a conflict theory of culture: ideology and social controls.

 

Social controls

 

Social controls are restrictions imposed on people as a consequence of their membership within a particular society or group (MacDonald, 1983, 1990, 1994, 1995). In the literature on models of the evolution of culture, social controls are norms that involve punishment for transgressions (e.g., Boyd and Richerson, 1992; Henrich and Henrich, 2007). At the theoretical level, the theory of social controls depends on a classic article by Boyd and Richerson (1992) showing that with punishment anything can evolve. That is, punishment can maintain any set of social norms, including individually costly behavior that does not benefit either any individual or the group as a whole. This points up the fact that social norms need not be adaptive (Alexander, 1979) . Durham (1991) discusses how the coercive imposition of cultural memes may result in the persistence of maladaptive cultural variants.

Importantly, social controls may prevent individuals from engaging in behavior they would otherwise engage in — particularly behavior that would result from evolved psychological mechanisms in the absence of social controls. In the examples elaborated below, monogamy by wealthy, powerful males and altruistic, self-sacrificing behavior within groups are analyzed partly as the result of social controls.

 

As in the case of ideology (see below), it is important to distinguish the concept of social controls as used here from idiosyncratic controls that result from the behavior of individuals without any social sanction. The difference is between, say, social controls and ideology that enforce and rationalize the institution of slavery versus a private citizen holding another person captive against his will and exploiting him. The former is part of the larger social context and may be enforced by powerful legal and military institutions, and supported by the media, academia, and popular opinion. The latter is idiosyncratic, although, if an important person was the victim of such an idiosyncratic event, it could certainly have historical consequences.

It is assumed here that animals are largely incapable of explicit processing (Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli, 2008); in particular, they are incapable of linguistic and symbolic representations that are capable of guiding and motivating behavior (MacDonald, 2008). This does not imply that other organisms are incapable of evolving mechanisms that, for example, are capable of efficiently regulating behavior in a group and, for example, producing egalitarian outcomes. A prototype is the suppression of meiotic drive (see Frank, 2003). However, meiotic drive operates in a quite different manner than social controls

 

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operating in human society.

 

The thesis here is that social controls and explicit ideologies that rationalize them are intertwined but independent processes in human societies. As conceptualized here, both of these processes require explicit processing — a perspective implying that the social controls and ideologies discussed here are uniquely human.

One possibility for conceptualizing social controls derives from modeling of altruistic punishment as a mechanism for maintaining cooperation in groups. For example, Boyd, Gintis, Bowles, and Richerson (2003; see also Henrich and Boyd, 2001) showed that cooperation can be sustained in large groups via altruistic punishment (i.e., punishment that incurs a cost for both the punisher and the one punished) in situations where defectors are rare and punishers common. These are models of idiosyncratic control because the model assumes that an individual punishes and incurs a cost for doing so that is not shared by other group members.

If explicit processing is added to the equation, things change considerably. Recent models of cooperation show that altruistic cooperation can be maintained if people have access to explicit information on others’ histories of interaction in cooperative situations (e.g., Henrich and Henrich, 2007; Milinski, Semmann, and Krambeck, 2003; Mohtashemi and Mui, 2003; Semmann, Krambeck, and Milinski, 2005; Smith, 2005) . For example, Semmann, Krambeck, and Milinski (2005) showed that participants were more likely to reward people with whom they had no direct experience if these people had developed a good reputation based on their previous behavior in a public goods experiment. In this experiment, people’s reputation was made available by displaying a written record of their behavior on a computer screen. Other sources of explicit information on the reputation of individuals include verbal communication and written records. As Mohtashemi and Mui (2003; see also DeBacker and Gurven, 2006; Henrich and Henrich, 2007; Panchanathan and Boyd, 2003; Smith, 2003) note, information on others’ reputations constitutes a collective memory of the past history of individuals made possible by language — that is, explicit representations of the past history of individuals in cooperative situations. In fact, explicit agreements to cooperate made prior to the prisoner’s dilemma game result in increases in cooperation and decreases in competition during the game (DeBacker and Gurven, 2006; Orbell, van de Kragt, and Dawes, 1988; see also Smith, 2003).

 

Reputation is a social, not an idiosyncratic, phenomenon. That is, reputation consists of explicit representations of the past history of others that are held by a significant group of people. The costs of transmitting reputation are minimal, but reputation raises the cost of defection because it makes it unlikely that a defector will receive indirect reciprocity in the future (Semmann, Krambeck, and Milinski, 2005). In effect, the non-cooperator is ostracized in future interactions, not only with the people with whom he has had direct dealings, but also with those among whom his reputation as a non-cooperator has become known.

Reputation is also likely to lower the cost of punishing because the behavior of defectors can be quickly and widely known at minimal cost, thereby facilitating measures that spread the costs of punishment among the cooperators. “Posse”–type coalitions of punishers are able to inflict punishment on defectors while sharing the costs. Indeed, the ethnographic record shows that people readily band together to prevent despotic domination and free-riding. Human hunter-gatherer groups exhibit an “egalitarian ethic” in which people band together to circumscribe the power of leaders and punish free-riders

 

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(Boehm, 1997, 1999; see also Smith, 2003). Low-cost forms of social control, such as gossip and withholding social benefits, are usually sufficient to control would-be dominators, but more costly measures, such as ostracism and execution, are recorded in the ethnographic literature.

 

Similarly, social controls operating within historically important groups are able to punish free-riders and enforce high levels of within-group charity (MacDonald, 1994; D. S. Wilson, 2002). For example, among Calvinists in 16^th-century Geneva, those who violated religious norms were subjected to an escalating set of penalties ranging from private “brotherly admonitions” from the pastor, to public forms of shaming, and finally to excommunication which would mean expulsion from the city (D. S. Wilson, 2002).

 

In modern states, the police and the judicial system are empowered to punish non-cooperators. The costs for these enforcement institutions are not borne by individual punishers but are widely shared as a result of tax collection systems that are enabled by explicit processing. That is, the system depends on prospective defectors making explicit calculations of the possible costs (e.g., likelihood of a prison sentence) and benefits (e.g., likelihood of financial gain) to their actions in a situation with a host of features that were not recurrent over evolutionary time (e.g., electronic surveillance methods, legal mechanisms to enforce payment of taxes, etc.) (MacDonald, 2008).

The social controls that actually come to prevail in a particular society are often the result of conflicts of interest whose outcome is underdetermined by evolutionary theory. Basic evolutionary theory implies that, in the absence of genetic identity, there are conflicts of interest among individuals. In particular, there are conflicts of interest over social controls — which behaviors are controlled, who benefits from the controls (e.g., different controls may benefit wealthy, powerful males, lower status males, or the group as a whole), and whose individually adaptive behavior is constrained by the controls.

Particularly interesting from an evolutionary perspective are social controls that establish and maintain egalitarian versus anti-egalitarian economic or mating patterns. Consider, for example, sexual behavior among males (MacDonald, 1983, 1990, 1995). Evolutionary theory is highly compatible with the proposition that males within a society have conflicts of interest regarding the regulation of reproduction. In general, wealthy, powerful males benefit from unfettered access to large numbers of females because they can support multiple mates and provide adequately for their children. However, their doing so opposes the interests of non -wealthy males, since intensive polygyny by wealthy males makes fecund females a scarce resource for which they are ill- equipped to compete. These non-wealthy males would benefit from establishing a more egalitarian mating system. Monogamy qualifies as a relatively egalitarian mating system since wealthy males are prevented from maximizing their reproductive success by having concubines.

 

An interest on the part of non-wealthy males in establishing an egalitarian mating system is therefore highly consistent with the principle of self-interest and the other central tendencies of human behavior predicted by evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory is compatible with the idea that humans will not only attempt to maximize their own reproductive success but also with attempts to minimize the negative differential between their own success and that of others. One way of accomplishing this latter goal is to cooperate with others in an attempt to impose egalitarian social controls on the variance in male reproductive success. Such a strategy of cooperation in an egalitarian group is expected to be the first choice of a relatively low ranking male, and in fact low-ranking

 

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males are far more likely than wealthy males to have been supporters of economically egalitarian (socialist) revolutions in the, 20th century (e. g., the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba).

 

Evolutionary theory (in combination with any known ecological variables or any set of universal, evolved psychological mechanisms) fails to predict the outcome of this conflict. The general finding that wealthy males in stratified societies tend to be intensively polygynous is not surprising given the evolutionary theory of sex and the fact that despotism with intensive polygyny may be viewed as an individually optimal male reproductive strategy (Dickemann, 1979). This finding must, however, be viewed as a probabilistic rather than a determinate result.

From an evolutionary perspective, it is not the least surprising that conflicts of interest regarding the regulation of mating or economic activity occur in human societies. Social controls supporting mating or economic systems can vary along a continuum ranging from egalitarian to anti-egalitarian, and these different types of social controls are in the interests of different individual members of human societies. The successful imposition of social controls on others is always a possibility, but there is no reason to suppose that it is a necessity: If the Czar had won the war of the Bolshevik Revolution, no evolutionary or ecological laws would have been broken, and there would be no violation of any of the principles of evolutionary psychology. Historical events are indeed locally embedded (Richerson and Boyd, 2005) and influenced by events such as which army has better weaponry and tactics.

However, the success of the revolution resulted in a very different type of society, with very different types of social control than would have occurred had the Czar won. Moreover, the success of the revolution affected the biological fitness of particular groups. The Soviet government killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first 25 years of its existence (Courtois, 1999). The previously dominant elites, bureaucracies, and commercial classes were purged, exiled, executed or imprisoned. If they remained in the USSR, they and their children suffered discrimination in employment and admission to universities and government service (Slezkine, 2004). It was a ‘state against its people’ (Werth 1999), mounting campaigns of collective punishment (usually involving deportation or forced starvation) against a great many ethnic groups, including Great Russian peasants, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, Moldavians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Balkars, Ingush, Greeks, Bulgars, Crimean Armenians, Meskhetian Turks, Kurds, and Khemshins as groups (Courtois, p. 1999, p. 10; Werth, 1999, p. 219ff).

 

Similarly, the social imposition of monogamy doubtless affected the relative fitness of males within the society because the fertility of elite males was confined to monogamous marriage with little possibility of divorce (MacDonald, 1995). At the extreme, social controls can institute a reproductive regime that dampens all sources of differences in reproductive success. An example is China’s one -child policy: Despite difficulties in enforcement, the policy has succeeded in its policy aim of reducing population. Fertility has been reduced to around 1.5 children per woman, far below replacement level (Baochang, Feng, Zhigang, and Erli, 2007). This implies that the social controls preventing people from choosing their own fertility largely succeeded in dampening differences in reproductive success and achieving the societal (group) goal of below-replacement fertility.

 

 

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Ideology

 

The term ‘ideology’ requires some comment. The psychological research on explicit processing discussed above suggests defining ideologies as explicit belief systems that may motivate behavior in a top-down manner. That is, explicit construals of the world

— for example, explicit construals of costs and benefits mediated in turn by human language and the ability of humans to create explicit representations of events — may motivate behavior. However, in order to be interesting and important for thinking about cultural conflict in historical societies, the belief system must characterize a historically significant group. The attempt here is to pinpoint the concept of a coherent set of beliefs that characterizes a significant group of people and motivates their behavior as described above — that is, top-down control of behavior via explicit processing.

Such a concept of ideology is differentiated from idiosyncratic beliefs. Idiosyncratic beliefs are certainly important from the standpoint of psychological functioning of individuals. However, in general, apart from the idiosyncrasies of particular powerful people (e.g., an idiosyncratic superstitious belief by a military leader that results in victory or defeat in an important battle), they are not an important component of historical phenomena. Ideologies are important because they characterize significant groups. They often define the group to its members, regulate relationships among group members and with non-group members, provide rationalizations for social controls, and explain the way things are and how they came to be (and, in some cases, even describe the way things will be after death).

This definition is essentially the same as that of Samuel P. Huntington (1957, p. 454): “By ideology I mean a system of ideas concerned with the distribution of political and social values and acquiesced in by a significant social group.”

This concept of ideology is compatible with several other mainstream conceptions of ideology in political science. As Gerring (1997) notes, ideology has been defined in many ways and has been used for many political and academic purposes over the centuries. At their core, all reasonable definitions conceive ideology as a coherent set of beliefs (Gerring, 1997; Knight, 2006). However, as Gerring (1997, p. 983) points out, it is not reasonable to try to construct a single, all-purpose definition of ideology. For example, Gerring, a political scientist, restricts ideology to the political realm and differentiates ideology from the concepts of worldview, belief-system, cultural system, or value-system. Such a restriction is not important for our purposes.

 

Ideologies emphasize the idea that factors internal to the individual, such as an individual’s personal beliefs and attitudes, often rationalize behavior and provide a proximate mechanism of motivation. The basis for this claim is the above analysis of explicit processing. That is, explicitly held beliefs are able to exert a control function over behavior and over evolved predispositions, and they are able to exert this control function independently of external processes of social control (e.g., punishment) . For example, a person may refrain from engaging in a particular behavior to which he is predisposed as a result of evolved modules (e.g., various forms of aggression [Buss, 2005]), and he may do so because of he believes that he would be sent to prison, or because of he believes that he will be punished for it in an afterlife, or because he believes that it violates an important moral principle or God’s law. The success of Calvinism in 16^th-century Geneva depended not only on the threat of externally applied sanctions, but also on the persuasiveness of the

 

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explicit beliefs that constituted religious ideology (D. S. Wilson, 2002): Calvinists believed that the strictures of their religion emanated from God and that to disobey them would result in severe punishment in the afterlife. Without an internally motivated set of beliefs that resulted in self-control for the great majority of the inhabitants of Geneva, the task of controlling a city of that size according to Calvinist principles would have been impossible.

 

Evolutionary analyses of personal beliefs often propose that individuals tend to believe what is in their perceived self-interest (e.g., Wilson, 1978). For example, moral reasoning tends to reflect self-interest (Krebs, 2005; Krebs, Denton and Higgins, 1988; MacDonald, 1988) . People tend to bias their moral judgments to favor self, relatives, and close friends; and they often engage in rationalization and self-deception in order to present their reasons in ways that present themselves in a positive light to significant others or to appeal to disinterested observers.

Nevertheless, beliefs and attitudes are products of explicit processing, so that there is no reason to expect a one-to- one correspondence between beliefs and self-interest (MacDonald, 2008). To the extent that beliefs are influenced by modular adaptations that reflect recurrences in the EEA, they may be maladaptive in the radically changed environments of the modern world. For example, there is evidence for modular mechanisms that influence male perceptions of female attractiveness resulting from natural selection for a correlation between fertility and attractiveness (Singh, 1993). These modular mechanisms may result in maladaptive negative appraisals of some women because they fail to reflect changes in fertility technology. Moreover, explicit processing is resource-limited and fallible, so that explicitly held beliefs about anticipated consequences of one’s actions may be inaccurate. One may have inaccurate beliefs about the costs or benefits of behavior because of inaccurate or incomplete information about rapidly changing and complex modern environments.

While individually held beliefs may well be maladaptive, there are special additional reasons that may result in the maladaptiveness of ideologies for at least some of the people who believe them. Together, these reasons indicate that ideologies are logically and psychologically separate from social controls. Like social controls, ideologies are likely to be relatively insensitive to individual self-interest. Ideologies often characterize virtually an entire society (e.g., communism as an official ideology in the USSR; the supra-ethnic, supra-regional status of Christianity in medieval Europe [Lynch, 1992, p. 71; Tellenbach, 1993, p. 58], or Islam as the official religion in some contemporary societies). Ideologies may also characterize the vast majority of people who belong to voluntary subgroups within a society (e.g., a Protestant religious denomination in the United States). In at least some cases, authorities (e.g., in a state such as the Soviet Union) are able to promulgate an ideology because of their control over education and the media, and they may be able to punish dissenters because of their control over the police and the judicial system. As a result, individuals who do not benefit from adopting the ideology will be socialized to do so or punished if they fail to publicly support the ideology. As discussed further below, ideologies are often intimately intertwined with various social controls — rationalizing the controls but also benefitting from the power of social controls to enforce ideological conformity in the schools or in religious institutions.

 

Like social controls, the imposition of ideology is the result of conflict within societies. As in the case of social controls and also because ideologies are so often intricately bound up with social controls, evolutionary theory is unable to predict which

 

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ideology will prevail in a particular society. Ideologies may be egalitarian or anti-egalitarian. They may promote the deregulation of human behavior or they may rationalize strong social controls on behavior. As in the case of social controls, if the Czar had won the war of the Bolshevik Revolution, no evolutionary or ecological laws would have been broken, and there would be no violation of anything we know about evolutionary psychology. However, the success of the revolution resulted in a very different type of society, with a very different official ideology than would have occurred had the Czar won.

 

Indeed, as noted in Resolution 1481 of the Council of Europe (Council of Europe, 2006), mass murder was a well-articulated aspect of the ideology of communism:

 

The crimes [of communism] were justified in the name of the class struggle theory and the principle of dictatorship of the proletariat. The interpretation of both principles legitimised the “elimination” of people who were considered harmful to the construction of a new society and, as such, enemies of the totalitarian communist regimes. A vast number of victims in every country concerned were its own nationals. It was the case particularly of the peoples of the former USSR who by far outnumbered other peoples in terms of the number of victims.

 

The indeterminacy of the outcome of the internal political processes resulting in ideology should be emphasized. Ideologies can be influenced by historical events such as the outcome of battles, or the religious conversion or death of a leader which are themselves underdetermined with respect to evolutionary/ecological theory. For example, the outcome of the Battle of Tours in 732 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683 halted the advances of Islam into Europe and therefore had major effects on the religious ideology (as well as the genetic profile) of the area. Similarly, Donahue (1979) showed that marital property law in England and France in the 13^th century was influenced by the success of the Norman invasion. Both countries had similar agricultural economies and a similar feudal social structure, as well as a similar ethnic composition and ecclesiastical influence. However, because of the success of the Norman invasion in the 11^th century, there were differences in the power of centralized political control between the two areas, with the king being much more powerful in England than in France; there was also a correspondingly greater power of aristocratic families in France as well as a generally greater importance of extended kinship groups in the latter area.

 

Notice the rich interplay between evolutionarily expected tendencies and historical circumstance here. Kinship is expected to be of great importance in an evolutionary account of human affairs because of its role in lowering thresholds of cooperation and altruism within the group. This power of the extended family, however, conflicts with the power of centralized authorities, and in this case the outcome of this conflict over the construction of property law was influenced by the outcome of a particular battle. The point here is that the relatively stronger central authority in England cannot be meaningfully related to what we think of as ecological variables. However, given that certain events occurred, then the disintegration of extended kinship and the establishment of a new form of property law are expectable.

 

Social controls and ideology are mutually reinforcing

 

Social  controls  are  typically  embedded  in  ideology.  For  example,  after  the

 

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Bolshevik Revolution, the ideology of Marxism rationalized the strong social controls on individual behavior that came to characterize the Soviet state; and the strong social controls of the state buttressed the official communist ideology by, for example, dictating that communist ideology be taught in schools and disseminated by the media, punishing individuals who publically dissented from the ideology, and by eliminating competing institutions, such as the Russian Orthodox Church, with incompatible or anti-communist ideologies. The same could be said for National Socialism in Germany from 1933–1945.

 

In liberal democracies there are social controls supporting the ideology of the market economy, and the ideology of the market economy legitimizes laws protecting private property. School curricula are often the focus of impassioned public debate among advocates for ideologies of, for example, creationism, evolution, ethnic and religious holidays, and multiculturalism. To the extent that they are successful, advocates for these ideologies utilize the power of the state to impose their ideologies in the public socialization process for children. Similarly, people who control media are able to influence ideologies that infuse media content (e.g., the portrayal of sex roles in children’s cartoons), and dissenters are able to attempt to influence media content by organizing boycotts or establishing their own media outlets.

The existence of ideological dissenters in at least some cases indicates that social controls and ideologies are logically and psychologically distinct. That is, people can dissent from ideologies even when these ideologies are enforced by social controls. For example, someone who believes in the theory of evolution and wishes that it be taught in schools might maintain his or her beliefs even in the face of the prospect of punishment. An opponent of communist ideology in the USSR in the 1930s might maintain his or her views even in the face of dire consequences should those beliefs become known. Such oppositional ideologies are common in historical societies, and at times they give rise to social movements that attempt to topple official, state-coerced ideologies, possibly yielding new forms of social control more in harmony with the oppositional ideology.

 

Because sexual behavior is influenced by a variety of evolved predispositions and is intimately bound up with biological fitness, it is of particular interest to describe how social controls and ideology have been able to regulate sexual behavior in historical societies. Mutually reinforcing social controls and ideology may be seen in the maintenance of socially imposed monogamy in Europe from the medieval period down to the present. There is evidence for the importance of the following social controls (MacDonald, 1995): prohibitions on divorce, prohibitions on endogamy, penalties for illegitimacy, and controls on concubinage by elite males. Controls were enforced with a variety of mechanisms, including ecclesiastical courts, secular courts, and various interest groups (e.g., attorneys expanding tort law to include victims of divorce, authorities enforcing bastardy laws because of fears of effects on the poor rates, women bent on controlling the behavior of their husbands, popular movements aimed at the sexual behavior of elite males). These social controls were reinforced with the following ideologies: celibacy as a morally superior lifestyle; the sinfulness of extra-marital sex of any kind; the sinfulness of sexual pleasure, even within marriage; the severe punishment that awaited violators of these sexual mores in an afterlife.

 

 

 

 

 

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Discussion

 

The transmission of culture

 

Evolutionary models of culture have been primarily concerned with cultural transmission (e.g., Richerson and Boyd, 2005), with the result that theorists have focused on social learning as the prime psychological mechanism involved in the transmission of culture. The present treatment does not dispute the importance of social learning. However, the discussion of social controls and ideology also implicates another mechanism for the transmission of culture: Once there is in place a set of social controls and a mutually reinforcing ideology that rationalizes those social controls, the stage is set for a considerable degree of inertia in the transmission of culture. This is partly because there will be substantial homogeneity in the attitudes and beliefs of parents as socializing agents. Moreover, parents who accept the ideology will receive powerful support because, due to social controls, the ideology may dominate the educational system and the media available to children. Even if parents are successful in transmitting heterodox ideologies during childhood, the child will eventually be subjected to orthodox ideology in the educational system and in the media. The social controls supporting the ideology may also include punishments imposed on people and groups, including parents who attempt to transmit incompatible ideologies.

Such mechanisms of cultural transmission have been common throughout history, ranging from the domination of education by religious authority for centuries Europe to the transmission of communism in the USSR. Dissenters attempting to promulgate their own ideology have often been treated harshly, as in the Spanish Inquisition and the gulags of the Soviet Union.

 

Group selection

 

The stress placed here on social controls and ideologies may be seen as examples of group-level processes capable of giving rise to natural selection between groups. In a famous passage, Darwin shows that he was well aware of the power of groups capable of high levels of within-group morality:

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children of the same tribe, yet an increase in the number of well-endowed men and advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, who were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world, tribes have supplanted other tribes; and as morality is one important element of their success, the standard of morality and the number of well- endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase (Charles Darwin [1890, 132], The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex)

 

Theorists have shown that cultural differences between groups can give rise to group selection (Sober and Wilson, 1998; Boyd and Richerson, 2002). The point here is that the processes that are critical for group selection among humans are those discussed in

 

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this article: Social controls and supporting ideologies are able to enforce discipline within groups, punish defectors, encourage patriotism and obedience to group aims, produce significant levels of altruism, and regulate variation in reproductive success (MacDonald, 1994). For example, because of increased internal solidarity and cohesiveness, groups characterized by social imposed monogamy or socially imposed altruism may well have increased reproductive success compared to groups in which individuals (and especially wealthy, powerful individuals) are free to pursue individually optimal reproductive strategies. Thus Richard Alexander’s (1979) theory of socially imposed monogamy implies that monogamy is adaptive in between-group competition because it results in greater group solidarity and ensures the allegiance of lower-ranking males.

 

Gene-culture co-evolution

 

Theories of gene-culture co-evolution stress the idea that cultural shifts set the stage for genetic changes (Durham, 1991; Henrich and Henrich, 2007; Soltis, Boyd, and Richerson, 1995). There is good evidence for gene-culture co-evolution of genes for lactose tolerance and fighting infectious diseases and parasites (Durham, 1991). There is also suggestive evidence for selection for genes influencing personality (e.g., delay of gratification) and cognitive abilities as a consequence of the invention of agriculture (Cochran and Harpending, 2009). Relevant to the present article, the relatively powerful social controls resulting when agricultural societies supplanted hunter gatherer societies may have resulted in selection for genes influencing conformity. Harpending and Cochran (2002) interpret available data as suggesting natural selection for the 7R allelle of the D4 dopamine receptor gene that is associated with novelty seeking, impulsivity, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, this allele is absent in China, although alleles derived from the 7R allele are common. Cochran and Harpending (2009, p. 112) suggest that this pattern may be due to high levels of social controls weeding out non-conforming individuals. “The Japanese say that the nail that sticks out is hammered down, but in China it may have been pulled out and thrown away.”

 

Conflicts over the construction of culture

 

A major theme of this article has been that understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying culture leads to a rich theory of conflicts over the construction of culture. If culture is as important as some evolutionary theorists claim (e.g., Richerson and Boyd, 2005), then it is not surprising that there are conflicts over the construction of culture.

Explicit processing, including means-end reasoning, enables conscious, intentional attempts at cultural influence. An advertizing campaign designed to influence consumers to purchase a product is a paradigm. In the contemporary world, such campaigns involve means-end reasoning, explicit mental models, and explicit evaluations of probable outcomes on the basis of scientific studies to determine which messages are most effective with which audiences. They may be designed to appeal to well-known psychological biasing mechanisms that influence social learning, such as endorsement by prestigious people or associating the product with the satisfaction of sexual desires.

The incorporation of explicit processing into an analysis of culture opens up a very large and indeterminate universe of possible costs and benefits. On one hand, humans are equipped with mechanisms able to control evolved prepotencies (although there are individual differences in the ability to control evolved predispositions). On the other hand,

 

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people are exposed to an often bewildering array of cultural messages that affect their explicit appraisals of costs and benefits and even their implicit appraisals of costs and benefits in situations where learning has become automatic with practice. These appraisals may be influenced by a wide range of competing interests. For example, media images, especially those aimed at explicit, conscious processing, have important effects on behavior even though people are often unaware that their behavior is influenced by the images (T. D. Wilson, 2002). These images are often engineered by advertisers who are consciously attempting to influence the recipients of the messages in ways that conform to the advertiser’s interests, not the recipient’s interests.

 

There are conflicts of interest between producers and consumers of culture as well as among producers of culture. Advertisers may attempt to persuade consumers to purchase inferior products, products they don’t need, or products that have negative effects on the consumer; or they may attempt to get consumers to pay to more than necessary for products. Consumers may lobby legislative bodies to enact laws that regulate products available to consumers. Advertisers compete with each other in order to create more effective cultural messages. Examples of these processes go well beyond advertizing — as, for example, in competing political or public relations campaigns.

Conflicts of interest over the construction of culture span the entire range of human conflicts of interest. In accordance with Marxist ideas, there may be conflicts of interest between social classes, with propertied people having different interests than people with little or no property. There may also be conflicts of interest between large interest groups, as between the Church and the emerging European aristocracy over the control of marriage during the Middle Ages (see MacDonald, 1995), or between interest groups in liberal democracies (e.g., opponents and proponents of teaching evolution in schools).

There may also be conflicts of interest between ethnic groups over the construction of culture. At times, ethnic groups have attempted to impose their culture on another group. For example, Bulgaria prohibited the Turkish language and forced ethnic Turks to Bulgarize their names; there have also been several examples of forced conversion throughout the history of Christianity (Bookman, 1997). Interest group dynamics in pluralistic societies may also involve ethnic differences in the construction of culture (MacDonald, 1998). For example, different ethnic groups may perceive the debate about the nature and nurture of intelligence or issues related to racial differences in various psychological traits as affecting their ethnic interests and therefore be motivated to influence academic research and media discussion of these issues.

 

In conclusion, an appreciation of the importance of explicit processing provides a rich view of culture as a force in evolution, particularly for organized groups and for state-level societies able to exert significant degrees of social control. Explicit processing is a double-edged sword. It allows for intensive cooperation in human societies, enabling levels of organization and control of group members that are impossible for animals, and often resulting in formidable, highly competitive groups. However, these same groups may use their superior organization to oppress, exploit, or destroy other human groups. Explicit processing also allows for erecting oppressive group structures that are able to mute or even obliterate the interests of individuals within the group; such groups may well impose controls that result in widespread disparities between our evolved predispositions and the reality of life within the group — a prescription for widespread unhappiness. An important point of this article is that such outcomes are not inevitable.

 

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Received 29 January 2009; First revision submitted 13 April 2009; Second revision submitted 30 April 2009; Accepted 04 May 2009

 

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PSYCHOLOGY AND WHITE ETHNOCENTRISM

PSYCHOLOGY AND WHITE ETHNOCENTRISM

 

 

KEVIN MACDONALD

 

While growing up I would often read accounts of European heroes who had battled for their people and for great causes. William Wallace, Robert Bruce and the Scots against the English, Sir Francis Drake leading the battle against the Spanish Armada, Charles Martel and the Franks defending Europe against the Muslims, King Leonidas and the Spartans at Thermopylae, and many others. Those days seem over now. Our political leaders are actually managing the displacement of their own people, and very few white people have the courage to do anything other than vote them back into office. Or they vote for the other party, which simply changes the faces of the managers.

 

How can it have come to this? One might think that evolution would have equipped us with powerful mechanisms of ethnocentrism and group identity that would ensure that such a thing could never happen. We would naturally stand up for our people and fight the good fight, even at great cost. We would willingly die for our people—like William Wallace, whose death is described as follows:

 

On 23 August 1305, following the trial, Wallace was taken from the hall, stripped naked and dragged through the city at the heels of a horse to Smithfield Market. He was drawn and quartered—strangled by hanging but released near death, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt before him, beheaded, then divided into four parts (the four horrors) at the Elms in Smithfield. His preserved head was placed on a pike atop London Bridge. It was later joined by the heads of his brother, John, and Simon Fraser. His limbs were displayed, separately, in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Aberdeen.¹

 

But there are no William Wallaces or mass movements of racial defense for Europeans, and the question is why this is so. The even more important question is how we can use our understanding of psychology to chart a path to legitimizing and building a movement of racial defense.

This paper begins by describing the two worlds of psychology: the world of automatic, unconscious mechanisms that form our ancient evolutionary heritage, and the world of more recently evolved conscious processing that makes us distinctively human. Ethnocentric tendencies are automatic, unconscious mechanisms, but despite the power of these ancient mechanisms, they can be suppressed or diverted from their original purpose by cultural programming

 

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that takes advantage of some recently evolved cognitive machinery: the conscious processing mechanisms of the human prefrontal cortex.

 

Nevertheless, ethnocentric tendencies continue to influence the behavior of white people. Despite the current cultural programming, white people are gradually coalescing into what I term “implicit white communities” in multicultural America—that is, communities that reflect their ethnocentrism but that “cannot tell their name”—they cannot explicitly state that they are an expression of white ethnocentrism. These implicit white communities are insuf-ficient for ethnic defense, however, and I conclude that progress in defending the ethnic interests of whites will happen only by legitimizing explicit asser-tions of ethnic identity and interests. A variety of obstacles to ethnic defense is discussed, with particular attention paid to understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying white guilt.

 

THE TWO WORLDS OF PSYCHOLOGY

 

Psychology has reached a consensus that the human mind has two kinds of processing, implicit and explicit (see Table 1). Implicit and explicit mechanisms may be contrasted on a number of dimensions.

 

Implicit Processing

 

Implicit processing is unconscious, automatic, effortless, relatively fast, and involves parallel processing of large amounts of information.² Most of the activi-ties going in our brains in our day-to-day life involve implicit processing.

 

Say you are negotiating with someone about buying a car. Without any conscious effort on your part, your brain is processing an enormous amount of data. It is processing the colors and shapes of the furniture and walls in the room, and it is processing data from your own body to allow you to stand upright without consciously thinking about it. More interesting, your brain is also processing the facial expressions and posture of the person you are negotiating with, and it is processing the age and sex of this person. If you are a heterosexual man talking to a woman, your brain is assessing the woman’s facial attractiveness and her body language as indicators of sexual availability for a long-term or a short-term relationship, even though the conversation is ostensibly about buying a car. And if you are a woman talking to a man, your brain is making calculations that differ from those of a man due to the very different interests that men and women have in sexual relationships, differ-ences that stem from our ancient evolutionary heritage.

 

Your brain is also assessing how similar this salesperson is to yourself, and, without any conscious awareness on your part, it is making you trust the person more if that person is more like yourself. Furthermore, if the person is from a different race or ethnic group, it is flagging that fact and it is coloring your interactions with the person by stereotypes—whether negative or positive—that your unconscious mind associates with that race or ethnic group.

 

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You may not be paying conscious attention to these features, but if something seems out of place, your conscious mind may well take notice. Perhaps the other person’s facial expression seems shifty, or he blinks too much when he tells you that the car was driven by a little old lady and has only 10,000 miles on it. If so, you may simply feel a vague unconscious unease, or you may actually notice that there is a major conflict between the person’s facial expression and what he or she is telling you. In either case, your brain is telling you that you should back away from the deal.

 

What’s going on here is that there is a large number of what psychologist Christof Koch calls “zombie mechanisms” whirring away deep in the recesses of your mind. They act like zombies because we are completely unconscious of their workings, much like a modern building in which we may be aware that the temperature is a comfortable 72°F but are completely unaware of the complexities of the climate control system that is humming away in the bowels of the building. When we look around the room, our brain is making millions of calculations about the appearance of objects that allow us to perceive the world. We are not aware of these calculations, but we are aware of the product—our visual world. In fact, we are not even consciously aware of most of our visual world, only what we are paying attention to.

 

Most of these zombie mechanisms are the result of our evolutionary past. Over thousands and millions of years, our ancestors had to solve the problems of living. These problems were recurrent—they happened over and over again. The result was that natural selection equipped people with a large number of mental mechanisms for coping with these problems—mechanisms for recogniz-ing faces and facial expressions, cooperating with others, interpreting threats, learning language, finding mates, and much else. Without this vast array of evolved modules, we could never do so many of the things we do effortlessly and routinely—literally without thinking about it.

 

But natural selection for modules specialized to solve particular problems is not the only route to implicit processing. Another route is when we learn something so well that we don’t have to think about it anymore. When children are learning their multiplication tables, it takes great conscious effort to remember that 3 x 4 = 12. But after a while, the answer to this problem comes automatically, without any conscious effort.

 

It’s the same with driving a car or playing tennis. When one is learning to drive as a teenager, it takes a great deal of conscious effort to monitor the road, watch for crosswalks, pay attention to the dashboard dials, and attempt to coordinate gas pedal and clutch in shifting gears. But after some practice, these activities are performed easily and without much conscious effort. The result is that experienced drivers have no difficulty listening to music or talking with a friend on the cell phone. (Of course, running on autopilot does have its dangers. Talking on a cell phone while driving is illegal in some states.)

 

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Learning multiplication tables, driving a car, and playing tennis are not innate activities. They are learned, but they become overlearned to the point that we don’t have to pay much attention to the task when we are performing it. This frees up our limited conscious processing space to do other—often more important—things. As a general rule, the mind makes common mental activities unconscious and automatic so that the limited resources available to the conscious mind can be allocated to tasks requiring attention and cognitive

 

³ The complicated motor routines involved in driving a car or playing tennis gradually become implicit. In fact, it is part of the folk psychology of tennis that a good way to make players play worse is to have them think about what they are doing. Tennis coaches talk about “muscle memory”—the uncon-scious, automatic mental processing that allows experienced tennis players to react quickly to situations without having to think about them.

 

The automaticity resulting from overlearning is important because some of people’s unconscious negative racial stereotypes may result from repeated exposure to information on different groups. For example, repeatedly encounter-ing newspaper articles on school failure and dropout by African-American and Latino children would be expected to result in an automatic stereotype of the educational abilities of these children. This stereotype would then be automati-cally activated when encountering these children or when contemplating sending one’s children to a particular school with high percentages of these children. These negative stereotypes may then become implicit and unconscious.

 

Table 1: Characteristics of Implicit and Explicit Cognitive Systems

IMPLICIT SYSTEM	EXPLICIT SYSTEM
Unconscious	Conscious
Automatic	Controllable
Fast	Relatively Slow
Evolved Early	Evolved Late
Parallel Processing	Sequential Processing
High Capacity	Limited by Attentional and
	Working Memory Resources
Effortless	Effortful
Acquisition by Biology	Acquisition by Culture
or Overlearning	and Formal Tuition

 

It’s important to note that these implicit negative stereotypes may coexist with explicit, conscious beliefs that there are no racial or ethnic differences in academic achievement. As described below, research has shown that there are often conflicts between implicit, unconscious attitudes held by whites on racial

 

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issues and consciously asserted explicit attitudes. Explicitly asserted attitudes are much more likely to be “politically correct”: That is, they are much more likely to conform to the more or less official racial ideology sanctioned by the media and the academic and political establishment.

 

Explicit Processing

 

The opposite of implicit processing is explicit processing. Explicit process-ing is conscious, controllable, and takes effort. A good example is solving a problem that we haven’t encountered before—that is, one that can’t be solved automatically like the multiplication tables we learned in the third grade. Say, for example, we are taking an IQ test like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices and we encounter the following problem:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Raven’s Progressive Matrices

 

The task is to find which of the eight possible answers fills out the pattern in a logical way. To solve the problem, one has to notice that as you go from the top row to the bottom row, more horizontal lines being added. So the missing piece must be filled with horizontal lines too—which means either piece 2 or piece 8. You also need to notice that the diamond shape is growing from left to right—from nothing in the left column, to the half-diamond in the middle column, to the full diamond in the right column. Since we already know the right piece must be filled with horizontal lines like piece 2 or piece 8, and the full diamond doesn’t appear in piece 8, we know that piece 2 is the right choice.

 

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Solving a problem like this requires that one keep a goal in mind, and it requires that one systematically pay attention to how the patterns change in two dimensions. This takes effort. The solution of the problem also involves processing information in a sequence. Rather than being able to process a vast amount of information in parallel as we do with implicit processing, we approach a problem like this in a sequence, one step at a time. The sequential processing of our conscious mind is always most obvious to me when I am trying to do two things at once, such as reading my email and listening to a comedy routine on TV. It simply can’t be done. Focusing on the email means that you really can’t pay attention to the jokes.

 

Whereas implicit mechanisms take in enormous amounts of information and process it very quickly, explicit mechanisms are relatively slow and have very limited capacity. For example, how good one is at solving problems like this (and they can get much harder) depends on working memory capacity. Working memory is the workspace of your mind. People with a strong working memory are better able to focus their attention on problems and ignore interfer-ing information. In general, people with a high working memory processing are better at solving these sorts of problems, and they have a higher IQ. But even the smartest human can’t really keep very much in mind at once. Most people can remember a number sequence of about 7–9 numbers—far fewer than a computer, and much less information than our modular, implicit mechanisms routinely process effortlessly.

 

As this example indicates, IQ is a critically important mechanism that involves explicit processing. However, another important explicit processing mechanism is the personality system of Conscientiousness, which will be the focus of this paper.⁴ Conscientiousness refers to “ socially prescribed impulse control”—that is, the ability to control one’s behavior to conform to social conventions and to pursue long-term goals.⁵ Conscientious people are able to delay gratification and to perform difficult, unpleasant tasks in pursuit of their goals. In general, they behave in a responsible, dependable, and cooperative

 

Conscientiousness is often labeled effortful control. This emphasizes the fact that Conscientiousness involves explicit, conscious processes. Simply put, conscientious people try hard. In a test of this trait for children, the experimenter places a piece of candy on a child’s tongue and asks him to not swallow until instructed to do so. Or the experimenter asks the child not to peek at a gift until the experimenter returns. For most five-year-olds, these are really hard things to do, because their natural tendency is to swallow the candy and look at the gift. In general, girls are more conscientious than boys, and of course Conscientiousness increases with age.

 

It’s not surprising that being low on Conscientiousness is a huge risk factor in modern life. Such people do poorly in school and on the job. They are more likely to become impulsive criminals—criminals whose crimes are due to lack

 

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of impulse control: murderers who can’t control their temper, drug abusers who can’t control their cravings, or rapists who can’t control their lust.

 

Notice that being conscientious means that we are better able to control our natural tendencies. Five-year-olds who manage to not peek at the present or eat the candy before the experimenter’s okay have to overcome powerful natural urges. We all have a natural attraction to the pleasures of drugs like cocaine (which mimic natural reinforcers) and the attractions of sexual desire. Most of us have had fantasies in which we imagine murdering a rival or enemy.⁶ These tendencies are very adaptive, because they motivate us to seek mates and other resources and to move up the social hierarchy.

 

But conscientious people can control these urges in order take account of the wider context (for example, going to prison for murder, or becoming a dysfunc-tional drug addict). They don’t allow their urges to interfere with long-term goals (such as inhibiting the desire to party in order to get a good education).

 

Neurobiological research shows quite clearly how this works. The prefrontal cortex is the seat of conscientiousness. It has inhibitory connections to subcor-tical regions of the brain responsible for our natural urges (drugs, sex, and rock–and roll, as I tell my students). The subcortical parts of the brain process information implicitly, and they are evolutionarily ancient. The prefrontal cortex processes information explicitly and is the crowning achievement of human evolution.

 

Consider one of evolutionary psychologist David Buss’s examples. A man is almost run over by a car; he responds by directing an obscene gesture at the car. The car stops and men get out and beat him. Suffering the pain and humiliation of being beaten enrages the man, and he responds by getting his gun: “I had stone hatred for him, and I righteously couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when I blew him away. As soon as he popped out of the liquor store door, I charged right up to him, rammed the barrel in his chest, and pulled the trigger.” ⁷ This is an example of impulsive aggression—the man is overwhelmed by rage stemming from his subcortex. It is a natural, reflexive reaction. His prefrontal cortex is pretty much out of the loop.

 

If this man had a stronger Conscientiousness system, things might have happened quite differently. The prefrontal cortex takes in information about the wider context of our behavior, and it analyzes the situation explicitly. The subcortical brain is responding in a reflexive, impulsive, angry manner, and the only context it is sensitive to is the fact that another person has inflicted pain. But a person with a strong PFC is able to control these urges, and take account of the wider context. Such a person doesn’t simply respond with impulsive aggression; he thinks about the big picture: If I kill this guy, will I get caught? If I kill him with a gun, does it have a serial number that can be traced? Is there any possibility of DNA evidence being left at the scene? If I do get caught, can I plea-bargain it down to manslaughter? Will his friends come and get revenge? Why not just call 911 and let the police deal with the beating?

 

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Most of these issues have become relevant only in modern times and would not have been relevant in the environments we evolved in. But the explicit processing mechanisms of the PFC allow us to consider them and, if necessary, inhibit our natural tendencies.

 

Research has shown that children with damage to the PFC have immature, egocentric moral reasoning and are prone to stealing and aggression.⁸ Patients with prefrontal damage originating in infancy exhibit a general lack of consci-entiousness (lack of dependability, inability to plan for the future, proneness to immediate rewards rather than long-term goals). Their aggression is impulsive rather than planned, and they lack a sense of guilt for transgressions against others.

 

Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California has shown how this works in the brain by contrasting impulsive murderers with predatory murderers.⁹ The brains of both impulsive murderers and predatory murderers have very active areas in the subcortical areas of the brain responsible for aggression. The difference is that predatory murderers also have normal levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex. As a result, they are better able to control their murderous tendencies. Their murders are planned, and because they are planned, it is often quite difficult to catch them. Serial murderers can go for years without being detected, while impulsive murderers are easily caught because they act on the spur of the moment, without the precautions needed to hide their crime.

 

To sum up, the PFC is able to regulate the more evolutionarily ancient parts of our brain responsible for many of our passions and desires. Another example is sexuality. When male subjects were shown erotic photos, subcortical areas of the brain responsible for sexual arousal were activated.¹⁰ However, when the subjects were told to distance themselves from the erotic stimuli and inhibit their arousal, they were able to do so. The fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) pictures of their brains showed that the prefrontal cortex was activated when they inhibited their sexual arousal.

 

ETHNOCENTRISM AND ITS CONTROL

 

Why is this important for thinking about psychology and white ethnocen-trism? Just as conscientious people can inhibit their natural tendencies toward aggression and sexual arousal, in the same way they able to inhibit their natural tendencies toward ethnocentrism. The critical point in the following is that cultural information is of vital importance for making people inhibit their ethnocentric tendencies. This cultural information relies on explicit processing and provides the basis for prefrontal inhibitory control of ethnocentrism. The conclusion is that the control of ethnocentrism is a direct consequence of the control of cultural information.

 

There is good evidence for several different evolved mechanisms related to ethnocentrism: genetic similarity mechanisms,¹¹ social identity mechanisms,¹² individualism/collectivism,¹³ and a human kinds module (see Appendix I).¹⁴

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In the following, the only assumption is that ethnocentrism exists. It is not important whether ethnocentrism is the result of psychological mechanisms that evolved for group defense or if it is the result of learned negative stereotypes of other groups. The point is that in either case people tend to have negative stereotypes of other races and they prefer people from their own race. The evidence shows that this includes white people, although as mentioned in the appendix below, there is also evidence that white people are less ethnocen-tric than other human groups: Western cultures tend toward individualism, whereas most of the rest of the world is much more collectivist in outlook.¹⁵ This implies that the control of ethnocentrism is easier for whites, because the subcortical mechanisms responsible for ethnocentrism are weaker.

 

Research on ethnocentrism has shown much awareness of the distinction between implicit and explicit processing. Implicit attitudes on race are assessed by tests like the Implicit Attitudes Test. Subjects are presented with photos of blacks and whites in succession and asked to pair positive or negative words (e.g., “intelligent,” “law-abiding,” “poor,” “success”) with the photos. Eighty percent of whites take longer to associate positive words with blacks than with whites. This is interpreted as indicating that whites have implicit negative stereotypes of blacks.

 

On the other hand, explicit attitudes on race are typically assessed by filling out questionnaires.¹⁶ College student populations of whites typically exhibit problack attitudes on these tests. For example, one study found that whites scored 1.89 on a six-point scale, with 1 meaning strongly pro-black, and 6 being strongly anti-black.¹⁷

 

Another way to measure explicit attitudes is by interview. A recent repre-sentative sample of 2000 households found that a surprising 74 percent of whites thought that racial identity was very important (37 percent) or somewhat important (37 percent).¹⁸ In general, people become more racially conscious as they get older—only 53 percent claimed that racial identity was important while growing up. (I have noticed this also as a feature of Jewish identity.¹⁹) Even more surprising is the finding that 77 percent of whites thought that whites had a culture that should be preserved. However, despite asserting the legitimacy of white ethnic identity, only 4 percent of whites claimed to be a member of an organization based on racial or ethnic identity. And 75 percent of whites state that prejudice and discrimination are important or very important to African-American disadvantage.

 

This study is therefore compatible with generally problack explicit attitudes. In general, blacks and other minorities have much stronger explicit ethnic identities than whites do. For example, this same survey found that 90 percent of blacks thought that racial identity was very important (72 percent) or somewhat important (18 percent), and 91 percent felt that black culture was worth preserving. Blacks also demonstrate a substantially larger explicit ingroup preference than whites.²⁰

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The main point here is that there is a gap between whites’ explicitly positive attitudes about blacks and their implicitly negative attitudes. Even white liberals show implicit negative attitudes toward blacks, but their implicit attitudes are less negative than those of conservatives. In fact, white liberals are more hypocritical about race than conservatives: There is a larger gap between implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes toward blacks among white liberals than among white conservatives.²¹

 

Implicit attitudes on race impact actual behavior. For example, whites’ explicit attitudes toward blacks predicted their verbal friendliness and their own perceptions of their behavior when interacting with a black. However, their implicit attitudes were a better predictor of nonverbal friendliness as rated by independent judges (higher rate of blinking and avoidance of eye contact).

 

The gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes is made possible by the inhibitory mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex. Two studies show that prefrontal control is able to inhibit negative implicit attitudes. In one study, subjects were shown photos of blacks and whites while hooked up to an fMRI machine that takes pictures of the brain in action.²² When the photos were shown for very brief periods—too short to be consciously processed, the fMRI showed that whites had a negative response to the photos of blacks. This procedure therefore measures implicit negative attitudes toward blacks.

 

However, when the photos of blacks were presented for a much longer period, so that they were consciously experienced, then the difference in reaction to black and white faces decreased. This happened because the prefrontal region was activated. In other words, people who are consciously aware that they are seeing photos of blacks are able to inhibit the negative automatic responses from the subcortex. Subjects who showed the most prefrontal activation showed the lowest subcortical response. This implies that they were better able to inhibit their automatic negative attitudes toward blacks.

 

Another study had black and white subjects scan photos of blacks and whites. fMRI scans showed subcortical activation when scanning photos of blacks but not when scanning photos of whites. This is interpreted as an implicit fear response because the reaction is involuntary and unconscious. However, when subjects were also given the verbal label “African American” along with the photo of a black person, there was no subcortical fear response. This is interpreted as resulting from prefrontal inhibitory control that suppresses the implicit fear response. In other words, the moment you start thinking about race in words, you know you’re thinking about it and can make decisions. Your prefrontal inhibitory centers have been activated, and the negative thoughts are suppressed.

 

Both these studies show the importance of prefrontal inhibitory control over automatic negative attitudes of whites toward blacks. White ethnocentrism exists, but it exists in a sort of underground world of unconscious, automatic processing. But ethnocentric attitudes dare not say their name: As soon as the

 

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explicit, conscious processor swings into action, it suppresses the negative implicit attitudes coming from below.

 

This is nicely illustrated in a study that explains what happens when people confront controversial issues related to race and ethnicity. White subjects were shown pictures of a smiling interracial couple and then told that their response to the photo indicated that they were prejudiced. After being told this, subjects took much longer to respond to later photos. This is interpreted as being due to subjects trying to consciously control their responses to the photos. The photo serves as a “cue for control”—a warning that “the situation is one in which prejudiced responses may occur and that the brakes need to be applied to ongoing behavior.”²³

 

Young children tend to have unabashedly explicit bias in favor of their own race. Explicit race bias emerges early, as young as age three or four, peaks in middle childhood, and then undergoes a gradual decline through adolescence, and disappears in adulthood.²⁴ However, there is no such decline in implicit racial preferences, which remain strong into adulthood.²⁵ There is also a decline in crossracial friends and companions as children get older. White school-children are much more likely to have white friends than chance expectation would account for, and this trend increases as they get older.²⁶ This means that at the same time that explicit racial preference in white children is declining, children are becoming less and less likely to actually interact with and form friendships with children from other races. In effect, schools undergo a process of self-segregation. And among adults, whites are significantly less likely than other racial groups to report interracial friendships and contacts.²⁷

 

The bottom line, then, is that as children get older they become increas-ingly aware of the official explicit racial ideology, and they conform to it. Their prefrontal centers of inhibitory control are becoming stronger, so that they are better able to inhibit their relatively positive attitudes about their own group. At the explicit level, they are free from any negative attitudes toward nonwhite groups and may even be politically liberal or radical. At the same time, however, they are “voting with their feet” by choosing friends and companions of the same race.

 

And their parents are doing the same thing. I have noted that liberals show a greater gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes and behavior than do conservatives. Indeed, while highly educated white parents tend to have liberal explicit attitudes on racial issues, including the desirability of school integration, a recent study shows that these same highly educated whites seek out schools that are racially segregated and are more likely to live in racially segregated neighborhoods.²⁸ There is a positive correlation between the average education of white parents and the likelihood that parents will remove their children from public schools as the percentage of black students increases. Michael Emerson, an author of the study, is quite aware of the gap between explicit attitudes and behavior: “I do believe that white people are

 

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being sincere when they claim that racial inequality is not a good thing and that they’d like to see it eliminated. However, … their liberal attitudes about race aren’t reflected in their behavior.”

 

The flip side of this is that less affluent whites are more likely to have explicitly illiberal attitudes on racial issues that are condemned by elites. Yet they are also more likely to actually live in racially integrated areas and send their children to racially integrated schools, presumably due to financial constraints

 

IMPLICIT WHITE COMMUNITIES

 

Children’s choice of friends and parents’ choice of schools and neighbor-hoods reflect the raw reality of racial hypocrisy in the United States. These children and their parents are acting on their implicit attitudes, and there is a profound gap between their implicit attitudes and their behavior (which show ingroup racial preference), on the one hand, and their explicit attitudes (which express the official racial ideology of egalitarianism), on the other. In effect, they are creating implicit white communities—implicit because even though they are an expression of (implicit) racial preferences, they cannot tell their name: They do not explicitly state that their friendship choices or their choice in neighborhood or school derives from racial preference, because that conflicts with their explicit racial attitudes and with the official racial ideology of the wider culture.

 

My hypothesis is that white Americans are gradually coalescing into a political and cultural affiliation as whites, and that this trend will continue to strengthen in the future. But at present, this political and cultural affiliation is not yet consciously white, at least partly because conscious white affiliation is a cultural taboo.

 

In the face of overwhelming sanctions on white racial identity in the post-World War II world, whites have adopted a variety of explicit identities which serve as the basis of white association and community. All of these identities exist under the radar of the political correctness enforced by elites in academia, politics, and the media. Considered here are several overlapping explicit white identities: Republican political affiliation, NASCAR racing enthusiast, evan-gelical Christian, and country music fan. Each of these identities allow white people to associate with other whites and even to form a white political base without any explicit acknowledgement that race plays a role.

 

Implicit white communities have become an increasingly important part of the American landscape. The most important of these implicit white commu-nities is residential segregation resulting from white flight. As Kevin Kruse notes, “at the dawn of the twenty-first century, America found itself dominated by suburbs and those suburbs dominated by the politics of white flight and urban secession.”²⁹ Part of this phenomenon stems from whites’ diminished

 

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willingness to contribute to public goods, because the beneficiaries are dispro-portionately blacks and other nonwhite minorities: “In the past, the hostility to the federal government, the welfare state, and taxation had been driven by racial resentment, whether in the form of segregationists inside Atlanta or seces-sionist suburbanites outside it. In the 1990s the new generation of suburban Republicans simply took the politics of white flight to the national stage.”³⁰ As Kruse notes, race is never part of the explicit rhetoric of white flight, which tends to be expressed as opposition to the federal government, the welfare state, taxation, and perceived moral issues like abortion and homosexuality. But at the implicit level, the desire for white communities and the aversion to contributing to public goods for nonwhites are the overriding motivations.

 

White flight is part of the fragmented future that lies in store for the U.S. and other Western countries with high levels of non-European immigration. It is a well-established finding that the more ethnically mixed a population becomes, the greater is its resistance to redistributive policies.³¹ For example, a study of donations to the United Way of America charity found that white Americans give less when their communities are more than 10 per cent nonwhite. Sociologist Robert D. Putnam recently showed that the greater the racial diversity of a community, the greater the loss of trust.³² People living in homogeneous areas like New Hampshire or Montana are more involved with friends, the community, and politics than people in more diverse areas.³³

 

At the political level, implicit whiteness is also reflected in Howard Dean’s famous comment that the Republican Party is the party of white Christians.³⁴ In 2004 and 2006, white evangelical or born-again Christians made up a quarter of the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted Republican.³⁵ In fact, other ethnic groups are coalescing into a nonwhite voting bloc centered in the Democratic Party to an even greater extent than whites are gravitating to the Republican Party. Over 90 percent of blacks typically vote Democrat, while Latinos vote around 60–70 percent Democrat.³⁶ Nonwhite ethnic groups tend to vote Democratic even when they have relatively high socioeconomic status—a good indication that this pattern results from identity politics rather than economics. In the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry won first-time Asian votes 78–20, and among American-born Asians he won by 80–18.³⁷ Despite the stridently pro-Israel policies of George W. Bush, around 76 percent of Jews voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, and Jews continue to form the financial backbone of the Democratic Party.³⁸ In 2002, only 8 percent of Republican votes came from nonwhites, and similar results occurred in 2006.³⁹

 

Not only are whites voting Republican, but white Republican voters are most likely to be married with children⁴⁰ These are exactly the people for whom white flight to safe neighborhoods, good schools, and predominant white ethnic composition is most compelling. The best correlation with Bush’s share of the vote by state in 2004 is the average years married by white women between age 18 and 44 (r= .91). Bush carried 44 percent of single white females

 

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but 61 percent of married white females; Bush also won 53 percent of single white men and 66 percent of married white men. Bush carried 25 of the top 26 states in total white fertility, while Kerry won all 16 of the states with the lowest white fertility. The correlation between total white fertility and Bush’s share of the vote was .86.

The recent congressional elections show that white support for Republicans is sensitive to issues such as the disastrous war in Iraq and the abysmal record of the Bush administration—the first neoconservative administration—in actually delivering on white flight political issues. As noted by many, the history of neoconservatism shows a strong support for core liberal issues (including relatively unrestricted immigration) and a stridently pro-Israel foreign policy.⁴¹ Nevertheless, even in 2006, 78 percent of white evangelical Christians—who are the most strongly identified implicit white voting constituency—voted Republican.⁴²

 

Another implicit white community is NASCAR racing, which strongly overlaps with evangelical Christianity, country music, and small town American culture, particularly the culture of the South. A famous Mike Luckovich cartoon that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows a black man and a white man talking with a Confederate flag flying in the background. “We need a flag that isn’t racist…but preserves white southern culture…” The next panel shows a NASCAR checkered flag. The implicit/explicit distinction could not be more obvious.

 

A large part of the attraction of NASCAR is a desire for traditional American culture. NASCAR events are permeated with sentimental patriotism, prayers, military flyovers, and postrace fireworks. As sociologist Jim Wright notes, “just about everything … you encounter in a day at the track drips with traditional Americana.”⁴³ However, “race is the skeleton in the NASCAR Family closet. On the tracks and in the stands, stock-car racing remains a white-person’s sport.”⁴⁴ The whiteness of NASCAR races can be seen from a comment that, after surveying the crowd at the 1999 Daytona 500, “there were probably about as many Confederate flags here as black people”—i.e., fewer than forty out of a crowd of approximately 200,000.⁴⁵ Because the Confederate flag is the ultimate in political incorrectness, their presence at NASCAR events is quite possibly an act of rebellion. “The near-universal discrediting of the Stars and Bars as a politically incorrect, if not racist, symbol has obviously not yet reached every Winston Cup fan. Either that, or they just don’t care. And, as you might imagine, there was no pussyfooting or self-flagellation about the point among fans at the Southern 500, which was adorned by a profusion of Confederate flags the likes of which I had not witnessed at any other track.”⁴⁶

 

Wright stresses the link of NASCAR to traditional small town and rural American culture and its links to outdoor pursuits like hunting, fishing, camping, and guns.⁴⁷ There is a large overlap between NASCAR fans and gun

 

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ownership. There is also a strong Christian religious atmosphere: Races begin with a benediction and a prayer. There is “a visible Christian fellowship” in NASCAR, including entire teams that identify themselves publicly as Christian teams; many of the drivers actively participate in Christian ministry.⁴⁸ Other values in evidence are courage in the face of danger—another throwback to traditional American culture, deriving ultimately from the Scots-Irish culture of the English borderlands: “As we enter the third decade of women’s libera-tion and the second decade of the post communist era, we’ve come to expect, even demand more sensitivity and empathy in our men than bravado or grit, and the traditional manly virtues of courage, bravery, and ‘guts’ strike many as anachronistic at best, even dangerous and moronic.”⁴⁹

 

The only recent scientific survey on NASCAR fans is the Southern Focus Poll of 1998, conducted by the Center for the Study of the South at the University of North Carolina.⁵⁰ 26.1 percent of white Southerners had been to a NASCAR race, compared to 4.4 percent of blacks. In the national sample using the same questions, the percentages were 24.1 and 12.5 percent respectively. These results undercount the total number of fans of non-NASCAR stock car racing and other forms of auto racing. 18.1 percent of respondents with a high school education had been to a NASCAR race, compared to 22.5 percent of high school graduates, 27 percent with some college, and 18 percent of college graduates. NASCAR also claims 75 million fans in America, 25 percent of the population.⁵¹ NASCAR racing is the fastest growing sport in America, second only to the NFL in sports viewership.⁵² This is a very large implicit white community.

 

Being a NASCAR fan overlaps with other implicit white identities. A 1993 survey carried out by the National Opinion Research Center found a 3:1 ratio in NASCAR attendance between small-town and large-city residents; almost 2:1 for gun owners vs. non-gun owners, 3:1 for hunters vs. nonhunters, and almost 3:1 between people who like country music “very much” and those who hate it (21.3 percent to 7.6 percent).⁵³ Indeed, one survey found that 49 percent of people who “listen to country music a lot” are fans of NASCAR, compared to 31 percent of all respondents. The biggest disparity is in the other direction: Only 24 percent of people who listen to country music a lot identify themselves as fans of the NBA compared to 47 percent of all respondents.⁵⁴

 

There is little doubt that country music is an implicit white community: Over 90 percent of country music listeners are white ⁵⁵ Although country music remains the most common radio format, it is disappearing from major urban areas where whites are becoming a minority.

 

While NASCAR is a white sport, the NBA is widely perceived to be a black sport. Whites, especially nonurban whites, are a decreasing audience for the NBA. Since the Michael Jordan era, television ratings for the NBA have been on the decline. In 2005, ratings were down 7 percent on ESPN and TNT, 4 percent on ESPN, and more than 30 percent for the NBA finals.⁵⁶ The audience

 

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for NASCAR and the NBA are nonoverlapping, with the NBA appealing to “a young, multicultural, urban market audience”⁵⁷ —the polar opposite of the married, white, Republicans who have adopted implicit white identities. NASCAR has enjoyed an increasingly dominant television audience position during the portion of the year formerly controlled by the NBA.⁵⁸

The NBA culture is seen as African-American, and the response of the NBA has been to attempt to make the NBA look more like white America in order to restore its fan base. Sports writer Gary Peterson notes that “for decades there has been a racial divide between NBA players (mostly black) and the paying customers (largely white). That divide has become a flashpoint over the past 15 years…Never before have the players seemed so unlike the fans. This divide is the top concern at the league office—even ahead of declining free throw shooting and baggy shorts. For proof you need look no further than the league-wide dress code NBA commissioner David Stern imposed last season. It was an extraordinary step—he might as well have told the players, ‘Quit dressing like typical young, urban African-Americans. You’re scaring the fans.’”⁵⁹ Besides banning ostentatious gold chains and mandating business casual attire, the NBA has also handed out draconian penalties for fighting among players, because fighting fits into the image of urban, African-American culture.⁶⁰ Another sportswriter, MSNBC’s Michael Ventre, opined that “the terms ‘NBA’ and ‘thuggery’ have become inextricably linked in the minds of basketball fans the world over.”⁶¹

 

The point is not that the NBA is more violent than, say, professional hockey; it’s just that the NBA is conscious of racial stereotyping processes among whites. Part of NASCAR’s attraction for whites is that it is an implicit white community. By regulating dress and conduct, the NBA seems to be trying to make the NBA an implicit white community despite the racial composition of its players.

 

MANAGING WHITE ETHNOCENTRISM:

 

THE PROBLEM WITH NON-EXPLICIT WHITE IDENTITY

 

Thus far the argument has been that white people are gradually coalescing into implicit white communities that reflect their ethnocentrism but “cannot tell their name.” They are doing so because of the operation of various mechanisms that operate implicitly, below the level of conscious awareness. These white communities cannot assert explicit white identities because the explicit cultural space is deeply committed to an ideology in which any form of white identity is anathema. Explicit culture operates in the conscious prefrontal centers able to control the subcortical regions of the brain.

 

This implies that the control of culture is of critical importance. The story of how this explicit cultural space came to be and whose interests it serves is beyond the scope of this paper. My view is that these cultural transforma-tions are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted

 

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tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science) and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe ⁶² The result has been a “culture of critique” that represents the triumph of the leftist movements that have dominated twentieth-century intellectual and political discourse in the West, especially since World War II. The funda-mental assumptions of these leftist movements, particularly as they relate to race and ethnicity, permeate intellectual and political discourse among both liberals and conservatives and define a mainstream consensus among elites in academia, the media, business, and government.

 

The explicit cultural space can be categorized into two components: social controls and ideology.⁶³ Social controls include penalties for explicit mani-festations of white ethnocentrism (e.g., hate crime statutes, ostracism, loss of livelihood, and the legal infrastructure of massive nonwhite immigration and affirmative action). While most animals are sensitive only to contexts that have repeatedly occurred in their evolutionary history, we humans are exquisitely sensitive to the complex cultural milieu, which includes a variety of subtle and not so subtle penalties for explicitly proclaiming a white identity. Being aware of the wider cultural context of social controls that structure the consequences of behavior requires input to the higher brain centers situated in the prefrontal cortex and, as we have seen, this input may result in inhibiting tendencies toward ethnocentrism originating from lower in the brain.

 

Ideologies are explicit belief systems that structure attitudes and behavior related to race and ethnicity. Because they are a manifestation of explicit processing, they are products of higher cognitive processes located in the prefrontal cortex. Because of the power of the prefrontal cortex over the lower brain, these ideologies can have important influences on behavior. They include ideologies of race and ethnicity (e.g., race doesn’t exist; assertions of white identity and interests are an indication of psychopathology or moral turpitude, while assertions of nonwhite identities and interests are legitimate and praiseworthy; white achievement and the underachievement of blacks and Latinos are the result of white racism and white privilege; there are no biological differences between the races affecting intelligence and achieve-ment); ideologies promoting massive nonwhite immigration (e.g., diversity is a strength; America is a country founded on a set of abstract principles with no ethnic identity); counter-stereotypical media images (blacks are more intelligent, wiser, and more responsible parents than whites).

 

Because implicit ethnocentrism is alive and well among whites and affects their behavior in subtle ways, one might suppose that whites are in fact able to pursue their interests even against the prevailing wind of the explicit culture of powerful antiwhite social controls and ideologies. The problem, however, is that white ethnic identity and interests can be managed if they remain only at the implicit level. In general, implicit white communi-ties conform to the official multicultural ideology and adopt conventional

 

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attitudes and rhetoric on racial and ethnic issues. This allows them to escape the scrutiny of the cultural elites that enforce conventional attitudes on racial and ethnic issues. However, it renders them powerless to actively promote issues that vitally affect their ethnic interests.

 

A good example is massive nonwhite immigration. In the past year, there has been much discussion of illegal immigration that tapped into a very large reservoir of public anger about the lack of control of our borders and, I think, the transformations that immigration is unleashing. Although it was common for proponents of illegal immigration to label their opponents “racists,” the fact that illegal immigration is, after all, illegal made it easy for conservatives to oppose without mentioning their racial interests.

 

This contrasts with no discussion at all in the mainstream media of the nearly one million legal immigrants who come to the U.S. every year—no discussion of their effect on the economy, social services, crime, and competi-tion at elite universities; no discussion of their effect on the long-term ethnic composition of the U.S. and how this will affect the political interests of whites; no discussion of the displacement of native populations in various sectors of the economy; and no discussion of whether most Americans really want all of this. (They don’t.)⁶⁴ Indeed, it has been quite common for conservative opponents of illegal immigration to assert their support for legal immigra-tion as a means of dodging the charge of “racism.” While assertions of ethnic interests by nonwhites are a commonplace aspect of the American political and intellectual scene, mainstream explicit assertions of ethnic interests by whites have been missing since the 1920s.⁶⁵

 

The result is that the leftist ideologies of race and ethnicity have become part of conventional morality and intellectual discourse, even within implicitly white communities. As a result, implicit white communities are impotent in opposing the forces that are changing the country in ways that oppose their long-term interest. Because there is no mainstream attempt by whites to shape the explicit culture in ways that would legitimize white identity and the pursuit of white ethnic interests, implicit white communities become enclaves of retreating whites rather than communities able to consciously pursue white interests.

 

The creation of an explicit white culture legitimizing white identity and interests is a prerequisite to the successful pursuit of the interests of whites

 

PSYCHOLOGICAL CHALLENGES TO DEVELOPING AN

 

EXPLICIT CULTURE OF WHITE IDENTITY AND INTERESTS

 

My view, then, is that in the absence of changes in the explicit cultural space on issues related to the legitimacy of white racial identity and interests, whites will continue to simply retreat into implicit white communities. There

 

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are obviously a great many obstacles to developing such a mainstream culture, the main one being opposition by elites in the media, academia, business, and political cultures. As is well known, there is a major gap between popular and elite opinion on critical issues such as massive nonwhite immigration.⁶⁶

 

A large part of the problem is that for many in these elites, economic and professional self-interest coincides with support for antiwhite policies. Particularly egregious examples are companies that directly benefit from immi-gration via cheap labor, or companies, such as First Data Corporation, which benefit from remittances sent by immigrants to relatives in other countries.⁶⁷ A noteworthy example is Mary Sue Coleman, who earns $742,148 as the president of the University of Michigan and has been a leader in attempting to preserve racial preferences and in promoting the educational benefits of diversity.⁶⁸ Another example is knee-jerk assumptions by faculty and administrators when three Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping and assaulting a black woman.⁶⁹ Because the leftist political cultural of the university has become conventionalized, expressions deploring the racism and sexism of the players could be counted on as good career moves, even when they turned out to be false. Adopting conventional views on race and ethnicity is a sine qua non for a career as a mainstream intellectual or in the political arena.

 

As Frank Salter has pointed out, whites who fail to attend to the interests of their wider kinship group benefit themselves and their families at the expense of their own ethnic interests.⁷⁰ This is especially true for elite whites—people whose intelligence, power, and wealth could make a very large difference in culture and politics. They are in effect sacrificing millions of ethnic kin for the benefit of themselves and their immediate family.

 

This is a disastrously wrongheaded choice by the standard measures of evolutionary success. However, because our evolved psychology is much more attuned to individual and family interests than to the interests of the ethnic group or race, whites who benefit economically or professionally from adopting conventional views on race and ethnicity are unlikely to feel unease at the psychological level.

 

Another problem is that part of our evolved psychology is designed to emulate and look up to socially dominant people, especially if they look like us. A critical component of the success of the culture of critique is that it achieved control of the most prestigious and influential institutions of the West, and it became a consensus among elites, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.⁷¹ Once this happened, it is not surprising that this culture became widely accepted among people of very different levels of education and among people of different social classes.

 

Although changing the structure of material benefits is doubtless critical for advancing white ethnic interests, we should also pay attention to the psychological level, because this also plays an important role. Adopting

 

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conventional views on race and ethnicity not only confers material benefits, it confers psychological benefits. On the other hand, dissenting from these views carries huge costs. White elites who turn their back on their own ethnic group are likely to be massively reinforced within the contemporary explicit culture, while those who attempt to advance white interests can expect to suffer rather intense psychological costs. The massive social approval University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman receives within the culture of the university for her positions on diversity issues is doubtless a positive component of her job.

 

In large measure, the reason for this lies in the same psychological system discussed previously—Conscientiousness. Thus far, I have stressed the impor-tance of Conscientiousness for inhibiting our natural tendencies in the service of long-term payoffs and fitting into the wider cultural context. However, people who are high on Conscientiousness also tend to be deeply concerned about their reputation.

 

This is no accident. In fact, developing a good reputation is an important way for conscientious people to get long-term payoffs. Think of it this way. If I cheat someone, I get a short-term gain at the expense of developing a bad reputation. The only way I can continue to survive is to prey on others who don’t know my reputation, and that means moving on and interacting with strangers, not friends and allies. On the other hand, if I cooperate with someone we both gain and I develop a reputation as a cooperator that may last a lifetime. In the long run, therefore, I will be better off. Conscientious people are cooperators, and as a result they are vitally concerned about their reputation.

 

Recent theoretical work has shown that having access to people’s reputa-tion is likely to be a necessary condition for the evolution of cooperation.⁷² Information on the reputation of individuals constitutes a collective memory of the past history of individuals and is made possible by language—that is, explicit representations of the past history of individuals in cooperative situ-ations ⁷³ Without such explicit information on reputation, cooperators would be at an evolutionary disadvantage and vulnerable to a strategy of short-term exploitation rather than long-term cooperation with like-minded others. This explicit information on reputation is therefore processed by the higher brain centers located in the prefrontal cortex linked to Conscientiousness.

 

I am suggesting, therefore, that evolutionary pressure for cooperation is a critical adaptive function accounting for the evolution of Conscientiousness. Psychological research shows that people high in Conscientiousness are respon-sible, dependable, dutiful, and reliable. Indeed, responsibility emerges as a facet (i.e., subcategory) of Conscientiousness defined as cooperative, depend-able, being of service to others, and contributing to community and group projects ⁷⁴ These traits are also highly correlated with honesty, morality, and behavior as a moral exemplar.

 

Thus Conscientiousness not only makes us better able to inhibit natural impulses like ethnocentrism, it also makes us more concerned about our

 

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reputation. We want to fit into the community and we want to be known as cooperators, not cheaters. At the opposite end are sociopaths. Sociopaths are at the low end of Conscientiousness. They take advantage of people for short-term gains and care nothing about developing a reputation as honest and trustworthy. After they prey on one victim, they must move on to an area where their reputation is not known.

 

Obviously, Conscientiousness as defined above is a pillar of human civili-zation and cultural life. Perhaps paradoxically, this is especially so in the indi-vidualistic cultures of the West. Western cultures tend toward individualism, whereas most of the rest of the world is much more collectivist and oriented toward the extended family (see appendix).⁷⁵ Individualism is associated with all of the markers of modernism in the West—the nuclear family, economic individualism, science, democratic and republican forms of governments, and moral universalism.⁷⁶ To this set of traits, Francis Fukuyama also adds trust as a critical virtue of individualist societies.⁷⁷

 

Trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust ends at the border of the family and kinship group. Social organization, whether in political culture or in economic enterprise, tends to be a family affair. Morality is defined as what is good for the group—typically the kinship group (e.g., the notorious line, “Is it good for the Jews?”). This lack of ability to develop a civil society is the fundamental problem of societies in the Middle East and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. The movement of the West toward multiculturalism really means the end of individualist Western culture.⁷⁸

In individualist cultures, on the other hand, organizations include nonfamily members in positions of trust. Morality is defined in terms of universal moral principles that are independent of kinship connections or group membership. Trust therefore is of critical importance to individualist society.

And fundamentally trust is about building a trustworthy reputation—for example, a reputation for honest dealing not only with fellow kinsmen, but with others as well. It follows that European-derived people are particularly prone to being concerned with reputation. In the individualistic societies in which they evolved, cooperation (and therefore success) resulted from having a good reputation, not from having extensive kinship relations.

 

There are obviously great benefits to trust and to the wider psychological system of Conscientiousness. The suite of traits associated with individualism is the basis of Western modernism. Relying on the good reputation of others is a key ingredient to building cooperative civil societies capable of rising above amoral familism.

 

The downside, however, is that conscientious people become so concerned about their reputation that they become conformists. Once the intellectual and political left had won the day, a large part of its success was that it dominated the

 

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moral and intellectual high ground related on issues of race and ethnicity. The culture of critique had become conventionalized and a pillar of the intellectual establishment. People who dissented from this leftist consensus were faced with a disastrous loss of reputation—nothing less than psychological agony.

 

There are many examples showing the power of this mechanism. Over 60 years ago Anne Morrow Lindbergh became one of the first victims of the modern version of political correctness when her husband, Charles Lindbergh, stated that Jews were one of the forces attempting to get the United States to enter World War II. Shortly after his speech, she wrote:

 

The storm is beginning to blow up hard…I sense that this is the beginning of a fight and consequent loneliness and isolation that we have not known before… For I am really much more attached to the worldly things than he is, mind more giving up friends, popularity, etc., mind much more criticism and coldness and loneliness…Will I be able to shop in New York at all now? I am always stared at—but now to be stared at with hate, to walk through aisles of hate ⁷⁹

 

What is striking and perhaps counterintuitive, is that the guilt and shame remain even when she is completely satisfied at an intellectual level that her beliefs are based on good evidence and reasonable inferences, and are morally justifiable. Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes,

 

I cannot explain my revulsion of feeling by logic. Is it my lack of courage to face the problem? Is it my lack of vision and seeing the thing through? Or is my intuition founded on something profound and valid? I do not know and am only very disturbed, which is upsetting for him. I have the greatest faith in him as a person—in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness—his nobility really…How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it?

 

Her reaction is involuntary and irrational—beyond the reach of logical analysis. Charles Lindbergh was exactly right in what he said, but a rational understanding of the correctness of his analysis cannot lessen the psychologi-cal trauma to his wife, who must face the hostile stares of others. The trauma is the result of the power of the Conscientiousness system in leading to loss of reputation resulting from breaching the cultural taboo against discussing Jewish influence.

 

I’ve had similar experiences, on a much smaller scale, resulting from attacks on me at the university where I work.⁸⁰ As with Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s concern about going shopping in New York, the most difficult thing is dealing with loss of reputation in my face-to-face world at the university. And it’s not just that it’s in the face-to-face world of everyday life. It’s that the areas of nonconformity on race and ethnicity have huge moral overtones. If one dissents from the reigning theory of macroeconomics or the main influences on nineteenth-century French Romanticism, one may be viewed as a bit eccentric or perhaps none too smart. But one is not likely to be subjected to torrents of moral outrage.

 

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Given that academics tend to be Conscientious types, it’s not surprising that academics are generally loath to do or say things that might endanger their reputation. This is at least ironic, because it conflicts with the image of academics as fearless seekers of truth. Unlike politicians, who must continue to curry favor with the public in order to be reelected, and unlike media figures, who have no job protection, academics with tenure have no excuse for not being willing to endure labels such as “anti-Semite” or “racist” in order to pursue truth. Part of the job—and a large part of the rationale for tenure in the first place—is that they are supposed to be willing to take unpopular positions: to forge ahead using all that brain power and expertise to chart new territories that challenge the popular wisdom.

 

But that image of academia is simply not based in reality. Consider, for example, an article that appeared almost two months after the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s famous essay on the Israel lobby,⁸¹ appropriately titled “A hot paper muzzles academia.”⁸²

 

Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle—and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamen-tably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.

 

Professors refused to take a stand on the paper, either in favor or against. As one Ivy League professor noted, “A lot of [my colleagues] were more concerned about the academic politics of it, and where they should come down, in that sense.”

 

Sadly, there is now a great deal of evidence that academics in general are careful to avoid controversy or do much of anything that will create hostility. In fact, some researchers are pointing to this fact to question whether tenure is justified. A recent survey of the attitudes of 1,004 professors at elite univer-sities illustrates this quite clearly.⁸³ Regardless of their rank, professors rated their colleagues as

 

reluctant to engage in activities that ran counter to the wishes of colleagues. Even tenured full professors believed [other full professors] would invoke academic freedom only “sometimes” rather than “usually” or “always”; they chose confrontational options “rarely,” albeit more often than did lower ranked colleagues…Their willingness to self-limit may be due to a desire for harmony and/or respect for the criticisms of colleagues whose opinions they value. Thus, the data did not support the depiction of Professorus Americanus as unleashed renegade.

 

Seen in this context, the reaction to the Mearsheimer and Walt paper makes a lot of sense. As one professor noted, “People might debate it if you gave everyone a get-out-of-jail-free card and promised that afterward everyone would be friends.” ⁸⁴ This intense desire to be accepted and liked by one’s

 

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colleagues is certainly understandable. Striving for a good reputation is part of our nature, especially for the conscientious among us.

 

Ostracism and moral condemnation from others in one’s face-to-face world trigger guilt feelings. These are automatic responses resulting ultimately from the importance of fitting into a group that were developed over evolutionary time. This is especially so in the individualistic cultures of the West, where having a good reputation beyond the borders of the kinship group forms the basis of trust and civil society, and where having a poor reputation would have resulted in ostracism and evolutionary death.

 

As shown by the example of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, being able to defend rationally the ideas and attitudes that bring moral condemnation is not sufficient to defuse the complex negative emotions brought on by this form of ostracism. One might think that just as the prefrontal control areas can inhibit ethnocentric impulses originating in the subcortex, we should be able to inhibit these primitive guilt feelings. After all, the guilt feelings ultimately result from absolutely normal attitudes of ethnic identity and interests that have been delegitimized as a result of the erection of the culture of critique in the West. It should be therapeutic to understand that this culture was instituted by people who typically retained a strong sense of their own ethnic identity and interests. And it should help assuage guilt feelings if we understand that this culture is now maintained by people seeking material advantages and psychological approval at the expense of their own ethnic interests. The guilt feelings are nothing more than the end result of ethnic warfare, pursued at the level of ideology and culture instead of on the battlefield.

 

Getting rid of guilt and shame, however, is certainly not an easy process. Psychotherapy for white people begins with an explicit understanding of the issues that allows us to act in our interests, even if we can’t entirely control the negative feelings engendered by those actions.

 

Evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers has proposed that the emotion of guilt is a sign to the group that a person will mend his ways and behave in the future. Shame, on the other hand, functions as a display of submission to people higher in the dominance hierarchy. From that perspective, a person who is incapable of shame or guilt even for obvious transgressions is literally a sociopath—someone who has no desire to fit into group norms. As noted above, sociopaths are at the low end of Conscientiousness, and there was doubtless strong selection against sociopathy in the small groups that we evolved in, especially among the individualistic peoples of the West. The trustworthy cooperators with excellent reputations won the day.

 

CONCLUSION

 

I think that evolutionists have not been properly sensitive to the enormous gulf between humans and animals resulting from human general intelligence and the Conscientiousness system. At a very broad level, the Conscientiousness

 

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system allows our behavior to come under the control of the surrounding culture. We make complex appraisals of how our behavior will affect us given the current cultural milieu. Potential murderers may think about the possibility of leaving DNA evidence and what types of plea bargains might be possible if they are caught. Potential thought criminals must assess the risks to their livelihood and their reputation in their face-to-face world.

 

But it gets more complicated than that. Modern humans are exposed to an often bewildering array of cultural messages that affect how they see the world. These messages are often directed at the explicit processing system and they may be influenced by a wide range of competing interests. For example, it is a commonplace that media images have important effects on behavior even though people are often unaware that their behavior is influenced by the images ⁸⁵ These images are often engineered by advertisers who are consciously attempting to influence the recipients of the messages in ways that conform to the advertisers’ interests, not those of the audience.

 

More important, media messages shape the discussion of issues related to white identity and interests. The culture of critique has become the explicit culture of the West, endlessly repeated in media messages but packaged differ-ently for people of different levels of intelligence and education, and for people with different interests and from different subcultures.⁸⁶ The message of this paper is that by programming the higher areas of the brain, this explicit culture is able to control the implicit ethnocentric tendencies of white people.

 

In attempting to find a way out of this morass, therefore, changing the explicit culture is critical. To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign slogan, it’s the explicit culture, stupid. Changing the explicit culture won’t be easy, but I suggest that the first step is a psychological one: Proud and confident explicit assertions of ethnic identity and interests among white people, and the creation of communities where such explicit assertions are considered normal and natural rather than a reason for ostracism. The fact that such assertions appeal to our implicit psychology is certainly an asset. It’s always easier to go with a natural tendency than to oppose it. And in this case, opposing our natural ethnocentric tendencies by using our quintessentially human prefron-tal inhibitory control against our own ethnic interests is nothing less than a death sentence.

 

APPENDIX: BIOLOGICAL ROOTS OF ETHNOCENTRISM

 

Frank Salter presents a powerful case for the adaptiveness of ethnocen-trism ⁸⁷ Different human ethnic groups and races have been separated for thousands of years, and during this period they have evolved some genetic distinctiveness. This genetic distinctiveness constitutes a storehouse of genetic interest.

 

In other words, people have an interest in their ethnic group in exactly the same way that parents have a genetic interest in raising their children:

 

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In raising their children, parents ensure that their unique genes are passed on to the next generation. But in defending ethnic interests, people are doing the same thing—ensuring that the genetic uniqueness of their ethnic group is passed into the next generation. When parents of a particular ethnicity succeed in rearing their children, their ethnic group also succeeds because the genetic uniqueness of their ethnic group is perpetuated as part of their child’s genetic inheritance. But when an ethnic group succeeds in defending its interests, individual members of the ethnic group also succeed because the genetic uniqueness that they share with other members of the ethnic group is passed on. This is the case even for people who don’t have children: A person succeeds genetically when his ethnic group as a whole prospers.

 

A quick look at the historical record shows that conflict between tribal groups has been common throughout human history. Cooperative defense by tribal peoples is universal and ancient and it is bound to have boosted the genetic fitness of those who acted to further the interests of their group. Under such circumstances it would be odd indeed if natural selection did not mold the human mind to be predisposed to ethnocentrism. Of course, this fact does not tell us what psychological mechanisms actually evolved to promote ethnocentrism or how these mechanisms can be controlled by inhibitory mechanisms located in the prefrontal cortex. For that, we will have to turn to the empirical research.

 

Genetic Similarity Theory: Birds of a Feather Flock Together

 

1. Philippe Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory (GST) is a biological/ genetic theory aimed at explaining positive assortment on a variety of traits in friendships, marriage, and alliance formation.⁸⁸ Friends, spouses, and the other people we make alliances with are more like us than people selected at random. At the psychological level, the same mechanisms that influence these choices may well also be involved in positive attitudes toward people in the same ethnic group.

People not only assort positively for a wide variety of traits, they do so most on traits that are more heritable—that is, the traits that have a relatively strong genetic influence. This means that when you select a genetically similar spouse, your children are more similar to you than they would be if (God forbid!) you had chosen your spouse at random. Moreover, identical twins have more similar spouses and friends than do fraternal twins. Genetic differences therefore influence the tendency to assort with similar others.⁸⁹ In other words, some of us are more attracted to genetically similar spouses and friends than others, and this tendency is influenced genetically.

 

The implication is that when there is a choice to be made whether in marriage, friendship, or other type of alliance, all things being equal, we are more likely to choose similar others as a way of enhancing the benefits of relationships and lessening the risks. Obviously, being of the same race is a

 

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very important basis of similarity. In the body of this paper, I describe what I call implicit white communities: communities, such as NASCAR and country music fandom in the United States, where the vast majority of participants are white but not necessarily self-consciously so. That is, white people choose to be among people who are white like themselves, but they don’t necessarily think of their choice as resulting from a conscious desire to be part of a white community. At the psychological level, GST is probably the best explanation for this phenomenon.

 

Social Identity Mechanisms: Our Team Is Better (and Smarter and More Moral) Than Your Team

 

An early form of social identity theory was stated by William Graham Sumner, a pioneer evolutionary anthropologist, in 1906:

Loyalty to the group, sacrifice for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders, brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common products of the same situation. It is sanctified by connection with religion. Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors of the we-group waged war…Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways, these excite its scorn.⁹⁰

 

Psychological research shows that people are highly prone to identifying themselves with ingroups. And once in a group, people tend to exaggerate the positive traits of ingroup members, and they exaggerate the homogeneity of their ingroup on these positive traits (“we’re smart and we have high moral standards”). On the other hand, people tend to have negative stereotypes of the outgroup and are even more likely to exaggerate the extent to which outgroup members share these negative traits (“they’re stupid and dishonest”).⁹¹ Of course, in some cases, these stereotypes may have a lot of truth to them.

 

There is good evidence that social identity processes are a psychological adap-tation designed by natural selection for competition between groups. William Graham Sumner would not be surprised that modern research shows that these group dynamics are cross-cultural universals. Similar results are found across subjects of different ages, nationalities, and social classes, and can even be seen in very young children.⁹² Anthropological evidence indicates the universality of the tendency to view one’s own group as superior⁹³ and to denigrate outgroups. As anthropologist Horowitz notes, “in one country after another, other ethnic groups are described in unflattering or disparaging terms.”⁹⁴

 

Note that even though social identity processes are an evolutionary adap-tation, they do not work by assessing genetic differences between groups. Instead, the important thing is that people be in different groups. A good example would be WWII-era intraservice rivalries—as reflected in barroom brawls between soldiers and sailors. There may be no genetic differences at

 

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all between the two teams or both teams may be a mixture of different ethnic groups, but social identity mechanisms still make us think highly of our team and not so highly of the opposition. In fact, some evolutionary psychologists have proposed using this feature of our psychology to deemphasize the impor-tance of race as a category.⁹⁵

 

Individualism/Collectivism:Individualism Is the Basis of Western

 

Modernism

 

Even though identifying with groups is a universal tendency, there are some important differences. Western cultures tend toward individualism, whereas most of the rest of the world is much more collectivist in its outlook.⁹⁶ Individualist cultures show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of self-reliance, independence, individual responsibility, and “finding yourself.”⁹⁷ Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup members and are more likely to behave in a prosocial, altruistic manner to strangers (e.g., white medical missionaries to Africa).⁹⁸

 

Individualism is linked to a suite of traits that together form the basis of Western modernism: the nuclear family, bilateral kinship patterns, monogamy, moral universalism, civil societies based on trust and reputation rather than kinship connections, relative lack of ethnocentrism and group orientation, and science ⁹⁹ Collectivist cultures typical of the Middle East, China, India, and African cultures have the opposite suite of traits. Most centrally these societies are based on extended kinship and tribal relationships.

 

An illustrative contrast between individualist and collectivist societies is in the area of moral reasoning. In collectivist societies, morality is defined in terms of whether an action satisfies obligations within the family or kinship group, whereas in individualist societies, morality is thought of as satisfying abstract notions of justice. The moral implications of the individualism/collectivism distinction can be seen by a study contrasting India (a collectivist culture) and the United States (an individualist culture). Young adults and children are asked what they would do in the following situation:

 

Ben was in Los Angeles on business. When his meetings were over, he went to the train station. Ben planned to travel to San Francisco in order to attend the wedding of his best friend. He needed to catch the very next train if he was to be n time for the ceremony, as he had to deliver the wedding rings. However, Ben’s wallet was stolen in the train station. He lost all of his money as well as his ticket to San Francisco. Ben approached several officials as well as passengers at the train station and asked them to loan him money to buy a new ticket. But, because he was a stranger, no one was willing to lend him the money he needed. While Ben was sitting on a bench trying to decide what to do next, a well-dressed man sitting next to him walked away for a minute. Looking over at where the man had been sitting, Ben noticed that the man had left his coat unat-

 

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tended. Sticking out of the man’s coat pocket was a train ticket to San Francisco. Ben knew that he could take the ticket and use it to travel to San Francisco on the next train. He also saw that the man had more than enough money in his coat pocket to buy another train ticket. ¹⁰⁰

 

Indian subjects were more than twice as likely to decide to take the ticket in order to fulfill their family obligation (around 80 percent to 40 percent). Children in the United States, on the other hand, tended to say that the man should not steal the train ticket because stealing violates principles of justice that apply to everyone. For children from India, morality is defined by the needs of the family. For children in the United States, morality is defined more by abstract principles of justice.

 

Individualism forms the basis of Western success, but it also implies that the control of ethnocentrism among white people is relatively easy. As discussed in the body of this paper, this does not imply that white people lack ethnocen-trism. But it does imply that controlling ethnocentrism among whites is easier because they are relatively less attached to their people and culture than the vast majority of other humans.

 

Individualism/collectivism is very likely to have a biological basis because of its widespread ramifications in the areas of kinship relationships, marriage, and the development of civil societies that define Western modernism. My theory is that this suite of traits is the result of a long history of evolution in northern climates.¹⁰¹

 

Is There a “Human Kinds” Module?

 

People have a natural tendency to place themselves in groups and to think highly of their ingroup and denigrate outgroups. These groups can range from groups that are arbitrarily chosen by psychologists, to bowling leagues, football teams, and religious groups. But in general, some groups seem to have much more of an emotional pull than others. Psychologists may indeed find discrimi-nation against outgroups in arbitrarily composed groups, but people are not going to lay down their lives for an arbitrarily chosen group, or even for their bowling team. College students identify with their college or fraternity and denigrate other colleges and fraternities, but few students would incur a huge cost in doing so. On the other hand, ethnic, religious, and patriotic emotions run deep, and it is not at all uncommon for people make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of these groups.

 

This raises the question of whether race and ethnicity are natural categories. If so, people would have a natural tendency to classify themselves into ingroups and outgroups on the basis of these categories. And they would tend to have stronger allegiance to these groups than, say, their stamp collecting club. These mechanisms would also make these groups more emotionally compelling. People would have more of a tendency to become emotionally involved in these groups than in garden-variety groupings: For example, we would get more psychologi-

 

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cal satisfaction in being accepted by the racial or ethnic group, and we would be more distressed at the possibility being ostracized from the racial or ethnic group. The deep and seemingly ineradicable attachments that so many people have to their ethnic groups strongly suggest that there is indeed a human kinds module that automatically places people in racial categories. Such a module might also result in automatic negative emotions toward racial outgroups. As described below, even relatively nonethnocentric white people have an attach-ment to their race, albeit rather rudimentary and unconscious.

 

To date, research has focused on whether race and ethnicity are natural categories. Since the official ideology is that race is nothing more than a social construct, it is not surprising that there is a great deal of controversy on this issue ¹⁰² In fact it often seems that a great deal of politically correct intellectual energy is put into trying to prove that Mother Nature could not possibly have made race or ethnicity a natural category. Some argue that people could not possibly have a human kinds module, because prior to the modern world of long- distance transportation they would not have come into contact with other races or ethnic groups. ¹⁰³ In fact, long distance migrations over several generations did indeed bring people with different physical appearance into contact with each other.¹⁰⁴ This sort of repeated contact with outsiders would allow the evolution of a module specialized to detect and respond to racial and ethnic differences.

 

Another politically correct proposal is that people are “fooled” into thinking that ethnic and racial groups are real because they superficially resemble animal species ¹⁰⁵ Like animal species, ethnic groups marry among themselves and membership is by descent. (One can’t just decide to be, say, Japanese.) According to this theory, the mistake is to think that races and ethnic groups really are like animal species.

 

Another theory argues that there is a human kinds module that evolved for categories like sex and age, but not race. Since all humans would have been exposed to the categories of sex and age over evolutionary time, there would be a module that these categories are essential to people’s identity and can’t be changed. However, this module is “fooled” into thinking that different races and ethnic groups are also natural human kinds.¹⁰⁶

 

But of course, ethnic groups do show genetic differences from each other, and they typically look different from each other. The mistake is to deny the reality of genetically based racial and ethnic differences and to simply dismiss the possibility that humans would have been repeatedly exposed to different groups over evolutionary time so that indeed racial and ethnic differences would be a natural trigger for this module.

 

My view is that in fact we do have a human kinds module designed not simply to categorize people in terms of a variety of natural categories such as men, women, and children, but to specifically categorize people as belonging

 

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to different racial/ethnic groups.¹⁰⁷ Even at very early ages children view race in more essentialist terms than either occupation or body build—that is, they see it as inherited and an important part of a person’s identity. We can change our body build or our occupation, but not our race. (Michael Jackson may be an exception!)

Race and ethnicity have all the features of an evolved module. Processing of racial and ethnic differences is rapid, unconscious, and automatic—all char-acteristics of implicit processing and hallmarks of evolved modules.¹⁰⁸ Social psychology experiments show that subjects respond differently to faces of racial ingroups and outgroups.¹⁰⁹ For example, subjects are better able to recall the faces of people from their own race.¹¹⁰ Subjects are also quicker to classify pictures of racial outgroup members than ingroup members.¹¹¹

 

There is good evidence that people have a natural fear of snakes and spiders because of our evolutionary past. So it’s interesting that for white people, looking at photos of blacks triggers a fear response in the same way that pictures of snakes and spiders do.¹¹² The basic procedure is to show, say, a white subject various photos (flowers, black people, white people, snakes, automobiles), some of which are followed by a mild shock. After learning what will happen when the photos are presented, subjects anticipate the shock by showing a fear response as soon as the photo is presented. Then the shock is discontinued. The results are that even after the shock is discontinued white subjects show a fear reaction to photos of blacks and snakes, but not to whites or photos of harmless things like flowers that had been paired with shocks. This is consistent with the theory that whites have a natural fear of blacks (and snakes). The fact that they quickly stop fearing the picture of a flower when it is no longer paired with a shock means that we don’t have a natural fear of flowers.

 

In another study, photos of racial ingroup and outgroup members were assessed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging recordings. The results showed that the photos triggered responses in the amygdala, a subcortical region responsible for fear.¹¹³ For example, white subjects had a stronger amygdala response to photos of blacks than to whites when the photos were presented too fast to be processed consciously. Under these circumstances, the photos are processed unconsciously by triggering the amygdala.

 

These studies are evidence that there is a natural fear of racial outgroups.¹¹⁴ This evidence is not conclusive because it is conceivable that automatic negative attitudes of whites toward blacks could be learned by repeated bad experiences with blacks or because of repeated negative portrayals of blacks in the media. The mechanism could also work via early socialization: The type of people I see around me early in life are my racial ingroup. In fact, developmental data shows that preference for own race occurs by three months, but is not present at one month.¹¹⁵ Moreover, babies have less of a preference for their own race

 

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if they are exposed to other races during this early period. If this is the case, then people would have a same-race preference under typical natural condi-tions. This mechanism could be “fooled” however, by exposure to other races during early infancy.

 

Conclusion

 

The evolutionary roots of ethnocentrism are unsettled, but we should be open to the idea that more than one mechanism is relevant.

 

1. Of the mechanisms reviewed here, Rushton’s genetic similarity theory has the most unequivocal empirical support. As indicated above, this mechanism is likely responsible for implicit white communities discussed in the body of this paper.

 

2. There is also good evidence that social identity processes are a bio-logical adaptation. But since they don’t respond to genetic differences between groups, they are not really of use in ethnic defense unless the groups are already constituted on an ethnic basis.

 

3. Individualism/collectivism is also very likely to have a biological basis because of its widespread ramifications in the areas of kinship relationships, marriage, and the development of civil societies that define Western modernism. This suite of traits also makes sense as an ecological response of northern hunter-gatherer peoples to the condi-tions of the Ice Age.

 

4. The existence of a module sensitive to racial and ethnic ingroup and outgroups remains controversial, but I think the evidence is persuasive that such a module exists. Indeed, I think it’s the only way to explain why ethnic emotions and allegiances are so intense and persistent, even in the modern world. The best evidence is that this module is programmed as a result of early experience during infancy.

 

In any case, whatever the strength of the mechanisms underlying ethnocentrism reviewed here, these natural ethnocentric tendencies are insufficient to provide for ethnic defense of whites in the contemporary world—the argument made in the body of this paper.

 

Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology, California State University – Long Beach, is the author of a trilogy on Judaism as an evolutionary strategy: A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998), and The Culture of Critique (1998). A revised edition of The Culture of

 

Critique (2002), with an expanded introduction, is available from http://www.1stBooks.com or http://www.amazon.com

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ENDNOTES

 

1 . William Wallace entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_ Wallac ; see also http://www.highlanderweb.co.uk/wallace/

2. See, for example, Geary, 2005; Stanovich, 1999.

3 . Bargh & Chartrand, 1999.

4. Conscientiousness is capitalized here to indicate that it refers to the personality trait of Conscientiousness as measured by personality tests. It is similar to what people normally think of as conscientiousness.

5 . John & Srivastava, 1999, 121.

6 Buss, 2005

7. In Duntley & Buss, 2005, 291.

8 . Anderson et al., 1999; Damasio (1994/2000).

9. Raine et al., 1998.
10. Beauregard, Lévesque, & Bourgouvin, 2001

11 . Rushton, 1989, 1999.

 

12. MacDonald, 2001; Tullberg & Tullberg, 1997; van der Dennen, 1999. 13 . MacDonald, 2001.
13. Hirschfeld, 1996.

15 . MacDonald, 2004a; MacDonald 1998/2002, preface to first paperback edition. 16. For example, the Modern Racism Scale and the Motivation to Respond without Prejudice Scale (see Cunningham, Nezlek, & Banaji, 2004).

17. Phelps et al., 2000.

18 . Croll, Hartmann, & Gerteis, 2006.

 

19. I describe several cases in my trilogy on Judaism, for example, Heinrich Heine (see MacDonald, 1998/2004, ch. 2, n. 9).

 

20. Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002; see also Ashburn-Nardo, Knowles, & Monteith, 2003.

21 . Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002.

22. Cunningham, Johnson, et al., 2004.

23 . Monteith et al., 2002, p, 1046.

24. Aboud, 1988; Augoustinos & Rosewarne, 2001.

25 . Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2005.

26. Moody, 2002.
27. Emerson, Kimbro, & Yancey, 2002.

28 . Emerson & Sikkink, 2006.

• Kruse, 2005, 259
• Kruse, 2005, 263

31. . Salter (ed.), 2005.
32. . Lloyd, 2006.
33. . Sailer, 2007.

• Murray, 2005.

35. . For 2004: Cooperman, 2006. For 2006: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. http://pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=132&gclid=CMqetuKxqYkCFR-CYAodt2pCMQ

 

36. . Sailer, 2005c, 2006.
37. . Sailer, 2004.
38. . Jewish voting in presidential elections of 2004: Jewish Virtual Library (undated).

 

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald

45

 

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/jewvote.html Jews and the Democratic Party: Goldberg, 1996.

39. For 2002: Sailer, 2005, 2006,

 

For 2006: Religion vs. race in 2006 voting and ideology. December 6, 2006. plantingliberally.or

 

http://www.plantingliberally.org/node/ 192?PHPSESSID=20de38bdd2cfc294c35b34a789535cf7 40. Sailer, 2005a, b.

41 . For example, MacDonald, 2004a.

42. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. http://pewforum.org/events/index. php?EventID=132&gclid=CMqetuKxqYkCFR-CYAodt2pCMQ

43 . Wright, 2002, 35.

44. Wright, 2002, 280.

45 . Wright, 2002, 83.

46. Wright, 2002, 141.
47. Wright, 2002, 156.

48 . Wright, 2002, 37.

49. Wright, 2002, 156.
50. Southern Focus Poll: Crosstabs, Non-Southern Sample, 1998. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Institute for the Study of the American South. ftp://ftp.irss.unc.edu/pub/irss/southern/focus/fall98/nonsouth/xtabs.pdf 51 . Miles, 2005.
51. Wright, 2002, 182.

53 . Wright, 2002, 167–168.

54. Edison Media Research: http://www.crb.org/pdf/edison_research.pdf

55 . Tucker, 2007.

56. Hollywood Reporter, July 12, 2005.
57. Sam Sussman, vp/media director at Starcom, quoted in MediaWeek, July 11, 2005. http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000976428

 

• http://msn.foxsports.com/nascar/story/5575164 http://msn.foxsports.com/ nascar/story/5575164 After increasing 70 percent from 2000 to 2005, NASCAR ratings were flat in 2006 (Tucker, 2006). http://www.ajc.com/search/content/ shared/sports/stories/2006/10/CAR_NASCAR_TV_1027_COX.html

 

• Peterson, 2006.
• Peterson, 2006.
• Ventre, 2006

62. . MacDonald, 1998/2002.
63. . See MacDonald, 1983, 1994/2002.

• Francis, 2002.

65. . MacDonald, 1998/2002, 2004b.

• Francis, 2002

67. . Guzzardi, 2004.
68. . Coleman, 2006.
69. . Skube, 2006.
70. . Salter, 2003/2006.
71. . See MacDonald, 1998/2002, Ch. 6.

• . Milinski, Semmann, & Krambeck, 2003; Mohtashemi & Mui, 2003; Semmann, Krambeck, & Milinski, 2005; Smith, 2005.

 

46    Vol. 6, No. 4                                                                                THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

 

73 . Mohtashemi & Mui, 2003; see also Panchanathan & Boyd, 2003. 74. Roberts et al., 2005.

75 . MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

76. MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

77. Fukuyama, 1995.

78 . MacDonald, 1998/2002, Ch. 8.

79. Lindbergh, 1980, 220–230; italics in text.
80. MacDonald, 2006.

81 . Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006.

82. Fairbanks, 2006.

83 . Ceci et al., 2006.

84. Fairbanks, 2006.

85 . Wilson, 2002.

86. MacDonald 1998/2002, preface to first paperback edition.
87. Salter, 2003/2006.

88 . Rushton 1989, 1998.

89. Rushton & Bons, 2005.

• Sumner, 1906, 13

91. . For example, Brewer & Brown, 1998; Fiske, 1998.
92. . Bourhis, 1994.

• Vine, 1987
• Horowitz, 1985, 7

95. . Cosmides, Tooby, & Kurzban, 2003.
96. . MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald, 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

97. . Triandis, 1991, 82.
98. . Triandis, 1990, 61.
99. . MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald, 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

100. . Miller & Bersoff, 1992, p. 545.
101. . MacDonald, 2002.

• Discussed in MacDonald, 2001.
• For example, Cosmides, Tooby, & Kurzban, 2003.
• Henry Harpending, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, personal communication, June 28, 2002

 

• Gil-white, 2001.
• Hirschfeld, 1996:197.
• Macdonald, 2001.
• Rothbart & Taylor, 2001.
• Fiske, 1998.
• Platz & Hosch, 1988; Bothwell, Brigham, & Malpass, 1989.
• Levin, 1996; Valentine & Endo, 1992.
• Olsson et al., 2005.
• Cunningham et al., 2004.
• Öhman, 2005
• Bar-Haim et al., 2006; Kelly et al., 2005.

MEMORY and the MEDITERRANEAN

MEMORY

and the

MEDITERRANEAN

Fernand Braudel

TEXT EDITED BY ROSELYNE DE AYALA
AND PAULE BRAUDEL

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY SIAN REYNOLDS

 

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Translation copyright © 2001 by Sib Reynolds

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A.
Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Originally published in France as Les Memoires de la Mediterranee:.
Prehistoire et Antiquite by Editions de Fallois, Paris, in 1998.
Copyright © 2998 by Editions de Fallois. This translation first
published in Great Britain as The Mediterranean in the Ancient World
by Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London, in 2001.
Copyright © 2001 by the Estate of Fernand Braudel.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are
registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A portion of this work was originally published
in Ruminator Review.

ISBN: 0-375-40426-0
LCCN: 2001091011

Manufactured in the United States of America
First American Edition

 

INTRODUCTION

Fernand Braudel (19o2–1985) was the greatest historian of the twentieth cen­tury. So universal has his influence been on the study of history since the pub­lication of his first major work fifty years ago that it is almost impossible for us to remember what history was like before Braudel. For that reason we often tend to forget how important was this revolution in historical method: it takes a discovery like that presented here, of a lost work by the master on his favourite theme, to remind us of our debt to him.

Braudel liked to think of himself as a typical Frenchman from the provinces. In his memory he belonged to a peasant family from Lorraine, on the borders of France and Germany. Because of poor health he had indeed spent his early years in the village of Lumeville-en-Ornois at his paternal grandmother’s smallholding, with its chickens, stone walls, and espaliered fruit trees, in a world that (as he described it) was still centred on the black­smith, the wheelwright, the itinerant woodcutters and an ancient mill. He subsumed the contemporary realities of industrial Lorraine and the ever-present threat from Germany into this idyllic picture, along with the fact that his later childhood and adolescence were spent in Paris and its suburbs, where his father was a teacher of mathematics. On leaving school Braudel did not compete for entry to the elite institution of the Ecole Normale Superieure but instead went to the Sorbonne. There he was attracted to economic and social history and the study of ancient Greece, and to the lectures of history profes­sors outside the mainstream, which usually had audiences of only four to seven people. He chose resolutely to identify himself with the margins of French society and to escape from his Parisian bourgeois background to a career in the provinces. In 1923, at the age of twenty-one, he travelled to his first post as a history teacher, at the grammar school of Constantine in Alge­ria, and here he saw the Mediterranean for the first time.

His true intellectual formation began in Algeria, a world in which a young man could take himself seriously. He turned from studying the past of

 

Introduction

Lorraine (which he came to think was too full of national problems) to that of Spain, and he began to contemplate a traditional historical thesis on the Mediterranean policy of Philip II between 1559 and 1574; by 1927 he was publishing reviews of books on Spanish history. But he was also fascinated by the new history of Lucien Febvre, based on the science of human geography, as exemplified in a book written in 1913 but nor published until 1922, La Terre et revolution humaine, translated as A Geographical Introduction to History (London, 1932). Braudel read the book in 1924. As usual his approach was cautious: it was three years before he began to write to Febvre, and their close personal friendship did not begin for another ten years. Meanwhile, in his first reply to Braude!, Febvre had planted a serious doubt about Braudel’s subject of research:

Philip II and the Mediterranean, a good subject. But why not the Mediterranean and Philip II? A much larger subject. For between these two protagonists, Philip and the middle sea, the division is not equal.

Braudel was a successful schoolteacher and became known as an expert in his chosen area. In 1932 he returned to Paris and was nominated to a series of more and more prestigious lycees; in 1933 he married one of his earliest pupils from Algiers. Then he made a decision that was to change his life: in 1935 he accepted the offer of a five-year secondment to the new university being established with French help at sao Paolo, Brazil. It was a golden chance for him and for others of his generation who had not followed the easy road to break into French academic life; at least one of his contemporaries and friends in that enterprise is now equally famous—the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

“It was in Brazil that I became intelligent.” Braudel was always an emi­nently practical man. He managed to rent a large mansion, complete with a Chevrolet and an Italian chauffeur, from someone who conveniently spent the period of the university terms in Europe. Each winter Braudel returned to Europe and worked in the archives of the great Mediterranean trading cities, such as Venice and Dubrovnik (Ragusa). He was an innovative researcher in two respects, conceptual and practical. He made the move from government archives to commercial archives, and by chance he invented the microfilm, which he used in order to copy two or three thousand documents a day, to be read during the university year in Brazil.

Introduction

I bought this machine in Algiers: it belonged to an American cam­eraman and was used to make rough images of scenes for films. On it you had a button that allowed you to take one photo at a time, or you pressed it and you took the whole shoot at once. When I was offered it, I said to the cameraman, “Photograph me that: if I can read it, buy it.” He made me a magnificent photo. And that’s how I made kilometres of microfilms. It worked so well that when I was in Brazil I could spend whole days reading documents.

In .1936, during the long voyage back to Brazil in a cargo boat, he told his wife that he had decided to make the Mediterranean the centre of his research. A year later he was offered and accepted a post with a much lower salary at the main research centre in Paris, the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, in one of the two nonscientific sections, the IVe Section (historical and philological sci­ences). By chance the boat on which he and his wife travelled home from Brazil in 1937 was carrying Lucien Febvre back from a lecture tour in Buenos Aires; during the two-week voyage they became close friends. Febvre, now aged sixty and a professor at the College de France, had been one of the two young professors at Strasbourg who founded the polemical journal Annales in 1929. The journal sought to create a new and more open approach to history in a provocatively colloquial style, an approach defined mostly by its search for “a larger and a more human history” (Marc Bloch), by its denial of all his­torical barriers and by its rejection of the traditional history of politics and government in favour of a deeper analysis of social and economic forces. From this time on Febvre became Braudel’s friend, intellectual adviser and confidant.

When war began, Braudel was mobilised in the artillery and stationed on the frontier in Alsace; he saw no fighting, but he was forced to surrender after the Germans encircled the French army. Despite the armistice, in 1940 he was imprisoned at Mainz, where he remained until 1942. Then he was denounced by fellow officers as being a supporter of De Gaulle rather than Petain and sent to a special “discipline camp” for “enemies of Germany” at Liibeck. He remained until 1945. He was reasonably happy amid all sorts of “dissidents”— partisans of De Gaulle, French Jewish officers, sixty-seven French priests of all descriptions, escapees, “all the best types in the French army,” together with English airmen and Dutch, Swedish and Polish officers. He only missed the German books that he could find in the municipal library of Mainz.

It was during these four years of captivity that Braudel wrote the first

 

Introduction draft of his monumental work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Assisted by a few books, but using mainly his prodigious memory of his prewar researches, he constructed a work that com­bined a vast chronological and historical sweep with a mass of minute details, covering the entire Mediterranean world from the Renaissance to the six­teenth century. This immense intellectual achievement was written in exercise books on a small plank in a room shared with twenty prisoners. At intervals parcels of the manuscript would arrive in Paris for criticism by Febvre; by the end of the war the work was finished, only to be rewritten at the rate of thirty to fifty pages a day until it was finally presented in 1947 as a thesis of 1,16o pages. The transformation of Braudel’s thought in captivity remains a mystery, although recent publications of writing from this period offer some insights. In one sense The Mediterranean was, as he said, “a work of contemplation,” his escape into a world that he could control and whose detailed realities he could believe in with greater ease than the artificial world of prison life. In 1941 he wrote a rare letter from Mainz to his wife (who was living in Algeria): “As always I am reading, writing, working. I have decided to expand my work to the period from 145o to 1650: one must think big, otherwise what is the point of history?” In the two camps he gave miniature university lectures to his fellow prisoners. Notebooks containing the text of some of these have been discovered and were published in 1997. They show that the reflective experience of prison was crucial to his historical thought, for in these lectures he sets out virtually all the great themes that he presented after the war. Shortly before the presentation of his thesis, Braudel had been passed over as Professor of History at the Sorbonne in favour of a more conventional historian. At his rival’s viva voce examination, he sought to justify the choice, telling Braudel: “You are a geographer; allow me to be the historian.” In ret­rospect it is clear that this moment marked a turning point in the intellectual history of France: over the next thirty years the Sorbonne stagnated as a con­servative backwater, while outside the university system Braudel proceeded to construct his great empire of “the human sciences,” and to open a series of vistas that could perhaps never have found their place within a more conven­tional university atmosphere, where orthodoxy in teaching was valued above originality of ideas. Braudel made his reputation with The Mediterranean, which was pub­lished in 1949; a second revised and reorganised edition was published in 1966, in preparation for the American edition of 1973, in the magnificent xii

Introduction translation of Sian Reynolds (who takes leave of Braudel with the present book). With this new edition Braudel became the best-known historian in the world. My generation was brought up to believe in the words of its pref­ace: the old history of events was indeed dead, “the action of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little relation to the slow and power­ful march of history . . . those statesmen were, despite their illusions, more acted upon than actors.” In their place Braudel offered not “the traditional geographical introduction to history that often figures to so little purpose at the beginning of so many books, with its description of the mineral deposits, types of agriculture and typical flora, briefly listed and never mentioned again, as if the flowers did not come back every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the ships sail on a real sea that changes with the sea­sons,” but a whole new way of looking at the past, in which the historian re­created a lost reality through a feat of historical imagination based on detailed knowledge of the habits and techniques of the ploughman, the shepherd, the potter, and the weaver, the skills of the vintage and the olive press, the milling of corn, the keeping of records of bills of lading, tides and winds. It began to seem as important for a historian to be able to ride a horse or sail a ship as to sit in a library. Only the third section of Braudel’s book returned to the his­tory of events, “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” Braudel taught us to see that historical time was divided into three forms of movement—geographical time, social time, and individual time—but that beyond all this the past was a unity and a reality. All these movements belonged together: “history can do more than study walled gardens.” This was the ultimate expression of the intellectual ambitions of the Annaks school, which was reborn after the war and the Nazi execution of Marc Bloch, one of its two founders and a hero of the resistance. Braudel became a member of the Annales editorial board. Meanwhile, in 1947, a new section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes had been formed (with the help of money from the Rockefeller Foundation): the famous VIe Section in social sciences, with Febvre as its president and Braudel as his assistant. In 1949 Braudel was elected to the College de France, and in the same year he was given the immensely powerful position of president of the agregation in history, the general qualifying examination for teaching in secondary schools. His reforms were resisted by the conservatives, but they could not dislodge him until 1955. The record of what he sought to achieve is contained in his lit­tle textbook for teachers called Grammar of Civilizations (written between

 

Introduction

1962 and 1963, republished in 1987), designed to introduce contemporary his­tory and world history to the school curriculum. History was divided into six civilizations—Western, Soviet, Muslim, the Far East, southeast Asia, and black Africa, all of course of relevance to a France still, at least in memory, committed to its status as a colonial power. Braudel’s attempts at reform were destroyed by an unholy alliance of right and left, for he was one of the few French intellectuals who belonged to neither camp. He was therefore hated by Georges Pompidou, who held proto-Thatcherite views on the unimpor­tance of all history apart from the history of one’s own country and who irra­tionally regarded Braudel as responsible for the events of 1968. At the same time Braudel was denounced by orthodox communists as “a willing slave of American imperialism.”

Lucien Febvre died in 1956, and Braudel inherited the direction of both the Ecole Pratique and the journal Annales. In the first institution he created and fostered one of the most extraordinary collections of talent in the twen­tieth century through his appointments: to mention only the most famous of his colleagues, they included the historians Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Maurice Aymard; the philosophers Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault; the psychologists Jacques Lacan and Georges Devereux; the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu; the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss; and the classical scholars jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Braudel worked hard to create a separate institution or build­ing where all his colleagues could work together, and where a succession of foreign visitors could be invited as associate professors; this idea, begun about 1958, did not achieve physical shape until the opening of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in 1970. And it was only after he retired in 1972 that the Vle Section finally metamorphosed into its present status as a new and independent teaching institution, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sci­ences Sociales.

In and through Annales Braudel sought to promote and defend his con­ception of history. For thirty years the great debates on the nature of history took place in its pages. In retrospect one can see four successive but overlap­ping issues with which he engaged.

The first debate was provoked by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’s claims that the theory of structuralism offered an explanation of human social organisation. Braudel had been possibly the first historian to use the word structure in his original thesis, but he saw that the structuralism of Levi-Strauss was fundamentally antihistorical, in that it sought to explain all human soci-

xiv

Introduction

eties in terms of a single theory of structures. The notions of difference and of change that are basic to all historical thought were simply dismissed as irrele­vant to the search for a universal underlying structure, which existed in the human mind if not in the physical universe itself. Against this, in a famous arti­cle in Annales (1958) on the “longue duree,” Braudel sought to explain his own historical conception of the varieties of underlying forces influencing human society, which he had already formulated during the writing of his thesis in relation to the static forces and the slow movements behind the ephemeral history of events. Braudel’s conception of the longue duree (usually translated rather misleadingly as “the long perspective”) is not easy to express in non-historical terms as a theoretical concept; it is the recognition that human soci­ety develops and changes at different rates in relation to different underlying forces, and that all the elements within any human situation interact with one another. There are underlying geographical constraints; there are natural regularities of behaviour related to every activity, whether climatic or seasonal or conventional; there are social customs; there are economic pressures; and there are short-term events in history with their resulting consequences—battles, conquests, powerful rulers, reforms, earthquakes, famines, diseases, tribal loves and hatreds. To translate the messy complications that constitute the essence of history into a general theory is impossible, and this fact repre­sents the ultimate problem of trying to subsume history within any abstract theory, from whatever philosophical or sociological or anthropological source it is derived.

The second debate concerned quantitative history: after The Mediter­ranean Braudel became more and more attracted to the idea of quantification in economic history, the notion that history could become scientifically respectable through the use of graphs and tables and the collection of hard quantifiable data. It took the example of his disciple Pierre Chaunu, who sought to surpass Braudel with his immense work of 7,80o pages on Seville and the Atlantic trade (finally published in 1963) to convince Braudel that something was missing from this type of statistical history. History was some­thing more than the effect of the fluctuations in the Spanish-American trade or the economic boom and decline of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­turies. It was in response to this debate that Braudel wrote his second great work, translated as Civilization and Capitalism, 1^–5th–I8th Century (1982). The first volume of this work was originally published in 1967 and translated into English as Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800 (1973). It presented a vivid picture of social life and its structures before the Industrial Revolution, in

XV

 

Introduction

terms of population, bread, food and drink, fashion, housing, energy sources, technology, money, cities and towns. This was revised and incorporated into a three-volume work with a one-word addition to the title: Material Civiliza­tion, Economy and Capitalism (1979). The work now approached the whole question of the origins of modern world capitalism. The second volume dealt with the organisation of commerce, manufacture and capitalism, the third with the growth of a world economy and world trade. His conclusion was both historical and practical: it is small-scale business and freedom of trade that both produce and sustain capitalism, not state enterprise or large-scale capitalism. Without the independent small artisan and the merchant-shopkeeper no economic system can survive, and these smaller entities are embedded in the social fabric so that society and economy can never be sepa­rated from each other. His work stands therefore as a refutation through the study of history of both communism and capitalism.

The third issue with which Braudel was involved was a consequence of his growing distance from the most talented historians whom he had called to join him in the management of Annales. The new history of the sixties turned away from the factual certainties of economic and descriptive social history, and explored the “history of mentalities.” The historical world was created out of perceptions, not out of events, and we needed to recognise that the whole of history was a construct of human impressions. The crucial problem for a history that still sought a degree of certainty and an escape from arbitrariness or fiction was to analyse the mental world that created an age or a civilisation. It was the medieval historians Duby, Le Golf and Ladurie who pioneered this approach from 1961 onward; it meant a whole-scale return to the old German conceptions of cultural history, and to the use of literary and artistic sources alongside archival material. This was perhaps one of Braudel’s blind spots: to him, it was the realities of peasant or merchant existence that mattered, not the way that they might be expressed in artistic or literary form. He was also more and more interested in the global sweep and saw the detailed studies of the mental world of small communities undertaken by his colleagues as a betrayal of the grand vision. As he said to Ladurie in relation to his famous book Montaillou, “We brought history into the dining room; you are taking it into the bedroom.” His disapproval of these trends cost him the direction of his journal, and by x969 he had abandoned Annales, sidelined by those whose careers he had started and whom he had originally invited to join him.

Braudel’s reply to this development was long in coming and remains incomplete; it was his last great projected work, The Identity of France. Three

xvi Introduction

volumes were published before his death, comprising the first two parts on geography and demography and economy: these were for him traditional ter­ritory. With the third and fourth he would be entering new territory by writ­ing about the state, culture, and society, and in the fourth about “France outside France.” Fragments of the third volume were published in 1997. They suggest that in this last work he intended to confound his critics by proving that the “mentality” of France was contained within its physical, social and economic history. The peasant was the key to the history of France, and a true history of mentalities could only be written in the longue duree and from a long perspective. History must do more than study walled gardens.

The difficulty of translating longue duree with the phrase “the long per­spective” reveals another problem that was perhaps to emerge in the later debates with Michel Foucault. Braudel never claimed that his categories were absolute. They were only means of organising the explanatory factors in any situation, but equally he was not prepared to see them simply as constructs fashioned by the observer for his immediate purposes. However indetermi­nate and changeable, they did possess a real existence as forces in the field of history. This was challenged by the theories and methods of Foucault in his Words and Things (1966), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). The idea of historical relativity introduced in these works and adopted by postmodern historians took one step beyond the history of mentalities. Not only did the uncertainty contained in the study of history rest on its derivation from a set of human impressions rather than facts: the crucial role in this process belonged to the historian as interpreter. Indeed, the whole organisation of knowledge could be seen as a construction designed to control the world. History, like all the social sciences, was an aspect of power, so that history was both the history of forms of control and itself a form of control, not an inno­cent activity. All this is still highly controversial today, but it was of course one step worse for Braudel than the history of mentalities. The historian was no longer the innocent observer but himself complicitous in society’s attempt to marginalize groups such as the women, aboriginal peoples, the mad, crimi­nals, and homosexuals, and through its control of the psychology of human­ity to construct mechanisms of social power—or ultimately (in Foucault’s last work) a more beneficent form of the control of the self Moreover, Foucault singled out the Braudelian conception of history for special attack: it was ideas and the sudden rupture created by them (exemplified in his own books), not the long perspective, which mattered in a history dominated by random change, by discontinuities instead of structures.

xvii

 

Introduction

This theoretical debate had just begun in 1968. Braudel was giving a lec­ture series in Chicago when he was recalled to face—at the age of sixty-two—the revolutionary student movement, Like many radical professors he was sympathetic but uncomprehending of the anarchic streak in youthful protest; his interventions were paternalistic and not well received, and later he con­demned the revolution because it made people less rather than more happy. He could not understand the desire to destroy everything that he had person­ally tried to build outside the university system of which both he and they disapproved, or their contempt for facts and research in face of neocommu­nist and anarchist ideas.

More dangerous still for Braudel was the reaction, which brought the conservatives under Pompidou to power, and which placed the blame, not on their own resistance to change, but on those who had tried to encourage change. Had not the “events” of 1968 proved the importance of the history of events? Where now was the long perspective? “Has Structuralism Been Killed by May ’68?,” as a headline in Le Monde put it in November of that year. Either the new history (whatever it was) was responsible for the “events,” or it was disproved by them. As a conservative you could have it both ways, and both implicated Braudel along with all his intellectual opponents. This was of course to accuse the Enlightenment of causing the French Revolution, but the claim was successful in blocking Braudel’s access to government circles almost for the first time in his career. The university conservatives had indeed lost, and the old Sorbonne was swept away, but they also had their revenge on the man who was most responsible for establishing their irrelevance to mod­ern life.

Braudel ended his life as he began it, as an outsider, but not unhappy with this fate. He had always believed in the importance of accepting reality and the relative powerlessness of the individual in the face of his circum­stances, even though he had himself ruled French intellectual life “as a prince” for a generation. Above all, despite his recognition of the importance of the grand vision and the power of the longue duree and of structures, he had always upheld that crucial historical value, the centrality of the individual as the subject of history; not the individual great man but the anonymous yet real peasant, the ordinary unknown man. In this sense he remains more truly revolutionary than any of his opponents on the left or the right.

How powerful the legacy of Braudel, and especially of his Mediterranean, still
is and how modern its conception still appears, can be seen by considering its

Introduction

impact on two recent books. The first is Barry Cunliffe’s Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples (zoos), in which Cunliffe seeks to do for the Atlantic what Braudel once did for the Mediterranean. The title of his last chapter makes explicit reference to Braudel’s longue duree. The second is the latest book on the Mediterranean, whose first volume appeared in the year 2000, Peregrine Harden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. For all its immense learning and resolute up-to-dateness, this work too is inconceivable without the example of Braudel: it is an attempt to answer the same questions as Braudel for the centuries before the age of Philip II. When we were young we all of us indeed dreamed of writ­ing a book on the Mediterranean that would replace in its title Philip II of Spain with that earlier Philip II of Macedon.

It is not therefore surprising that this work, Braudel’s Memory and the Mediterranean, although it was originally written a generation ago, can still serve as a model. This little book exemplifies all the ideas that Braudel believed in, and for that reason it is richer than most of the detailed books by experts written both before and since its composition. It contains all those elements that he taught us to respect, and offers new surprises. The first is its scope and its exemplification of the meaning of the longue duree. A history of the ancient Mediterranean would normally begin with the Minoan age, or not earlier than 2000 B.C.; Braudel invites us to consider the Mediterranean, not geo­graphically, but as a historical phenomenon beginning in the Paleolithic age or even with the start of geological time; as he points out, the historical period of classical civilization belongs in the last two minutes of the year, and the last two chapters of his book. How Braudel would have relished the new perspec­tives on the early stages of evolution and the biological history of the universe that are being revealed by the new uses of genetics in archaeology and evolu­tionary biology. How he would have loved the enrichment of our knowledge of the origins of human art in the Paleolithic age with the new discoveries of the Grotte Chauvet in the Ardeche.

Braudel’s picture also invites us to consider the Mediterranean in its broadest geographical context, inclusive of the great civilisations of Iraq and Egypt, the steppes of Russia, the forests of Germany, and the deserts of the Sahara. For him Mediterranean history is an aspect of world history. Within the context of human history he emphasises two themes. The first is what I would call the reality principle. Human history is a history of technological mastery and the development of the skills basic to ancient civilisation: fire and water technology, pottery, weaving, metalworking, seafaring and finally

 

Introduction

writing. This emphasis on the physical realities of early civilisations brings out the actual quality of life with a vividness that no amount of reading other books can achieve. The second is the importance of exchange, especially long-distance exchange: “Our sea was from the very dawn of its protohistory a wit­ness to those imbalances productive of change which would set the rhythm of its entire life.” It is imbalance that creates exchange and therefore leads to progress. These two ideas, first formulated in The Mediterranean and subse­quently explored in depth in for the preindustrial world in Civilization and Capitalism, are here applied to the ancient Mediterranean with magnificent effect. This deceptively modest book is indeed the work of the greatest histo­rian of the twentieth century, and the new poem by Christopher Logue will serve as a fitting preamble.*

Oswyn Murray

In writing this essay I have been helped of course by Braudel’s own brief description of his his­torical development published in English in the journal of Modern History for 1972, but more especially by the magnificent biography of Pierre Daix, Braudel (Flarnmarion, 1995). The lec­tures from the period of the Second World War and the fragments related to the third volume of Braudel’s adentite de la France are published in Les ambitions de IHistoire (Editions de Fal­lois, 1997).

Christopher Logue’s poem was first published in Harold Berliner’s deluxe edition of War Music (Nevada City, California, 1999). It is reprinted here for the first time as fitting homage to Braudel, for which privilege I thank my friend Christopher Logue.

 

CHAPTER ONE

Seeing the Sea

The best witness to the Mediterranean’s age-old past is the sea itself. This has to be said and said again; and the sea has to be seen and seen again. Simply looking at the Mediterranean cannot of course explain everything about a complicated past created by human agents, with varying doses of calculation, caprice and misadventure. But this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them, locating them under a sky and in a landscape that we can see with our own eyes, a landscape and sky like those of long ago. A moment’s concentration or daydreaming, and that past comes back to life.

An ancient scar on the terrestrial globe

But if that is true, if the Mediterranean seems so alive, so eternally young in our eyes, “always ready and willing,” what point is there in recalling this sea’s great age? ^–What does it matter, the traveller may think, what can it possibly matter, that the Mediterranean, an insignificant breach in the earth’s crust, narrow enough to be crossed at contemptuous speed in an aeroplane (an hour from Marseille to Algiers, fifteen minutes from Palermo to Tunis, and the rest to match) is an ancient feature of the geology of the globe? Should we care that the Inland Sea is immeasurably older than the oldest of the human histo­ries it has cradled? Yes, we should: the sea can be only be fully understood if we view it in the long perspective of its geological history. To this it owes its shape, its architecture, the basic realities of its life, whether we are thinking of yesterday, today or tomorrow. So let us look at the record.

 

MEMORY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

In the Paleozoic era, millions and millions of years ago, removed from us by a chronological distance that defies the imagination, a broad band of sea known to geologists as Tethys ran from the West Indies to the Pacific. Follow­ing the lines of latitude, it bisected what would much later become the land­mass of the Ancient World. The present-day Mediterranean is the residual mass of water from Tethys, and it dates back almost to the earliest days of the planet.

The many violent foldings of the Tertiary era took place at the expense of this very ancient Mediterranean, much larger than the present one. All the mountains, from the Baetic Cordillera to the Rif, the Atlas, the Alps and the Apennines, the Balkans, the Taurus and the Caucasus, were heaved up out of the ancient sea. They reduced its area, raising from the great sea bed not only sedimentary rocks—sands, clays, sandstones, thick layers of limestone—but also deeply buried primitive rocks. The mountains surrounding, strangling, barricading and compartmentalizing the long Mediterranean coastline are the flesh and bones of the ancestral Tethys. Everywhere the sea water has left traces of its slow labour. The sedimentary limestones outside Cairo, “so fine-grained and of such milky whiteness that they allow the sculptor’s chisel to give the sensation of volume by working to a depth of only a few millimetres”; the great slabs of coraline limestone from which the megalithic temples in Malta were built; the stone of Segovia which is easier to work when wet; the limestone of the Latomies (the huge quarries of Syracuse); the Istrian stones of Venice and many other rock formations in Greece, Italy and Sicily—all these came from the sea bed.

Volcanoes and earthquakes

At the end of this process, since the series of Mediterranean trenches was never filled in, the sea was left as a deep basin, its hollows as if scooped out by some desperate hand, its depths in places equal or superior to the heights of the tallest Mediterranean mountains. Near Cape Matapan runs a sea-trench 4600 metres deep, easily enough to drown the tallest peak in Greece: Mount Olympus, 2985 metres high. Whether under the water or on land, the relief of the whole area is unstable. Networks of long fault lines are visible everywhere, some reaching as far as the Red Sea. The narrow passage of the Pillars of Her­cules between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean is the result of at least a twofold fault.

All this suggests a tortured geology, a process of orogenesis not yet stable

Seeing the Sea

even today. It accounts for the frequent and often catastrophic earthquakes, for the hot springs which the Etruscans had already discovered in Tuscany, and for the broad volcanic zones, with their strings of volcanoes, extinct, active or potentially active. Mount Etna was the fabled home of the Cyclops, blacksmiths and makers of thunderbolts, wielding their mighty bulihide bel­lows; here, much later, the philosopher Empedocles is supposed to have cast himself into the crater, from which a lone sandal was recovered. “How often we have seen boiling Etna spill forth balls of fire and molten rock!” remarked Virgil. Vesuvius really did destroy Pompeii and Herculaneum in AD 79. And in the years before 1943 its plume of smoke could be seen hanging over Naples. Every night, in the Lipari archipelago, between Sicily and Italy, Stromboli still lights up the sea with its incandescent lava displays. Earth­quakes and eruptions have continually punctuated the past and still threaten the present in Mediterranean countries. One of the most ancient of mural paintings (and I mean mural, not cave painting) in a temple at catal Hoyuk in Anatolia dating from koo B.C., represents a volcanic eruption, probably of the nearby Hasan Dag.

We shall have occasion to return to the “Plutonian” convulsions of the earth’s crust apropos of Minoan Crete, notably the cataclysmic explosion of the nearby island of Thera (known today as Santorini) in about 1470-1450 B.C. Half the island was hurled into the air, creating a massive tidal wave and an apocalyptic rain of ash. Today the strange island of Santorini is a semi-crater, partially submerged under the sea. According to the archaeologist Claude Schaeffer earthquakes and seismic shocks also contributed to the swift and unexpected destruction of all the Hittite cities in Asia Minor in the early twelfth century B.C. In this instance, nature rather than human intervention may have been responsible for a cataclysm that still puzzles historians.

The ever–present mountains

Mountains are all around in the Mediterranean. They come right down to the sea, taking up more than their share of space, piling up one behind another, forming the inescapable frame and backdrop of every landscape. They hinder transport, turn coast roads into corniches and leave little room for serene landscapes of cities, cornfields, vineyards or olive-groves, since altitude always gets the better of human activity. The people of the Mediterranean have been confined not only by the sea—a potential means of escape, but for countless ages so dangerous that it was used little if at all—but also by the mountains.

 

MEMORY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

Up in the high country, with few exceptions, only the most primitive ways of life could take hold and somehow survive. The Mediterranean plains, for lack of space, are mostly confined to a few coastal strips, a few pockets of arable land. Above them run steep and stony paths, hard on the feet of men and the hooves of beasts alike.

Worse still, the plains, especially those of any size, were often invaded by floodwaters and had to be reclaimed from inhospitable marshland. The for­tunes of the Etruscans depended in part on their skill at draining the semi-flooded flatlands. The larger the plain, of course, the harder and more backbreaking the task of drainage, and the later the date at which it was undertaken. The great stretches of the Po valley, watered by the wild rivers of the Alps and Apennines, were a no man’s land for almost the entire prehistoric period. Humans hardly settled there at all until the pile-based dwellings of the terramare, in about 15oo B.c.

On the whole, human settlement took more readily to the hillsides, as being more immediately habitable than the plains. Lowland sites, which called for land improvement, could be occupied only by hierarchical societies, those able to create a habitable environment by collective effort. These were the opposite of the high-perched hill settlements, poor but free, with which they had contacts born of necessity, but always tinged with apprehension. The lowlanders felt and wished themselves to be superior: they had plenty to eat and their diet was varied; but their wealth, their cities, their open roads and their fertile crops were a constant temptation to attackers. Telemachus had nothing but contempt for the acorn-eating mountain-dwellers of the Peloponnese. It was logical that Campania and Apulia should dread the peas­ants of the Abruzzi, shepherds who at the first sign of winter swarmed down with their flocks to the milder climate of the plains. Given the choice, the Campanians would rather face the Roman barbarians than the barbarians from the local mountains. The service Rome rendered southern Italy in the third century B.C. was to bring the wild and threatening massif of the Abruzzi to heel.

Dramatic descents from the mountains took place in every period and in every region of the sea. Mountain people—eaters of acorns and chestnuts, hunters of wild beasts, traders in furs, hides or young livestock, always ready to strike camp and move on—formed a perpetual contrast to lowlanders who remained bound to the soil, some as masters, some as slaves, but all part of a society based on working the land, a society with armies, cities, and seagoing ships. Traces of this dialogue remain even today, between the ice and snow of

Seeing the Sea

the austere mountain tops and the lowlands where civilizations and orange-trees have always blossomed.

Life was simply not the same in the hills as in the plains. The plains aimed for progress, the hills for survival. Even the crops, growing at levels only a short walk apart, did not observe the same calendar. Wheat, sown as high up the mountainside as possible, rook two months longer to ripen there than at sea level. Climatic disasters meant different things to crops at different altitudes. Late rains in April or May were a blessing in the mountains but a disaster lower down, where the wheat was almost ripe and might rust or rot on the stalk. This was as true of Minoan Crete as of Syria in the seventeenth century A.D. or Algeria in our own time.

The Sahara and the Atlantic

The one exception, where the mountains do not come right down to the sea, is the very long and unusually flat seaboard starting at the edge of the Sahara and running hundreds of kilometres, from the Tunisian sahel or coastal hills and the round island of Jerba (home of the Lotus-Eaters) to the Nile delta, which empties its fresh, muddy waters far out into the sea. The flat coastline runs even further round, as far as the mountains of Lebanon, which lent the cities of the Phoenicians, on their crowded islands and terraces overlooking the sea, their thoroughly Mediterranean character. Viewed from the air, when landscapes appear in brutal simplicity, the sea and the Sahara come into stark contrast: two great immensities, one blue, the other white shading away into yellow, ochre and orange.

In fact, the desert has had a powerful impact on the physical and human life of the sea. In human terms, every summer saw the desert nomads, a dev­astating multitude of men, women, children and animals, descend on the coast, pitching camp with their black tents woven from goat or camel hair. As neighbours, they could be troublesome, at times marauding. Like the mountain people, high above the fragile strips of civilization, the nomads were another perpetual menace. Every successful civilization on the Med­iterranean coast was obliged to define its stance towards the mountain-dweller and the nomad, whether exploiting them, fighting them off, reaching some compromise with one or other, sometimes even keeping both of them at bay.

In spite of its great size, the desert never completely contained the peo­ples who inhabited it, but usually propelled them at regular intervals towards

 

MEMORY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

the coast, or on to the sahels. Only small numbers of people took the caravan routes which criss-crossed the deserts like so many slow sea-passages across the stony and sandy wastes of Africa and Asia—oceans incomparably greater than the Mediterranean. But in the long run, these caravan routes created a fantastic network of connections reaching out to sub-Saharan Africa and the primitive gold-panning of the Senegal and Niger rivers, or the great civiliza­tions bordering the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, the sites of the earliest experiments in ceramics, metal-working, jewellery, perfumes, miraculous medicines, spices and strange foods.

Physically, too, the desert has always invaded the Mediterranean. Every summer, the hot dry air above the Sahara envelops the entire sea basin, extending far beyond its northern shores. This is what creates those dazzling skies of startling clarity to be seen over the Mediterranean, and a starry night sky found nowhere else in such perfection. The dominant north-easterlies, from April to September, the Aetesian winds as the Greeks called them, bring no relief, no real moisture to the Saharan furnace. There, the summer sky is clouded only for a few short days when the khamson blows, or the sirocco, the wind Horace called the plumbeus Auster, heavy as lead. These southerly winds carrying grains of sand sometimes dropped from the sky that “rain of blood” which made sages wonder and simple mortals tremble.

Six months of drought, without a drop of rain, is a long time to wait, whether for plants, animals or humans. The forests, the indigenous vegeta­tion of the Mediterranean mountains, could only survive if the inhabitants left them alone and did not build too many roads through them, burn too many clearings for crops, send flocks to graze in them, or fell too many trees for fuel or shipbuilding. Ravaged forests declined fast: maquis and scrub, with their rocky outcrops and fragrant plants and bushes, are the decadent forms of these mighty forests, which were always admired in the ancient Mediter­ranean as a rare treasure. Carthage, disadvantaged by its African site, sent to Sardinia for timber to build ships. Mesdpotamia and Egypt were even worse placed.

The desert retreats only when the ocean advances. From October onwards, rarely earlier and often later, Atlantic depressions, heavy with mois­ture, begin to roll in from the west. As soon as a depression crosses the Straits of Gibraltar, or makes its way from the Bay of Biscay to the Gulf of Lions, it heads east, attracting from every compass point winds that propel it further eastwards. The sea grows dark, its waters take on the slate-grey tones of the Baltic, or are whipped up by gales into a mass of spray. And the storms begin.

Seeing the Sea

Rain starts to fall, sometimes snow: streams which have been dry for months become torrents, cities disappear behind a curtain of driving rain and low cloud, giving the dramatic skyline of El Greco’s paintings of Toledo. This is the season marked by the imbribus atris of the ancients, “dark rains” cutting off the light of the sun. Floods are frequent and sudden, rushing down through the plains of Roussillon, or the Mitidja of Algeria, striking Tuscany or Spain, or the countryside round Salonika. Sometimes this torrential rain­fall invades the desert, swamping the streets of Mecca, and turning the tracks through the northern Sahara into torrents of mud and water. At Ain Sefra, south of Oran, Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian exile fascinated by the desert, was killed in 1904 when a flash flood swept down the wadi.

But the Mediterranean winters have their gentle side too. Snow falls only rarely in the low-lying plains; there can be days of bright sunshine without the cold mistral or bora winds; the sea itself can become unexpectedly calm and the galleys of former times would have been able to risk a brief sortie. And the rain of the stormy season is much needed. The peasants of Aristo­phanes’ plays make merry, drinking and talking the time away while Zeus, with mighty rainstorms, “makes the earth fertile.” In cold weather, let us heap logs on the fire and drink, advises Alcaeus, the ancient poet of Mytilene. There will always be time for the few tasks of the winter season: crushing grain or roasting it to keep it edible, heating and reducing sweet wine, cutting vine props, finding a curved branch of evergreen oak to make the plough han­dle, trapping migrating birds, weaving baskets, taking the mule into town to market.

Real work could only begin again after the last of the spring rains, when the swallows returned, as the old song of Rhodes recalled:

Swallow, swallow,
Bringer of spring,
Swallow, white of throat,
Swallow, black of back .. .

But spring is short-lived, almost over by the time the hyacinths or lilies bloom, or when the tiny flowers appear on the olive trees. The “dragging months of summer” begin, with their interminable round of tasks. The full farming calendar will be interrupted only in autumn, when, according to Hesiod, “the voice of the crane sends its call from the clouds,” heralding the tune of planting and “the coming of rain-drenched winter.”

 

MEMORY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

When things go wrong

I have of course simplified the mechanisms of the Mediterranean climate. It is certainly not a perfect agricultural model with two clear seasons; other influ­ences play their part. But this account is not too misleading, so long as we remember that the mechanism can malfunction at times: rain can arrive too early or too late, there can be too much of it or too little, “winter can become like spring,” wayward winds may bring an untimely drought or too much water, spring frosts may burn up the young wheat or the vine shoots, and the hot sirocco can parch the grain before it has had time to ripen. Peasant soci­eties in the Mediterranean have always dreaded these surprises which can destroy everything in the twinkling of an eye, as fast as the “plagues of locusts”—and these too were frequent. In Kabylia, when the “gates of the year” opened (equinoxes and solstices), they used to say it was the signal for a new season “with its fortunes: barley bread or famine.”

Was the only remedy artificial irrigation, the solution adopted by the ear­liest civilizations on the banks of rivers such as the Nile, the Euphrates or the Indus? In theory, yes. But even in these cases, some necessary circumstance had to make irrigation imperative. For it was a costly solution, requiring immense effort. Limited in extent, it brought help only to a few regions.

Waterways

Claudio Vita-Finzi’s book The Mediterranean Valleys (1969) reminds us that the most spectacular events—volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, climate change—are not the only ones we should notice in retrospective geography. The waterways too have had a role to play, even the coastal streams which so often run dry in the Mediterranean.

Their role is twofold: as carriers of water, debris or alluvial clay, they were basically responsible for creating the arable plains which humans would labo­riously cultivate; or as instruments of erosion, they might attack their own valley beds, cutting channels through their own flood plains and shifting them once more. Plato imagined that the waters had carried off “the soft thick layers” of earth in Attica: “all that remains is the bare carcass.”

The value of Vita-Finzi’s book is not so much that it distinguishes between these two types of long-term action, but that it historicizes their past, suggesting a kind of human history of the waterways that run down to the

I0

Seeing the Sea

Mediterranean. It is an exciting and eventful history, since flowing water min­gles with every kind of natural phenomenon; and, more than one might imagine, it has also mingled with the particular destiny of mankind.

In the Paleolithic era, there began a long period of sedimentation, which was also responsible for the layers of ancient alluvial mud, the soils reddened by iron oxide. Between 30,000 and ro,000 B.C., the Nile flowed more abundantly than in the time of the Pharaohs, and accumulated its greatest volumes of mud. The Neolithic Age, when agriculture began, coincided unfortunately with a time of erosion, damaging to arable lands. This carried on until and during the Roman Empire, which sought to combat it by every means, building dykes, dams, and retaining terraces throughout North Africa, from Cyrenaica to Morocco. Halting only briefly, erosion made further advances towards the end of the Empire: water poured in to break the dams and dykes, and fertile soil was washed away. The Middle Ages, in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, were more fortunate: the waterways were more abundant and became once more the source of good river-valley soil. The Arabian geographers of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries were even able to compare the Sous, or the Shell, with its regular flooding, to the Nile. We may think this an exaggera­tion, but these rivers were not then as they are today. It was in about the six­teenth century that the balance swung back the other way. Erosion began once more, the rivers cut channels through the ancient flats (sometimes forty metres deep) and carried off into the sea all the sand and mud accumulated there. The deltas expanded, but their fertile land was not easy to bring into cultivation. And it seems there is little hope today of finding an effective remedy to this general erosion of the land, which has been going on down to our own time.

The alternation between sedimentation and erosion is explained by changes in the sea level, by variations in the climate (more rainfall brings more erosion) and by human activity which may interfere with the composi­tion of the layers of soil and modify the conditions of flow. This has been part of the equation since the Paleolithic era, when humans first caused forest fires (there are 5000 cubic metres of ash on one Algerian site from the Caspian era); and since Neolithic times, when the critical factors were slash-and-burn agriculture and grazing livestock.

These considerations open up new perspectives and oblige us to revise previous hypotheses. If the Roman Campagna was depopulated and became wasteland in the fourth century A.D., the reason may be sought not only in human negligence but in the increased waterflow which washed gravel and unhealthy waters down to the low-lying regions. Similarly, when malaria

II

 

MEMORY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

became virulent there in the sixteenth century, it was because water had flooded the flatlands and stayed there, obliging the residents either to wage war unremittingly against floodwaters, or to abandon the site.

All this helps to explain too why hill farming persisted and came to be of exceptional value in the Mediterranean: up above the waterlogged valleys, on the mountain slopes, a combination of wheat, olives, vines and fig-trees was cultivated from earliest times.

Limits on expansion

Let me sum up. We are too inclined to think of Mediterranean life as In dolce vita, effortlessly easy. But we are allowing the charms of the landscape to deceive us. Arable land is scarce there, while arid and infertile mountains are everywhere present (“plenty of bones, not enough meat” as one geographer has put it). Rainfall is unevenly distributed: plentiful when the vegetation is hibernating in winter, it disappears just when plant growth needs it. Wheat, like other annual plants, has to ripen quickly. Human labour is not relieved by the climate: all the heavy work has always had to be done when the sum­mer heat is at its fiercest, and the resulting harvest crop is all too often meagre. Hesiod’s advice in summer was to go “naked to sow, naked to plough, naked to reap,” and Virgil repeated the tag: nudus ara, sere nudus. If the grain is in short supply at the end of the year, he adds, “then shake the oak tree of the forests to satisfy your hunger.”

To all this, it should be added that the water of the Mediterranean, always quite warm, near 13 degrees centigrade over most of its area (hence the warm winter climate), is biologically very poor. The naturalist who knows the Atlantic, and then witnesses the “hauling up of pots and nets” in the Mediter­ranean, is astonished not to find there “that squirming variety of sea life that characterizes the rich ocean deeps.” There are few species of fish and shellfish and most of them are small. There are of course some famous fishing-grounds, the lagoon of Comacchio, the lake of Bizerte, the Riviera of the Bosphorus and in the Hellespont the “passes of Abydos, rich in oysters.” Shoals of tuna are hunted every year off the coast of Sicily, North Africa, Provence and Andalusia. But for all that, the overall harvest is lean. The frutti di mare may be exquisite perhaps, but their stocks are limited. There are sev­eral reasons for the shortfall. The coasts plunge abruptly into the water with­out shelving—and coastal shelves are the habitat of sea creatures. The animal and vegetable plankton is very poor—almost as bad as in the Sargasso Sea,

12

Seeing the Sea

where the surface water for that very reason has the same blue transparency as the Mediterranean. And lastly there is the complicated marine history, which is responsible for frequent sudden shifts of salinity and temperature: the local species have been decimated one after another.

It is its narrow opening into the Atlantic that has been the Mediter­ranean’s lifeline. Imagine if a dam were to seal up the Strait of Gibraltar: the Mediterranean would be transformed into a salt lake from which all life would disappear. If on the other hand it was more open to the Atlantic, the sea would be reinvigorated, revived by the traffic of the tides, invaded by oceanic fauna. The surface water would be disturbed, the exceptional warmth in winter would vanish. Which would we prefer? Perhaps we should be resigned to eating frozen fish from the Atlantic, which is brought regularly to the Mediterranean. Then when we visit Venice, it will be a great luxury to order an orata di fern not from the lagoon but from the free waters of the Adriatic, landed from one of those beautiful fishing smacks from Chioggia with their painted sails.

But what about the riches of the sea itself, the reader may wonder. We can all conjure up images of a Mediterranean jewelled with islands, its coastlines indented by harbours, those schools for mariners, an invitation to travel and trade. In fact the sea did not always in the past provide that “natural link” between countries and peoples so often described. A very long apprenticeship had to be served. Almost as daunted by the sea as later generations would be by the sky, primitive peoples did not risk taking to the waves in the Mediter­ranean until the twelfth and eleventh millennia B.c. at the very earliest, more likely the sixth and fifth (dates of which we are much more certain)—and even then it was a brave venture. But starting an apprenticeship does not mean attaining mastery all at once. Only with the third millennium B.c., if then, did fleets become of practical importance; in the second, effective trade became possible, and not until the first did ships sail out beyond the Pillars of Hercules on to the trackless waters of the Sea of Darkness.

So although they were attempted very early, these “haphazard voyages” did not become regular and civilized (though not always safe) shipping roads until very late in the day. While the network of maritime links was compara­tively dense, it operated only on certain coasts, from certain ports. Crossings were mostly made across narrow stretches of the sea, or in one of the sea-basins into which the Mediterranean is divided and which acted as so many semi-insulated economies. “He who sails beyond Cape Malea,” said a Greek proverb, “must forget his native land.”

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MEMORY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

The Sicilian bar

As a result, the Mediterranean world was long divided into autonomous areas, only precariously linked. The entire globe is today far more united as between its constituent parts than the Mediterranean was in the age of Peri­cles. This is a truth one should never lose sight of even when contemplating the apparent tranquillity and unity of the Pax Romana. The plural always outweighs the singular. There are ten, twenty or a hundred Mediterraneans, each one sub-divided in turn. To spend even a moment alongside real fisher­men, yesterday or today, is to realize that everything can change from one locality to another, one seabed to another, from sandbank to rocky reef. But the same is equally true on land. Yes, we can always tell that we are somewhere near the Mediterranean: the climate of Cadiz is quite like that of Beirut, the Provençal riviera looks not unlike the south coast of the Crimea, the vegeta­tion on the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem could equally well be in Sicily. But we would find that no two areas are actually farmed alike, no two regions bind and stake the vines the same way—in fact we would not find the same vines, the same olive-trees, fig-trees or bay-trees, the same houses or the same kind of costume. To understand the essentially dual character of Dalmatia, one would have to have seen the port of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in February during the Feast of Saint Blaise, when the city was transformed by music and dancing, and thronged by men and women from the mountains. These dif­ferences have often only been partly created by geography. It is the historical past, persistently creating differences and particularities, that has accentuated these variations, leaving colourful traces which still delight us.

The unified image of the sea is in any case belied by some major con­trasts. The north can never be taken for the south; a fortiori the eastern Mediterranean is not the same as the west. The Mediterranean stretches out so far along the parallels that the Sicilian bar bisects it rather than bringing the fragments together.

Between the south coast of Sicily and the low-lying shores of Africa, the sea is not very deep. It seems to heave up its bed: one more effort and a barrier would run from north to south. These shallow waters are signalled by the string of islands stretching from Sicily to the Tunisian coast with its coral and sponges: Malta, Gozo, Pantelleria, Lampedusa, Zembra, the Kerkennah islands, Jerba. I can remember flying from Tunisia to Sicily, or between Greece and Italy, in the days of flying-boats which took you low over the sea: you

Seeing the Sea

could make out even the white edge of the Trapani saltmarshes in western Sicily, the shadows of the boats on the seabed close in to shore, and the chan­nels of deeper blue water marking the surface currents. You could even see Corfu and the Gulf of Taranto at the same time! I always imagine the dividing line between the two Mediterraneans on this imaginary aerial map, made up of memories laid end to end. It is a line marked by some of the stirring episodes in Mediterranean history. But that is hardly surprising. North against south meant Rome against Carthage; east against west meant the Orient against the Occident, Islam against Christendom. Mall the battles of the past were to be plotted together on the map, they would describe a long combat zone stretch­ing from Corfu through Actium, Lepanto, Malta and Zama to Jerba.

History has demonstrated over and again that the two basins of the Mediterranean, the east and west, have been comparatively self-contained worlds, even if they have at times exchanged ships, commodities, people and even beliefs. In the end, the sea itself obliged them to co-exist, but they have always been quarrelling brothers, opposed to each other in everything. Even the sky and its colours look different either side of Sicily. The east is lighter: in a sea more purple than blue, or wine-dark as Homer called it, the Cyclades are patches of luminous orange, Rhodes a black mass, Cyprus a shape of intense blue. Or that is how I saw them, one afternoon, flying from Athens to Beirut. We may criticize progress, but if you want to see the Mediterranean, the best thing you could do as an introduction would be to fly over it on a clear day in a little plane which is not travelling too high or in too much of a hurry.

The Mediterranean at the heart of the Ancient World

Immense though the Mediterranean was if measured by the travelling speeds of the past, it has never been confined inside its own history. It rapidly out­stripped its own borders, looking westward to the Atlantic, eastward to the Levant which was to fascinate it for centuries on end, south to the desert marches beyond the palm groves, north one way to the rolling Eurasian steppes that border the Black Sea, and north the other way to the slow-developing Europe of forests, beyond the traditionally sacrosanct northern limit of the olive tree. The life and history of the Mediterranean do not stop—as the geographer, the botanist or even the historian might have imag­ined—at the point where the last olive tree has been left behind.

It is in fact the major feature of the sea’s destiny that it should be locked inside the largest group of landmasses on the globe, the “gigantic linked con-

 

MEMORY AND THE MEDITERRANEAN

tinent” of Europe-Asia-Africa, a sort of planet in itself, where goods and peo­ple circulated from earliest times. Human beings found a theatre for their his­torical drama in these three conjoined continents. This was where the crucial exchanges took place.

And since this human history was in perpetual motion, flowing down to the shores of the Mediterranean where it regularly came to a halt, is it any wonder that the sea should so soon have become one of the living centres of the universe, and that in turn it should have sent resonant echoes through these massive continents, which were a kind of sounding-board for it? The history of the Mediterranean lent an ear to the distant sounds of universal his­tory, but its own music could be heard from far away too. This two-way flow was the essential feature of a past marked by a double movement: the Mediterranean both gave and received—and the “gifts” exchanged might be calamities as well as benefits. Everything was in the mixture and, as we shall see, the brilliant arrival of the earliest civilizations in the Mediterranean can already be explained as the coming together of different elements.

gramatica civilizaţiilor

FERNAND BRAUDEL

Grammaire des civilisati?ns

© Les Editions Arthaud, Paris, 1987.

T-oate drepturile

asupra prezentei edili• in limba română
sint rezervate Editurii Meridiane.

CARTE FINANŢATĂ DE GUVERNUL ROMÂNIEI

PRIN MINISTERUL CULTURII

Fernand Braudel
gram.atica

civilizaţiilor
Volumul/

În româneşte de

DINU MOARCĂŞ
EDITURA MERIDIANE BUCUREŞTI, 1994

Pe copertă: Zeifa Kali, miniatură indiană.

ISBN 973-33-0198-i ISBN 973-33-0197-3

BRAUDEL NE ÎNVAŢĂ ISTORIA de Maurice Aymard

• ,

Această carte este un• manual – sau mai degrabă partea principală a unui manual – publicat pentru prima 6ară în 1963. Un manual conceput şi scris pentru a fi folosit în clasele terminale ale liceelor noastre-şi pe care. trebuie să-I’ citim astăzi ca atare, rară idei preconcepute sau rezerve. Căci •acesta nu este un text de circumStanţă, unde îl vom regăsi pe F. Braudel, bineînţeles, în spatele manualului. Este, în cel mai adevărat sens, un manual dţ F. Braudel, redactat într-un context deosebit şi abordat de el cu un fel de provocare. Cu alte cuvinte, un text scris nu pentru egalii săi, nici măcar pentru marele public care Ia acea dată nu îl cunoştea încă şi de care el, în ce-l priveşte, nu se sinchisea deloc, ci pentru un auditoriu bine definit, băieţi şi fete între 16 şi 18 •ani — “adulţi”, scria el, în 1983, într-unul din articolele sale din Corriere delia Sera. reprodus aici -, pe care vroia să-i sensibilize­ ze, precum şi’, inutil să mai adăugăm, pentru profesorii lor. Un text menit să arate � şi să demonstreze – că istoria cea mai exigentă, cea mai nouă şi, de asemenea, cea mai neobişimită dintre alte ştiţnţe ale omului, poate fi predată şi cum să fie predată. Un principiu funda­ mental: să-i intereseze pe cei şi pe cele cărora le era destinată şi trebuia să le permită să o înfrunte, .făcîn-9u-i să înţeleagă lumea în care urmau să trăiască. Nu este de fapt istorie – după părerea si – aceea care nu răspunde prin întrebări şi reveniri la trecut, curiozităţi” lor, incertitudinilor şi problemelor prezentului.

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Vom înţelege mai bine, recitindu-1 astăzi, de ce, solicitat timp de zece ani de editorul său “să adapteze� textul pentru un alt public, el a amînat acest lucru pen� mai tîrziu, fără a spune vreodată limpede nu. Fiecare carte are logica ei .. care nu admite retuşuri de detaliu, ci cere să se reînceapă întotdeauna de la zero. El nu a încet�ţt să repete tuturor celor care I-au abordat: pentru a scrie bine, şi istoria trebuie să fie scrisă bine de către istorici ,,maeştri ai limbii lor”, textul nu trebuie niciodată îndreptat, ci întotdeauna rescris, neîncetat, reluind de la A la Z, pînă la găsirea expresiei celei mai exacte şi, în acelaşi timp, mai simple a gîndirii sale, pînă cînd textul “apare în chip firesc, fără efort”.

Este mai bine deci ca această carte să fie astăzi prezentată din nou în versiunea ei originală, cel mult fără ilustraţii, documente şi note de lectură. Paradoxul ar fi, de altfel, dacă acest lucru nu i s-ar datora în parte lui F. Braudel,_ că apare •atît de tîrziu, la o distanţă de aproape un sfert de secol. Primii săi cititori au depăşit 40 de ani, iar cei mai tineri dintre profesorii care au folosit- o au atins 50 de ani. Ca şi în cazul Mediteranei, Spania şi Italia au fost cele care au dat, totuşi, exemplu, jncă din 1966. Prima traducînd -o integral pen� studen­ ţii de la Universitate {Madrid, Tecnos), cea de a doua propunînd-o ca lucrare de fonri.at mic, reeditată cu regularitate de atun«i (Torino, Einaudi, PBE). Ceea ce evidenţiază diferenţe semnificative în circulaţia cărţii, fapt car:e ar putea surprinde şi Europa noastră pe cale de unificare: nimic mai compartimentat, de fapt, în pofida paralelispmlui cursurilor şi treptelor învăţămîntului nostru secundar. Să adăugăm la aceasta, cu riscul de a forţa termenii, că, fără îndoială, ca manual el nu a avut în Franţa difuzarea pe care ar fi putut şi ar fi trebuit

să o aibă: cîte consilii profesi;>rale nu au decis oare (aşa •c u însumi a� trăit, puţin �u�rins, această expe i­ llll! � , � enţa m 1964, m hceul de provmcte, la nord cţe Paris,

unde tocmai fusesem numit) că este prea dificil pentrU elevi şi că pentru ei trebuie ales un manual mult mai accesibil, păstrîndu-1 pe acesta ca ,,manual al dascălu-” lui”. Ceea ce garantează, într-o epocă în care editurile şcolare îşi distrib\liau generos manualele, un frumos eşec
editorial! Dar îmi place să cred că dacă această carte îşi găsea, chiar în aceste condiţii, jumătate din publicul căruia îi era destinată, şi ar fi servit într-adevăr ca ,,manual al dascălului”, ajutîndu-i pe profesori să pre­ dea, în spiritul dorit de F. Braudel, această nouă şi. dificilă programă pentru care el a făcut mari eforturi s-o facă acceptată, el ar fi fost mai mult deţît pe jumătate satisfăcut. Va găsi el astăzi, în sfrrşit, în acelaşi timp cititorii şi regulamentul pe care mulţi doreau să le eva,ueze riguros? Cel puţin trei motive ne invită să credem acest lucru: voi încerca• să le expun pe rînd.

Această carte, ca şi multe altele, îşi are istoria ei şi, pentru aA. aprecia impactul, trebuie să o plasăm în contextul ei: cel de la sfirşitul apilor ’50. Marele efort de reconstrucţie şi modernizare de după război debutează la această dată cu repunerea în cauză a anumitor structuri esenţiale ale societăţii franceze,. a căror inadaptare părea •evidentă, cel puţin în opinia unei “elite” luminate şi deschise spre exterior. Sinceritate în politică, sinceritate şi în ce priveşte sistemul educativ, supus unei presiuni fără precedent, de la şcoala primară pînă la Universitate. Trebuie primiţi copiii perioadei baby-boom-ului pentru o durată de şcolarizare mai îndelungată şi recrutaţi dascăli prea numeroşi din rindul unor generaţii reduse numeric, de dinainte de război. Primii vor trebui să înveţe, iar ultimii să predea într-un mod diferit discipline profund înnoite. Şi aceeaşi exigen­ ţă a unui dublu progres – în fapt o veritabilă ruptură – în ce priveşte cantitatea şi calitatea este valâbilă pentru pregătirea altor cadre ale naţiunii, în frunte cu inginerii şi medicii. Reformele sînt la ordinea zilei, în numele sloganului “a guverna înseamnă a prevedea”. Dar ele divizează opinia, pe • beneficiari, pe specialişti. Unele reforme vor reuşi: predarea matematicilor, studiile medicale. Altele vor cunoaşte un eşec total sau parţhil. Printre acestea, cea a predării istoriei.

Principiul unei reforme a programelor de istorie a fost hotărît înainte de sfrrşitul celei de a IV-a Republici: începută în 1957, în clasa a şasea, ea ajunge la reluare� cursurilor în 1962, la clasele t�rminale. Principiul este

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simplu. Vechea împărţire (în vigoare din 1945) a istoriei in etape succesive, pornind de Ia Mesopotamia şi Egipt,
rezerva ultimelor două clase epoca aşa-zisă .,contempo­
rană”: 1789–185 1 în prima şi 1851- 1939 în ultima
clasă. Noua împărţire, datînd din 19 iulie 1957, devan­
sează predarea istoriei cu un an şcolar şi deplasează spre clasj!le inferioare divizarea internă ( 1789– 187 1 în a doua, 181 1- 1945 în prima), pentru a rezerva claselor terminale studiul “principalelor civilizaţii contemporane”. S� b acest titlu provizoriu, B.O. (Buletinul Ofjcial) din 25 iulie detaliază conţjnutul în şase “lumi” (occidentală, sovietică, musulmană, extrem-orientală, asiatică de sud-est, africană neagră), totul precedat de o introducere menită să precizeze “concepţia şi sensul” şi care ,.,va trebui mai întîi să definească noţiunea de civilizaţie, dar va sublinia, explicînd, forma pe care o va căpăta studiul avut ,în vedere, care va comporta, pentru fiecare dintre ansamblw:ile enumerate… trei elemente esenţiale –­ bazele, factorii esenţiali ai evoluţiei, aspecte particulare actuale ale civilizaţiei sale”.

Acest titlu reprezintă pentru F. Braudel, la acea dată, o compensaţie mai degrabă decît o adevărată victorie. Constrîns să părăsească preşedinţia juriului unui con­ curs pentru ocuparea unor posturi de profesori, care i-a permis să cunoască toate dificultăţile de care se putea lovi necesara “reformă a concursurilor”, el a fost chemat de Henry Longchambon să redacteze partea referitoare Ia ştiinţele sociale din r�portul asupra cercetării ştiinţifi­ ce în Franţa, prevăzut să fie defmitivat în planul cinci­ nal în curs. Dar proiectul prezentat de el privind o mică facultate experimentală de- ştiinţe economice, sociale şi politice s-a lovit de opoziţia facultăţilor existente 1 Li­ tere şi Drept-, ameninţate �e concurenţă. În iunie 1957, raportul final prezentat guvernului îl reţinea (“tară să creadă prea mult în ea” dată fiind “apatia sau rezistenţa sistematică, pornind din teamă sau «bun simţ», a tuturor instituţiilor existente”) ‘ca “reformă pe termen lung”, posibilă în cadrul unei “adaptări a structurilor”. Sub ţitlul “Ştiinţele so’dale în Franţa. Un bilanţ, un program”, poate fi citit textul, evident redactat de F. Braudel însuşi, în prima ediţie a Analelor ESC din 1958.
Totuşi, acest prim eşec urma să aibă doua conse­ cinţe, datorate, şi una şi cealaltă, lui Gaston BeFger, pe atunci director al învăţămîntului superior. Proiectul de a crea la Paris. o Casă a Ştiinţelor Umaniste (sau Ştiin­ ţelor .Sociale pentru că articolul din 1958 foloseşte alternativ cele două expresii), loc de ,.regrupare a cerc�­ ti\fii”, în jurul unei biblioteci şi a unor servicii �uxiliare (“în special un centru de mecanografie şi un laborator de cartografie”). Şi această reformă a programelor claselor terminale (şi în. fapt a ciclului al doilea al învăţămîn­ tului secundar) care trebuie să-i pregătească pe elevi pentru Universitate şi pentru. lumea contemporană şi să ilustreze’ pentru ei, prin intermediul noţiunii de civili:z;aţie, tot ceea ce putea reţine istoria dintr-o lectură atentă a “ştiinţelor sociale înrudite: geografie, demografie, .c;cono­ mie, sociolog•ie, antropologie, psihologie”. O adevărată• lecţie de fenomene la scară mondială.

Dar scoaterea evenimentului din predarea istoriei, sau cel puţin trecerea lui pe planul al doilea, chiar şi pentru tm singur an înseamnă că refotrna era . prea brutală rentru a fi acceptată ca atare şi rezistenţele pu au mtîrziat să apară. Doi ani mai tîrziu a trebuit să se accepte concesii. în noul text din 1959, enunţare� părţii a doua, “civilizaţiile lumii contemporane”, regrupează Extremul Orient şi Asia de Sud-Est .într-o singură lume denumită a “Oceanului Indian şi a Pacificului” şi adaugă o concluzie în ce priveşte ,,marile probleme ale momentului”. Şi mai ales, perioada 19 14– 1945 este reintrodusă în programa claselor terminale, ocupind întreg trimestrul intii, modificîn� astfel echilibrul anului şcolar. Bătălia nu• era încă pierdută. Dar nici nu era cîştigată, aşa cum urma să dovedească toat� rezistenţele intimpinate, în transpunerea în practică, a modalităţilor şi orientărilor învjţămîntului, alegerea subiectelor etc. Un exemplu dintre multe altele� în plină decolonizare, în timp ce noile state independente căutau, nu fără curaj, să-şi rescrie istoria, o hotărîre din 10 august 1965 elimina pur şi simplu “lumea africană”.

În preajma intrării sale în vigoare, rezervele privind noua programă sînt exprimate în mod deschis. Cum să predai istoria fără suportul expune�ii amănunţite, al

9

evenimentelor, al unor cunoştinţe concrete şi verificabile în momentul examenului – se întreabă cei răspunzători de gradul al •doilea, conştienţi, fiiră îndoială pe bună dreptate, de ruptura totală pe care ar unna să o reprezin­ te această programă pentru profesorii fonnati la o altă Ş’::oală, în Universitate, unde mai multe dintre ştiinţele soCiale în cauză nu-şi aveau încă locul? Opţiunea nu s-ar face oare între ,,fapte”. pe de o parte,- şi ,. vorbărie” sau “abStracţie”, pe de altă parte? Autorii noilor manuale sau ai unora vechi, reînnoite, nu ezită să-şi exprime perplexitatea, dacă nu chiar neîncrederea. Să recitim din cuvîntul introductiv al unuia dintre cele mai reputate manuale (Hatier, 1962), care a reprezentat biblia unor generaţii întregi ale claselor pregătitoare pentru liceu: “Dacă int�resul pe care îl prezintă această programă este neîndoielnic, dacă acest studiu al lumii contempo­ rane prezintă atracţie şi avantaje pentru elevii aflati la sfrrşitul studiilor din ;ciclul al doilea, nil pot fi ascunse dificultăţile pe care: le comporu1 tranSpunerea lor în practică. Multe cuvinte tehnice vor trebui să fie neapă­ rat abordate. Dar acest lucru trebuia făcut simplu de tot. ..”. Şi după ce îi prezintă pe ,.specialişti”, adică universitari sau doctoranzi cărora le-au fost încredinţate faimoasele capitole. noi, cuvîntul introductiv continuă: ,.Această echipă de specialişti s-a străduit să prezinte cartea simplu şi clar, aşa cum dotfm toţi. Ea a vrut să indice numai liniile mari, să înţeleagă şi să se facă înţeleasă… Pornind de la pagina 288, cînd se abordează istoria civilizaţiilor mai anevoioasă decît simpla narare a faptelor, o listă de argumente cu caractere îngroşate precizează şi completează textul. Această listă ar putea ţine loc de sumar, foarte scurt, fără îndoială, dar suficient, pentru elevul grăbit care ar vrea să cunoască la o primă privire cuprinsul lec;ţiei…”. La sfrrşitul volumului “o ultimă parte mai pedagogic� încearcă să răspundă preocupărilor legitime ale candidaţilor”.

Să-mi fie iertat acest citat cam lung, , în care am

.subliniat expresiile semnificative: el nu urmăreşte să incrimineze pe nimeni, nici să facă să reînvie vreo dispută maniheistă între Antici şi Moderni. Dar nimic nu arată mai bine mizele în cauză şi temerile pe care le

10

provoacă “această programă pasionantă, desigur, dar ambiţioasă”. Scriind acest manual, F. Btimdel se anga­ jează personal, fără iluzii excesive •în ce priveşte opoziţiile de care se va lovi. El optează pentru dificul­ tate. Îşi rezervă partea centrală, cea a “marilor civili­ zaţii” � cea mai contestată şi criticată. Plasînd la înce­ putul volumului cîteva pagini de introducere, “Istoria şi epoca prezentă”, a cărei “logică pedagogică” ar trebui să determine “amînarea de preferinţă a lecturii după prima parte a programei” (istoria din 1 9l4 pînă în zilele noastre) … , “cînd va fi abordat studiul dificil al marilor civilizaţii”, el reafmnă fără. să ezite unitatea profundă a acestei lecturi globale a lumii actuale. În momentul in care apare, acest manual nu este deci un manual printre altele: este o carte de luptă. Şi o luptă dintre cele mai delicate şi ingrate: lupta împotriva obiceiurilor castei sale de istorici, căcj nu poate impune, ci trebuie să convin- . gă, iar pentru a convinge trebuie să reînceapă fără încetare şi să repete că erorile, ignoranţele cele mai scandaloase există dintotdeauna, că ele nu _trebuie imputate nici elevilor, nici programelor, nici manualelor, de astăzi ca şi de ieri. Dificultăţile – cuvîntul “dificil” revine de două ori în primele zece rînduri, dar în mod limpede el riu are acelaşi sens ca în textul citat mai sus – nu sînt nici negate, nici minimizate. Ele sîni abordate frontal.

S- ar putea crede, fireşte, că F. Braudel s- a expus inutil pe im teren pe care nu îl poate controla şi unde deci nu putea decît să eşueze în faţa inerţiilor unui. sistem şcolar cu atît mai puţin capabil să evolueze la această dată cu cît umflarea rapidă a personalului, legată de prelungirea duratei studiilor şi de accesul generalizat la cel puţin primul ciclu. al învăţămîntului • secundar, începea deja, încă înainte de 1968, să-I aducă într-o situaţie de criză. S-ar putea crede, de asemenea, că adevărata luptă, căreia îi consacră toate eforturile sale, se situează altundeva, în aria cercetării, a acestei

.�istorii de vîrf’ pe care s-a străduit, după L.’ Febvre; să o dinamiteze şi să o regrupeze, fără excepţie, folosin­ du -se de acest minunat instrument de acţiune, pe .atunci cu totul nou, în plină expansiune, care era Secţia a VI-a

1 1

a Şcolii Practice de Studii Inalte. Sau în sfera universita­ ră, al acestui învăţămînt superior care continua să-i refuze participarea la acordarea de grade. A lansa cerce­ tările, a conferi istoriei, aliate cu ştiinţele sociale, o imagine înnoită, a -i impune pe cei mai buni în Univer­ sitate şi a asigura în acelaşi .timp înnoirea conţinutului programelor şi lărgirea cîmpului disciplinelor predate, a-i forma într-un alt spirit pe viitorii profesori — iată care ar fJ. fost calea raţiunii. Un pariu diferit în ce ppveşte timpul şi transformarea lentă. Dar lui F. Braudel nu-i plăcea să fie raţional. Este suficient, pentru a ne convinge de acest lucru, să revedem ultimele sale cuvinte rostite în. public, la .Chateauvalion, Ia 20 octombrie 1985: “Oameni pe care îi iube5;c . rhult mi-au spus: «Nu fi nerezonabil, ca de obicei». Credeţi că •le-am urmat sfatul?” (O lecJie de istorie de Fernand Braudel, Chateauvallon, octombrie

1985, Paris, Arthaud-Flammarlon, p. 224). Butada, ca întotdeauna în caiul lui,• sugerează felul de a fi ironic, ceea ce este, după părerea sa, esenţialul. Şi � cazul predări� (a istoriei, ca de altfel a tuturor celorlalte discipline), esenţialul este convingerea intimă, reafirma­ tă cu regularitate, că o schimbare nu se fragmentează. Pentru a avea o oarecare şansă de reuşită, ea nu se poate limita la unul din etaje – şcoala primară, ciclul întîi sau al doilea al şcolii secundare, Universitatea. Este necesar ca ea să fie totală.

Oricum ar fi, el a avut sentimentul, destul de justificat, de a fi eşuat în sfera şcolară. Mult înainte chiar ca elevilor din clasele terminale să le fie oferite noi texte oficiale ale acestei programe care stînjenea prea mult obişnuintele şi readucea frumoasa istorie veche• evenimenţială a epocii prezente – din 1914, apoi din 1939 pînă în zilele noastre •- pe locul pe care nu ar fi trebuit să-I piardă vreodată, ,.,manualul Braudel”, pus de fapt la index, a fost discret retras de la vînzare în 1970: seinn care nu înşală. Dar, în ochii lui, problema nu era. cea unei cărţi; era mult mai profundă, şi anume era vorba de predarea istoriei.• O proţ>Iemă care îl va preocupa pînă în ultima zi şi care îi trezea întotdeauna o pasiune combativă.

Sînt cunoscute intervenţiile sale repetate pentru a

12
denunţa, cu orice prilej, chiar pînă în ajunul morţii sale, aberaţia pe care o reprez�tau pentru el ,.noile”, apoi “şi mai noile” programe. Articolul său din Corriere delia Serra din 1 983, reprodus mai jos, reia argumentele pe care le-a folosit, cu patru �u cinci ani mai inainte, într-o dezbatere care i-a reunit, printre alţii, pe J.- P. Che:.. venement, M. Debre, A. Decaux, şi anunţa ceea ce urina • să spună din nou, doi ani mai tîrZiu, la Chateauvallon.

Aici, povestind din nou asediul de la Toulon – cel din 1107, căruia i-a consacrat numeroase pagini în Identite de la France (Identitatea Franţei), şinu cel, prea cunos­ cut, din 1793 – în faţa unor elevi dintr-a treia ai unei şcoli din Toulon, în prezenţa camerelor de luat vederi, el şi-a afirmat conyingerile, fără a cruţa nici un efort: filml:il există pentru a sta mărturie. Dar nici aici el nu s-a mul(umit să se adreseze elevilor: a ţinut să răspun­ dă, la 17 octombrie, cel puţiQ unora d in întrebările pe eate le pregătiseră pentru el circa 40 de profesori în legătură cu predarea istoriei, istoria artelor, locul ştiinţelor şi tehnicilor, cel al geografiei şi, din nou şi mereu, programele şcolare.

Notele luate cu acest prilej de colegul meu Gilbert Buti confmnă, dacă mai .era nevoie, continuitatea poziţiilor. El a ţinut să-şi reafirme credinţa într-o istorie deschisă aporturilor altor ştiinţe umaniste -• dar fără a se confunda vreodată cu acestea, căci istoria păstrează avantajul de neînlocuit al stăpînirii trecutului, ca trecut care îi permite să înţeleagă mai bine prezentul. Iar el şi-a reafmnat profunda dezaprobate faţă de o structurare a programelor care păreau că se străduiesc ..să surprin­ dă problemele şi să înfrunte ‘dificultăţile într-o •ordine inversă celei care ar fi permis rezolvarea lor. În clasele mici – istoria nouă. În ciclul al doilea şi pînă în clasele terminale- istoria tradiţională, expunerea, evenimentele, cronologia, războaiele. În timp ce în opinia sa demersul trebuia să fie exact invers. Să-I ascultăm încă. o dată la Chateauvallon: “Dacă ar depinde de mine, ‘pînă în c!asa întîia aş preda istoria tradiţională, istoria-naraţiune: povestesc, mă opFcsc, explic un lucru ceva mai impor­ tant şi, din timp în timp, strecor remarci de sociologie, de economie socială etc.; aş concentra «istoria nouă-nouă»

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şi/istoria «nouă-nouă-nouă» în clasele terminale. Pentru cit eu consider îngrozitor; abominabil, ca la bacalaureat elevii să fie întrebaţi despre perioada din 1945 pînă în X:985 aşa cum se procedează asţăzi: Sînt sigur că dacă aş fi examinator aş trinti pe orice istoric la bacalaureat! Şi dacă m-aş întreba pe mine însumi, şi pe mine m-aş
.;trinti!”.

. Să nu vedem şi în aceasta o simplă butadă rostită în euforia acestei întîlniri. Articolul din 1983 nu spune altceva, în termenii săi mai clari chiar, cititorilor italieni: “De unde vine acest scandal? Dintr-o decizie absurdă a Ministerului Educaţiei Naţionale. Personal, aşa cuţn a m . propus întotdeauna, aş fi introdus o iniţiere în istoria nouă numai ‘în programa cltJsei tenninale. •Istoria nouă este o alăturare intenţionată de diver.ie ştiinţe umaniste. Aceste ştiinţe diverse cercetează, explică lumea actuală, făcînd inteligibilă confuzia. Şi mi se pare necesar ca la optsprezece ani, în pragul pregătirii pentru o meserie, indiferent care •ar fi, tinerii noştri să fie iniţiaţi în problemele actuale ale economiei şi societăţii, în marile conflicte culturale ale lumii, în pluralitatea civiliza­ ţiilor …” .

În felul său provocator, P. Braudel va ţine deci să reafirme pînă la capăt credinţa sa intimă în adevăratul proiect pedagogic care va da istoriei (“Cine va nega rolul violent al istoriei?”) un loc central şi o va folosi ca instrument privilegiat de decodificare şi înţelegere a lumii, de fapt a trecutului şi prezentului în ansamblu. Dar el •nu a încetat niciodată să repete, “pe toate tonurile’\ că istoria tradiţională, – naraţiunea, bazată• pe o cronologie precisă — este singura capabilă să reţină în acelaşi timp atenţia celor mai tineri elevi ••-• “a copiilor” în opoziţie cu “adulţii” din clasele terminale-•• şi să le dea “ucenicia indispensabilă a timpului”. Or, ar fi o greşeală să se vadă •în această afirmaţie, reluata în mod regulat, o argumentaţie de circumstanţă, încercînd să restabilească, în numele nu ştiu cărui eciunenism, continuitatea între “istoria tradiţională” şi această “istorie nouă”, în timp ce el’ şi-a consacrat energia de cercetător şi capacităţile de administrator ştiinţific creării rupturii între una şi cealaltă. Ca şi cum el trebuia

1 4

să purifice cu orice pret istoria pe care prefera să o numească “de vîrr’, aşa cum există matematicile de vîrf, de toate păcatele care, justificat sau nu, i se imputau: nu a fost el oare făcut, aproape la cel mai înalt nivel, unul din cei răspunzători pentru mai 1968?
La maturitate, o dată cu dificultăţile întîmpinate şi eşecurile -suferite, F. Braudel îşi va preciza şi înăspri fără îndoială poziţia. Dar adevărata cauză trebuie căutată în experienţa acumulată în cursul celor zece sau. doisprezece ani de învăţămînt secundar în Algeria şi la Paris, între 1923 şi 1935. Chiar dacă cercetarea există pentru a. o stimula, a o face mai vie, a o înnoi, istoria este făcută în primul rînd, după părerea sa, pentru a fi învăţată. Iar una dintre primele sale coRferinţe ţinute în Brazilia, în seprembrie 1936, la Institutul pentru Educaţie din Sâo Paulo, poartă tocmai titlul “Pedagogia istoriei”: textul, publicat atunci în portugheză în Arhivele acestui institut, a fost republicat în 1955 în Revista de historia din Sâo Paulo (nr. 23, pp. 2-2 1). Angrenat în pregătirea Mediteranei, F. Braudel (atn fi • tentaţi să spunem “Braudel înainte de Braudel”) prezintă deja aici nucleul a ceea ce nu va înceta să repete timp de cincizeci de ani.

Pentru a transforma “romanul şcolar” în “roman de aventuri” (traduc liber din portu� heză), nu există alt secret decît simplitatea care duce la �senţial, nu (simpli­ tatea care mutilează •adevărul, care enunţă vidul şi care constituie un nume de împrumut pentru �ediocritate, ci simplitatea limpezită, lumină a inteligenţei…”. “Să ajungi la ceea ce reprezintă centrul unei civilizaţii: Grecia, o civilizaţie a Mării Egee, din Tracia pînă în

Creta, şi nu a Peninsulei Balcanice. Egiptul, o ‘civilizaţie
a Nilului domesticit”. Modelul său: Henri Pirenne,

“primul istoric de limbă franceză de astăzi” şi, prin .el, o cunoaştere care înţoarce spatele cărţii pentru a se consacra cuvîntului. Pentru a te face înţeles, sînt interzişi termenii abstracţi. Pentru a te face ascultat, “Iasă-i istoriei interesul ei dramatic” şi fă astfel încît “istoria să (ie întotdeauna interesantă”. A preda istoria înseamnă mai întîi a şti să o povesteşti. Şi, pentru a încheia: “De la activitatea istorică la activitatea didactică este ca şi cum ai trece de la un curs de apă la altu1 • Atenţie:

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sarcina voastră pedagogică nu trebuie să fie ghidată de preferinţele ştiinţifice. Insist. Colegul nostru nu îşi va face sub nici o formă datoria dacă va vorbi elevilot săi numai de societăţi, de cecuri, de preţul grîului. lstmio­ grafia a traversat lent diferite etape. Ea a fost cronica prinţilor, istoria bătăliilor sau oglinda evenimentelor politice; astăzi, graţie eforturilor unor pionieri îndrăz­ neţi, e11 plonjează în realităţile economice şi sociale ale trecutului. Aceste etape sînt ca treptele unei scări care duce la adevăr. Nu sacrificaţi nici una dintre aceste trepte cînd veţi fi în compania studenţilor… “. Important, adaugă el mai departe – împrumutînd exemplul său de la o geografie, strîns asociată în Franţa cu predarea isto­ riei-, nu este ca, pentru a explica mareele, să porneşti de la teoria ştiinţifică cea mai exactă, ci’să ajungi la ea. Şi “mareea bacalaureatului”, denunţată de Henri Poinca­ re, poate fi un excelent punct de plecare pedagogic. Aceste rinduri dezvăluie continuitatea, .iiproape surprin­

.zătoare, a unei opţiuni făcute foarte devreme şi menţi­ nute pînă în ultima zi: F. Braudel sau o anumită pasiune pentru predarea istoriei, a istoriei care se învaţă. Cine ar îndrăzni să spună • că această propunere pedagogică şi- a pierdut astăzi, la ora unei noi reforme, actualitatea? Să notăm în orice caz în trecere c.ă această propunere, apărată cu pasiune pentru istorie, este valabilă şi pentru alte discipline tot atît de fundamentale după părerea sa ca matematicile sau gramatica.

Cea de -a treia pistă, pe care mă voi limita să o schiţez aici, ar fi cea care va încerca să reaşeze această lucrare, în mod fals “minoră” (şi, îfnpreună cu ea, un întreg ansamblu qe alte texte), în continuitatea unei opere. Prizonier al reuşitei sale, F. Braudel s-a văzut adesea redus la o singură carte, şi multora le-a făcut plăcere să stabilească opoziţii între Miditerranee (Mediterana),

Civilisqtion materielle (Civilizaţia materială) şi Histoire de la France (Istoria Franţei) şi să facă un clasament. Eu cred, dimpotrivă, că opera’ ,sa merită astăzi, dupji trecerea• timpului, să fie citită în totalitatea sa şi în continuitaţea sa. Vorba şi scrisul, amîndouă repetitive (dar “a învăţa înseamnă a repeta” reprezenta una din
devizele sale favorite), jdacă, strins întrepătrunse, un rol central in elaborarea unei ginditi, a unei formulări, a unui stil. Ele îi permit să se jdace cu ideile şi cu concep­ tele, . să l e îmblinzeas’Că şi apoi să le abandoneze, inainte de a le găsi expresia şi locul definitiv. De la un text la altul, reluările, la fel ca ţiglele unui acoperiş care se acoperă una pe alta, dau impresia unei suprafeţe omogene. Dar acest proces, in desfăşurarea • sa, mi încetează să introducă motive <noi care, ‘mai întîi schiţate, sînt puţin cite puţin, şi” întotdeauna în mod progresiv; dezvoltate şi integrate.
In această per:spectivă, •Gramatica civilizaţiilor

<>cupă un loc intermediar între prima ediţie a Meditera­ nei (1949) _pe de o parte şi cea de-a doua {1966) şi primul volum al Civilizaţiei materiale (1967) pe de altă parte: Ea se sprijină dvident pe capitolul V din Ency­ clopt!die franţaise, tomul XX (1959), “Istoria civilizaţi� ilor: trecUtul explică prezentul” •(reeditată în Ecrits sur l’Histoire – Scrieri deSpre istorie, 1969, pp.’255-3 14), precum• şi pe alte texte ,.mari” ale aceloraşi ani, dintre care amintim în primul rînd “Histoire et sciences sociales. La longue duree” (Annales E.S.C., 1958). Practic, aceasta îi oferă prilejul de a dezvolta şi de a duce’ pînă la capăt

(evident provizoriu), profitînd de’ sfaturile şi de cunoştfu­

ţele a numeroşi cercetători chemaţi la iniţiativa sa în cadrul “Domepiilor culturale” din Secţia a VI-a a EPHE -astăzi E.H.E.S.S. -, o reflecţie asupra noţiunii înseşi de civilizaţie, întîlnită în .Mediterana ca “prima şi cea mai complexă dintre permanente”, cu toate contradicţiile pe •care le comportă. Căci civilizaţiile sint “frăţeşti şi liberale, dar în acelaşi timp închise� exclusiviste, recalci­ trante … ; paşnice” şi “nu mai puţin războiriice; de o uluitoare fixitate” şi, “in acelaşi timp, mobile, rătăcitoa­ re”. Puţin cîte puţin se creează un vo cabular sprijinit ca întotdea�na la el pe o reţea coerentă de imagini: supra­ punerea itivelurilor, întrepătrunderea duratelor etc. Tuşă după tuşă, el precizează sensul pe care îl va atribui fiecărui cuvînt, într-un sistem care rămîne al său şi care se justifică în primul rînd prin capacitatea sa de a îmbina cît mai strîns posibil contururile complexităţii• realului şi de a sugera tot ceea ce, prin opacitate; scapă analizei.

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anunta Mediterana. Cu CiviliSation materieUe.
Fste suficient să se gindeasc� la cuvintul cultură, despre care va sfrrşi prin a scrie, – după ce şi-a pus

indelung întrebări (şi işi mai pune în paginile care urmează), prin referire la limba gen:DaDă, iri. legătură
cu raporturile dintre civilizaţie şi cultură, – că o
cultură “este o civilizaţie care nu şi-a atins încă maturi­ tatea, pun.ctul etdminant, nici nu şi-a asigurat creştei- ea”
(CivillZtlJia materială, 1, p. 79). Definită dimpotrivă aici

în mod succesiv in raport cu spaţiul, cu societatea, cu economia şi cu mentalităţile colective, civilizatia se

vede, în 1963, identificată cu însăşi” durata tungă: .,Ceea

ce continuă să trăiască de-a lungul şirurilor de econo­ mii, a şirurilor de societăţi, necedind decît cu greu şi

puţin cîte puţin”. Dar nu cu totalitatea istoriei, pentni care el este în căutarea unui al treilea cuvînt care să nu
fie nici civilizaţie, nici cultură (1959) şi pentru care va sfrrşi, dar mult mai tirziu, prin a alege cuvintul societate,

definit de data aceasta la singular ca .,ansamblul ansam­ blurilor’\
F. Braudel şi-a •însuşit adesea, şi o ultimă dată în introducerea cărţii Identitatea FranJei, afrrmaţia lui Mare

Bloch: ,.Nu există o istorie a Franţei. Nu există decît o iStorie a E uropei”, pentru a adăuga imediat: .,Nu există

o istorie a Europei, există o istorie a lumii”El. nu a avut timp să ducă pînă la capăt această istorie a Franţei,
care era – şi el o ştia – ultimul său pariu. Nu a făcut decit să schiteze, prin film şi text (L ‘Europe, Paris, Arts
et Metieis Graphiques, 1982), această istorie a Europei
pe care o

economie et capitalism (Civilizaţie materială, econoinie
şi capitalism) el �e-a dat o istorie a lumiicare duce, spre deosebire de Mediterana, la o interogaţie asupra prez�n­
tului şî viitorului apropiat. în n’tuhe privinţe, aceaStă

.,gramatică a civilizaţiilor” lumiiactuale o pregăteşte şi o completează.

ÎN•LOC DE PREFAŢĂ1>
A fost suficient un cuvînt al lui Franţois Mitterrand, în cursul alocuJiunii din 16 septembrie, anul trecut, pentru a reanima disputa privind predarea istoriei. Fără îndoială, aceasta nu aştepta altceva decît să reizbuc­

nească.

Este o dispută veche, care a avut întotdeauna succes şi care nu lasă pe nimeni indiferent, nici publicul, îndrăgostit mai mult ca oricînd de istorie, nici oamenii politici obligaJi să siea la pîndă, nici ziariştii şi cu atît mai puJin profesorii de istorie. Este o dispută veche care nu ne mai învaJă nimic nou şi al cărei cerc nu încetea­ ză totuşi să .se lărgească. Toate .:ontroversele fşi găsesc aici cu uşurinJă locul. Ele ajung la noi în zgomot de tunuri, ca tru/Jele de elită.
În principiu, este vorba numai de programele de învăJămînt primar de care, în mod curios, de-abia s-a vorbit; de programefe învăJt’imîntului secundar, care mai mult sînt evocate decit studiate. Este vorba, de aseminea, de dezastrul sau aşa-zisul dezastru al acestui • învăJă­ mînt, judecat dugă rezultatele, despre care se spune că sînţ scandaloase, ale copiilor noştri. Dar oare aceste
•> Acest articol, publicat în 1983, în Corriere delia Serra, inedit în Franta, ne-a părut a fi cea mai adecvată prefată pentru GramqJica civilii:aJiilor.

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rezultate ar putea fi,’ au fost ele vreodată perfecte? Spre 1930, o revistă de istorie se amu;,a deja, în coloanele utiei antologii de umor, să enumere gafele gogouate ale liceenilor. Şi totuşi, la acea epocă, minU11atul învăţă­ mînt se făcea după sacrosanctul manual Malet-lsaac, căruia atîţia dintre participanţii. la dispută ‘îi aduc• astăzi elogii.

. În s.firşit, este pusă în cauză •evoluţia istoriei însilşi, în diversele ei forme. Pentru unii, istoria tradiţională, fidelă naraţiunii, sclavă a naraţiunii, rmpovărează memoria, risipind – fără cea mai mică dorinţă de a economisi – datele, nU;niele eroilor, faptele şi gesturile marilor personaje; pentru ceilalţi, ‘istoria “nouă”, care se vrea “ştiinţifică”, care cultivă între altele durata lungă şi neglijează evenimentul, ar fi răspunzătoare de aceste eşecuri didactice care sînt adevărate catastrofe, antrenînd cel-puţin uitarea de neiertat a cronologiei. Această dispută dintre Antici şi Moderni nu este ea oare bună la toate? Într-o dezbatere care ţine de pedagogie şi nu de teoria ştiinţifică, ea ascunde problemele şi “culpabilităţile” în loc să le elucideze.

Estf! oare problema atît de complicată? Avejrîn faţa voastră, în învăţămîntul şecundar, copii mici, apoi adulţi. • În mod necesar, la un moment dat predarea trebu[e să se schimbe, cea a istoriei, ca şi a altor materii. Problema este de a şti cum veţi repartiza chestiunile ce urmează a fi predate de-a lungul anilor şcolari care se succed şi nu se aseamănă între ei. La început – copii; la s.firşit – adulţi. Ceea ce se potriveşte primilor nu se potriveşte ultimilor. Se pune problema de a opera o împărţire şi de a exista, pentru a face acest lucru, o idee directoare, un clasament al utgenţelor şi exigenţelor, o inteligenţă prevenitoare.

Am susţinlft întotdeauna, pentru copii, o naraţiune simplă, imagini, seriale de televiziune, filme, în mare o
, istorie tradiţională dar ameliorată, adaptată mijloa­ celor de informare cu care este obişnuit copilul. Vorbesc în. cunoştinţă de cauză. Am fost multă vreme, ca toţi universitarii din generaţia mea, profesor de liceu şi am cerut întotdeauna, alături de clasele terminale sau de

20

concursurile care mi-au fost încredinţate, o clasă de a VI-a, adică copii de la 1 O la 12 ani. Este un public delicios, care se minunează cu spontaneitate, in faţa căruia poţi face să defileze istoria aşa cl#n ai face-o cu o lanternă magică. Marea problemă este ca, pe par­ curs, să-I faci să descopere perspectiva, realitatea timp�ţ/ui trăit, direcţiile şi selnnificaţile pe care’ le ilnplică, succesiunile care; marcîndu-1, îl jalonează şi îi dă o primă îlifăţişare ce poate fi recunoscută. Găsesc abominabil în sine faptul ca un elev mediu să nu-l poată situa pe Ludovic al XIV-lea în raporl cu Napoleon, sau pe Dante în raport cu Machiavelli.. Pentiu că timpul, cunoscut puţin cîte puţin, reduce la minimum posibili­ tatea unei confuzii! •Dar cu condiţia ca naraţiunea uşoară să se deschidă de la sine în spectacole, peisţlje, vederi de ansamblu.[ • Sîntem într-un loc sau altul:’ la Veneţia, Bordeaux, sau la Londra … Alături de ucenicia timpului se impfine .de asemenea ucenicia vocabularului: să înveţi să vehiculezi cu preCizie cuvintele, noţiunile• abstracte şi concrete … Noţiunile cheie – o societate, un stat, o economie, o civilizaţie … Şi toate aeestea în cel mai simplu mod din lume. Să ceri cunoaşterea tkltelor esenţiale, să situezi in timp oameni� eminenţi, impor­ tanţi, sau chiar detestabili. Să-i pui în locul care li se cuvine.

lată -ne acum de partea cealaltă a baricadei, faţă în faţă cu tineri, astăzi poate ceva mai liberi, ck asemenea mai nejericiţi decît eram noi la vîrsta lor, revoltaţi, în timp ce de fapt societatea, lumea, modul de a trăi sint cele care se schimliă în jurul lor, ducîndu:i cu sine în acţiunile, constrîngerile şi mîniile lor. Ei sînt poate mai puţin intelectuali, mai puţin îndrăgostiţi de cărţi, dar 7a fel de inteligenţi, categoric mai curioşi decît eram noi cînd am terminat şcoala. Atunci, ce fel de discuts istoric• să le fie impus?

Programele noastre absurde, în Franţa, le impun, în primară, lumea dintre 1914 pînă in 1939, •apoi în c��a terminată – lumea de după 1939. De două ori vasta lume, dar aceea a pou’ticii,’ războaielor, instituţiilor, conflictelor. Adică o masă fabuloasă de date, de

21

evenimente. il provoc ,pe orice istoric, dotat cu o me­

morie de elefant, să treacă cu succes garantat orice examen asupra acestei. masf!c1 de fapte adesea’ mediocre,

succedîndu-se- pentru că se succed… Am in faJă ultimul născut dintre aceste manuale referitor la Timpulprezent, cel mai bun din familie, după cum mi s-a spus. Il găsl!$C uti� bine întocmit, dar decepJionant. Nici măcar un singur cuvtnt intemeiat despre capitalism, despre crizele economice; despre populaJia lumii, despre civilizajliledin afara Europei, despre motivele profunde ale conflictelor

în locul conflictelor Studiate ca atare. 1 ‘ De unde vine acest scandal? De la o decizie absurdă
a Ministerului EducaJiei NaJionale. Persona� aşa cum am propus întotdea’1na, aş fi introdus o iniJiere în istoria nouă numai in programa clasei terminale. Istoria nouă este o îmbinare necesară a diverselor ştiinJe umaniste. Aceste ştiinJe diverse cercetează, explică lumea actuală,

făcînd. confuzia inteligibilă. Şi mi se pare necesar ca la optsprezece ani, în pragul pregătirii pentru o meserie,

indiferent care ar fi ea, tinerii noştri să fie iniJiaJi in problemele actuale ale economiei şi societăJii, în marile conflicte culturale ale lumii, în pluralitatea civilizaJiilor. Să fii capabi� pentru a căpăta o imagine clară, să citeşti un cotidian de informaJie • înjelegînd ceea ce
citeşti.
Or, s-a făcut exact contrariuL Istoria nouă a fost plasată, cantonată în claSele mici, unde a făcut, evident,
ravagii. Se putea altfel? .
În sfirşit, ce le două discursuri istorice au fostfolosite
greşit şi sînt dăuniftoare şi unul şi celălalt, unul la
începutul liceului, celălalt la terminarea lui. Rezultă de
aici o confuzie evidentă,. agravată şi mai . mult de
libertăJile pe care fnvăJămintul şi le-a luat din 1968,
optînd cu cele mai bune intenJii din lume pentru o anume parte di11. programă• şi netratind alta. În funcJie • de hazardul opJiunii şi de profesorii care s-au succedat, unii elevi nu au auzit niciodată vorbindu-se, în cursul vieJii lor şcolare, de o parte; sau alta importantă a trecutului. Continuitatea şirurilor cronologict nu• a adus nici un. cîştig. ..

Cu istoria predată copiilor noştri s-a întîmplat, din

22

nefericire, ceea ce s-a întîmplat cu matematicile sau cu.

gramatica. .. Ve ce să-l înveţi, cu sforicele şi nasturi, ce înseamnă o mulţime pe un puşti de 10 ani care, astfe�

nu va stăpfni niciodată cakulul ordinar şi numai unii dintre ei vor aborda, mult mai tirziu, matematicile superioare? Lingvistica a dat peste cap gramatica la fel

ca năvala unui mistreţ într-un cîmp de cartofi. Ea a

îmbrăcat-o într-un limbaj pedant, comjJiicat, incompre� hensibil şi care în plus este şi perfect inadecvat. Rezulta­ tul: niciodată gramatica şi ortografia nu au fost atît de neglijate ca acum! Dar nici lingvistica, nici matematica

superioară, nici istoria de vîrf nu sînt vinovate .de aceste incongruenţe. Ele fac ceea ce au defăcut. Fără să se
preocupe de ceea ce este sau nu potrivit să se predea la o vîrstă sau alta. În acest caz, de .vină este ambiţia intelectuaiă a celor care au făcut programele. Ei vor să meargă prea departe. Mă bucură să fie• ambiţioşi în ceea ce-i priveşte. Dar să se străduiască să fie simpli pentru cei de care răspund,• chiar dacă şi mai (lles

atunci cînd este greu.

Mă întreb. fn ce măsură această discuţie poate interesa pe un cititor italian. Şi totuşi, dacă stăni şi ne

gîndim bine, fondul disputei este de o imensă importan­ ţă, încît nu-l poate lăsa indiferent. Cine va nega rolul violent al isttJriei? Fireşte, ea nu trebuie să se piardă în fabricarea unui naţionalism’ intotdeauna criticabi� nici să se afunde numai intr-un UTIUlnism care se bucură de preferinţele mele. Marea problemă este că istoria este ingredientul fără de• care• nici o conŞtiinţii naţională nu

este viabilă. Şi fără această cor.ştiinţă nu poate exista o cultură originală, o civilizaţie adevărată, nici în

Franţa şi hici in Italia.

FERNA.’ll>BRAUDm.

INTRODUCeRE:

ISTORIA ŞI TIMPUL PREZENT
Aceste prime pagini precizează sensul efortului cerut elevilor din clasele terminale de nouaJ. or programă de istorie. După orice logică, ele nu puteau fi puse decît la începutul acestui volum. Cu toate acestea, logica pedago­ gică nu va fi de fapt deloc de acord cu această soluţie. Lectura acestor pagini ar urma să fie amînată, de preferinţă după prima parte a programei, spre începutul celui de-al doilea trimestru, cînd va fi abordat• studiul dificil al marilor civilizaţii şi cînd candidaţii se vor fi familiarizat într-o oarecar� măsură cu vocabularul şi discuţiila filozofice:• încercarea unei prime lecturi, încă de la intrarea în joc, merită să fie făcută.

Noua programă de istorie pentru clasele tenninale ridică probleme dificile. Ea se prezintă ca o explicaţie

. a lumii actuale aşar cum se dezvăluie ea, în termeni adesea obscuri, astfel încît să poată fi înţeleasă sub aspectele multiple ale unei istorii care nu dispreţuieşte ştiinţele sociale înrudite: geografia, demografia, econo­ mia, sociologia, antropologia, psihologia.
• Trei explicaţiisuccesive.

A explica actualitatea rămîne o pretenţie. Cel mult se poate nutri ambiţia de a o înţelege mai bine pe o cale sau alta. Programa voastr� vă propune succesiv trei căi:

25

fizică care

care trăiesc,
în primul rind, zilele pe care le trăim se explică. în parte, prin zilele care le-au precedat imediat Pentru această scurtă întoarcere înapoi, istoria poate vorbi cu uşurinţă. Prima parte a programei voastre pune deci în.
cauză acele zile, acei ani dramatici, adesea inumani,pe care i-a trăit lumea de •Ia începutul .primului război

mondial, în august 1914, pînă în momentul de faţă. Aceste evenimente au bulversat, au dOimatizat Ja maxi­ mum ,.prima parte” a secolului XX şi se prelungesc – şi în
viaţa noastră prezentă prin numeroase consecinţe. Aceste evenimente de ieri explică şi nu explică ele

însele universul actual. Practic, actualitatea prelungeşte, în grade diferite, alte experienţe mult mai îndepărtate în timp. Ea se alimentează din secole trecute, chiar din

întJ:eaga ,.evoluţie istorică trăită de utTianitate pînă în

zilele noastre”. Faptul că prezentul implică o asemenea dimensiune a timpului trecut nu trebuie să vi se pară absurdă, deşi tOţi avem, spontan, tendinia de a considera
lumea care ne înconjoară doar în durata foarte scurtă a
propriei noastre existente şi de a vedea istoria ei cal un
film rapid în care totul se succede sau se.îngrămădeşte:
războaie, bătălii, intilniri la nivel înalt, crize politice,

zile revoluţionare, revoluţii; dezordini economice, idei, mode intelectuale, artistice …

Cu toate acestea, nu vă va fi greu să constataţ i că viaţa oamenilor implică multe alte realităţi care nu pot ocupa un 1� în acest ftlm al evenimeptelor: spaţiul în
formele sociale care ii constring şi le
determină existenţa, normele etice cP’ora în mod conşti­

ent sau inconştient li se supun, credinţele lor religioase_şi filozofice, civilizaţia care le este proprie. Aceste realităţi
au o -viaţă mult mai lungă decît a noastră şi nu avem întotdeauna timp, în cUrsul existenţei noastre să .le vedem cum se schimbă de la un capăt la altul.
Dacă am recurge la o comparaţie, lumea
ne înconjoară – munţi, fluvii, gheţari, maluri – se
schimbă inevitabil. Or, această evoluţie este atit de lentă încît nimeni dintre noi nu ar putea-o observa cu

propriii săi ochi, fără referiri la un trecut îndepărtat, fără ajutorul studiilor şi măsurătorilor ştiinţifice care
depăşesc limitele propriei noastre observaţii. Viaţa

naţiunilor, a civilizâţiilor, comportamentele psihice religioase au fără îndoială o mai redusă imuabilitate evidentă şi totuşi generaţii întregi de oameni se succed fără a le schimba prea mult. Ceea ce nu diminuează importanţa acestor forţe profunde care se încorporează in viaţa noastră şi fasonează lumea, ci dimpotrivă.
Astfel, -un trecut apropiat şi � trecut mai mult sau
mai puţin îndepărta t se îmbină în multiplicitatea timpu­ lui prezent in timp ce o istorie apropiată aleargă spre

noi cu paşi grăbiţi, o istorie îndepărtată ne însoţeşte cu paşi lenţi.

Această istorie îndepărtată, această t�le-istorie e!!te cea la care şe referă a doua parte a programei voastre. A alege de fapt marile civilizaţii drept ,.cadre inteligibile” ale lumiiactuale înseamnă a depăşi mişcarea rapidă a istoriei aşa• cum o veţi urmări, de la 1914 pină la 1962. Aceasta ne invită să reflectăm la o anumită istorie cu
respiraţie lentă, ..de lungă durată… Civilizatiile• sînt

evident personaje aparte, a căror .longevitate depăşeşte

puterea de înţelegere. Peste măsură de bătrîne, ele persistă să trăiască in fiecare dintre noi; şi ne vor supravieţui încă multă vreme.
Aceste două explicaţii odată terminate (istoria

recentă, istoria îndepărtată),. programa voastră necesită o a treia – este vorha de data aceasta de a defmi marile probleme ale anului de graţie 1962 la scară monc:ţială.

Aici intră toate categoriilede probleme: politice, sociale, economice, culturale, tehnice, ştiinţifioo … Pe scurt; vi se cere, dincolo de luminile căii istorice cu dublu sens pe

care o vom urma, . să faceţi distincţia, in universul care ne înconjoară, îtitre esenţial şi accesoriu .

. In mod obişnuit, istoricul . reflectează şi lucrează cu trecutul şi, dacă documentaţia nu-i dă întotdeauna

mijloacele de a-1 inţelege exact, cel puţin el ştie dinainte, studiind de exemplu secolul – al XVIII-lea, spre ce sca­ denţe se indreaptă ;.Secolul Luminilor” şi fie şi numai acest lucru ţSte un element preţios de cunoaştere şi discernere. El ştie cart; este sfîrşitul. CîD.d este vorba de

lumea actuală care ni se oferă ca o serie c1e posibilităţi: a distinge marile probleme înseamnă în esenţă a-ţi imagina deznodărnîntul, a discerne, dintre toate posibili-

27

tăţile, •pe cele care vor triumfa mîine. Iată ce este dificil, risc�t, dar fără îndoială necesar . .
Condorcet credea că această operaţiune este permi­ să: Istorici serioşi se fac cu curaj apărători ai progno­ zei, oricît ilf fi de -periculos. Un. ef.onomist de reputatie mondială, Colin Clark, a calculat în 1951, pOrnind de la statisticile pe c;:are le cunoştea atunci, dimensiUDile proba­

bile ale economiei viitorului. Jean Fourastie disertează liniştit despre civilizatia 1980 pe care o dictează sau ar.

trebui să o dicteze politica ratională din 1960. O ,.ştiinţă” foarte fragilă, privirea spre viitor a filozofului

Gaston Bergel’, pretinde să se specializeze în înţelegerea viitorului apropiat: “futuribilul”, cum spun cu un cuVint oribil unii economişti, deci futuribilul fÎind ceea ce poate fi, • din acest moment, în tnod legitim plasat în viitor, această subţire aşchie a viitorului ,apropiat• care este ealculată dinainte şi pe care aproape că îl stăpîneşti.

Âceastă atitudine te face uneori să surizi. Ea _ are avantajul în oric.e caz, de a suge � în confuzia timpului prezent, această linie de fugă privilegiată, adevărată sau pe jumătate adevărată, care dă naştete, pentru că ea este îndreptată spre viitor, celor mai vaste probleme ale ‘prezentului şi încearcă să le dea un sens. Lumea
actuală este o lume fn devenire.
Veti găsi mai jos o hartă . plauzibilă a răspîndirii populatiei în anul 2000. Ea vă va face să reflectati ,şi să înţelegeţi, între altele, că nici un planificator – i!lf planificarea f!U e$e oare, prin excelenţă, studiul atent şi ;,prospectiv” al marilor probleme actuale? -, deci nici un planificator nu va putea elabora un proiect, indiferent care, fără a avea în minte (fu afară de multe alte documente) 9 asemenea hartă. Ea dă întreaga semnifi­ catie reflecţiei lui M. Houphouet Boigny, preşedintele Republicii Coasta de Fildeş, şi anume . că în Asia şi în Africa neagră planificarea • nu poate avea sub nici o formă aceeaşi înfăţişare, căci subdezvoltarea trebuie să facă faţă pe de o parte suprapopulaţiei, iar • pe de alta densităţii demografice reduse.
1. Popu_lajia luniii Îllatud_2000.

• Istoria variată şi singulară.

Faptul că istoria se pretează la aceste jocuri, la aceste speculaţii, di ea se vrea, pe scurt, ştiinţa prezentului – şi a unui prezenţ ambiguu – poate uimi. � oare un

abuz ‘ d in partea ei? Va căpăta ea, ca lupul diilfabulă, obiceiurile altora, pe cele ale ştiinţelor sociale cu care se
înrudeşte”! Vom vorbi despre act:<C!>la ia începutul celei de-a doua părţi a acestei cărţi. Atunci problema vă va părea mult mai clară pentru că este o problemă a timpului în sine, iar timpul va fi abordat ui perspectiva studiilor voastre de filozofie .
. Evidenta multitudine a modurilor de explicare a istoriei, distanţa dintre punctele de.. vedere diferite, chiar contradicţiile dintre ele . converg de fapt într-o dialectică particulară a istoriei, întemeiată pe diversitatea timpului istoric însuşi: ‘ timpul rapid al evenimentelor, timpul prelungit al episoadelqr, timpul lent, leneş al civilizaţiilor. Putem rămîne în limitele unui timp istoric sau ale altuia de fiecare d8tă cînd este vorba• de un s.tul;liu particular. Dimpotrivă, orice tentativă de explicare istorică globa­ lă – cum ar fi istoria civilizatiilor – te obligă să multiplici aceste fotografii, diverse prin timpul lqr de expunere, apoi să asamblezi timpul şi imaginile multiple într-o unitate, aşa cum culorile spectrului solar amestecate cum trebuie recompun obligatoriu lumina albă.

GRAMATICA
CIVILIZAŢIILOR

CAPITOLUL 1

VARIAŢIILE VOCABULARULUI
Ar fi bine să definim cuvîntul civilizaţie cu claritate şi simplitate, dacă• s-ar putea aşa cum se defineşte o linie dreaptă, un triunghi, un corp chimic…

Diti păcate, vocabuland ştiinţelor umaniste Q.u pennite în nici un fel defmiţii categorice. Fără ca totul

să fie aici incert sau în devenire, majoritatea termenilor, departe de a fi stabili ţi o dată peptru totdeauna, variază de la un autor la altul şi nu încetează să evolueze sub ochii nşotri. “Cuvintele, afmnă Uvi-Strauss, sînt instru­
mente cărora fiecare dintr�- noi este liber să le dea
întrebuinţarea pe care o do�eşte, cu condiţia s�-şi explice
intenţiile”. Aceasta înseamnă că, în sectoarele ştiinţelor
umaniste (ca în cel al ftlozofiei), cuvintele cele mai siin­
ple îşi schimbă adesea şi în funcţie de împrejurări sen­

sul, urmind gîndirea celui care le animă şi le foloseşte.
• Cuvîntul civilizafie – un neologism – apare tîrziu în Franţa,; în secolul ai XVIII-ka şi ‘are la început . o sem”ificaţie restrînsă. •

El a fost format pornind de. la cuv�tele ,.civilizat”, ,.a civiliza”, care există deja de multă vieme şi sînt uzuale în secolul al XVI-lea. ,.Civilizaţie”• nu este încă (pe ta 1732) decît un, teimen de jurisprudenţă şi desemnează un act de justiţie sau •O hotărîre care conferă Un. caracter

33

civil unui proces . penal. Expresia modernă, în sensul de
,.trecere la o conditie civilizată’.. vine mai tirziu, în 1752, sub pana lui Turgot care pregătea atunci o lucrare•
de istorie universală, dar p_e care nu o va publica el. Intrarea oficială in circulaţie . a cuvîtţului intr-un text tipărit, este marcată fără indoială de publicarea lucrăriiTraiti de la population (Tratat deSpre populatie) (l756) de Mirabeau, părin�le tribunului _1\:volutionar: se ppne problema ,.resorturilor civiliza.tiei” şi chiar a
Juxului unei civilizatii falSe “.

Acestea fiind zise, să ne atnuz&ln să constatăm• că

Voltaire insuşi nu a folosit cuvintul comod civilizatie ,;chiar dacă tocmai el este omul care concepuse noţiu­
nea … în lu�ea sa Essai sur les moeurs et sur l ‘esprit

des natiotzs (Eseu deSpre obiceiurile şi spiritul natiunilor) (1756) făcuse deja o primă schiţă a unei istoriigenerale
a civilizatiei” (J. Huizinga).
.
• în noul său sens, civilizatie se opune în mare barba­
riei. Există pe de o parte popoarele civilizate, de cealal­ tă – popoarele sălbatice, primitive sau barbare. Nici

măcar .,bunii sălbatici”, îndrăgiţi într-un fel în secolul al XVIii-lea, nu sint numiti civilizaţi. Nimeni nu se
indoieşte că în acest cuvint nou, civilizaţie, societatea franceză de la sfîrşitul domniei lui Ludovic al XV-lea nu
vede cu satisfacţie propriul său portret care,
de altfel, rie
poate seduce încă ş� astăzi. în orice caz, cuvintul �
apărut fiindcă era nevoie de – el. P”mă atunci, poli
(politicos, civilizat), policl (persoană care a ajunS la un anume grad de civilizatie}, civil (persoan ă care respectă convenienţele, _bunele maniere in relaţiile sociale), civilisl

(civilizat), care se foloseau pentru cineva eate avea maniere frumoase şi uşurinta de a se purta in lume, nu

corespundeau nici unui substantiv. Cuvintul police {referi­ tor la legislaţie) avea mai curînd sensul de ordine socia­

lă, ceea ce ii îndepărta destul de mult de adjectivul poli pe care DicJionarul universal al lui Furetiere (1690) il defineşte după cum urmează: ,..Se foloseştela figurat in

morală şi inseamnă civilizat. A te civillza, a rafma . moravurile, a deveni politicos şi �iabil… Nimic nu este •mai adecvat pentru a civiliza şi a rafma un tînăr decît• conversatia cu femeile”. •

34

• Civilizaţie şi cultură. Pornind din Franţa, cullintul civilizaţie face rapi d înconjurul• • Europei. Cumltul cultură îl însoţeşte.

El există in Anglia din 1772, şi fără îndoială ..şi mai devreme, sub forma civilization, care ciştigă teren in fata
cuvintului civility (politete), folosit ţotuşi multă vreme.

Zivilisation se – instalează. fără dificultate în Germania� fată de vechiul cuvint Bildung {cultură) . în Olanda:,

dimpotrivă, se întîlneşte cu S\lbstantiwl • beschaving, derivat din verbul beschaven: a iafma, a innobila, a civiliza. Beschaving,, avind aproape acelaşi sens, se va încărca fără dificultate cu conceptul de civilizaţie şi va reziSta astfel noului cuvîD.t care apărea’ în pofida a orice: civilisatie. Aceeaşi rezistenţă se constată dincolo de Alpi şi din aceleaşi motive: limba italiană are şi • va folosi în mod. rapid in însăşi sensul de civilizaţie fnnno­ sul şi vechiul. cuvint civilitd, pe care îl folosise • deja

Dante. Bine înrădăcinat, . civilitd va împiedica pătrun­ derea noului cuvint, dar nu şi discuţiile explozive pe care

le provoacă. în 1835, Romagnosi va incerva in �dar să lanseze cuvintul incivilmento care după părerea sa însemna trecerea la civilizaţie, precum şi civilizaţie ca atar�.

ln această călătorie in jurul Europei, noul cuvint, civilizaţie, este însoţit de un cuvînt vechi – cultUră

(Cicero afirmase dej a: Cultura animi philosophia est), care este întinerit pentru a căpăta aproape acelaşi sens cu civilizaţie. Multă vreme, cultura nu va fi decît dublura civilizaţiei. Astfel� la Universitatea: din Berlin, in i 830, Hegel foloseşte fără nici o �diferenţăun cuvint sau altul. Dar intr-o zi apare necesitatea de a se face o distincţie între ele.

Noţiunea de civilizaţie are, de fapt, cel puţin un dublu sens. Ea desemnează in acelaşi timp valori morale şi valori mateiiale. Karl Marx făcea astfel deosebire intre infrast ructuri • (materiale} şi suprastructuri {spirituale), acestea din un’nă depinzind strîns de prhnele. Charles Seignobos afirma intr-o butadă: ‘”Civilizaţia inseamnă drumuri, porturi şi cheiUfi”, un mod de a spune că nu înseamnă numai spirit “Este tot ce a realizat omenirea”;

35

afmn� Marcel . Mauss, iar istoricul Eugene Cavaignac arăta: “Este un minimum de ştiinţă, de artă, de ordine şi de virtuţi …”.

Civilizaţiâ are deci cel puţin două etaje. De aici tentaţ�a multor autori de a face deosebire intre cel� două cuvinte, cultUră şi civilizaţie, într-un mod în care unul � încarcă -cu demnitatea spiritualului, celălalt cu triviali­ tatea materialului. ‘Din nefericire, nimeni nu a căzut de

acord asupra distincţiei care trebuie făcută: ea va varia de la ţară la ţară, sau chiar în interiorul aceleiaŞi ţări,
după epeci şi aut,.ori::. _ • • • •

în Germania, după o oarecare ezitare, distincţia V’a duce la un fel de intîietate acordată culturii (Kultur) şi la o devalorizare c_Qnştientă a civilizaţiei. Pentru. A. Ton­ nies (1922) şi Alfred Weber (1935), “civilizaţia” nu este decît un ansamblu de cunoştinţe •tehnice şi practice, un apsamblu de mijloace folosite pentru a acţiona asupra naturii; “cultura”; dimpotrivă� reprezintă principiile normative, valorile, idealurile, într-un cuvînt: spiritul.

Aceste poziţii explică reflec.ţia, stranie la prima vedere pentru un francez, a istoricului german Wilhelm Mommsen: “Este datoria omului ,ca în zilele noastre (1951) civilizaţia să nu distrugă cultura, nici tehnica fiinţaumană”. Această frază ne uimeşte pentru că iD Franţa cuvîntul civilizaţie rămîne dominant, aşa cum este m Anglia sau •în Statele Unite, în timp ce în Poloni� şi

Rusia s-a în].pus: cuvîntul cultură, ca în Germania (şi din cauza acesteia). Ît1 Franţa, cuvîntul cultură nu îşi păs­

trează forţa decit in măsura în care el desemnează “toate aspectele specifice, proprii vieţii, spiritului” (Henri Marrou): noi vorbim de cultura, nu de civilizaţia lui Paul Valery, civilizaţia desemnînd mai curînd valori colective.

Iată ce multe încurcături sînt deja; să le-o adăugăm pe ultima, •Cea mai importantă. Antropologii anglo-sa­ xoni, începîrid cu E.B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1874), au căutat, pentru a-l aplica la.scicietăţile primitive pe ca� re le studiau, un cuvint diferit de cel de civilizaţie, pe care limba engleză îl foloseşte în mod obişnuit pentru sOcietăţile moderne. • Ei vor folosi, şi aproape toţi antropologii vor sfirşi prin a face ca ei, culturi prim,itive, în opoziţie cu civilizaJiile societăţilor evoluate,•/ m

36

această lucrare vom recutge deci în mod frecvent tocml!i
la această dublă . u._.llzare de fiecare • dată • cînd vom
compara civilizafia şi C1-fltura.
Din fericire, adjectivul cultural, inventat în Germania
spre ami 1850 şi a cărui folosire este atît de comodă� nu
comportă nici una <Untre aceste compliCaţii. El desem­
nează practic ansamblul sensurilor are acoperă în
acelaşi timp civilizaţia şi cultura. ln aceste condiţii, vom
spurie despre o civilizaţie (sau despre o cultură) că este
un al:lsatn,blu de bunuri culturale, a cărui .”locuire”
geografică este o arie culturală, istoria sa – o istorie
culturală, că imprumuturile de la o civilizaţie la alta sînt
împrumuturi sau transferuri culturale; acestea din urmă
fiind atit materiale cît şi spirituale. Acest • adjectiv prea
comod provoacă. multe iritări: i se aduce . acuzaţia că
este •barbar, prost formal Dar atîta vreme .cît nu i se va
găsi un rival, viitorul lui va rămîne asigurat ‘Pentru
funcţia sa, el este singtiru l.
• In jurul lui 181!1, cuvîntul civilizaţie, pina atunc’i la
singular (ci.”ai:zaţia), trece la pluraL
De atunci, el “tinde să capete un sens nou, cu totul
diferit: ansamblul caracteristicil�r pe care le prezintă
viaţa colectivă a unui grup sau a unei epoci”. Se va
spune civilizaţia Atenei în secolul al V-lea, sau civilizaţia
franceză din timpul lui Ludovic al XIV-lea. A lamuri
această problemă a singuhtrului şi a pluralului cuvîntului
civilizaţie înseamnă să ajungi într-o nouă îneurcătufă,’
nu mai puţin importantă. • •
ln realitate, în mentalitatea omului secolului• XX
prevalează pluralul care, mai mult decît singular_ul, este
în mod direct accesibil ‘ experienţelor noastre personale . . Muzeele ne trimit în titnp; ne adîncim mai mult sau mai puţin complet în civilizaţii trecute. Trimitenle sînt şi•mai clare cînd este vorba de spaţiu: treci Rinul •sau Canalul

Minecii, ajungi în Mediterana venind din nord, iată tot atitea experienţe liml>ezi şi de neuitat care subliniază – toate – realit!ttea pluraiului cuvîntului nostru. ESte vor\Ja incontestabil de civilizaţii.

37

Dacă. ni se cere să defmim civilizaţia, vom fi cu siguranţă mai şovăitori. De fapt. . folosirea plilralului corespunde dispariţiei unui anumit concept. estompării treptate a ideii – proprie secolul�i al XVIll-lea- a unei ciVilizaţii confundate cu progresul în sine şi care •va fi

rezervată cîtorva popoare privilegiate, unor grupuri de oamerii, chiar ,.elitei”. Pin fericire, secolul XX s-a

debarasat de o serie de judecăţi de valoare şi nu va şti cu adevărat să definească – în numele căror criterii? – cea mai bună dintre civilizaţii.

• în aceste condiţii, civilizaţia la singular şi-a pierdut strălucirea. Ea nl! mai este înalta, foarţe înalta valoare morală şi intelectuală pe care o remarca secolul al XVIII-lea. De exemplu, în accepţiunea limbii;se va spune mai degrabă astăzi că un act abominilbil este o
crimă împotriva umanităJii decît împotriva civilizaJiei, deşi sensul poate fi acelaşi. Dar limba modernă încearcă o anumită reticenţă în a folosi cuvîntul civilizaţie în

vechea lui accepţiune de perfecţiune, de superioritate umană.

La singular, nu este oare astăzi civilizaţia, îtiainte de toate,,bunl)l comun pe care-I împ�esc,.ihmod inegal de altfel, toate civilizaţiile, ,.ceea ce omul nu mai uită”? Focul, scrierea, calculul, domesticirea plantelor şi anima­ lelor nu au nici o origiiiespecială: ele au devenit bup.uri colective ale civilizaţiei.

Or, acest fenomen de difuziune a bunurilor culturale comune ale întregii omeniri capătă în lumea actuală .o
amploare extraordinară. O tehnică i,ndustrială creată de

Occident este exportată în întreaga lume care o primeşte cu braţde deschise. Va unifica ea oare lumea, impunînd
pretutindeni acelaşi peisaj : clădiri de beton, sticlă şi oţel, aerodromuri, căi ferate cu gările şi megafoanele lor,• oraşe uriaşe care, puţin cîte puţin, acaparează cea mai mare parte a oamenilor? ,.Sîntem într-o fază, scria Raymond Aron, în care desoperim adevărul relativ al conceptului de civilizaţie şi, în acelaşi timp, “faptul că acest concept trebuie depăşit …Etapa civilizaţiilor s-a incheiat şL spre binele •sau răul ei, omenirea este pe cale să aj\mgă la o nouă etapă”, în concluzie . cea a unei civilizaţii • capabile să se extindă la universul întreg.
38

Cu toate acestea, “cMiizatia industrială” exportată

de Occident nu este decît U11adintre trăsăturile civiliza­

ţiei oceidentale. Adoptind-o, lumea nu acceptă, dintr-o­ dată şi ansamblul acestei civilizaţii, ci dimpotrivă. ‘

Trecutul civilizaţiilornueste de altfel decit istoria unor împrumuturi continue pe care aceste civilizaţii şi le fac .
urla alteia de-a luligul secolelor, fără să-şi piardă ţotuşi nici p�cularitătile, nici trăsăturile specifice. Să recunoaştem totuşi că este pentru prima dată cind un aspect decisiv al unei anumite civilizaţii este considerat

un imprumut dorit de toate civilizaţiile din lume şi că viteza comunicaţiilor moderne ii favorizează difuzarea

rapidă şi -eficace. Credem că putem spune doar că ceea ce numim civilizatie industrială este pe punctul de a se

alătura acestei civilizaţiicolective a universului despre care am vorbit ceva mai inainte. Fiecare civilizaţie a fost, este sau va fi bulversată de acest lucru in structurile sale.

Pe scurt, presupunind că toate civilizaţiile lUţnii ajung, intr-un răstimp mai lung sau mai scurt, să-şi

uniform:izeze tehnicile uzuale şi, prin aceste tehnici, unele dintre modurile lor de viaţă, nu este mai puţin adevărat că, pentru multă vreme de aici inainte, ne vom găsi in

cele din urmă in faţa unor civilizaţii loarte diferenţiate. Pentru multă vreme încă, cuvintul civilizaţie va avea singular şi plural. în această privinţă, istoticul• nu ezită să fie categoric.

CAPITOLUL 11

CIVILIZAŢIA SE DEFINEŞTE
ÎN RAPORT
CU DIFERITELE ŞTIINŢE UMANE

Noţiunea de civilizaţie nu poate fi defmită. decît in contextul tuturor ştiinţelor umane, inclusiv istoria. Dar în cursul prezentului capitol nu se va pune încă cu adevă­ rat problema acesteia.

Vom încerca de data aceâsta să defmim conceptul de civilizaţie în raport cu alte Ştiinţe umane, făcînd apel pe rînd la geografie, sociologie, economie, la �ihologia colectiv,ă. Sînt patru incursiuni in domenii care nu se aseamăhă deloc. Dar răşpunsurile obţinute ‘Se âpropie unele de altele mai mult decît s-ar părea la prima vedere.

Civilizatiile înseamnă spatii .

Civilizaţiile (indiferent care este statura lor, cele mari, ca şi cele mici) pot fi întotdeauna localizate pe o hartă. O

parte esenţială a existenţei lor depinde de constrîngerile sau �vantajele situăriilor geografice.

, Bineînţeles, omul a realizat această situare de şecole, adesea chiar de milenii. Nu există un singur peisaj care să nu poarte marca acestei m!lhci continue, îmbună­ tăţite de-a lungul generaţiilor, acumulate. în cadrul acestui efort, omul s-a transformat el însuşi, prin această

.”puternică muncă a lui asupra lui însuşi” despre care vorbeşte Michelet sau, dacă vreţi, prin “această produ­ cere a omului de către om”, cum spune Karl Marx. –

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• A. vorbi de âvilizaţie înseamnă a vorbi de spaţii,de pămî�rl, de relief, de clime, de vegetaţii,’despecii de

animale, de avantajele date sau dobindite.

Şi tot ceea ce decurge de aici-pentru om: agricultură, creşterea animalelor, brană, locuinţe, • îmbrăcăminte, comutiicaţii, industrie… Scena pe care se joacă aceste piese de teatru interminabile comandă in parte desfăşu­ rarea lor, le explică particularităţile; oamenii trec, ea răniine destul. de. asemănătoare cu ea insăşi.
Două Indii se opun •pentru indianistul Hennann
Goetz: Indii!- plină de wrtiditatea ploilor puternice, ,de lacuri, de mlaştini, de plante şi de flori acvatice, de păduri şi de jungle, India • Oamenilor cu piele brună şi, in contrast su aceasta, India relativ secetoas ă, care cuprinde Indusul Mijlociu şi Ga:Îlgele Mijlociu şi care se prelungeşte de-a lungul Deccanului, acesta fiind domeniul oamenilor cu pielea de culoare de�hisă, adesea agresivi.

India inseamnă dialogul, lupta dintre aceste două spaţii, dintre aceste două umanităţi.
Fireşte, mediul natural şi, in acelaşi timp, cel reatizat

de om nu se inchide dinainte intr-un determinism ingust. Locul nu explică totul, chiar dacă rolul său rămîne important, s,ub fonna avantajelor – date sau dobindite.

Sub semnul avantajelor date, fiecare civilizaţie ar fi • rodul privilegiilor imediate, folosite de timpuriu de om. Astfel, la inceputul vremurilor, Civilizaţiile flul’iale ale lumii• vechi au înflorit de-a lungul Fluviului\ Galben (civilizaţia chineză), Indus1,1lui (civilizaţia •prein.diană), Eufratului şi Tigrului (Sumer, Babylon, Assiria); Nilului (civilizaţia • egipteană) . în acelaşi fel au inflorit civiliza- • ţiile thalassosocratice, roade ‘ilie mării:Fenicia, Grecia, Roma (dacă Egiptul este un dar al Nilului, ele sint un dar al Mediteranei) sau acea grupare de civilizaţii puter­ nice ale Europeî nordice, axate in jurul Balticii şi Mării Nordufui; fără a uita Oceanul Atlantic şi civilizaţiile sale periferice: partea esenţială a Occidentului actual şi a ceea ce depinde de el nu s-a grupat oare in jurul oceanului, la fel ca lumea romană, cîndva, în jurul
Mediteranei? /

De fapt,’ aceste cazuri clasice dezvăluie in special

41

prioritatea circulaţiei. Nici o civilizaţie nu ttăi�- tiră mişcare proprie, fiecare se îmbogăţeşte in urma schim­ burilor, a conflictelor Care atrag după sine imprejurimi folositoare. Astfel, Islamul este de. , neconceput • fără deplasarea caravanelor �-a’ lungul vastelor sale .,mări fără apă”, deşerturile şi stepele intinderilor sale; este de

neconceput fără navigaţia pe Mediterana şi, de-a lungul Oceanului Indian, pînă la Malacca şi China.

Enumerind insă aceste suc:!cese, iată�ne deja dincolo de aceste avantaje naturale, imediate, aflate chipurile la originea civilizaţiilor. Să invingi ostilitatea __deşerturilor sau furiile violente ale Mediteranei, să foloseşti vinturile

regulate ale Oceanului Indian, să indigujeşti un fluviu ­ iată tot atîtea eforturi umane, avantaje dobîndite, mai
degrabă cucerite.

Dar aiunc� de ce au fost capabili de aceste reuşite unii oameni şi nu alţii, pe unele teritorii şi nu pe altele, şi aceasta timp de generaţii îD.tregi?

1 Anîo ld Toynbee avansează in această privinţă o

teorie seducătoare: pentru reuşita umană sint necesare întotdeauna o provocare şi un răspuns;• este necesar ca
natura să se prezinte omului ca o dificultate de invins; dacă omul acceptă provocarea, răspunsul ,său creeaz înseşi bazele civilizatiei sale.

Cu toate acestea, dacă mergem pînă la capătul acestei teorii, ar trebui oare să tragem concluzia că, cu cît provocarea naturii eşte mai mare, cu atît mai puternic va fi răspunsul omului? Mă indoiesc. Omul civilizat al secolului XX a acceptat provocarea insolentă a deşerturi­ lor, a regiunilor polare sau ecuatoria1e. Or, in pofida unor interese indiscutabile (aur, petrol), nu a putut nici pînă azi să se inmulţească, nu a putut crea adevărate civilizaţii: Astfel, există provocare, există răspuns _:_ dar nu neapărat civilizaţie. Cel • puţin pînă în ziua în care vor fi găsite tehnici•şi răspunsuri mai bune.

Fiecare civilizaţie este deci legată de un spaţiu cu limite aproape stabile; de unde, pentru fiecare dintre ele, o geografie particulară, a ei însăşi. care implică o serie
de posibiliţăţi, de constringeri date, unele cvaSipenna­ nente, niciodată acel�i de la o dvilizaţie la alta.

Rezultatul? O suprafaţă pestriţă a lumii, unde hărţile

42

indică, la întîmplare, zone cu case din’ lemn, din chirpici, din .bambus şi hîrtie, din cărămidă ‘Sau din piatră; zone cu fibre textile diverse: lină, bumbac, mătase; zone cu mari culturi alimentare de bază: orez, porumb, grîu …

Provocările variază,, şi nu in mai mică măsură răs­ pUJ)SUrile.

Civilizaţia occidentală europeană sau nu este ea oare. cea a grîului, a piinii, chiar a piinii albe, cu .limitele pe care aceasta le implică? Pentru • că grîul este o plantă pretenţioasă. Gîndiţi-vă • că pentru . cultura lui este necesară asigurarea unei rotaţiianuale şi, fie la fiecare doi ani, fie la fiecare an, pămîntul pe care a fost cultivat trebuie lăsat să se odihnească! Orezăriile inundate, extinse progresiv pe tereourile joase din Extremul Orient, impun şi ele multe constringeri.
Astfel, reacţiile -omulUi nu încetează să-I elibereze de mediul care îl înconjoară şi să.-1 supună în acelaşi timp soluţiilor pe care şi le imaginează. El scapă de un determini:>m pentru a cădea întt”altul.

• O arie culturală este, în lifllbajulantropologilor, un spaţiu în interiorul căruia se regăseşte, dominant, asocierea anumitor trăsătUri culturale.

Astfel, cînd este vorba de �poarele primitive, in afara limbajului folosit, _ există anum’ite culturi productive, o anumită formă de căsătorie, anumite �ţe, o anumită artă a olăritului Sau săgeata cu pene, o anumită tehnică •a ţesutului… Pornind de la detalii precise pentru a le defini, aceste arii stabilite de antropo­ logi .sînt în general restrînse.

Cu toate acestea, diferitele ariiculturale se asociază în • mulţimi mai mari, conform anumitor • trăsături comune de grup şi care, în acelaşi timp, le deosebesc de alte mulţimi considerabile. Marcel Mauss suSţinea că in jurul imensului Ocean Pacific culturile primitive formau; în pofida deosebirilor apreciabile şi imensităţii spaţiilor interpuse, un singur şi. acelaşi ansatriblu uman, sau mai
curind cultural.

în mod frr esc, urmînd antropologii, • geografli şi

43

istoricii au inceput să vorbească (de data aceasta in

legătură cu civilizaţii evoluate şi greu deS<:ifrabile) de arii culturale. Este vorba de desemnarea unor spaţii care

se pot descompune de fiecare dată intr-o serie de ţinuturi individuale. Această posibilă descompunere rămîne

esenţială, o vom vedea, in cazul marilor civiliZaţii: ele se disociază in mod regulat in unităţi restrinse.

Civilizaţia numită. “occidentală” este in acelaşi timp “civilizaţia americană” a Statelor Unite şi cea a Americii Latine, mai înseamnă Rusia şi, bineinţeles, Europa. Europa însăşi înseamnă o serie de. civilizaţii – polone­ ză, germană, italiană, engleză, franceză etc. Fără a mai vorbi de faptul că aceste civilizatii naţionale se despart la rîndul lor in “civilizaţii” şi mai mici: scoţiană, irlandeză, catalană, siciliană, bască etc.

‘ Să nu uităm că aceste diviziuni, acest mozaic format din diferite plăci colorate sint fără indoiala

trăsături permanente.
• Imuabilitatea spaţiilordurabil ocupate şi a frontie­ relor care le delimitează .nu exclude permeabilitatea aceloraşi frontiere în faţa multiplelor căliitorii ale bunurilor culturale care nu încetează să le traverseze.

Fiecare civilizaţie exportă . şi primeşte bunuri culturale. Poate fi vorba la fel de bine despre o tehnică pentru modelarea cerii, despre busolă, praful de puşcă, indemi­ narea pentru a: căli oţelul, de Un. sistem ftlozofic intreg sau fragmentar, de un cult, de o religie sau de acel cintec din Malborough care, incep�d cu secolul al XVlll-lea, va face înconjurul Europei: Goethe îl va auzi pe străzile Veronei in 1786.
Un sociolog, Giiberto Fr�yre, s-a amuzat să întoc­ mească o �stă a ceea ce ţara sa, Brazilia, a priplit, una

peste alta, din Europa atît de îndepărtată pe atunci, in cursul ultimelor decenii ale secolului al XVIll-lea şi in primele cinci sau şase ale secolului al XIX-lea: berea neagră din Hamburg, vilele englezeşti (cottage), maşina cu aburi (o navă cu aburi circulă in “golful” San Salva­ dor din 1819), costumui de vară din pînză albă, dinţii

44

z. Harro lingvistic4 a lumii.

lill!

�

�
�
IZ2TI
Limbi �i dlo1ec1o v�hi �

EillJ

artificiali, gazul de iluminat şi, inaintea tuturor acestora, societăţile secrete, în spe,cial francmasoneria, al cărei rol a fost deosebit în _întreaga Americă hispano-poitugheză,
•jn momentul independenţei sale. Oteva deceniimai

tîrziu, vom găsi aici sistemul filozofic �l lui Augusie Comte, a cărui influenţă . a • fost considerabilă, în
măsura in care regăsim şi astăzi, însufleţite, unne ale
sale. . .
– Toate aceste intruziuni demonstrează, .prin orice
exemplu afes dintr'”() inie, că nici o frontieră culturală

nu este închisă, impenneabilă.
Adevăr de ieri şi dţ altădată: bunurile culturale care soseau pe atunci erau puţine, intîrziind din cauza duratei lungi a călătoriilor. Dacă e să dăm. crezare istoricilor, formele caracteristice epocii Tang (secolulVUp.H.) s;au răspîndit- atît de încet încît au ajuns in Cipru şi la străluci ta cqrte a Lusignanilor în secolul al. XV -lea, de unde se vor difuza cu viteza puternicului trafic meditera­ nean pînă in Franţa, la curtea exttavagantă a regelui Carol al VI-lea: podoabele femeieşti, pălăriile în formă

de con şi pantofii cu -vîrful întors în sus au făcut aici furori, moştenire a unei lumi de multă vreme dispărută.

Astfel, lumina stelelor stinse de multe’ secole ajunge încă pînă la noi.

Astăzi, răspînfiirea• bunurilor culturale s-a accelerat extraordinar. ln curînd nu va •mai exista nici măcar un singur punct în lume “necontaminat” de civilizaţia industrială provenită din Europa. în North Bomeo (care,
impreună cu Sarawak-ul vecin, ţin de autoritatea britani­ că), cîteva difuzoare transmit emisiuni ale unor posturi

de radio îndepărtate, din China comunistă, Indonezia. Or, chiar <4lcă ascultătorii nu- înţeleg practic nimic, ritmurile auzite le-ap alterat deja dansurile şi muzica tradiţională. Ce să mai spunem de influenţa cinemato­ grafului, în special a filmului american şi european, asupra gusturilor şi chiar asupra moravwilor unor ţări foarte îndepărtate?

Cu toate acestea, nici un exemplu nu poate rivaliza cu istoria povestită . în mica lucrare a unui antropolog american, Margaret Mead. ln tinereţe, ea, a făcut -o anchetă într-o insulă din Pacific unde, timp de ‘cîteva

46

de! . ani, prezintă aventură.
luni, s-a supus modul�i de viată al unei populaţii primitive. Războiul, contac�le aberante pe care acesta le-a provocat, i-au . aruncat pe aceşti oameni intr-o existentă nouă care i-a legat pentru prima dată de vîltoarea lumii. Margaret Mead a refăcut această experientă şi inica sa carte, in care adesea se regăsesc alături fotografiile aceloraşi oameni Ia un interval de 20

cu emotie această extraordinară

Se evidenţiază astfel din nou dialogul, pe care l-am
stabilit de la inceputul pînă la sfîrşitul acestei cărţi, dintre civilizaţie şi civilizaţii. Această difuziune care se

a�celerează, va arunca oare in aer frontierele civilizati­ ilor, aceste linii,aproape statornicite pînă acum, ale istoriei lumii’? Mulţi cred acest lucru, bucurîndu-se sau

întristindu-se. Dar oricît de mare ar fi această aviditate a ciVilizaţiilor de a imprumuta bunurile vieţii “moderne�, ele nu sint ‘gata să asimileze totul de-a valnia. Se

întimplă, dimpotrivă (şi vom reveni asupra acestui lucru), ca ele să se incăpăţîneze in anumite refuzuri de a împrumuta, ceea explică, astăzi ca şi ieri, că ele

pot păstra trăsăturile caracteristice pe care totul pare a le ameninţa.

Civilizatiile •sînt societăti.

Nu există civilizaţii fără societăţile care le dau naştere,

le aillmăcu tensiunile, cu progresele lor..
De aici, prima întrebare de la . care nu ne putem
eschiva: • este oare necesar să creăm ‘acest cuvint,
civilizaţie, apoi să•-1• promovăm pe pl� ştiinţific, dacă
el . nu este decit sinonimul societăţii? •Nu foloseşte
Amold Toynbee in permanentă cuvintul society
(societate) în loc de civilization (civilizaţie)? Iar Marcel Mauss aprecia Că ,.noţiunea de civilizatie este categoric mai puţin clară decît cea de societate pe care o pre­
supune”.
47

• Societatea nu poate fi• niciodată separată de r,ivili­ zaţie (şi invers): cele• două no#uni se referă la aceeaşi realitate. •

Sau, cum spunea C. Uvi-Strauss, “ele nu corespund unor obiecte distincte, ci celor două perspective comple­ mentare asupra aceluiaşi obiect care e5te caracterizat in mod adecvat fie printr-un termen, fie prin celălalt, potrivit punctului de vedere adoptaţ”. .

Noţiunea de societate implică un conţinut extrem de oogat, la fel •ca şi noţiunea de civilizaţie ou care se contopeşte adesea. Civilizaţia occidentală in care trăim depinde astfer de “societatea industrială” care îi dă viaţă. Va fi uşor să o descrii zugrăvind insăşi aeeastă societate,, grupurile ei, tensiunile ei, valorile ei intelec­ tuale şi morale, idealurile, armpniile, gusturile ei etc; Pe scurt, descriind oamenii care sint purtătorii. acestei civilizaţii şi c�e o vor transmite mai departe.

Dacă societatea subiacentă se clatină sau se trans­ formă, civilizaţia, la rjndul, ei, se clatină, se transformă.

Este ceea ce afirmă frumoasa carte a lui Lucien Gold­ mann,le ‘Dieu cacht! (1955), care se referă• la Franţa
Marelui Secol. În” fond, orice civilizaţie, explică el, îşi extiage plinctele de vedere esenţiale din ,. viziunea asupra lumii”/pe care o adoptă. Or, de fiecare dată, această viziune a lumii nu este decit- transcrierea, rezultatul tensiunilor sociale dominante. Civilizaţia:, la fel ca o oglindă, va • fi . mecanismul c� . înregistrează aceSte tensiuni şi aceste eforturi.

în timpul jansenismului lui Racine, Pascal, al abateltii Saint-Cyran <!’şi al abatelui • Barcos, ale căror scrisori redescoperite de L. Goldmannprezin� un atit de mare interes pentru acest moment p�ţSionant al destinului fratlcez pe care Le Dieu cacht! îl dezbate, viziunea tragică a lumii care se propagă, atunci trebuie pusă pe seama inaltei burghezii parlamentare, la cuţite cu rega­ litatea şi decepţionată de ea. Tragismul soartei sale, înţelegerea sa, ascendentul său intelectual implin Marelui Se.�ol o viziune dominantă, cea a burgheziei. .

într-un cu totul alt mod, o identificare a civilizaţiilor şi societăţilor domină • deopotrivă • opiniile lui

48

C. Uvi-Strauss despre diferenţierea între soeietătile primitive şi societăţile moderne, între culturi şi• civilizaţii putem spune, aşa cum le deosebesc antropologii. ‘

CultUţilor le corespund societăţile “care dau naştere unei mici dezordini pe care ftz icienii o numesc «entro­ pie», şi care au o tendinţă de a se menţine la infinit în starea lor iniţială, ceea ce explică de altfel faptul că ne apar ca societăţi fără istorie şi• fără progres. In timp ce societăţile noastre (cele care corespund civilizaţiilor moderne) … folosesc pentru funcţionarea lor . o diferenţă de potenţial, •care se realizează prin diferite forme de ierarhie socială . • . Asemenea soCietăţi ajung să �reeze în sînul lor un dezechilibru social pe care îl utilizează pentru a produce mai multă ordine – avem sO<:ieJăţi bazate pe maşinism – şi totodată tot mai multă dezor­ dine, mult mai puţină• entropie, chiar pe planul relaţiilor dintre oameni”.
Pe seurt, culturile primitive ar fi rodul societăţilor egalitare, în cadrul cărora raporturile dintre grupuri sînt reglementate o dată pentru totdeauna şi se repetă, în timp ce civilizaţiile s-ar întemeia pe societăţi cu rapor­ turi ierarhizate, cu puternice diferenţe între grupuri, deci cu tensiuni variabile, conflicte sociale, lupte politice şi o perpetuă evoluţie.
• Semnul exterior cel mai puternic al diferenjelor dintre “culturi” şi “civilizaJii” este fără îndoială prezenja s�u absenja oraşelor.

Oraşul proliferează la nivelul civilizaţiilor şi este abia schiţat la nivelul culturilor. De la o c�tegorie la alta există, fără îndoială, eşaloane intermediare. Ce este Africa neagră dacă nu un grup de societăţi tradiţionale, de culturi angajate în procesul dificil, adesea crud, al unei civilizaţii în formare şi al. unci urbanizări moderne? Oraşele sale, atente la influenţele exterioare, la deschi­ derea spre o viaţă unitară a lumii, sînt inSule în cadrul inerţiei acestor ţări închise. Ele prefigurează• societatea şi civilizaţia viitoare.
Cti toate acestea, civilizaţiile, societăţile cele mai

Fiecare lucru la timpul său.

decît în

devreme,

insule de subdez­

straturile populaţiei.
strălucite preşupun, chiar în interiorul graniţelor \ lor,
culturi, societăţi elementare. Sesizaţi dialogul, intotdea­
una important, dintre . oraşe �i sate. în orice societate, dezvoltarea nu :a atins îD mod egal toate regiunile, toate

Sînt frecvente

voltare (zone muntoase sau pcea sărace, sau departe de
retelele de comunicaţii),adevărate societăţi primitive,
adevărate.,culturi” în mijlocul unei civilizaţii.
Primul succes al Occidentului a fost categoric cuce­

rifea satelor ‘sale, a .,culturilor” sale de la tarii, decătre oraş. în lumea •istamică, dualitatea rămîne mai vizibilă

decît în Occident; orăşele s-au fonnat aici mai oraşe mai precoce (dacă ;Se poate” spune aşa)

Europa, în •timp ce sateie rămîit în această lume mai
primitive, cu vaste .regiuni străbătute de nomazi. în Extremul Orient, disj unctia rămîne regula: culturile au

rămas aici separate, trăind în ele însele … piin ele insele. între oraşele cele • mai strălucite se intercalează sate

trăind într-o econonrlţ aproape închisă, adesea �lba­ tice.
• Dtită fiindrelaţitl strînsă dintre civilizaţie şi socie­ ltlte, este folositor punctul tk -vedere tJl unui sociolog, de fiecare datiicînd este abordată istoria indelungiJIQ a

civilizafiir..W

Dar noi, istoricii, nu vom confunda cu toate acestea societăţile şi civilizaţiile.
Vom explica, în capitolul următor, în. ce conStă
după părerea noastră diferenţa: pe planul duratei, civilizaţia cuprinde, implică spaţii cronologice mult mai
vaste decît o realitate socială dată. Ea se trimsformă

mult mai puţin rapid decît societăjile pe care ea le produce sau le atrage după sine. Dar nu a sosit momen­
tul de a pune în discuţie cu adevărat această ,perspecti­

vă a istoriei.

50

Civilizatiile sint economii

Orice sociebtte, orice civilizatie depinde de date econo.,.
mice, tehnologice, biologice, demografice. Conditiile materiale şi biologice lnfluentează Ia nesfitşit destinul civilizaţiilor. Creştereasau scăderea numărului oameni­

lor, sănătateasau degmdarea fizică, avintul sau rămi­ nerea in urmă economică SIJU tehnică se repetcutează asuprn edificiuluicultural. precum şi al celui sociaL

Economia politică . in sensul ei larg înseamnă studiul tutu� acestor probleme uriaşe.

• lmpoTtanţa numiirului:’Vrememultiiomula fost

singura rmealtă, • siRgund motor aflat la dispozJ.ţia omului, prin liTRUU’esinpnd făurito r 41 civilizaţiei materiak. El a edificat-o cu forţa braţelor şi q mîinilor

sale.

în principiu, şi în realitate, orice creştere dentografică a favorizat deci avintul civilizatiilor. Aşa s-a întîmplat in
Europa în secolele al XIII-lea; al XVI-lea. al XVIII-lea,
al XIX-lea şi al XX-lea.

Cu regularitate, de asemenea, supmabundenţa oame­
nilor, benefică la începuturile sale, devine la un moment

dat nocivă atunci cind creşterea demografică este mai rapidă decît creşterea economică. Aşa s-a întîmplat
fără îndOială in Europa de dinaintea sfitşituluisecolului
al XVI-lea. Aşa stau lucrurile şi a s t ă z icea� mai mare
parte a ţărilor subdeZvoltate. în trecut; rezultatul acestei

stări de lucruri a fost foametea, deteriorarea salariului real, revolte populare, � sinistre de recul Pînă in

momentul în care epidemiile, împreună CU• foam� răresc în mod brutal rindurile prea strînse ale Oamenilor.

După aceste catastrofe biologice (de• exemplu cea din a doua jmnătate a secolului al XIV-lea în Europa, cu
ciuma neagră şi epidemiile care i-;m 1irmat), supravieţu­
it� trăiesc cîtva timp mai uşor şi expansiunea reincepe,
se accelerează, pînă Ia viitoarea frînă. .
Industrializarea este singura care, Ia sfuşitul secolului al XVIll-lea şi în secolul al XIX-lea, pare să ‘fi rupt

51

acest ciclu infernal şi să fi redat omului, chiar în număr foarte mare, valoarea sa, posibilitatea de a munci şi a trăi. Istoria Europei va demonstra acest lucru: această valoare în creştere a omului,.necesitatea deci de a cruta folosirea lui,. au permis avîntul maşinilor şi motoarelor. Antichitatea greco�romilllădeşi inteligentă, nu a avut maşinile pe măsura inteligenţei sale. Ea nu a căutat de fapt să le aibă: ea a avut .,neajunsul de a poseda sclavi. China clasică, formată mult înaintea secolului al XIII-lea, atît de inteligentă şi ea îndeosebi în p\anul tehnicii a �vut, de asemenea, din nefericire, .prea mulţi oameni. Omul nu costă nimic; • el îndeplirieŞte orice sarcină într-o economie care ignoră practic chiar şi animalul domestic. În consecinţă, China, muită vreme avansată pe plan ştiinţific, nu va trece pragul ştiinţei moderne. Ea va lăsa Europei acest. privilegiu, această onoare, acest benefici�.
• Jircidenja fluctuaţiilor econo mice: l’iaja economică nu încetează să roscil••eze, unele fluc'”aţiifiind scurle, altele lungi.

Astfel se succed, de-a lungul anilor, perioadele eco­ nomice bune şi rele, şi de fiecare dată societăţile şi civilizaţiile resimt consecinţele, mai ales cînd este vorba de mişcări prelungite. Pesimismul şi îngrijorarea de la sfrrşitul secolului al XV-lea – acyastă “toamnă a.Evului Mediu”, care l-a preocupat atît de mult pe J. Huizinga ­ corespund unui recul important al economiei Occidentu­ lui. La fel, mai tîrziu, romantismul european corespunde unui recul economic de lungj durată, între. 1817 şi 1852. Expansiunile economice ale secolului al XVIII -lea (după 1 733) au cunoscut .cîteva frînări (aşa cum s-a întÎlÎlplat în ajunul• Revoluţiei), dar, în ansamblu, accele­ rarea_ .lor benefică înlocuieşte dezvoltarea intelectuală din “Secolul Luminilor” îptr-un context de bunăstare, de co­ merţ activ, industrie în plin avint, de creştere a numă•-rului oamenilor.
52

• lndij(rent dacă• fluctuaţia • merge într-un sens sau altu� viafa economică este aproape întOtdeauna crea­ toare de surplus.

Or, cheltuirea, risipirea acestui surplus au reprezentat una din condiţiife indispensabile înfloririi civilizaţiilor, a anumitor forme de. artă. Astăzi, cînd admirăm cutare arhitectură, sculpturi sau portrete; contemplăm de asemenea, fără ‘ să o ştim întotdeauna, orgoliul calm al unui oraş, extravaganţa vanitoasă a tJDUi prinţ sau bogăţia prea nouă a unui negustor-bancher. Civilizaţia în Europa, începînd din secolul al XVI-lea (şi fără îndoială mai devreme), se află pînă la ultimul ei nivel

sub semnul banului . şi al capitalismului. .
Civilizaţia este astfel funcţia unei anumite redistri­
buiri a bal,lÎlor. Civ.ilizaţiile se nuanţează diferit, întîi la nivelurile lor superioare, apoi în cuprinsul lor, ,potrivit modului de redistribuire care le este •propriu, potrivit mecanismelor sq�iale şi economice cru.- e prelevă din circuitele băneşti”partea rezervată luxului, artei, culturii. În secolul al XVII-lea, in vremurile foarte dure Qin punct de vedere economic ale domniei regelui Ludovic al XIV-lea, mecenatul se practica numai la curte sau aproape numai la curte. Întreaga viaţă literară şi artisti­ că se desfăşoară în acest cyrc strîmt. În perioada fas­ tului şi facilităţilor economice ale secolului al XVIII- lea, aristocraţia şi burghezia participă din plin, alături de regalitate, la răspîndirea culturii, ştiinţei, filozofiei.,.
par în această epocă luxul rămîne încă pţivilegiul unei minorităţi sociale. Civilizaţia subiacentă, �ea • a vieţii cotidiene şi sărace, nu se bucură deloc de acesta. Or, parterul unei civilizaţii este adesea adevăratul ei nivel.. Ce este libertatea? Ce înseamnă cultura individului cînd nu poate fi atins minimul vital? Din acest punct de vedere, secolul al XIX-lea european despre care s- a scris atît, secolul al XIX-lea al noilor îmbogăţiţi, al “bur­ gheziei cuceritoare”, aga5antul secol al XIX-lea anunţă (deşi el nu realizează încă) un nou destin pentru civili:­ zaţii şi pentru fiinţa umană. Pe . măsură ce numărul oamenilor • creşte considerabil, iată-i, din ce în ce mai mulţi, chemaţi să partjcipe la o anumită civilizaţie

53

rar pe
colectivă. Fară îndoială, pretul unei asemenea transfor­
mări (inconştiente, nu trebuie si o mai’ spunem) a fost,
pe plaD social, foarte mare, Dar rezultatul este important.
Dezvoltarea învăţămîntului, accesul • la cultură, în
universităti, prOm.ovarea socială sînt cuceririle de mare
importantă ale deja bogatului secol al XIX-lea.
Marea problemă, astăzi ca şi mîine, este crearea unei
civilizatii care să fie in acelaşi timp de calitate şi de
masă, teribil de costisitoare, de neconceput fără. impor­
tante surplusuri puse în slujba societătii, de neconceput
de asemenea fără timpul liber pe care maşinismQ} va fi
fără îndoială capabil să .U:l ofere în cUrind. în tările
industrializate, acest viitor este sesizabil, într-un răstimp mai scurt sau mai lung. Dar• problema• se complică la
scara lumii.

Pentru că aceleaşi inegalităţi ale accesului la civili­

zaţie pe care viata economică le-a creat între dife ritele clase sociale.. le-â creat şi intre diferitele Jări din lume.
O mare parte a lumii constituie ceea ce uneseist a

denumit ..proletariat exterior”, care in limbaj curent se numeşte lumea a treia, masa enormă de’ oameni pentru
eare accesul la minimul vital se pune chiar inaintea
accesului la civilizaţia – Care le este adesea necunoscu­
tă – a propriei ţări. Ori umanitatea va munci pentru a
umpl� aceste denivelări gigantice, ori civilizatia sau civilizatiile îşi vor asuma riscul de a dispărea Iară unnă.
Civilizatiile sint mentatităti colective
‘

După geografie, sociologie. şi economie, psihologia ne

obligă la o ultimă confruntare. Cu deosebirea că psihologia colectivă nu este o :ştiinţăatît de sigură de
sine, atît de bogată în rezultate ca ştiinţele umane la care
ne-am referit pînă acum. Ea se, aventurează foarte
căile istoriei. –
• Psihism colectiv, conştientizare, mentalitate sau instrument mental? Este. greu de. ales între termenii pe

54

sînt ae

care le
care îi prop une lungul titlu . al acestui ptmzgTtJf. Şi

aceste ezitiiridelimbaj indicti însăşi tinereţefl psiholo­ giei colectiFe.
Psihismul este termenul favoriţ al unui istoric, mare
specialist al acestui domeniu, Alphonse Dupront. Conşti­
entizarea nu înseamnă decît un moment al acestOr
evolutii (în general sfJIŞitul lor). Mentalitate este evident
cuvintul mai comod. Lucien Febvre, în admirabil�•-său
Rabelais, prefera să vorbească de instrument mental.
Dar cuvîntele au putină importanţă! Problema nu depinde de ele. ln fiecare apocă, o anumită reprezentare

a lumii şi a lucn,Wlor, o mentalitate colectivă dotriina

insufleţeşte, penetrează întreaga masă a societăţii. Această mentalitate care• dictează atitudinile, orientează opţiunile, înrădăcinează prejudecăţile, înclină într-o
parte sau alta mişcările unei societăţi este eminamente

un fapt de civilizaţie. într-o măsură mult mai mare decît accidentele sau circumstantele iStorice şi sociale aie �i

e�. ea este rodul moşteniriiîndepărtate, al temerilor, credinţelor, al unor nelinişti străvechi aproape inconşti­
ente adesea, este adevăratul rezultat al unei imense contaminăriai cărei geiiQeni sîntpierduţi în trecut şi
transmişi de-a lungul• unor intregi generatii de oameni.
Reactiile unei societăţi Ia evenimentele momentulu �, la
presiunile pe care le exercită asupra ei, la deciziile pe
cere de la ea se supun mai puţin logicii, sau chiar

interesului egdist, cît acestui comandament neformulat.

adesea imposibil de formulat şi care ţîşneşte din inconşti-

entul colectiv. .
Aceste valori fundamentale, acest� structuri p�olo­

gice reprezintă în mod categoric ceea ce civilizaţiile pot comunica cel mai puJin una alteia, ceea ce le- izolează şi
le deosebeşte cel mai bine. Iar aceste mentalităti

asemenea puţin sensibile la trecerea timpului. Ela se
schimbă lent, nu se transformă decit după îndelungate perioade de incubaţie, puţin conştiente şi ele.

55

• Aici religia este trăsătura cea mai puternică, nucleul civilizaţiilor, trecutul şi în acelaşi timp prezen­ tul lor.

Şi în primul rînd, bineînţeles, nucleul civilizaţiilor neeuropene. în India, de exemplu, toate acţiunile îşi extrag forma şi justificarea din viaţa religioasă şi nu din raţiune. De acest lucru se mirau deja grecii, dacă este să dăm crezare anecdotei povestite de Eusebiu, episc9p de Cezareea (265-340): “Aristoxane, muzicianul, povesteşte despre indieni unilătoarea istorioară: unul dintre ei îl întîlneşte la Atena pe Socrate şi îi cere să-şi defmească filozofia. «Este un studiu al realităţilor umane», răspun­ de Socrate. La care indianul izbucneşte în rîs: «Cum ar
putea un om să studieze realităţile umane, a • exclamat
el, cînd nu cunoaşte realităţile divine!»” . Chat­
Un filozof hindtJs contemporan, Siniti Kunar
terji, descrie următoarea imagine binecunoscută despre neputinţa omului de a măsura imensul mister �i, în acelaşi timp, unicitatea supranaturalului: “Sîntem aseme­ nea orbilor care, pipăind o •parte sau alta a unui elefant, sînt convinşi unul că atinge o coloană, altul un şarpe, al treilea o substanţă dură, al patrulea un zid sau o perie prevăzut � cu o coadă flexibilă, , după cum ating piciorul, trompa, colţii, corpul sau coada.”

În faţa acestei profunqe smerenii religioase, Occiden­ tul pare să-şi fi uitat izvoarele creştine. Dar mai degrabă decît de o ruptură pe care raţionalismul ar fi creat-o între religios şi cultură, trebuie să vorbim de fapt de o coexistenţă între laic, ştiinţă şi religie, de dialoguri, dramatice sau pline de încredere, niciodată întrenipte în pofida aparenţelor. Creştinismul se afirmă ca o realitate esenţială a vieţii occidentale şi care îi marchează, fără câ ei să o ştie sau să o recunoască vreodată, chiar şi pe atei. Normele etice, atitudinile în faţa vieţii şi a morţii, concepţia despre muncă, valoarea efortului, rolul femeii 5&U al comlului, iată tot atîtea comportamente care par să nu mai aibă nici o. legătură cu sentimentul creştin şi care, cu _toate acestea, derivă din el. , ,

Nu este mai puţin adevărat că tendinţa civilizaţiei occidentale, din momentul din care gîndirea greacă se dezvoltă, este atracţia spre raţionalism, deci spre o

56

atitudine degajată în raport cu viaţa religioasă. Dar va trebui să revenim asupra singularităţii sale. Cu excepţia cîtorva exemple deosebite (unii sofişti chinezi, unii filozofi arabi ai secolului al XII-lea), nici una dintre aceste detaşări nu se remarcă cu atîta claritate în istoria lumii in afara Occidentului. Aproape întotdeauna civiliza­ ţiile sînt invadate, • scăldate de religios, supranatural, magic; ele trăiesc aici dintotdeauna, inspiră cele mai puternice •motivaţii ale: psihismului lot particular. Vom avea ocazia să repetăm aceasta de multe ori ..

58

o punere
CAPITOLUL III

CIVILIZAJIILE SÎNT CONTINUITĂJI

Rămîne să punem problema istoriei, a unităţilor ei de
măsură. a explicatiilor ei evident esenţiale intr-un

demers complica� pe care ea îl va complica şi mai mult.

dar căruia ii va da un sens. Practic, nu există civilizaiie actuală care să IJ93tă fi cu adevărat înţeleasă fără o

cunoaştere a itinerariilor,dejaparcurse, a valorilor străveChi, a experienţelor trăite. O civilizatie este
intotdeauna un trecut, -un anumit trecut viu.
Prin urmare, istOiia uneicivilizatii este căutarea,
printre coordonatele vechi, a acelora care rămîn valaoile

şi astăzi. Nu se pune problema să spunem tot ce se poate şti despre civilizatia greacă sau despre Evul Mediu

chinez, ci tot ceea ce, din această. viaţă de altădată, rănline eficient, chiar şi astăzi în Europa occidentală sau în China lui Mao Tzedong. Tot � ce scurtcircuitează

trecutul şi prezentul este, de cele mai multe ori, la depărtare de secole întregi.

Civilizatiile văzute in duratele lor scurte, de pe o zi pe alta

Să incepem însă cu începutul. Orice civilizaţie, de , ieri
ca şi de a5tăzi, se dezvăluie în primul rind printr-o serie

de inanifestărideuşorses�t: o piesă de teatru, o expoziţie de pictură, succesul unei cătţi, o filozofie, o

modă vestin\lentară, o descoperire ştiinţifică,

nimeni nu
afiş.
la punct a _unei tehnici.:.; toate – evenimente aparent
independente unele de altele (nu există nici o legă�
la prima vedere. între filozofia lui Merleau-Ponty Şi o
pînză de uhimă oră a lui Picasso). •

Aceste fapte de civilizape, să reţinem. au întotde�una o existentă destul � scurtă. Cum ne vor duce ele Sltre
aceste coordonate pe care trebuie să le descoperim. acelaşi timp străvechi şi actuale, dacă ele par să se
înlocuiască şi să se distrugă ‘uneori unele pe ahele mai
degrabă decît să se continue?

• Aceste spectacole stau de fapt ‘Sub semnul schimbă-.

rilor permaente. Programul se st:feimbă, doreşte ca el să se menţină multă vreme pe

Această varia}lilitate se exprimă în însăşi • succesiunea
epocilor literare, artistice • sau filozofice. Tot atîtea
episoade inchise în ele însele. Se poate spune. împrumu­
tînd lunbajul economiştilor; • c ă există conjuncturi
cultUrale tot aşa cum .există conjuncturi econ’omice,
adică fluctuaţ ii, mai mult sau Iilai putin ltmgi sau
precipitate, şi care cel mai adesea se succed, contestin­
du-se violent. De Ia o epocă la alta totul se schimbă sau
pare că se schimbă, la fel cum Ja teatru, un proiector,
fără a modifica decornrile sau fetele, le colorează•
diferit şi le proiectează într-un alt univers..
Dintre aceste “epoci .., Renaşterea este cel mai frumos
exemplu. Ea are temele sale, culorile, preferinţ ele sale. obiceiurile sale’chiar. Ea stă sub semnul pasiunii intelec­
tuale, al dragostei pentru frumos, •al discuţiilorlibere şi
tolerante în eate jocurile spiritului vin să se adauge
bucuriei de a trăi. Stă, de asemenea, sub semnul unei
descoperiri sau al uitei redescoperiri � operelor antichită­
ţii, la care participă cu pasiune întreaga Europă cul-
tivată. .
• Tot aşa există şi o conjunctură romantică (in mare
de la 1800 pînă la 1850, deşi • a existat, fireşte, un
preromantism şi un romantism întîrziat); ea va marca
sirntirea şi mintea de-a lungul unei epoci_ – co� nedară, lipsită de bucurie – de după Revoluţie şî

59

Imperiu, care va fi o perioadă de reflux economic în întreaga Eutopă (între 1817 şi 1852). Nu vom afmna că acest reflux, el singur, explică sau, cu atît mai mult, creează neliniştea romântică; nimic nu ne spune că n-ar fi existat’şi perioade deosebite în ceea ce priveşte sensibi­ liU!.tea de a trăi şi de a gîndi, independente sau semi-in­ dependente de orice. context … în orice caz, fiecare gene­ raţier are dorinţa de a o nega pe cea precedentă, iar cea care îi va urma îi •Va p�ti cu aceeaşi monedă� Ar exista astfel o oscilaţie tară sfrrşit între romantism (sau baroc, afirma Eugenio d’Ors) şi clasicism, între inteligenta seacă şi inima neliniştită, cu .răsturnări spectaculoase.

Imaginea care se impune este deci cţa a unui perma­ nent du- te-vino. O civilizaţie, ca • şi o economie, are ritmurile sale. Ea arată ca o istorie cu eclipse pe care nu vom ezita să o decupăm în bucăţi succesive, în tran$e aproape străine unele de altele. Nu numim oare Secolul lui Ludovic al XiV-lea Secolul Luminilor? Şi chiar “civilizaţia clasică”, “civilizaţia secolului al XVIII-lea”? Este vorba aici • de- “civilizaţiile de epocă”, “invenţii diabolice” cum susţine un economist filozof, Joseph Chappey. Acest mod de a discuta i se pare să contrazi­ că, de fapt, însăşi ideea de civilizaţie, care, vom vedea, presupune o continuitate. Dar, pentru moment, să lăsăm această contradicţie. De altfel, unitatea şi diversitatea nu încetează să se înfrunte, să trăiască împreună. Iar noi trebuie să le înţelegem aşa cum sînt.
• “Cotituri”, evenimente, eroi: aceste conjuncturi, această succesiune •de evenimente ne ajută să înje­ legem locul aparte pe care îl ocupă în istoria civiliza­ Jiilor anumite evenimente sau personaje excepjionale• .

Fiecare eveniment, văzut de aproape, se descompune într-o serie de fapte, gesturi, roluri. În defmitiv, civiliza­ ţiile înSeamnă oameni şi deci demersurile lor, acţiunile, entuziasmele, “angajamentele” acestor oameni, ca şi schimbările sînt nesfirşite. Cu toate acestea, în această serie de fapte, de opere, de biografii, o selecţie se impune: se detaşează evenimentele •sau oamenii care

60

semnalează o “cotitură”, o fază nouă. Cu cît anunţul este mai imponant, cu atit semnalul se impune.

‘ Un eveniment foarte important (adică plin de conse­ cinţe) a fost descoperirea gravitaţiei univerşale de către Newton� in 1687. Un evei:ri.ment marcant a fost reprezen­

taţia Cidului (1’636) sau a operei, Hemani (1830).

La fel se evidenţiază şi oamenii, in măsura in care opera lor anunţă o perioadă a istoriei, sau reprezintă un episod, al acesteia. Poate fi vorba la fel de bine despre Joachim du Bellay (1522-1566) cu a sa Def�nse et Illustration de la Languefr:an�aise, cit şi dţspre Leibnitz•

( 1646-1716), părifltele calculului infmitezimal sau Denis Papin (1641-1’714), inventatorul maşiliii cu,aburi. •
Par numele care domină cu adevărat istoria civi­ lizaţiilor sint cele care depăşesc o serie de conjuncturi, aşa cum o navă poate invinge mai multe furtunL La joncţiunea unor vaste perioade • apar adesea spirite privilegiate, in care se încarnează mai multe generaţii: Dante (1265-1321) Ia sfrrşîtul Evului Mediu ,.latin”;

Goethe (1749-1832) la sf itul primei perioade moderne lll ‘

a Europei; să-I adăugăm pe Newton Ia inceputurile’ fizicii clasice şi, de asemenea, ridicat la dimensiunile

colosale ale ştiinţei noi de astăzi, prestigiosul Albeit Einstein (1879:—1955).

Întemeietoriimarilor sisteme de gmdire aparţin acestei categorii de excepţie: Socrate • sau Platon, C:onfucius, Descartes sau Karl Mm domină . mai multe secole deodată. Ei. sint intemeietori de civilizaţie; cu greu putem să acordăm mai puţină importanţă acelor aştri de primă mărime, fondatori pe religii: Buddha, Christos,
Muhammad, strălucitori cu
toţii incă, este oare nevoie
să o mai spunem? . , •

În concluzie, unitatea de măsură• după care se •

judecă şi se clasea�ă, în ordinea inlportanţei, masa confuză de evenimente şi masa nu mai puţin• confuză de oaniem este timpul pe care ei il aşază pină la ştergerea lor •de pe scena lumii. Numai cei cărora le aparţine durata şi care se confundă cu o realitate h\delung trăită contează în marea istorie a civilizaţiei. Astfel se regă­ sesc, dincolo de o istorie familiară, cu :limpezime,

61

coordonatele secrete ale timpului lung spre care trebuie acum să ne înd.reptăm.

Civilizatiile in structurile lor

A� limbaj al epocilor nu ne-a dat decit imagini scbimbătoare:ele� pe scena civiliza ţiilor,apoi dispar. Dacă încercăm să sesizăm ceea ce, in ,timpul desfăşurării spectacolului, nu se schimbă deloc în
fundalul sceqei, apar atuncj alte realităţi, mai simple,
care prezintă un interes nou. Unele dllfeal:ă timp de
două sau trei spectacole, altele traversează cîteva secole, altele, in sfîrşit, durează atît de mult încît le credem imuabile; în mod greşit, bineinteles, căci se mişcă şi ele,

dar ledt, impercept.-oil.

• Realităţile abortlote. în capitolul pnutknt sînt:f con-strîilgerile exercitate continuu de spaJii,iuarhiik

soci6le, ,.psihism ele” colect:We, mcesităţile economice,

toate acestea fiind forte profu 1Ule. puJin ncognosdbile totuşi la prima lledere, în special pentru cei CIITe �riU!se
în aceeaşi peritHU/ă cu ele, eărora le par întottkauna
de 14 sine înţelese şi nu le pun nid un fel de probleme.
Acestea sînt realităJi pe CIITe limbajul de astăzi le desemnează sub numele de “structuri”.

Istoricul însuşi nu le vede apărînd imediat in expunerea sa cronologică obişnuită, prea precîpitată. De asemenea, nu putem ‘ nici înţelege. nici urmări îndeosebi aceste

realităţi în evoluţia lor foarte lentă . decît parcurgînd, consumînd vaste spatiitempornle. Mişcările de supra­ faţă de care vom vorbi imediat, evenimentele şi oainenii

înşişi dispar în faţa ochilor noştri atîta timp ci’t le apar în faţă mari permanente sau .semipennanente, conştiente şi inconştient� în acelaşi timp. Aici se află .,temeliile..sau
�m:i degrabă “structurile.. . civilizaliilor: sentimentele religioase de exemplu, sau imobilismele rurale, sau

atitudinile în faţa mort� în fata muncii,plăcerii,vieţii

familiale …

62

63

a luat de la aceştia.

ceea ce
Aceste realităţi, aceste structuri sînt în general
străvechi, de lungă durată şi întdtdeauna trăsături
distinctive şi (Jriginale. Ele dau civilizaţiilor aspectul
specific, fiinţa lor. Şi acestea nu le înlocuiesc în nici un
fel, fiecare fiind consideratecavalori • de neînlocuit.
Bineinteles, aceste pennanenţe, aceste opţiuni moştenite
sau 11ceste refuzuri: fată de alte civilizaţii;sint :în generat
inconştiente pentru marea � a oameoilor.,Şi este
neceS:ar, pentru a le contura cu claritate, să te îndepăr­
tezi, cel puţin mental, de civili�ţia in care te afli
Să .J.uăm un exemplu simplu şi care afectează

structuri profunde – rolul femeii în secolul al XX-lea. într� societate dată, să Zicem a noastră, societatea

europeană. Particularităţile sale nu se evidenţiază (atît le găsim de “frr eşti”) decît în comparaţie cu rolul femeii

musulmane sau, pentru a merge la �It capăt al lanţului, cu cel al femeii americane din Stateie Unite.
Dacă vrem să înţelegem de ce-ul acestei situaţii sociale
v� trebui să ne întoarcem mult în trecut, cel puţin pînă
în. secolul al XII-lea, în epoca ;.dragostei curtenitoare”,
pentru • a ne da seama care a fost concepţia despre
dragoste , şi cuplu în Occident. Apoi să recurgem la o

serie de explicaţii: creştinismul, accesul femeilor în şcoli şi universităţi; ideeaeuropeanului despre educaţia copi,ilor; condiţiile economice: nivelul de ttai, munca
femeii în cămin sau în afara casei ţtc.
Rolul femeii se afinnăîntotdeaima ca o structură de civilizaţie, un test, pentru că el este .in itecare civUizatie o realitate de lungă durată. rezistentă: la şocorile

exterioare, greu de schimbat de ci pe mîine.

• Unei civilir.afii îirepugnă in general să adopte un

bun cu11ural care pune in discuţie UlUI din structurile ei profu nde. Aceste reju:r.uri. de a ÎlnJITIUIIula,aceste ostilitiiţi-secrete sînt relaiit’raie, IIm- conduc• întotdea-

una în inima unei civi/izaJii.

în fiecare zi, o civilizatie împrumută de la vecinii • săi,
chiar dacă .,reinterpretează”, asimilează tocmai

La prima vedere, fiecare civilizaţie

seamănă cu o gară • de mărfuri care nu va înceta să primească, să expedieze bagaje eteroclite.

Cu toate acestea, fiind solicitată, o civilizaţie poate respinge cu încăpăţînare un aport sau altul din exterior. Marcel Mauss• va sein:Pala acest lucru: nu este o civili­ zaţie demţtă de acest nume aceea care nu are ,.repulsiile, refuzurile sale. De fiecare dată refuzul este concluzia unei lungi seriişi experienţe. Gîndit, hotărît în timp, el capătă întotdeauna o importanţă extremă.

Nu este oare. cazul clasic cucerirea, Constantinopolului de către turci în 1453? Un istoric turc de astăzi a susţinut că oraşul s-a predat, că a fost cucerit din interior înaintea asaltului turcilor. Deşi exce5ivă, teza nu este inexactă. Practic, Biserica Ortodoxă (dar am putea spune civilizaţia bizantină) a preferat uniunii cu latinii, singurii care îi puteau salva, supunerea faţă de turci. Nu vorbim de o “decizie”, luată repede pe teren, în faţa evenimentului. ESte vorba de rezultatul firesc al unui. lung proces, tot atît de lung ca şi decăderea Bizanţului însuşi şi care, zi de zi, a accentuat repulsia grecilor . faţă de apropierea de• latini, de care îi qespărţeau divergenţele teologice . .

Uniunea era posibilă. împăratul Mihail Paleolog o
acceptase la Conciliul de la Lyon, în 1274. împăratul Ioan al V-lea, în 1369, a făcut la Roma profesiune de credinţă catolică. în 1439, Conciliul mixt de lâ Florenţa a demonstrat din nou posibilitatea uniunii. Cei mai eminenţi teologi greci, Ioan Beccos, Demetrios Lydones, Bessarion au scris în favoarea uniunii cu un talent la înălţimea căruia adversarii lor nu au ajuns nicicum. Cu toate acestea, între turci şi latini, grecii îi vor prţfera .pe turci. “Dornică de independenţă, Biserica bizantină şi-a chemat duşmanul, i•a predat Imperiul şi Creştinătaţea”, pentru că, aşa cum scria încă din 1385 patriarhul (Constantinopolului) papei Urban al VI-lea, a lăsat Bisericii greceşti “deplină libertate de acţiune” şi acesta este cuvîntul decisiv. Femand Grenard, de la .care împru­ mutăm aceste explicaţii, adaugă:• “Aservirea Constanti­ nopolului de către Muhammad •al II-lea a fost triumful patriarhului antiunionist�. Occidentul cunoştea de altfel foarte bine această antipatie a Orientului faţă de el.

64

,.A ceşti schismatici, scria Petrarca, s-au temut de noi şi ne au mit din rărunchi” .
Alt •.r�fuz care s-a • conturat lent (în Fra.tţa, unde

ezitare.\ va fi cea mai mare, îi va trebui aproape 1m secol) este cel care închide în faţa Reformei Ital!a şi r:-�eninsula

lberică, apoi Franţa, cîmp• de bătălie multă vreme indecis între cele două maniere de a crede fu Christos.
Încă un ref’Qz, şi nu n.Illlai politic, deşi nu este unanim, este cel care îndepărtează un Occident evoluat
şi o Americă anglo-saxonă (inclusiv canada) de marx­
ism Şi de soluţiile totalitare ale Rept•b:icilor socialiste: nu-ul este categoric din partea• • ţărilor germani’ce şi anglo-saxone; temperat şi mult mai nuanţat din partea Franţei şi a Italiei, şi chiar din partea ţărilor iberlce. Este

vorba aici � probabil, de un refuz de la civilizaţie la civilizaţie. •

Vom spune, pe aceeaşi, linie de gîndire, că o Europă occidentală care ‘să fi adoptat comunismul I-ar fi organizat probabil în maniera ei, I-ar fi sistematizat aşa cum sistematizează în prezent capitalismul� într-un mod• categoric diferit de cel al Statelor Unite.

• Această operaţie, de primire sau de refuz, pe care o civilizaţie. o efectuează în faţa unor civilizaţiiexte­ rioare, o exercită şi faJă de ea însăşi, într- un ritm lent. Aproape ;”totdeauna această opţiune e6te în mică măsură conştientă sau aproape inconştientă. Dar tocmai datorită acestei operaţii ocivilizaţie se transfor­ mă puţin cîte puţin, “despârţindu-se” de o parle ti propriului său trecut.

Din mulţimea de bunuri sau atitudini pe care trecutul şi evoluţiile sale le împing spre ea şi i le propun, ea triază pe nesimţite, îndepiirtează sau favorizează şi, prin opţiunile sale, recompune o faţadă niciodată nouă în
întrdghne, niciodată aceeaşi. . • .
Aceste refuzuri interne pot fi directe, atenuate,
durabile sau. pasagere. Numai refuzurile durabile sînt esenţiale în aceste domenii pe care le explică în mod progresiv studiile de istorie psiho)ogică, extinse fie la

65 ‘

dimeushmile un ei ţări, fie ale unei civilizaţii. Astfel, Albettd,Tenenti prezintă două lucrări de pionierat des­ pre viaţă şi moarte în secolele al XV-lea şi al XVI- lea; de la R. Mauzi . avem o punere în discuţie a ideii de fericire în Franţa secolului al XVID-lea (L’Idee de

bonheur etţ France au XVIII’ siecle); de la- • Michel Foucault – o carte pasionată şi pasionantă, L ‘Histoire de la folie d l’âge classique (1961).

în toate aceste trei cazuri este vorba de “lucrarea” unei civilizaţii asupra ei însăşi, care se luptă cu ea însăşi, “lucrare” care nu se remarcă decît rareori în plină• lumină. Totul se mişcă cu q asemenea încetineală încit contemporanii nu observă niciodată. Oe fiecare dată, eliniinările şi adaosurile complementare care decurg uneori din ele – se operează timp de secole, cu interdicţii, baricade, cicatrizări dificile, adesea imper­ fecte, totdeauna considerabil de îndelungate.

Este ceea ce Michel Foucault numeşte, într-un limbaj specific, “departajare”, cu alte cuvinte respingerea din partea unei civilizaţii <dincolo de frontierele ei şi de frru l drept al vieţii sale a unei valori sau alteia ‘renegate. “S-ar putea face, scrie el, o istorie a limitelor, a acestor gesturi obscure care trebuie uitate din momentul în care au fost făcute, prin care o civilizaţie respinge ceva care va fi pentru ea Exteriorul; şi de-a lungul întregii sale istorii, acest vid, acest spaţiu alb prin care se izolează, o desemnează în aceeaşi măsură ci valo rile sale. Căci ea primeşte aceste valori şi le menţine în continuitatea istoriei; dar în acest domeniu despre care vrem să vorbim ea îşi exercită opţiunile esenţiale, ea face partajul (sublinierea o facem noi) care îi dă caracterul său pozitiv; în aceasta constă încetineala originară• cu care se formează”.

Acest frumos text merită să fie citit şi recitit. O civilizaţie ajunge la reprezentarea ei personală respingînd ceea ce o jenează în obscuritatea terenurilor limitrofe şi deja stăine. Istoria sa înseamnă decantarea,’ timp de secole, a unei personalităţi colective, prinsă, ca orice personalitate individuală, între un destin conştient şi clar, şi un destit. ol,>scur şi inconştient care serveşte drept bază şi motivaţie esenţială celuilalt; �r fi:ră ca acest lucru
să fie întotdeauna evident. Vom vedea că aceste studii de psihologie retrospectivă au fost marcate în trecere de descoperhile psihanalizei.
Cartea lui Michel Foucault studiază• un caz particular: separarea între JJaţiune şi nebunie, între nebuni şi raţio­ nali, necunoscută în Evul Mediu european pentru care nebunul, ca orice nefericit, era, mai mult sau mai puţin misterios, trimisul lui Dumnezeu. Nebunii vor fi închişi, cu asprime şi brutalitate mai întîi, în secolul al XVII-lea, căzut în admiraţia ordinii sociale şi pentru care aceştia nu sînt decît epave ce trebuie îndepărtate de lume, aşa cum sînt îndepărtaţi delincvenţii şi trîndavii fără leac; apoi, ei sînt trataţi cu blîndeţe, cu o anumită dragoste în secolul al XIX- lea care îi va recunoaşte ca bolnavi. De la o atitudine la• alta •problema centrală nu s-a schimbat totuşi:. pornind • de la epoca clasică şi pînă în zilele noastre, Occidentul s-a “departajat” de nebunie, a proscris limbajul ei şi i-a refuzat prezenţa. Astfel, triumf •1 raţiunii este însoţit în profunzime de <> furtună lungă şi s:Jen­ ţioasă, de un demers cvasiinconştient, cvasiignorant şi care este totuşi într-un amml.it fel sora acestei victorii care a fost, în plină lumină, cucerirea raţionalismului şi a ştiinţei clasice. •

Am putea da, •bineînţeles, şi alte exemple în ceea ce priveşte aceste departajări sau semidepartajări. Cartea lui Alberto Tenenti unnăreşte cu grijă procesul prin care Occidentul a ,,reconsiderat” problema morţii creştine aşa cum fusese ea concepută în Evul Mediu, ca simplă trecere a creaturii, exilată pe pămînt, spre adevărata viaţă de dincolo. în secolul al XV -lea, moartea devine “umană”, încercarea supremă a omului în grozăvia des­ compunerii trupului. Dar în această nouă concepţie d!!spre moarte omul găseşte noua concepţie despre o viaţă care, după părerea sa, îşi redescoperă preţul, valoarea umană. O anumită obsesie a morţii dispare cu secolul următor – al XVI- le� -• care, cel puţin la începuturile sale, este secolul bucuriei de a trăi.
• Şocurile violente ale civilizaţiilor: pînă acum, argu­ mentele s-au bazat pe. civilizaţii aflate în raporturi

67

paşnice unele cu altele, libere pe opţiunile lor. Or, raporturile violente au fost adesea regula. ln!f!tdeauna tragice, ele au fost destul de des inutile pe termen lung.

Succese ca romanizarea Galiei şi a unei mari părţi a Occidentului european cucerit nu se explică decît prin durata lungă a încercării şi, de asemenea, indiferent ce s•a spus despre aceasta, prin nivelul scăzut, la început, al popoarelor . romanizate, prin admiraţia pe . care au avut-o pentru învingător; pe scurt, printr-o •anumită coniyenţă. Dar aceste reuşite au fost rare; excepţii, ele confrrmă regula. • • •

în timpul acestor contacte violente, eşecurile l u fost

mai frecvente decît reuşitele. ,.Colonialismul” a putut să triumfţ ieri, dar astăzi fiasco-ul lui nu mai trezeşte nici

o îndoială. Or, colonialismul este prin excelenţă îneca­ rea unei civilizaţii -de către o alta. învinşii cedează întotdeauna în faţa celui mai puternic, dar supqnerea lor rămîne provizorie de cînd există conflicte între civili­ zaţii.

Aceste perioade lungi de coexistenţă forţată nu se scurg fără Concesii SaU fără înţelegeri, fără •împru­ muturi culturale importante, uneori fructuoase. Totuşi, ele nu depăşesc niciodată anumite limite.

Cel mai bun exemplu de interpenetrare culturală sub semnul violenţei ne este oferit de frumoasa carte a lui Roger . Basti de – Les Religions • africaines . au Bresil (1960,. Este istoria tragică a sclavilor negri smulşi din diferite părţi ale Africii şi aruncaţi în societatea patriar,. hală şi creştină din Brazilia colonială. Ei vor reacţiona împotriva acesteia adoptînd creştinismul. Mulţi negri “fugiţi” vor forma republici indep eQdente, quilombos: cea din Palmeiras, dincolo de Bahia, nu se va preda decît în urma unui război în regulă. • Faptul că aceşti negri, deposedaţi de tot, au reconstituit vechile practici reli­ gioase ale Africii şi dansurile rituale, că, în plus, au amestecat -� ale lor candomblt! sau macumba practici. africane şi practici creştine şi că acest ,,sina:etism” este astăzi viu pe plan cultural, chiar cuceritor, nu este oare un exemplu uimitor? lnvinsul a cedat, dar în acelaşi ti.”‘:lp­ s-a apărat.

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Istorie şi civilizatie

Ac1este incurSiuni în rezistenţele, . acceptările, penna­ nenţele, defonnările lente ale civilizaţillor permit formularea unei ultime defmiţii, cea care restituie civili­ zaţiilor chipul lor parţicular, unic: ele sînt continuităţi interminabile, continuităţi istorice.

Civilizaţi� este astfel c � mai lungă dintre istoriile lungi. Dar istoricul nu are acces de la bun început la acest adevăr care nu se degajă decît la •capătu\ unor observaţii succesive. Astfel, înt{:O ascensiune, priveliştea se lărgeşte progresiv.
• Diferitele timpuri ale istoriei: istoria acţionează la diverse n iveluri, cu unităţi de măsură adesea diferite, sau zf de zi, an de an, pe zeci de ani deodată sau pe secole întregi.

Peisaj.d va varia de fiecare dată, în funcţie – d e măsura folosită. Contradicţiile dintre aceste realităţi observate, dintre perioadele de timp care sînt diferite ca durată, dau naşt•:re acelei dialectici proprie istoriei.

Pentru a simplifica explicaţia, să spunem că istoricul lucrează cel puţin pe trei . planuri.

Un plan A, cel al istoriei tradiţionale, al expunerii obişnuite care. sare de la un eveniment la altul, la fel ca cronicarul de ieri sau reporterul de astăzi. Astfel, mii de im�gini sînt culese în’direct şi fonnează imediat o istorie multicoloră, tot atît de bogată în peripeţii ca un roman în foileton. Dar această istorie, dată uitării-de îndată ce a fost :Citită, ne lasă prea adesea cu u n •sentiment de insatisfactie, incapabili să judecăm sau să înţelegem.

Un plan B reflectă evenimentele în mare, fără a intra în detalii: romantismul, Revoluţia fraqceză, revo­ luţia industrială, cel de-al doilea război mondial. De data aceasta, unitatea de măsură o reprezintă 10, 20, chiar 50 de ani. Şi datorită acestor ansambluri – fie că le denum� perioade, etape, evenimente sau• conjuncturi – se face o apropiere între fapte, sînt interpretate şi se

69

avansează explicaţii. Aici găsim, dacă vreţi, evenimen­ tele de durată, eliberate de detaliile superflue.

. în sfrrşit, un plan C depăşeşte şi aceste evenimente de durată şi nu reţine decît mişcările seculare sau

multiseculare. El se referă la o istorie în care fiecare mişcare este lentă şi face p aşi peste mari perioade de timp, o istorie care nu poate fi traversată decît cu cizme de şapte poşte. Revoluţia franceză nu mai este decit un moment, . bineînţeles esenţial, al lungii istorii a genero­

sului destin revoluţionar, violent, ai Occidentului. Vol­ taire este o simplă etapă-a evoluţiei gîndirii libere …

în acest ultim stadiu – sociologii – care au şi . ei imaginile lor ar spune “palier în profunzime” – civili­ zaţiile apar – cu excepţia unor accidente, unor peripeţii care .Je-au dat cUloare şi le-au marcat destinul – în durata lor sau, dacă preferaţi, în permanenţele lor, în structurile, în schemele lor aproape abstracte dar esenţiale.

• O civilizaţie nu este deci nici o economie dată, nici o so.:;’!tate dată; ci ceea ce, de-a lungul unor succesiuni de e �onomii, de societăJi, continuă să trăiască, nelăsî1• . • – • � .- �nodificată decît cu greutate şi cîte puţin.

Nu ajungem deci Ia o civilizaţie decît în timpul mare, durata lungă, apucînd un frr care nu se mai termină; de fapt este ceea ce un grup de oameni de-a lungul unei istorii tumultuoase, adesea furtunoase, a conservat şi transmis, din generaţie în generaţie, ca pe bunul său cel mai de preţ. .

în aceste condiţii să nu acceptăm prea repede că istoria civilizaţiilor ar fi ,.întreaga istorie”, aşa cum afirma marele istoric spaniol Rafael Altamira (1951) şi, cu mult înaintea lui, Fran� ois Guizot (1855). Este întrea­ ga istorie, fără îndoială, dar privită dintr-o anumită perspectivă, cuprinsă în acest maximum de spaţiu cro­ nologic posibil, compatibilă cu o anumită coezhme istorică şi umană. Şi nu este, ca să preluăm im:ir:_inea

atît de cunoscută a lui Fontenelle, istoria rozdor, oricît de frumoase ar fi ele, ci cea a grădinarul•Ji pe care

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ro:::eleîl cred nemuritor. Pentru societăţi, economiile şi miile de incidente cu viaţă scurtă ale istoriei, civiliza­ ţiile, şi societăţile înseşi par nemuritoare.

Această istorie de largă respiraţie, această tele-isto­ rie, această navigare în larg condusă peste oceanul timpului şi nu de-a lungul coastelor, niciodată pierdute din vedere de un cabotaj înţelept – acest demers istoric, indiferent de num�le sau imaginea cu care îl împodobim, are avantajele şi inconvenientele sale. Avantajele: • el obligă să gîndeşti, să explici în termeni neobişnuiţi şi să te serveşti de explicaţia istorică pentru a înţelege propriu-ţi timp. Inconvenientele, chiar pericolele: poate cădea în generalizări facile ale unei filozofiia �toriei, pe scurt o istorie mai mult imaginată decît recunoscută sau dovedită.

Istoricii au, desigqr, motive să nu fie încrezători în călătorii prea entuziaşti, ca Spengler sa:u Toynbee. Orice istorie împinsă pînă la explicaţia generală impune reveniri constante la realităţi concrete, la cifre, •Ia hărţi, la cronologii precise, pe scurt, la verificări.

În consecinţă, pentru a înţelege ce este o civilizaţie este recomandabil să ne ocupăm de cazuri concrete mai degrabă decît de gramatica civilizaţiei. Toate regulile de acord şi de dezacord Pe care le-am defmit vor fi clarifi­ cate, simplificate prin exemplele care vor urma.

11

CIVILIZAŢII LE

NEEUROPEN E

Partea întîi
ISLAMUL
ŞI

LUMEA MUSULMANĂ

CAPITUJ.l’l. l

CE NE INVAŢĂ ISTORIA
Un timp nesfirşit este necesar civilizatiilor pentru a se
naşte, a se instala, a înflori. .
.A sustine că Islamul se naşte în cîţiva ani, o dată cu

Muhanunad, este foarte exact, şi în acelaşi timp inexact,

greu de înţeles. Creştinismul, la rîndul său, s-a născut o dată cu Christos şi mult înaintea lui. Fără Muhammad ‘ şi fără Christqs nu ar fi existat nici Creştinătatea şi nici Islamul; dar de fiecare dată aceste religii noi au ocupat timpul •civilizaţiilor dej a existente. De fiecâre dată ele au constituit sufletul: încă de la început au avut avantajul de a prelua o moştenire bogată, un trecut, un întreg prezent, un viitor deja.

lslamul, forr.1ă nouă a Or.ientului Apropiat

• O civilizaţie “de gradul doi”: la fel cum creştinismul a moştenit Imperiul r<Oman pe care îl prelungeşti, [a. începuturile sale Isliţmul s-a aşezat în Orientul Apro­ piat, unul dintre cele mai vechi din lume, poate cel mai vechi loc de coexistenţă a unor oameni şi popoare civilizate.”

Consecinţele acestui fapL sînt imense: civilizaţia musul• mană a preluat vechi imperative de geopolitică, de forme urbane, de’ instituţii, obiceiuri,- ritualuri, moduri vechi de credinţă şi vhti-ă.

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Credinţa: sub aspectul religiei, Islamul se leagă de iudaism şi creştinism, urmează filiaţia lui Abraham şi a Vechiului Testament, monoteismul său riguros. Pentru Islam, Ierusalimul este un oraş sfint, iar Isus cel inai mare profet înaintea lui Muhammad,• care este singtirul ce îl depăşeşte.

Viaţa: gesturi vechi de mai multe milenii ,se perpe­ tuează prin Islam pînă în zilele noastre . . În O mie şi una de nopţi, suveranu”t este salutat “printr-o temenea agîncă şi sărutarea pămîntului dintre mîini� — . adică chiar

gestul care s� •practica la curtea regelui part Chosroes (531-579) şi cu siguranţă mai devreme. În secolele al

XVI -lea, al XVII -lea şi chiar mai tîrziu •este gestul pe care încearcă să-I evite ambasadorii europeni la Is�bul, Ispahan sau Delhi, într-atît li se pare de umilitor pentru ei şi, mai mult, pentru prinţul pe care îl reprezintă: Herodot era deja indignat de obiceiurile egiptene pe care le considera respingătoare: ,.în plină stradă, în semn de salut, ei se prosternează pe jumăţate unul in • faţa celuilalt; de parcă .ar fi cîini, îşi coboară mîinile pînă la genunchi”; această- formă de salut există şi astăzi. Alte detalii: băile maure sau turceşti, hammam}- nu sînt decît vechile terme romane, pe care •cuceririle arabe le-au introdus în Persia şi în alte locuri; mîna lui Fătima, echivalentul musulman • al ,.medaliilor şi scapularelot• noastre”, împodobeşte deja stelele funerare cartagineze; în; ce priveşte costumul tradiţional al musulmanilor, E. F. Gautier, de la care am luat aceste detalii, nu ezită să-I recunoască în cel al vechilor babilonieni, aşa cun: este descris •de Herodot în urmă cu peste douăzeci şi patru de secole. După acesta, “babilonienii poartă .mai întîi o tunică de in care coboară pînă la pici<?are. (am sputie în Algeria o gandourah, comentează E. F. Gautier), iar pe de.as pra o altă tunică de lînă (am sp�e o djellaba); se înfăşoară apoi cu o mică manta albă (am putea spune un mic burnus alb); îşi acoperă capul cu o mitră (am spune un fes sau un turban)”.

Unde vom ajunge oare, apucînd-o pe acest drum – a deţermina ce este şi ce nu este musulman într-o ţară islamică? Nu s-a susţinut deunăzi că. cuşcuş-ul nord-a­ frican era roman, ba chiar punic? în orice ca-:, casa

77

foarte vii care
musulmană cu patio, joasă, care predomină in Egiptul arab şi in Magbreb, este preislamică, , analoagă casei greceşti cu peristil şi ,.casei africane din primele �le

ale erei noastre”.
Acestea sint detalii,dar semnificaţia lor este clară: civilizaţia musulmaDă, la fel ca rea occidentală, este o
civilizaţie derivată, de gradul doi, pentru a folosi tenni­
nologia lui Alfred Weber. Ea nu s-a e&ficat plecînd de

la nimic, ci pe tuful civilizaţiei pestriţe şi a precedat-o in Orientul Apropiat

Biografia Islamului nu începe deci prin viziunea lui Muhammad, sau în cursul celor zece ani ai primelor cuceriri fulgerătoare (632-642). De fapt, ea se vatSă în nesirrşita isto,rie a Orientului Apropiat

Istoria Orientului Apropiat

Unificarea Orientului Apropiat, începută de asirieni, a continuat timp de multi ani prin cuceririle lui Cyrus, Cambyse şi Darius (54�86). Două secole mai tîrziu, imensa construcţie a ahemenizilor cade •sub loviturile grecilor şi.macedonenilor lui Alexandru (334-331 a.H.).

Această cucerire a fost mai rapidă chiar decît cea, fulgerătoare, zece secole mai tirziu, a cuceritorilor arabi.

în mare, acest interval de zece secole constituie un extraordinar episod “colonial”, în timpul căruia grecii domină imensul spaţiu nedefmit dintre Mediterana şi. Oceanul Indian. Colonizatori, ei fondează oraşe, mari , porturi (Antiohia, Alexandria), state întinse (seleucizi, la­ gizi…). Amestecati cu supuşii lor, ei nu se confundă însă cu aceştia; astfel, ei nu trăiesc niciodată in afara oraşelor, ţinuturi care le rămîn străine. Pe scurt, micul popbr greco-macedonean a colonizat această vastă porţiune din Asia, la fel după cum Europa va coloniza mai tîrziu Africa, impunîndu-i limba şi administraţia sa, comunicindu-i o parte din dinamismul său.
,..••<,..erirea romană s-a extins şi ea in Asia Mică, în Siria, ît• Egipt, fără a intrerupe această eră colonială:

în spa•ele faţadei romane, civilizaţia greacă contin:;!. să• exiSte şi redevine dominantă la că:ier”-4 lml !:�i:dui

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VIII-Jea,
roman, în secolul al V -lea, cînd Bizanţul preia ştafeta – Bizanţul, adică din nou civilizaţia greacă: Emile Felix Gautier, trăind: în Algeria, a f� obsedat de această aventură colonială colosală pe care istoria o va ţpătura într-o bună zi, fără a mai lăsa aproape nimic din ea.
Orientul Apropiat coloni�t nu şi-a iubit stăpînii.

încă din 256 a.H., vastul stat al parţilor arsacizi, apoi al perşilor sasanizi (începînd din 224 p.H.), s-a constituit �

teritoriul Iranului, de la marginile Indusului pînă la frontiera fragilă a Siriei. Roma, apoi Bizanţul au dus lupte grele împotriva acestui vecin puteţnic, organizat, belicos, seniorial, birocratic, dispunînd de o cavalerie numeroasă, legat departe, spre est, cu India, mongolii şi China (arcul cavalerilor parţi, a cărui săgeată traver­ sează platoşele romane, vine fără mdoială din Mongo­ lia). Sprijinit pe “religia superioară a lui Zoroastru”, el va lupta viguros “impotriva intrusului: elenismul”. Dar această ostilitate politică nu îl va impiedica, ocazional,
să accepte curente culturale venite de la vest: ftlozofi greci alungaţi de Justinian şi-au găsit refugiu în marea

capitală Ctesifon; prin Iran, nestorienii – creştini eretici persecutati în Bizant – au ajuns în China, undd s-au bucurat mai tirziu de o şansă deosebită .

• In ace st Orient Apropiat ezitant, luptînd împotriva prezenţei greceşti, convertit l4 creştinism, agitat de tulburări religioase continue, violente, primele cuceriri arabe (634-642) au găsit imediat înfelegere.

Siria (în 634), iar apoi Egiptul (în 639) îi primesc cu bra:ele deschise pe noii veniţi. Mai greu de prevăzut, ralierea Persiei (642) este rapidă: bătrînul imperiu, epuizat de lupta seculară împotriva Romei şi Bizanţului, se apără cu dificultate, în . pofida cailor şi elefanţilor săi, sstu nu se apără deloc îniJ.)otriva raidurilor feroce ale cămilarilor arabi. Orientul Apropiat a cedat în faţa noilor. veniţi. Acestora le-a fost greu să ocupe Africa de t .ord, de la mijlocul secolului al VII-leapînă. la lnceputul
elui de-al dar odată această cucerire înfăptu­

ită, Spania a căzut dintr-o lovitură în mîinile lor (711).

7J

În concluzie, foarte rapid – dacă exce;Jtam Asia Mică, ‘muntoasă, apărată şi salvată de aizant �- cuce­

ritorii arabi au ocupat Orientul Apropiat in întregime; iar apoi i-au depăşit cu mult frontierele spre vest.
Această rapiditate a fost oare:

a) rezultatul unei acţiuni surprinzătoare, în avantajul atacatorului pe care nimeni nu-l aştepta?
b) succesul firesc al raidurilor sale în forţă, distrugă­ toare, ce au izolat oraşeie, obligîndu-le să se predea unul după altul?

c) finalul lentei deteriorări a Orienţului Apropiat, pe cale de a se decoloniza, cwn am spune astăzi?

Fără îndoială, toate cele trei cauze au concurat. Totuşi, în optica istoriei civilizaţiilor a)este expl!catii cu bătaie scurtă nu sînt suficiente. Slăbiciunea sau obo­ seala nu pot explica SUCCeSUl durabil al invaziei. Nu ar trebui oare pusă în discuţie. o profundă afinitate religioa­

să şi morală, foarte veche, . rodul unei îndelungate co­ existente? Această religie nouă elaborată de Muham­

mad a .fost fabricată în chiar această răspîntie a Orien­ tului Apropiat, în sensul vocaţiei sale profunde, potrivit spiritului său. .

Islamul, în primăvara expansiunii Sale, nu face decît să dea viaţă anticei civilizaţii . orientale -care a . fost personajul principal al aventurii,cel puţin pentru “a doua coloană” a casei de construit .<Prima fiind evident Arabia însăşi). Este vorba despre o civilizaţie solidă, edificată pe regiuni foarte bogate faţă de care Araţ>ia arată săracă.

îritr-un !’el, destinul Islamului va fi acela de a repune această • bătrînă civilizaţie pe o nouă orbită, de a o acorda la un diapazon nou.

Muhammad� Coranuls lslamul

Originile nemijlocite ale • Islamului ne pun deîndată în prezenţa unui om, unei căfţi, unei religii.

• Opera hotăritoare a lui’Muhammad sesiturz.qză între ,610-612 (date problematice, dar probabiiej şi 632, data morţii sale.

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Dacă nu ar fi fost el, Arabia• – fărîmiţată in triburi şi confederaţii rivale, deschisă influenţelor străine, efortu­ �ilor coloniale • ale Persiei, Etiopiei creştine; Siriei, Egiptului bizantin – nu şi-ar fi realizat unitatea şi, . consolidată ‘în unna acesteireuŞite, nu şi-ar f i •aruncat briganzii dincolo de lungile frontiere din nord.

Nici Bizanţul şi nici parţii, inamici de secole, nu aveau cea mai mică teamă de a vedea ridic,indu-se un duşman: serios din aceste ţări atit de slfrace. Fără îndoială, aveau loc incursiuni violente, dar briganzii veneau şi plecau. Cine s �ar fi îngrijorat, mai ales in aceste zone – deseori no man ‘s land – pe care şi le disputau perşii şi grecii, la marginea ,,semilunii fertil e”?

Totul se schimbă o dată cu succesul lui Muhammad Cercetările erudite au cu,răţat biografia sa de strălucirea cu care a fost împodobită. După decapare, iniaginea nu mai este frumoasă, emoţionantă; Născut pe la 570, in primii patruzeci• de ‘ani ai vieţii Muhammad a fost covîrşit de necazuri. Această viaiă obscură devine istorie abia cînd profetul împlineşte patruzeci de ani, pe la 610-612. “Într-o noapte din ultima decadă a Ramada­ nului, intr-o grotă de pe muntele Hira”, nu departe de Mecca, în vreme ce dormita, ,,s �a produs infuzia Cuvin­ tuiui Necreat în lumea relativă; coborîrea Cărţii în inima profetului”. Fiinţa misterioasă i-a arătat in vis “un s.ul de stofă acoperit de semne, şi i-a ordonat să-lcitească . •. – Nu ştiu să citesc, spuse • Muhammad. – Citeşte, mai repetă de două ori îngerul, strîngîndu-i stofa în jurul gitului. – Ce să citei>c? – Citeşte, in numele Dqmnului tău care a creat omul” … “Alesul se trezeşte cu conştiinţa că o carte a coborît în inima lui” (E. Dermenghem). Un mic detaliu – se poate traduce prin a citi sau a propo­
vădui, pentru că nu vom şti cu certitudine dacă profetul
. ‘ – . – -• – . \
şua sau nu sa citeasca ŞI sa sene.
Această legendă sfmtă este binecunoscută. Că
Muhammad, după cuvintele Arhanghelului Gabriel (misteriosul vizitator) se consideră trimisul lui Dwime­ zeu, ultimul; cel mai mare din profeţii tradiţiei biblke; că, la început, primeşte singurul sprijin din partea soţiei • sale, Khadidja şi intîlneşte aproape . imediat ostilitatea bogaţilor negustori din Mecca, rudele sale; că atunci îl

81
covîrşt$e neşiguranta, ajllligeinpragul disperării, demenţei, sinuciderii- la ce bun să unnim, pas cu

. această .,patimă”, aşa cum se recoostituieea,diamici puncte luminoase, m mătturli,.spusele.. pmfetului

(hadit) şi versetele (surate) Comnului, aceasti adegere postumă. ‘ transmisă prin 1laditit; a revelaţiilorlui
MUbammad? Esentialul este $ă fim atenti la ftumusetea,
la forta explozivă, 111 ,.muziCa puri”‘ � aaistui text ,.inimitabil.. (dovadă că este divin), ale acestor preziceri

(care precedau adeseori transe ingrozitoareîncare Muhammadişi pierdea pentru multă vreme cuuoştţa),o
să fim atenti la poezia extraQrdinad. puternicmareati,
pe care traducerea nu reuşeşte să o redea in întregime.
Arabia preislam.ică trăieşte atunci vremuri hom.erice:
poezia îi deschide urechile şi inimile. .
• Ani in şir� Profetu l nu predică decit unui mic cerc de
fideli, citorva rude. citorva nefericiti, adeseori .OIII foarte săraci: Mecca, lingăpe n.egliStOriiimbogătiti \te traficul caravanelor dintre Siria, Egipt şi Golful Persic, işi
are muncitorii,meşteşu garii,sclaviisăi. Aşa este Bilâl,
sclavul negru pe care n va riscumpăra Abu Bakr (prie­
tenul şi viitorul soa;u al profetului)� care a devenit primul
muezin a1 Islamului. •
Curind, bogatiisint infriOOşati de o propagandă care
i-a făcut mai intiisă sun”dă, � apo”i-a iritat. Amenin­
ţaţi, fideliilui Muhammad sintobligati să plece. unii in
Etiopia creştină. alt� vreo şaizeci in oaza Yatti’b,JallOid de Mecca. Acolo s-a refugiat şi MiJhammad:Yatn”b va fi oraşul Profetului (Mediua), iar fuga lui (Hegira) punctul
de pornire al erei musulmane (20 septembrie 622). Să
remar� chiar dacă este un minuscUl amănunt. că se.
pare că Medina era deja numele olaşului inaintea.
Hegirei.

Pe atunci, era un oraş :Pe. �i sferturi prinesc, cu două triburi . ara� ostile unul altuia, şi ilnpoitant fracţiuni evreieşti, formate in mai mare sau mai mică • măsură din negustori. Fatăde acestea din �� politica lui Muhammad va trece de la �ela neinc::r­
dere, apoi la ostilitate. • Rugăci� • orientată . pini
atu�i spre Ierusa� se va face de acum � in

direcţia Meccăi. Totul se petrecea intr-un cfmat de

83

.chahada;
război continuu: pentru a trăi, musulmaniitransfugi fac incursiuni de jaf asupra vecinilor lor, hărţuieSc lungile drumuri ale caravaneloţ celor din Mecca. Acest război

de zece ani, îi va permite în c ele din unnă -Profetului să revină, învingător, la Mecca, nu fără a fi demonstrat,
de-fl lungul unor dificultăţi atroce, adeseori• un simţ

deosebit al deciziei, cît şi, în egală măsură, prudentă

şi toleranţă.
• Religie reJielată, edificată puţin cîte puţin prin 1ersetele a ceea ce . Jla fi Coranul, prin cuvintele şi acţiunile Profetului, Islamul (supunere în faJa lui Dumnezeu) se afinnă �u o simplitate exemplară.

Cei ,.cinci stîlpi” sîilt: afmnar� unui singur Dumnezeu,

Allah, al Cărui trimis, este Muhammad –

rugăciunea rostită de cinci ori pe zi; postul de 29 sau 30
de zile al Ramadanului; pomana dată •săracilor; peleri­ najul la Mecca. Jihadul, războiul simt, care în curînd va

fi chemat să joace un rol foarte însemnat,• nu face parte din recomandările de bază.

Simbolistica religioasă a Islamului nu are nici o taină, deşi numeroase puncte sînt • controversate şi

deschid diferite porti pentru interpretările complicate ale misticii. Din acest punct de vedere, teologia islamică ini are pentru ce s-o invidieze pe cea creştină: amîndouă

oferă spiritului căi dificile. -‘ .
Pentru rugăciune, Profetul • s-a inspirat din practica
creştină şi evreiască. Dimpotrivă, în ce priveşte peleri­ najul, el a fost fidel tradiţiei arabe şi celei din Mecca, menţinînd obiceiurile vechilor pelerinaje legate .unul de alttil, la Ka’ba de la Meţca şi la -muntele Arafat, în vecinătatea oraşului, poate o veche sărbătoare de. primăvară şi o veche sărbătoare pe toamnă, prima ftin d – analoagă sărbătorii Tabemacolelor din Vechiul Testament Aceste vechi practici, al căror sens profund se pierduse în neguqt timpurilor, sînt retrans1crise într-un limbaj nou. “Muhammad a anexat vechea instituţie,

. justificînd-o a postetiori printr-un fel de legendă cultura­ lă: Abraham, pretindea el, organizase împreună cu fiul

84

său Ismail, strămoşul arabilor, cultul Sfmtei Ka’ba şi ceremoniile pelerinajuhrl. Astfel, era fondată prioritatea Islamului’ in raport cu iudaismul creat de Moise, ‘şi cu creştinismul legat de Iisus”.’ Ar fi oare suficient să explicăm . acea5tă legătură cu Abraharri prin calculul politic, prin dorinţa de prioritate? Nu au oare religiile logica lor . religioasă, adevărurile lor? Este ceeace

susţine Yuakim Mubarac (Abraham în Coran, 1958).’
Pentru Louls Massignon, “Islamul salută in ‘Abraham primul dintre musulmani, ceeace este adevărat, ade­
vărat sub aspect teologal”.
Esenţial este şi a inţelege pină în ce punct credinţele şi practicile r�ligioase influenţează viaţa musulmanului, îi impun o disciplină’ Strictă. Pentru el totul (inclusiv dreptul) decurge din Coran. Plactica religioasă rămin� şi astăzi mult mai vie în – lumea islamică decît într-o ţară creştină. “De o mie trei sute şaizeci de ani – scrie Louis -Massignon în 1955 – in fiecare an la Arafat … se adună 150 000 de pelerini din toate ţările”. Şi îri oricare sat din Egipt numărul acestor pelerini este relativ identic cu numărul participanţilor la ceremoniile pascale in oricare oraş din Franţa. Avantajul �ste evident de partea Islamului. Dar trebuie oare atribuit unei credinJe mai . puternice? Creştinismul a trebuit să facă faţă unor încercări interne, chiar celor 3le civilizaţiei pe care. o promovează, încercări abia intrezărite pînă acum . de lumea islamică. Nu continuă aceasta să Se bazeze pe societăţi vechi, arhaice, în care riturile religioase se perpetuează ca şi celelalte gesturi sociale, ca şi restUl vieţii înseşi?

Arabia: problema unei culturi abia urbani�ate

Ce rol a jucat de fapt imensa PeninSulă Arabică in succesul lui Muhammad şi expansiunea Islamul�? Răspunsul nu este siniplu.

as

• ,.”.,.”” IIJ’6a:Jlrilu•.- • t1 ITQit, t1 eo’II
(itlai se JI(Jtlle .”•aStfel) ia metlm urbtm, 111limitll
“,..; }H’illfiliH Îllt’4
• • AnrJii Iti ,Meeea.
Averea acestui oraş era recentii peatunci, făurită
grape
caravaneb� dobinditădatorită legăturilor. sale cu alte
centre umme, iodepirtate, străinecareyizauşi doar
marele comert şi c:apitammul de piaţă in faşă al
locuitmb săi. că in oraşele siriene – mai degrabă
Este nei:ndoie1nic
. decit ib. Arabia i n s i ş i -acunoscut Mubammacondu�­ Cit« ele Calavane inaintea revelapei, mediile iudaiz
şi creştine. Inori� caz, recotnandărilesale,chemările
liuleVA-ului, rugăciUDea in comun de � vălul
femeilor, demnitatea preţiosă fidelilor şi imam-ilor lor
(conducătOrii•rugăciUnii) presupun un cadru urban.
Penlm toate aCestea este nevoie de martori, de multime,
de tnghemia1acitadină.

,.Acest ideal rigorist şi virtuos este cel al: negusamJor
austeri dia Hidjăz. �ul vizează ordinea in cetăp mai
� decit dezordinea din afara lor” (X. de Planhol).
In aceastăviziune. trebuie interpretate unele hadit ale
Profetui.Qi: “.Deceea ce mătem pentru poporUl meu este
laptele . in care diavolul se ascunde între spumă şi
smintini-Le . va plăc:ea să-I bea şi se vor intoarce in
de§ert, piiriisindcentrelermde se roagă fn comun …
. (SUbliniereane apartine.) O altă retnaKă ain”‘buită
� de astă-dată la vederea unui bfăzdar- de plug:
“Acesta nu va intra. vreodată in casa credincioşilor, fără
c:a o dată.�el să nu intre şi injcsirea .” Pe scurt, după
CQB1 afirmă • insuşi Coranul: ,.,Arabii din deşert sint cei
mai imăip în necmătenia _şi ipocritia lor”. In acest
Islam de �• cealrele credintei • sint deci oraşele, o
situatie ce o evocă pe cea a :m.ericii creştine la •incepu­ turile sale in Occident:osulneaedincinuesteoare. atunci
• . Cirulap .,/ărtmi”sînt beduinii Arabit; este atleJ1ărat. LllÎ’MqiiiUl secoluluiXX-leatiiera posibil să-i mai illi’IIN•escakJi,.Jiiiae4 lllfel erua neîndiJielnit mai

JH11ft îmibriJi şi tutizi “”_,; in inima Ambiei.

86

87

sedentari. •

noma�
Un islamolog, Robert Montagne (1893-1954}, a scris o
carte foarte frumoasă despre Civilkisţia deşeitului, pe
care un etnograf ar refuza, fără îndo!a lă, s-o numească
altfel decît cultură. . • ( • • •
Oraşele lipsesc, iirtr�adevăr, iar cind există � cît ‘sînt
de elementare! Yatrib, in momentul Hegirei,. nu ‘arăta
nici măcar ca Teba din Beotia pe vremea lui Epaminon­
da! fn jurul acestor ,.oraşe”, in văile in care exista un
minimum de • apă, găsim cîfiva Jiirtmi sedentari, şerbi
legaţi de glie,. dar i’n tiumăr mic. Majoritatea arabilor
este constituită din nomazi, ‘.,asemănători unor roiuri de

albine”, formînd foarte mici grupuri sociale; familii patriarhale, “subfracţiuni .., ,.fracţiuni� .,tn”buri”, ,.confe­

deraţii de •triburi”‘. Aceste etichetăriapartin cerc:etăto­ rilor actuali şi reprezintă un singur mod de calcul: o fractiune îriseamnă de la 100 la 300 corturi; un trib –
3000de persoaDe, cea mai mare unitate, pe această
scară, care inai posedă o coeziune. Ficţiuoea şi reali­
tatea legăturilor de singe – singurele Pe care beduitiul le
recunoaşte – ‘pot coexista. Tn”btil reprezintămarea
unitate’ de luptă; în el trăiesc frati, veri, supuşi. Dinipo­
trivă, confederatia • nu este decît o fragili’ uniune ce-şi
dîspersează participanţii pe distanţe imense.
Viaţa foarte grea •a beduinilor în deşerturileşi semide­
şerturile Arabiei nu este posibilă decit gntţie creşterii
cămilei. Nepretenţioasă, capabilă să reziste la sete, , ea
permite călătorii indelungate . de la o pişunţ ta a�ţa.
Pentru jefuirea turmelor de vite şi război, ea asigură
transportul furaju lui, a burdufelor cu apă. a •grînelOr. Caii
(tratati cu mare grijă pînă atunci) permit in ultima
vreme galopul de atac. “iarba care fuge “. Cu
Viaţa cotidiană aleargă după
cămila de povară Şi cămila albă de curse, marii nomazi
pendulează pe parcursul a o mie de kilometri uneori� de la nord la sud şi invers. Spre nord, fa limitele pămîntu­
rilor Semilunii fertile, între Siria şi Mesopotamia,

dismul se degradează, slăbeşte în contact c u . sedentarii.
Creşteriicămilei i se adaugă cea a oilor, cu o rază

mică de deplasare . Crescînd oile, beduinul nu mai’ este decît un chaouya, un cioban. Sub el, crescătorut •de vaci
sau de bivoli intră în ultima• categorie, cea a .pnm• liiO’•
În sudul şi în centrul Arabiei, nomadismul c(imilar îşi conservă puritatea, pretenţiile de nobleţe. Aceste triburi qobile se află permanent în război: cele mai puternice le alunga pe cele mai slabe. Deşertul, suprapopulat îşi varsă in afară excedentul uinan, ieşirea avînd loc de obicei pe căile vestului: puntea Siilaiului, îngusta pangli­ că a Nilului, nu sînt obstacole spre Sahara şţ ţările Apusului.

. Predominanţa exodului spre yest este motivată ‘geografic şi istoric. Geografic: spre nord, deşerturile reci iau locul deşerturilor calde.• Arabii nu triumfă în Asia Mică, în secolul al VII-lea, deoarece cămilele lor nu pot rezista. frigului aspru al platourilor actualei Anatolii, unde se aclimatizează în schimb cămila din Bactriana. Pe cînd Sahara este prelungirea deşertului Arabiei dincolo de

.fosa MăriiRoşii. Istoric: deşerturife din nord, din Asia centrltlă îşi au propriii nomazi, cămilele cu două cocoaşe, caii, cavalerii, propriile, lor mişcări migratoare violente. Cu siguranţă nu sînt spaţii gqale care să poată fi umplute’•cu uşurinţă.

• Nu fără ezitări, Arabia beduinilor şi-a pus in serviciul Islo. mului forJa combativă excepţională.

Nomazii nu se,vor fi convertit de la o zi la• alta. Fără încetare, ei vor rămîne luptători, instabili.: în Spania cucerită, pe vremea califilor umayyazi, disputele se aprind din nou; între originarii din Yemen şi cei din Qais, la mii de Jeghe de ţările şi disputele de origine.

‘ La moartea Profetului de altfel, toţi nomazii aparent supuşi s-au răsculat. Represiunea a •fost lungă, iar succesorul lui Muhammad, califul Omar• (634-644), nu a • găsit o . soluţie• mai bună la aceste dispute infernale decît să arunce cavalerii şi căinilarii înjihad: un mod de a-i îndepărta din Arabia şi totodată de a evita disputele între triburi.

Beduinii vor realiza astfel primele cuceriri ale lslamului. Pe imense distanţe, trebuie să ne imaginăm drumul ac�tor . grupuri restrînse, acestor popoare în miniatură, cu convoaiele lor, cu corturile din păr de cămilă şi capră, transportînd cu ele obiceiurile, deprin­ derile, orgoliul lor, profunda dorinţă a păstorilor de a rămîne păStori, dispreţul faţă de viaţa sufocantă a sedenta.nfiui. . Aceşti corpusculi supun unui adevărat

88

bOmbardament spaţiul vast pe care îl va umple spre vest cucerirea musuhnană. Ei se implantează pretutindeni, şi• o dată cu ei limba lor, folclorul, defectele şi virtuţile lor; în .primul rîfid al acestora din unnă-•încl�ţia pătima­ şă pentru ospitalitate, o trăsătură caracteristică•• Isla-mului în întregul său.

Cunoaştem înaintarea îndelUngată a tribului Banii Hillăl: plecaţi din sudul Hidjăzului în secolul al VII-lea, se simt stingheri în Egiptul de sus pe la 978; sînt împinşi în Africa de nord la mijlocul secolului al XI-lea, ca o furtună de lăcuste, zdrobiţi de berberi în secolul al XII-lea (lupta de la Setif, 1151) şi dispersaţi apoi în Maghreb. Epopeea lor reînvie astăzi în folclor, “din deşertul Transiordaniei pînă la Biskra şi Port-Etienne”, în Mauritania. •

• “Civilizaţie ” ş_i “culturi” în lumea islamică; r(Jlul triburilor arabe• atrage atenţia asupra modului în care Islamul, această cil’ilizaţie care l’a fi în curind atît de rafinată, Şi-a sprijinit succesil’ aproape toate reuşitele pe forjele puternice ale “culturilor” luptătoare, ale popoarelor primitil’e p”e care de fiecare dată le-a asimilat şi “\cil’ilizat” rapid.

De- a lungul unui secol, triburile arabe i-au oferit prima din aceste reuşite. Apoi, cu muntenii aspri din Africa de nord, berberii, Islamul a cucerit Spania, qupă care a . construit Egiptul fatimid în sfrrşit, el se va servi de turco�mongoH, nomazi pe care i-a găsit în faţa porţilor sale, aproape de el, in Asia centrală şi pe care a ştiut să-i convertească începînd din secolul al X-lea, merce­ narii turci formează esenţialul armatelor califilor din Bagdad, dovedindu-se soldaţi minunaţi, arcaşi şi călăreţi extraordinari.

Djăhiz, marele scriitor arab din secolul al IX-lea, îi persiflează puţin pe aceşti neciopliţi in portretul de

neuitat pe care li-1 face. Dar încă o dată istoria va fi aceeaşi: săracii vor deveni bogaţi, nomazii – citadini, şi ei vor dovedi că, de la servitor la stăpîn, calea este uneori scurtă. Mercenari în ajun, stăpîni a doua zi, turcii selgiukizi, apoi turcii osmanlîi v<>ţ fi noii prinţi ai

89

Islamului. ,.Matt!lesenior” sau “marele turc” va fi titlul pe care Occidentul il va da suveranilor osmanllicînd

căderea Constantinopolului {1453),’ devenită capitala imperiului, le va fi dovedit defmitiv puterea�

Poate că este una din legile destinUlui Islarnului de a atrage, a folosi jlopoarele primitive eare-i înconjoară sau

îi străbat. teritoriile,şide a sucomba astfel sub greutatea

violenţei lor. Apoi totul se restabileşte şf se cicatriZează. Luptătorul primitiv, eficace, dispare în viata urbană

atotputernică a Islamului.

CAPITOLUL 11

CE NE ÎNVAŢĂ GEOGRAFIA
Islamul implică o serie de spaţii, legate unele de altele, atinse la marginile lor de variaţii �stul de puternice.

Istoria Isiamului riu a fost şi nu este o istori� liniştită.

Totuşi, aceste variatii(raportate la ansşmblul spaţiu­ lui) rămîn relative. bnensa scenă .i.SJamiCă prezintă în
mare o evidentă stabilitate. Ea se oferă ca o serie de
realităţi şi de e�Jicatii.

Păminturile şi mările lslamului

Hărtllespun esenţialul. Am reprezentat regiunile ocu­ pate, apoi abandonate de Islam, de fiecare dată în fata
unor civilizatii străine şi rivale: Sicilia, Peninsula

I�rică, Septimaniâ, Italia meridională, Mediterana

occidentală, •în faj4t Occidentului; Creta, Peninsula Balcanică• în faţa Europei orientale, a creştinătăţii
ortodoxe în mare; cîmpia centrală indo-gangelkă,
Dekkanul septentrional şi central, in faţa lumii �se.

Regiunile ocupate dintotdeauna de Islam, sau cel puţin de multă vreme, rămîn şi astăzi nesfirşite. Nu
întotdeauna foarte bogate, ele se întind din Maroc. şi
Sabara atlantică pbi.ă în China şi Insulinda, .,de la Dakar
la Djakarta”‘, potrivit subtitlului unei cărţi recente. .
Să nu uităm în această enumerare că enormele

spaţii maritime, odinioară mai mult sau mai puţin folosite, astăzi aproape întotdeauna în afara jurisdicpei

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statelor musulmane, care au �;ămas doar cu o îngustă fişie • de -a lungul coastelor. Marea apartine celor care o străbat, iar astăzi nu mai ex�tă practic marină nnisul­ mană. Odinioară, lucrurile stăteau cu totul altfel iri Mediterana, Marea Roşie, Golful Persic, Marea Caspică şi .mai ales in Oceanul Indian; gtatie alternanţei musoni­ lor, o navigaţie activă menţine aici multă vreme schim­ buri importante in beneficiul corăbiilor a!ilbe, a luntrelor, nave cu planşeele unite prin corzi din fibră de palmier şi in constrUcţia cărora nu se foloseşte nici un cui. Din secolul al IX-lea, aceste vase cu pînză ajung la Canton� Vasco da Oama le va hirţui şi jefui in 1498. Totuşi, mei portughţzii ş_i nici olandezii sau englezii mai tirziu, nu le vor elimina din traficul rentabil •al Oceanului Indian. Abia spre sfîrşitul secolului •al XIX-lea vaporul le va invinge.
Prezenţa musulmană pe mare a- fost deci durabilă. Gloriile străvechi ale Islamului nu au fost doar ale călăreţÎ].qr săi, ci şi ale oamenilor mării, al •căror simbol rămine Sindbăd Marinarul.

• Primatul Mediteranei: în Mediterana s-a jucot partea esenţială a acestei mari aventuri.

Sindbăd vorbeşte despre odisee, insă de -a lungul imot intimplări uimitoare, minuni şi catastrofe ale Oceanului IDdian. Dar să nu ne•!linăgim – in Mediterana s- a juca\ destitiul• maritim, mondial al Islamului. Aiei,. el a fost victorios, a luptat cu disperare şi in • cele din urmă a pierdut.

Aproape întreaga Mediterană s- a numărat printrt; importantele cuceriri ale Islamului, alături de Siria,’

Egipt, Persia, Afri ca de nord şi Spania. Cucerirea ei ar fi fOst pecetluită dacă musulmanii, instalati in Creta Îlij

825, ar fi rămas aici, dar . Bizanţul a recuperat acest’ av�post e_senJial in 9�1- şi s:a m�?tinut in Ciprq şi Jâ Rhodos, pastnnd.m mma chede cailor ce duc la M�ea: Egee .

.Deci eşec, semieşec la est. Bizanţul va păstra aceas,­ tă mare presărată cu insule şi, in jurul . Peninsulei Balcanice, atit intinsa Mare Neagră Cit şi Adriatica,

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Pe la 1080,
această cale a Italiei pe, care o va utiliza prima avutie, modestă, a Veneţiei: cea • a cărăuşilor de lemn, de sare, de griu, in serviciul extrem de. oogatului Bizanţ.
În acest timp, cealaltă Mediterană, • occidentală,
cădea sub puterea marinarilor din Egipt, Africa de nord,
Spania, trecuţi cu toţii sub flamura verde. Andaluzii au fost cei c are au cucerit Creta; în 825; tuni sienii sînt cei care s-au instalat în Sicilia, între 827 ş( 902. JnsQla a cunoscut atunci un avint prestigios. Ea a devenit sufletul viu al Mediteranei ,,sarazine”, cea mai frumoasă reuşită.

urbană fiind Palenno, în rilij locul acelei Conca d’Oro pe

care irigaţiile o transfonnă intr-o grădină a paradisului ‘ Musulmanii s-au aflat şi în diferite locuri din Corsica
sau Sardinia, un moment î n . Provenţa; ei ameninţă, insultă Roma, debarcă cînd doresc la gura Tibrului. Sînt instalaţi solid în Baleare, arhipelag esenţial pentru legătUrile din vestul mediteranean, loc de escală pe ruta directă Spania-Sicilia.
Dintr-odată, marea, purtătoare a bogăţiilor, trece în

slujba . Islamulu.i; ea face să crească şi să respire oraşele.i maritime: Alexandria (de pe atunci sucursala uriaşei , metrOpole interioare Cairo), Palermo, Tunis (retras, din pruden tă parcă, spre intţriorul continentului). Alte •cetă ti apar sau renasc: Bougie, cu pădurile-i apropiate, indispensabile construcţiilor navale, Algei,

Oran, amîndouă mOdeste încă, activul port spaniol Almeria şi, pe Guadalqyivir (marele fluviu), metropola puternică îndreptată spre Atlantic, Sevilla.

Această şansă durează peste un secol. Fără îndoia­ lă, Isl amul se loveşte curent de pirateria creŞtină: este soarta bogaţilor să ofere pradă şi tentaţii• săracilor. ln secolul al X-lea, contrar situaţiei clasice, mai tîrziu, bogat este musulmanul, iar pirat — creştinul. Atnalfi, Pisa, Genova sînt cuiburi de viespi. Totul se agravează şi se precipită o . dată cu cucerirea • Siciliei de normanzi

(1060- 1091). Rapid�le nave ale acestora se aruncă şi e1e asupra corăbiilor musulmane. Ocuparea Siciliei este prima breşă . deschisă în monopolul maritim al “ne­
credincioşilor”.
Urmează o asftxie, o închidere progresivă, o jenă

curînd resimţită în întregul “lac musulman”.

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în epoca lui Ci� Campeador, in ajunul sosirii almoravi­ zilor (veniti din Sudan şi Afriea de nord in ajutorul’: musulmanilor din Spania, 1085): un poet arab din Sicilia: ezită să accepte oferta de a se duce in’ Spania; iÎl pofida celor cincizeci de dinari de aur care i se oferă de către

regele din Toledo, Motamid: .Nu vă miraţi văzînd cum irii-aalbit părul de supărare, dar mirati-vă de ce negrul

ochilor nu mi-a albit! Marea apartine• rumilor, corăbiile nu circulă decit expunirtdu-se unor mari riscuri, doar

continentul este al arabilor!” Ce. revanşă deja! .

Cruciadele cqre încep curînd (1095-1270) permit recucerirea mării interioare – inclusiv spaţiul fortificat

bizantin . __,_ ‘de ‘către flotele oraşelor italiene. Marile episoade clasice (cpcerirea Ierusalimului in .1099, • fon­ darea statelor din tTara Sfintă, cucerirep Constantinopo­ lului de către latini in 1204 in unnafabuloasei abateri a Cruciadei a IV-a) nu trebuie să ascundă o altă realitate
majoră: cucerirea spaJiuluf mar:itim şi comercial al
Mediteranei. • . Cind • in. 1291, o dată cu fortăreaţa
Saint-Jean-d’ Acre, creştfn:ătatea işi pierde ultimul punct de sprijin important in Asi� ea işi menţine totuşi supre­

maţia neconteStată asupra intregii Mediterane.’

.Riposta Islamrilui va surveni abia două-trei secole mai tîrziu, cind turcii osmanlîi vor incerca să recucereas­ că supremaţia navală. Victorioşi la Prevesa (1538), Mediterana devenise aproape a lor, dar imensa infringere de la Lepante (1571) a pus aproape imediat capăt acestei intoarceti a norocului, care viza � altffiinteri doar supremaţia militară. Niciodată nu a existat decit o flotă turcă d�tul • de mediocră de corăbii de transport (greceşti in majoritate şi limitate la traficul intre Istanbul, Marea Neagră şi Egipt) in faţa numeroaselor flote ale Veneţiei, Genovei, Florenţei…

A apărut .apoi, fără îndoială, indelungata . activitate a corsarilor musulmani în eate s-au remarcat indeosebi

algerienii. CU toate acestea, nord-africaniinu. au ,avut niciodată o flotă (:omercială. •

Astfel, in Mediterana au altemat gloriile şi �tastro-• fele. în Oceanul Indian timpul s-a scurs mai liniştit, pină

deşertitri•
la apariţia po!tughezilor, in 1498, după periplul de la Cap1d. Bunei Speranţe. De acum inainte Islamul este incoojurat, prins din spate.

• E$eistul Essad Bey are dreptfJte să spunii:”Islamul înseamnă deşertUl”, dor acest deşert, .flcest ansamblu de
mai degrabă, se plaseaz’ă, pe de o parte; între

două căi de navigaţie, două întinderi de apă săratii

– Mediterana şi Oceanul Indian —iar, pe de altă parte între trei mase destul de dense de oameni – Extremul Orient, Europa, Africa Neagră.

înainte de orice, IslatnJJl este un “continent intennediar” ,. el uneşte aceste întinse regiuni intre ele.

Evident, de la• Atlantic la pădurea siberiană şi_ China de nord există deşerturi şi deşerturi: deŞerturile calde din sud se deosebesc de deşerturile reci din nord, acestea fiind în mare, zona cămilei cu două cocoaşe – adevă­ raţa cămilă -, iar celelalte domeniul dromaderului. O linie trasă de la Caspica la gura Indusului aproape• sepaiă aceste regiuni.

Bineinţeles, nu există deşert care să nu aibă spre margini zone de stepe şi oaze in care brăzdarul şi săpă­ liga sedentarului să nu amenajeze culturi . . Există chiar, în aceste vechi ţări civilizate, paradisiace, oazele fiu­ viilor Nil, Tibru, Eufrat, Indus, Amu şi Sîr Daria, şi excelentele SQluri, rare şi• ],pc’rate de multă vreme, ce-i drept pînă la punctul de a fi adeseori epuizate. Din cauza climei, ele sint fragile, ultrasensibile la cele mai mici greşeli ale oamenilor, la cele mai mici accidente naturale. O invazie, un război prelungit, ploi violente, o supra­ populaţie periculoasă şi ÎJ:\tinse zone agricole sint pe putictul de a se pierde, • în sensul exact al cuvîntului: deşertul a înghiţit, a acoperit oraşe, cimpii …

Islamul încorpo’rează astfel în destinul său aceste multiple fragil,ităţi subiacente. Oraşele sale prea încăr-• eate, populate datorită comerţului, cimpiile prea înguste, civilizaţia sa permanent tensionată se află şub semnu\ unor dificultăţi neîncetate. O hartă actuală a populaţiei o • Semnalează cu precizie: lumea islamică este. formată

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din cîteva zone dens populate, ctJ goluri imense între ele.

Nici irigeniozitatea construcţiilor hidraulice, nici suc­ ceseie culturii dry fanning (în sol uscat), nici tenacitatea

ţăranilor rezistenţi şi nepretenţioşi, nici utilizarea unor. arbori atît de minunat adaptaţi ca măslinul sau curmalul nu reuşesc să dea lumii islamice •o viaţă sub semnul siguranţei cotidiene, şi mai puţin mcă al ‘abundenţei: orice abundenţă este aici de moment – sau sub semnul excepţiorlal al unui lux Social, cel puţin dacă nu este privilegiul vreunui oraş anume.

Este cazul – doar la prima vedere paradoxal – al oraşului Mecca, cu bogăţiile imense pe care i le aduce
afluxul de pelerini. Aici totul este posibil, miraculos
posibil. în 1326, lbn Battiita, cel mai . mare dintre toţi
călători� arabi, îi cînta abundenta, “savoarea deli”ioa1ă”
a “cărnurilor sale grase”, fructele excelente, struguri, smochine, piersici, • curmale “care nu au echivalent în lume”, pepeni • galbeni incomparabili … ,.Pe scurt – eon­ chidea el – , toate mărfurile ce pot fi găsite î n •diferite ţinuturi sint adunate iB. acest oraş.” în alte părţi, foamea rămîne cel mai adesea inevitabilă. ,.Ştiu să-mi ascund foamea in străfundurile măruntaielor, spune un poet arab, la fel după cum o torcătoare iscusită ţine strîns in mînă frr ete pe care • i le torc degetele.” Iar rin camarad al lui Muhammad, Abii Horaira, spune despre Profet: “A părăsit lumea aceasta fără a fi mincat măcar o dată o pîine• de orz pe săturate …”

Consecinţele sînt uşor de sesizat. Rezultatul lor obiş­
nuit este nomadismul exclusiv, pas�ral, ‘în forme diverse şi pe care le-am semnalat în legătură cu Arabia. Muttitis

.mutandis, imaginea este valabilă pentru întregui spaţiu al deşerturilor• în care lumea islamică este condamnată

să trăiască. Portretul beduinului a fost ‘adesea conturat, •

şi f� indulgenţă, drept cel al unui primitiv, în pofida titlurilor sale de nobleţe. Dacă el nu-i înţelege deloc pe sedentari, nici aceştia nu-l iartă. Un islamolog, Jacques Berque, afrrmă pe drept cuvînt: “Cît de frumos este acest beduin, atît de des defăimat !” Da, este un eşantion splen- • did de aninialitate umană. Pentru Islam totuşi, un colaborator atît de greu de îmblînzit, de dirij . at! Dar colaborator, inst.ruffient totuşi, căci fălă el…

96•

. în acelaşi timp, viata mizerabilă care-I înconjoară şi care-I înCătuşează face dificilă ceea ce noi am numi astăzi “promovarea lui socială”, cu atît mai mult cu cit aceasta nu poate fi infăptuită decît prin sedentarizarea pe care o detestă şi pe care atîtea state musulmane au început• să o aplice astăzi pe scară l!lfgă. ţn ceea ce-l priveşte, hnperiul otoman o realizase, de bine de rău, începînd din secolul al XVI-lea, atît în Turcia asiatică cit şi în cea europeană,. instalînd cam peste tot colonii de yourouk, de nomazi. Acest nomadism riguros şi ,.cultura” lui închisă asupra ei însăşi sennialează un determitiism evident. Omul este aici prizonierul• “răspunsului” său, pentru a reveni la limbajul lui, Arnold Toynbee.

• Ci’vilizaţie ducînd lipsă de oamelii,•lslamul a fost obligat, deunăzi, să folosească . oamenii aşa cum . îi
erau la îndemînă. tipsa cronică de oameni’ era una din fonnele sărăciei lui funciare.

Paradoxal, Islamul are astăzi prea mulţi: 3.65-400 milioane, adică între o şeptime şi o optime din locuitorii planetei, prea mult, mult prea mult, date fiind•• resursele sale.

Deunăzi însă, cînd atinsese apogeul, Islamul număra poate între 30 şi 50 milioane de oameni cel mult, la o populaţie mon,dială de 30.6-500 •milioane, Ceea ce este puţin, pentru că chiar dacă proporţia rămîne, în mare, aceeaşi, este evident că pe atunci sarcinile Islamului erau relativ mult mai grele decît astăZi. El conducea de fapt istoria globală a acestei planete (înaintea • descoperirii Americii) care este Lumea Veche (Europa,,Afri�, Asia).

De unde şi atîtea sarcini covîrşitoare: guvernare; comerţ, război, supraveghere militară; Pentru a le duce la bun sîrrşit, Islamul a fost nevoit să accepte pretutin­ deni oamenii aşa cum îi găsea, cu, o tolerantă pe care Occidentul dens populat nu o va .cunoaşte hlciodată. în plus, el i-a căutat în afarll frontierelor sale, cu o insisten­ ţă care face din Islamul clasic o civilizaţie sclavagistă prin excelenţă.

Această alimentare continuă, colosală a susţinut

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multă vreme acţiunile lumii• musulmane. Rînd pe rind, toate ţările vecine şi-au adus tributul: creştini din Europa capturaţi pe uscat sau pe mare chiar de musulmani sau cumpăraţi de ocazie (ca sclavii prizonieri de război vînduţi de negustorii evrei din Verdun in secolul al IX-lea); negri din Africa, abisinieni, indieni, turci şi slavi prăpădiţi, caucazieni; , in secolul ‘al XVI-lea, ruşii capturaţi in raidurile tătarilor din Crimeea alimentează cu sclavţ Istanbulul turc.

Aceşti sclavi reuşesc adeseori să facă isprăvi uimitoare, cum s-a întîmplat cu mamelucii din Egipt, care au luat puterea in chiar momentul in ‘care eşua Cruciada Sîmtului Ludovic (1250). Sclavi instruiţi in meseria armelor, în majoritate de origine turcă, apoi caucaziană,

ei vor guverna Egiptul în circumstanţe oarecum favora­ bile pînă la cucerirea otomană (1517), după care, însă, nu vor dispărea: Bonaparte îi va întîlni in bătălia de Ia Piramide. “Mamelucii sint nişte parveniti – scrie un istoric al zilelor noastre �, dar ‘DU sint josnici.” Ienicerii turci, şi ei celebri, li se aseamănă în mare măsqră.

De fapt, orice oraş musulman are cartiere cu rase, religii şi limbi diferite. în 1651, in timpul rebeliunii din palatul padişahului otoman, “blestemul lui Babel a căzut in serai asupra icoglanilor (paji şi ofiţeri ai sultanului), făcîndu-i neputincioşi”. în culmea emoţiei, oameliiiau uitat idiomul otoman artificial dobindit iar “urechile celor de faţă – scrie Paul Ricaut (1668) _,__au fost lovite de un tumult de voci şi’ de limbi diverse. Unii striga�1 in gruzină, alţii în albaneză, in bosniacă, in mingreliană, in turcă sau • italiană”. Bun exemplu, între atîtea altele

(să ne gindim Ia Algerul corsarilor turci)!
Continent intermediar sau spatiu-mişcare: oraşele

Slab inzestr�t, Islamul nu ar tf nimic fără drumurile care, traversîndu-i trupul deşertic, îl însufleţesc, îi dau viaţă. Drumurile îi sînt bogăţia, raţiunea de a fi, civilizaţia. Secole la rînd, datorită lor el va oc;upa o poz�ţie “dorillnantă”.

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Pînă la descoperirea • Americii, el domină Lumea Veche, reglementează de fapt ceea ce pe atunci • era istoria sa• “mondială” . . El singur – s-o mai S{>unet;n o dată – pune în contact marile ariiculturale între care se împarte Lumea Veche: Extremul Orieţ�.t, Europa, Africa Neagră. Nimic nu trece fără consimţămîntul său, sau cel puţin fără ştirea sa. El este intermediarul.

• Corăbii, caravane şi negujătiJri: oricît de difi cilă părea uneori situajia lui poUtică –: şi aşa a fost adea seori –, Islamul rămîne, din punct de vedere geogt’fljic, uzufructuarul trecerilor obUgatorii

Evident, el riu este întotdeauna conştient de această poziţie excepţională, şi ni�i întotdeauna stăpîn pe ea. • Astfel, în faţa deşerturilor reci din Asia, Islaniul este victima fragilităţii, unei dominaţii slab exercitate, ,,marginale” – a sa – asupra unei populaţii de nomazi foarte turbulenţi. Turkestanul musulman, şir de oaze, este o regiune de avanposturi,’dar niciodată de baraje eficace. De fapt este imposibil să barezi turcilor, turkmeniior sau mongolilor calea de la Marea Arai la Caspica şi Marea Neagră . .Cei mai viguroşi dintre aceşti nomazi escaladea­
ză ,lranul, ameninţă BagdaduL. Priviţi
pe o hartă
(p.123) imensul dezastru pe care îl va aduce în Est
invazia mongolă din secolul al XIII-lea.
Cu toate acestea, de-a lungul sec9lelor, Islamul este
singurul care. face să circule aurul din Sudan şi sclavii nj!gri, în tranzit spre Mediterana; mătasea, piperul, mirodeniile, perlele Extremului Orient îh tranzit spre Europa. În Asia şi Africa, el ţine comerţul Levantului, care nu va ajunge în mîinile neguţătorilor italieni decît ori de Ia Alexandria, ori din Alep, ori de la Beirut, ori din• Tripoli, Siria.

Jslamul este deci, prin excelenţă, o civilizaţie care se

mişcă, • de tranzit, ceea ce implică îndepărtate călătorii pe mare şi pe uscat, traficul caravanelor fiind intens mai cu seamă între Oceanul Indian şi Mediterana, de la Marea Neagră pină in China şi India, din ţările negrilor pînă în A(rica de nord.

În pofida prezenţei, spre, est,’ a elefanţilor şi pretutin-

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deni a cailor şi măgarilor, caravanele folosesc predomi­ nant cămila. O cămilă de povară ajunge să transporte pinij. la 3 chintale sarcină utilă. Cum o caravană reuneşte •uneori 5-6000 de cămile; • volumul său global pciate fi comparat � cel al unei corăbii de marfă foarte mari.

O caravană se deplasează, aidoma unei armate, cu şeful său, statul său major, reguli stricte, etape obligata: rii,precauţii rituale îm,potriva tîlharilor nomazi, cu care este înţelept să închei înţelegeri. De-a lungul drumului, ea iJ!tîlneşte )a distanţe fixe, în fiecare zi de marş (mai puţin în plin deşert), marile construcţii ale cara ,nseraiu­ riwr sau Khăn-urilor, unde-şi adăpoşteşte o arte• din animale şi oameni. Sînt gările caravanelor. Nu este călător european care să nu fi descris aceste săli gigantice şi confortul lor relativ. Unele există şi astăzi, ca admirabilele Khăn-uri din Alep.
Acest sistem caravanier nu se poate lega de tnţnspor­ turile pe mare fără o vastă organizare semicapitalistă. Islamul îşi are neguJătorii săi (musulmani şi nemusul­ malii).• întîmplarea a făcut să ajungă pînă la noi scrisorile unor negustori evrei din Cairo, din ,epoca Primei Cruciade (1095-1099): ele dezvăluie cunoaşterea tuturor instn:unentelor de credit şi plată şi a tuturor formelor de asociere comercială (Italia deci nu le va inventa ulterior, aşa cum . prea uşor s-a crezut). Ele semnalează de asemenea comerţul pe distanţe lungi: mărgeanul ajunge din Africa de nord în India; sclavi sînt cumpăraţi în Etiopia; fier este adus din India, o dată cu piperul şi mirodeniile. Toate acestea implică o imensă mişcare de bani, de mărfuri şi oameni.

Nimic de mirare să constatăm încă de pe atwi.ci amploarea, fabuloasă pentru epocă, a itinerariilor călătorilor arabi. Islaniul însuşi, care este mişcare, care trăie� din nlişeare, îi antrenează.

Ibn Battiita� un marocan născut la Tanger în 1304, care făcuse deja o călătorie “în jurul lumii” de la 1325 pînă la 1349 (Egipt, Arabia, Volga inferioară, Afganis­ tan, India, China), ajunge în 1352 în ţările negrilor şi pe malurile Nigerului, unde se va plînge de lipsa de conside­ raţie a sudanezilor, musulmani şi ei� faţă de “albi”. La

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Sidjilmâsa, oraşul aurului, el întîlneşte, cu oarecare uimire ce-i drept, pe unul din compatriotii săi din Ceuta, fratele unui anumit Al-Buchri, pe care îl cunoscuse, în China… Islamul acestei epoci abundă in dezrădăcinaţi de acest gen pe’care ospitalitatea musulmană (asemănă­ toare ospitalităţii ruseşti) ii primeşte fără neincredere, de la Atlantic la Pacific.
• Aceste mişcări ar fi inimaginabile fără oraşe puter­ nice•. Fireşte, acestea se înmuljesc rapid în Islam. Ele sînt motoarele care fac posibilii această imensă circulajie.

Căci totul trece prin ele – mărfurile, animalele de povară, oamenii, ba chiar şi bunurile culturale cele mai preţioase. Din acestea din unnă, în di-urn spre EUropa, ar putea fi schiţat un imens tablou de onoare (heteroclit şi care nu va fi niciodată complet): plante îndepărtate (trestia de zahăr, bumbacul), viennele de mătase,• hîrtia, busola, cifrele indiene (numite arabe), praful de puşcă (probabil) şi, concomitent cu o anumită medicină foarte reputată, germenii celor mai teribile maladii epidemice, originare din China şi India, patriile holerei şi ciumei…
în mare, toate aceste oraşe se aseamănă. Străzile sint strîmte, în general Î1;l pantă pentru ca apa ploilor să le cureţe de la sine. Atît de strîmte incît adeseori doi
măgari cu . povară nu pot trece unul pe lingă celălalt. La şapte coti – lăţimea prevăzută de un hadit al

profetului – trecerea ar fi• posibilă, dar casele uzurpă spaţiul străzii – verticalitatea nu este decît teoretic un obstacol; în plus, ele sîltt construite pe coilsole, de cele mai inulte ori, ca şi casele occidentale din Evul Mediu. Totul se explică prirî faptul că Islamul interzice (eu exceptii cum sînt Meeca, la Dj�dda, portul ei, şi Cairo) c�sele cu etaje, s�mn de orgoliu din partea proprietarilor, demn de dispreţ.

Dată fiinddtSzordinea, absenta oricărei acb:ni:ilistraţii municipale, de îndată ee un oraş cunoaşte o creştere demografică ceva mai serioasă, aceste case joase îi invadează spatiul, se împing unele in altele, Se înghesuie.

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Francezul Thevenot se mira în 1657 că ,.la Cairo nu există nici o stradă principală, ci o-mulţime de străduţe care şerpuiesc în toate părţile, ceea ce dovedeşte că

toate casele au fost conStruite fără nici un plan, fiecare ocupînd tot locul pe care se putea construi, făr8 a ţine seama de faptul că barează sau nu o cale de trecere.”

Un alt francez, Volney, descrie aceleaşi străzi un secol ;mai tirziu (1782): �Cum nu sînt deloc pavate, mulţimea de oameni, de cămile, măgaţi şi cîini care se înghesuie ridică un praf supărător; deseori proprietarii stropesc cu apă în faţa porţii, astfel încît prafului îi urmează noroiul şi aburii rău-mirositori. Contrar obice…

iului din Orient, casele sirit cu două sau trei etaje, terminîndu-se cu o terasă pavată sau podită cu pămhlt; majoritatea sînt construite •din pămhlt şi cărămizi prost arse, iar altele din piatră moale cu granulaţie frumoasă scoasă din muntele Moqattam din• vecinătate; toate aceste case au aerul unei închisori pentru că le lipSesc ferestre spre stradă … “. Aceeaşi imagine referitoare la Istanbul, o regăsim la mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea: ;,tiu numai vehiculele, dar chiar şi caii trec cu greutate. Strada Divanului, cea .mai largă în această epocă, nu depă­ şeşte 2,50—–metri:3 în unele locuri.”

Toate acestea sînt, în geneml, adevămte. Cu toate acestea, în secolul al XI-lea Cairo. avea case de şapte pînă’ la douăsprezece etaje, iar în �colul al IX- lea Sămarră avea o şosea dreaptă de mai mulţi kilometri, cu o lăţime de 50′ pînă la 100 metri. Excepţii care conf’rr­ mă regula!

Oricît de strîmtă ar fi, strada într -o ţară musulmariă este întotdeaunâ deo’sebit de animată, este loc de întîlni­ re, mai ales pentru uri popor căruia ii place să se exteriorizeze. Ea este “artera esenţială… unde îşi dau întîlnire povestitorii, cîntăreţii, îmblînzitorii de şerpi, saltimbancii, tămăduitorii, şarlatanii, bărbi�rii – toate aceste ocupaţii fiind foarte suspectate de canoniştii şi moraliştii islamici-. Mai sînt şi copiii cu jocurile lor, uneori violente …”. • Circulaţiei străzii i se adaugă confortul, rezervat femeilor, circulaţiei pe terase�

Dezordine deci. Totuşi, aceasta nu exclude niciodată un plan de ansamblu, cu atît mai mult cu cît acesta este

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legat de structurile înseşi ale oraşului, de via� loc;uitori­ lor lui. în centru – Marea Moschee, cu predica săptă­ mînală, �spre care totul se adună şi de la care totul se răsfrră, ca şi cînd ar fi o inimă” (J. Berque). În apro­ piere – bazarul, adică cartierul negustorilor cu străzile prăvăliilor (sfiq) şi caravanseraiurile, care sint antre­ pozite de mărfuri, băile publice, care s-au implantat sau au subzistat in pofida• numeroaselor blamări p� care şi le-au atras. Meşteşugarn sînt dispuşi în mod concentric, începînd 4e la Marea Mos.chee: mai întîi fabricanţii şi negustorii de parfumuri şi tămîie, apoi prăvăliile unde se vînd stofe şi cuverturi, bijutierii, mărfurile alimentare, şi în sîrrşit meseriile cel mai puţin nobile – pielarii, cizmarii, fierarii,olarii, şelarii, boiangiii … Cînd ajungi la ei, ai atins deja limitele oraşului.

Fiecare din aceste amplasamente corporative este în principiu fixat o dată pentru totdeauna. De asemenea, în general, cartierul Prinţului (maghzen) se află la marginea oraşului, la adăpost de• răzmeriţe şi alte surprize popula­ re. Alături de el şi sub protectia sa – cartierul evreiesc, mellah. Acestui mozaic i se adaugă diversitatea •foarte mare a cartierelor rezidenţiale, împărţite potrivit etniilor şi religiilor (45 de cartiere în Antiohl,a). ,.Or�l este un agregat de cetăţi trăind sub teama masacrului.” Se poate deci afrrma că colonizarea , occidentală nu a creat nicăieri segregaţia rasială, chiar dacă, ce-i drept,• nu a
st�primat-o.
Sub • dezordinea , aparentă, acpstă rigiditate este accentuată prin faptul că adesea, oraşele se află între ziduri cu porJi somj:Jtuoase, înconjurate de cimitire vaste• uzurpate cu dificultate de urbanism. Astăzi, circulaţia necesară vehiculelor şi automobilelor impune transfor­
marea lor, uneori exagerată. în elanul lărgiriistrăzilor, Istanbulul s-a transfonnat în ultimii ani într-un şantier

neverosimil de amenajări: case tăiate in două ale căror 1 porţi interioare se deschid în gol, noua stradă principală în care dau străzi laterale suspendate ,.ca nişte văi glaciare”, păduri de •canalizări devenite aeriene după debleieri precipitate …

Dacă este adevărat, in mare, că oraşele musulmane nu aveau nici libertăţile politice şi nici sensul ordinii

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arhitecturale , pe . care aglomerările din Occident au încercat să le dobîndeasCă deîndată ce s-au dezvoltat suficient, ele dispuneau totuşi de toate funcţiile care constituie un oraş, inclusiv o burghezie întotdeauna conformistă, inclusiv mase de ‘săraţi, de meşteşugari nevoiaşi, de borfaşi, cu toţii trăind’ mai mult sau, mai puţin din “ftrimiturile de la masa bogaţilor”, inclusiv o viaţă rafma tă, mai liberă decît în alte părţi şi ale cărei plăceri par rigoriştilor de o perversitate intolerabilă. Ele sînt citadele ale spiritului graţie şcolilor de p e .lîngă moschei şi universităţilor. ln sf’rrşit, ele constituie o atracţie constantă pentru ţăranii din împrejurimi, pe care-i îmblînzesc şi -i domesticesc, potrivit vechii reguli a jocului, imuabilă de cînd există oraşe şi sate. “Nu există în lume oameni care să aibă mai ,multă nevoie de o corecţie, pentru că sînt hoţi, tîlhari, _ răufăcători”

-: afrrmă un orăşean din Sevilla, referindu-se ‘ f ă r ă îndoială la disputele fără sf’rrşit care se iscă la porţi,

1 sau chiar în piaţă, cu ţăranii ce vînd animale, carne sau piei, unt rînced, palmieri pitici, “iarbă verde” sau mazăre. Dar şi orăşenii sînt vigilenţi şi şireţi, şi işi iau

• revanşa înzecit. Hoţul este furat la rîndul lui rară nici un scrupul, căci orăşqtnUl Islamwui, mai �uit chiar decit cel din Occident, ţine ferm în mină lumea •rurală deosebit de rudimentarăaflată la porţile sale; astfel, Dam�ul controlează ţăranii vecini de la Ghouta şi muntenii din Djebel Druze; Algerul – corsarii, ţăranii
din Fărs, din Miti<lja şi masivele kabyle; burghezii
. îmbrăcaţi î n . mătase din• Grenada – ţăranii săraci îmbrăcaţi în bunibac de pe munţii din apropiere.

Dar aceste trăsături sînt caracteristice tuturor oraşe­

lor. Originalitatea aglomerărilor musulmane în raport cu Occidentul, constă fără .îndoială � precocitatea lor• pe. de o parte, şi în dimensiunile excepţionale, pe de alta.
hnportanţa o�lor Islamului nu trebuie să ne uimească: ea ţine de esenţa civilizaţiei sale. OraŞe,

drumuri, corăbii, caravane, pelerinaje, toate formează un întreg: sînt fascicule de mişcări, aceste “linii de forţă”

ale vieţii musulmane, despre care • îi place lui Louis Massignon să vorbească.
CAPITOLUL III

GRANDOAREA ŞI DECLINUL ISLAMULUI
(secolele VIII-XVIII)
Apogeul, splendoarea lslamului se situează între secolele al VIII-lea şi al’ Xll� lea. ‘toată lumea este de acord Îil această privinţă. Dar de cînd a început decăderea lui? Dacă acceptaţi explică.ţia frecventă, refluxul decisiv ar fi început încă în secolul al Xlll-lea. Dar aceasta în­ seamnă a confunda două lucruri foarte diferite: sîu:şitul unei preponderenţe şi sîu:şitul unei civilizaţii.

Îtr secolul al XIII-lea este foarte clar că Islamul. şi-a pierdut poziţia de lider. Dar pierderea foarte periculoasă de Viteză în ce- l priveşte nu a început pentru el decît o dată cu secolul •al XVIII-lea, ceea ce, la scara lentă a civilizaţiilor, înseamnă în uim.ă cu foarte puţin timp. Soarta lui este cea a numeroase naţiuni, numite astăzi subdezvoltate întrucît au . ratat Revoluţia industrială, prima revoluţie capabilă să facă lumea să progreseze cu viteza fantastică a •maşinii.

Acest insucces evident nu a determinat moartea Islatnului ca civilizaţie. El a rămas doar în urma Europei cu • o întîrziere materială de două seeole, dar ce şecole!

Nu a existat civilizatie m�.:�sulmană înaintţ!a secolului al VIII-lea sau al IX-lea

Islamul ca realitate politică s-a născut în cîţiva ani, cei cîţiya ani le-au trebuit arabilor pentru a cuceri un im­ periu. Dar civilizaţia islamică a provenit din unirea

10s

acestui imperiu cu civilizaţii antice. Pentru aceasta a fost nevoie de mult timp, de generaţii întregi.

• Puţine convertiri, numeroşi supuşi: primul ciclu al cuceririlor, ciclul arab, a creat un imperiu, un stat, dar încă nu a creat o Civilizaţie.

La început, cuceritorul arab nu a fucercat deloc să converţească. Dimpotrivă, el s-a limitat să exploateze bogatele civilizaţii ajunse la bunul său plac: Persia, Siria, Egiptul,. Africa (adică Africa romană, i.friqya arabilor, corespunZînd Tunisiei de azi), Spania (adică Andaluzia, al-Andalus). Dacă un creştin, incerca să se convertească

la ls!am, era pedepsit cu biciul. Plata impozitelor ftind
rezervată nemusulmanilor, la ce bun să-şi fi redus noii
stăpîni veiliturile? •
• �Populaţiile’ ţărilor ocupate.�. tşi păstrează modul de

viaţă,’ fără a fi stinjenite, dar . .. sint tratate ca atlimale superioare, de care ai grijă pentru că plătesC cea mai mare parte a impozitelor” (Gaston Wiet). .

Aşa se va întîmpla sub primii patru succesori ai lui Muhammad,”califii buni conducători” (632-660) (calif înseamnă succesor, locotenent, vice -gerant, după cum consideră traducătorul), apoi sub califti umayyazi

(660—750), care-şi stabilesc capitala la Damasc. în timpul acestor ani de războaie continue, niciodată sau aproape niciodată motivul religios nu s-a aflat pe primul plan, Astfel, faţă de Bizanţ, lupta este politică, nu- de la religie la religie.

Mai mult, •in ţările • cucerite administraţia rămîne in

miinile “ihdigenilor”, iar scriptele se ţin in•continuare in greacă sau pehlvi (persana mijlocie). în sfrrşit, arta

însăşi rămine de inspiraţie elenistă, chiar in construcţia moscheilor. Curţile centrale, colonadek, arcadele, cupolele reproduc modelul bizantin. Doar minaretul – deşi evocă clopotnita creştină – este driginal, conceput pentru chemarea la rugăciune făcută de muezin.
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• Cotitura abbasizilor: abia spre mijlocul secolului al VIII-lea, schimbări decisil’e jal’orizează o largă fră­ mîntare poUtică, socialiişi curînd intelectuală, cînd califatul trece la dinastia abbasizilor iar flamura lor neagră înlocuieşte flamura albă a umayyazilor.

Atunci, lumea musuhnană se repliază spre est şi se îndepărtează puţin de Mediterana care o fascinase pînă atunci. O dată cu noii califi, capitala Islamului se deplasează de la Damasc la Bagdad, favorizînd revanşa masivă a iranienilor şi .altor “clienţi” şi popoare supuse. S-a srrrşit cu domnia arabului “pur sîpge”, care a durat un secol cel mult, timp de trei sau patru generaţii strălu­ cite, timp în care “C?tSta superioară” de războinici se pierde în deliciile bogăţiei şi luxului, civilizaţiei. Aceas­ tă civilizaţie despre• care lbn Khaldiin, gentilom arab din Andaluzia, va- spune mai tirziu că este “răul personi­ ficat”.

Rolurile principale revin atunci firesc vechilor ţări civilizate, in momentul în care o mare prosperitate materială îşi arată pretutindeni chipul. Pe la 820, venit:urile califului sint poate de cinci ori mai mari decît venitul anual al Imperiului bizantin de atunci. Se acumu­ lează averi uriaşe datorită capitalismului cemercial precoce, ale cărui legături se intind pînă în China şi India, Golful Persic, Etiopia, Marea Roşie, Ifriqya, A,ndaluzia …

Capitalism, cuvîntul nu este chiar atît de an�cronic. De la un capăt la altul al domeniului planetar al Islamu­ lui, comerţul cu mărfuri nu mai are limite. Un autor arab; Hariri, pune î n -guni unui negustor: ..Vreau să duc şofran persan în China, unde am auzit că are un preţ

mare, iar apoi porţelan din China în Grecia, brocart grec în India, oţel indian la Alep, sticlă de Alep în Yemen şi
stofe vărgate _din Yerilen în Persia… ” La Basra regle­ myntările între _ negustori se fac potrivit principiului numit astăzi clearing.

Schimburile presupun oraşe. Se, ridică cetăţi enorme: ele conduc jocul, nu nlJtil,lliBagdadul (care, de la 762 pînă la distrugerea lui brutală de către mongoli, in 1258, va fi fără îndoială cea. mai mare, cea mai bogată

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capitală a Lumii Vechi, cu siguranţă un �.oraş lumină”), ci şi, nu departe de el, pe Tigru, gigantica Săinarră (fondată în 836), cît şi marele port Basra, Cairo, Da­ masc, Tunis (această nouă încarnare a Cartaginei), Cordoba …

. Tute aceste oraşe, plecînd de la limba Coranuiui şi poeziile tradiţionale, au fabricat sau refabricat (cuvîntul este doar puţin prea tare) araba’ numită “literală” – limbă savantă, cu siguranţă artificială sau inai degrabă literară, care va fi idiomul comun tuturor ţărilor islam.i­ ce, ca latina pentru ‘ creştini. În raport cu ea, araba din Arabia şi celelalte limbi vorbite vor căpăta tot maf mult aspectul unor dialecte. La Bagdad nu se elaborează door o limbă, ci o literatură, o gînd�, o fervoare ecume-nică, o civiliza-ţie, iar de aici va radia departe. .

Înaintea abbasizilor are loc deja o răsturnare serioasil în recrutarea funcţionarilor. în 700, califul umayyad Ald-al-Malik îl cheamă pe viitorul călugăr Ioan Da­ maschinul (655-749), consilierul său pe atunci, şi-1 anunţă că a hotărît să suprime din acel moment limba greacă din toate actele administraţiei publice. “Ceea ce – povesteşte istoricul arab Baladhori – a ‘făcut multă neplăcere lui . Sargun (Sergius, alt nume al lui Ioan Damaschinul), care, f6arte trist, l-a părăsit pe calif;
întîlnindu-se
cu nişte funcţionari greci, el le-a spus:
.« Că�taţi-vă o altă, profesiune . rentabilă, căci cea pe
care o aveti acum v-a fost retrasă de Domnul.»” •

Era silfŞitul unui modus vivendi, unei lungi faze de
toleranţă reciprcx;ă între creştini şi musulmani; o eră absolut nouă înceg.ea.
Prin unitatea – lingvistică, se crea un vehicul indispen­ sabil schimburilor intelectuale, afacerilor; guvernării, administraţiei. Scrisorile negustorilor evrei despre care am vorbit sînt redactate in arabă, deşi scrise cu caractere ebraice.

Din acest instrument lingvistic, cultura va căpăta avantaje imense. Fiul celebrului Hăriin ar-Rashid, Ma’miin (813-833), va pune să Se traducă în arabă un număt considerabil de lucrări străine, mai ales greceşti. Difuzarea acestor cunoştinţe a fost foarte rapidă, cu atît

mai mult cu cît1 Islamul’ a cunoscut foarte curînd hîrtia,

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mult mai ieftină decît pergamentul. • La Cordoba, se spune, califul al-Hakam al II-lllll(961-976) poseda p bibliotecă cu 400 •ooomanuşcrise (cu 44 volume de catalog) şi chiar dacă aceste cifre sînt exagerate, trebuie• amintit faptul că biblioteca lui Carol al V -lea (fiul lui Ioan cel Bun) nu con,ţinea decît 900.

O întreagă transformare int�rnă are loc în cursul acestor s �ole importatite. Religia lui Muhamm ad se complică îÎl exegeze qe tip bizantin, se dublează cu o mistică în care specialiştii văd renaşterea neoplatonis­ mului. Chiar şi formidabila criză a s�hismei şiite pare să iasă din adîncîmi în parte străine primului Islam arab. Şiiţii sînt legaţi de cucernicul calif Ali, asasinat de umayyazi. Ei se •opum sunniţilor, care reprezintă: ma­

joritatea şi tradiţia Islaniului. La unul din locurile lor de pelerinaj, Kerbela, în Irak, se adună şi astăzi mii de cre:­

dmcioşi. “Ali seamănă cu un al doilea Christos, iar ma­ ma lui, Fătima, cu Sîmta Fecioară. Moartea lui Ali şi a fiilor lui este relatată.”ca uila din patimi” (E. F. Gautier).

Astfeţ Islamul, pînă în profunzimea sufletului său religios, se constnJieşte împrumutînd• de la vechile civilizaţii oiientale şi mediteraneene întinerite, atrase de atuncţ într-o misiime laică Şi spirituală comună şi în. reţeaua unei limbi comune; Arabia nu a fost ‘decît un episod; civilizaţia musulmană, dintr-un anume punct de vedere, nu începe decît o dată cu convertirile masive la Islam ale popoarelor nearabe, şi de asemenea, .o da� cu • generalizarea şcolilor prin “Unună”, unitatea credincioşi� lor, întinsă de la Atlantic la Pamir. O dată în plus, vinul vechi umple ulcioarele noi.

Vîrsta de aur a lslamului: secolele VIII-XII ,

Timp de patru sau cinci secole, Islamut’ a fost cea mai strălucită civiliiaţie din întreaga Lume Veche. Această
vîrstă de aur . se întinde, în mare, de la domnia fiului lui

Hăriinar-Rashid, Ma ‘ miin (813-833, cptorul Casei ŞtiinJei de la Bagdad, bibliotecă, centru de traduceri şi observator astronomic în acelaşi timp), pînă la moartea lui A veroes, ultimul dintre marii filozofi musuitJ.?.ani,

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survenită la Marrakeş, în 1198, cînd era în vîrstă de peste 72 de• ani . şi cevll. Dar istoria ideilor şi artelor nu explică, singură,• marile momente ale Islam ului.

• Inainte de toate, contextul istoriei generale se dove­ deşte decisiv.

Un istoric al filozofiei musulmane, Uon Gautier, afmnă că perioadele favorabile gmdiriiIslamului au fost ,.epoci

de pace şi prosperitate generală, care au avut şansa de

a primi protecţia .unui calif luminat şi atotputernic: aşa cum, în Orient, în secolele al VIII-lea şi al IX-lea, califii abbasizi care, de la al-Mansiir pînă la al-Mutawakkil,au favorizat fără întrerupere, timp de aproape un secol, răspîndirea•: în lumea musulmană a ştiinţei şi filozofiei •elene, graţie unei imense ac.ţiuqi de traduceri făcute de creştini nestorieni… tot aşa în Occident, în secolul al XII- lea, califii almohazi, obişnuiţi cu îndelungate conver­ saţii speculative cu medicul şi filozoful lor au favorizat acest lucru. Sau,., dimpotrivă, perioadele favorabile au fost cele în care decadenţa Imperiului facilitează gîndito­ rilor intransigenţi alegerea, dintre micii potentaţi, a unui patron binevoiţor, aşa cum a fost în prÎlJ.ta jumă.tate a secolului al IX-lea emirul din Alep, • Sayf al-Dawla, protectorul lui ai-Fărăbi…”
După cum se vede, Uon Gautier pune problema în termeni de istorie politică. Civilizaţia a eepins de prinţi, de “despoţi luminaţi”. Deteriorarea rapidă a califatului din Bagdad semnalată de atîtea accidente, antrenînd o fărînliţare nemaivăzută a spaţiului politic, nu a dăunat gîndirii, ci dimpotrivă, a favorizat o anumită libertate intelectuală, chiar şi numai prin faptul că a permis vreunui literat să fugă dintr-un stat sau să se sustragă unei protecţii princiare într-un stat yecin, alegind o nouă protecţie. Va fi o practică obişnuită în Italia Renaşterii sau în Europa secolelor al XVIT-lea şi al XVIII-lea. Islamul a avut adeseori acelaşi privilegiu.

Dar aceste privilegii • ale spiriţului, singure,. nu sînt niciodată suficiente. Ele sîrit sprijinite, sînt explicate de puternice privilegii materiale.

Pe Ia • 750, • Islamul şi-a atffis frontierele externe fto
esenţiale; expansiunea lui se afla atunci bloc::ată de ripostele sirăine (Constantinopolul, asediat în 718, este salvat de curajul lui Uon Isaurianul şi de focul grecesc;

Galia şi Occidentul sînt menţinut� prin victoria de la Poitiers, 732 sau 733, şi revolta concomitentă din Maghreb). Astfel, exterior, se stabileşte un fel de calm (relativ, dar real) şi, ln contrapondere, în tot Imperiu l, o economie vastă îşi găseşte fundamentele, ritmurile de creştere, prosperitatea.
Acest avint antrenează instalarea unei economii de
piaţă, a unei economii monetare, a unei”comercializări”
în creştere a produselor agricole: consumate în parte pe loc, excedentul lor devine marfă, care . va aliment.a otaşele, permiţînd dezvoltarea lor. Comerţul cu curmale

pune în mişcare în fiecare an peste 100 000de cămile de
poyruă. Halele comerciale ale qraşelor se numesc casa
pepenilor galbeni, iar pepenii de Merv, în Transoxiana,

se bucură de o reputaţie deosebită. Desbidrataţi, e.i sînt expediaţi în mod masiv departe, în vest; proaspeţi, ei ajung la Bagdad printr-o retea specială de poştă,

ambalaţi într-o pungă de piele cu gheaţă. Culturli trestiei• de zahăr naşte o industrie.
în ce priveşte produsel� alime�tare, trebuie evidenţia­
tă dezvoltarea morăritului, prin mori de apă (ca cele de lîngă Bagdad) sau a morilor de vînt, semnalate din 947
la Seistan, în vreme ce la Basrab este folosit curentul
Tigrului pentru a pune în mişcare roţile morilor pluti­ toate.

Această economie în dezvoltare explică avîntul multor industrii – a fieru lui, lemnului, textilelor (in, mătase, •bumbac, lînă) şi o dezvoltare imensă în Orient a culturilor de bumbac. Covoarele de la Buhara, din

Armenia, din Persia sînt deja celebre. tlasrah importă mari cantităţi de cînnîz şi indigo pentru vopsirea stofelor
în roşu sau, albastru. Indigoul indian, care este adus prin Kabul, are reputaţia de a fi mai fm decît• cel din Egiptul supţrior. •

Toate aceste evoluţii • au nenumjirate consecinţţ. Economia monetară răstoarnă fundamentul unei. socie­ tăţi înainte de toate senioriale şi ţărăneşti: bogaţii devin şi mai bogaţi, insolenţi; săracii – şi mai nevoiaşi. Dacă adăugăm faptul că extinderea tehnicilor de irigare

1 1 1

impune, întăreşte şerbia tăranilor, pe care bogăţia Islamului îi permite acestuia să- i cumpere ‘cu aproaperde cinci-şase ori mai scump decît alţi sclavi de . eate are nevoie, nu sînt greu de ghicit tensiuilile sociale ce se nasc.:

•, Chiar dacă această prosperitate nu a dirijat totul, ea explică numeroase lucrpri şi mai ales climatul revoluţia� nar, lanţul neîntrerupt de tulbuiări ‘rurale şi urbane, l�gate deSeori de mişcări naţionaliste, cum este cazul în
• moderne:
• naţionalisrp, capitalism, luptă de clasă. Ascultaţi acest pamflet scris de al-Ifriki pe la 1000:..Nu, cu siguranţă nu mă voi ruga Domnului cîtă vreme voi rămine sărac. Lăsaţi rugăciunile şeicului, , comandantului armatei ale cărui pivniţe pocnesc de pline ce sînt. De c� să mă rog? SîÎlt puternic? Am un palat, cai, haine boga�, centură de aur? Să mă rog cînd nu am nici cel mai mic petec de pămint ar însemna pură ipocrizie.”

Cum totul Se leagă, ereziile islamice care .abundă în aceste secole de acti:vitate intensă , au, toate; rădăcini sociale şi , PQlitice proprii, la fel ca şi ereziile Europei medievale. Un grup beterodox se naşte, se dezvoltă, apoi se deformează în pofida ‘persecuţiilor sau conivenţelor. Istoria gîndirii musulmane . este legată fără• sfirşit ‘ de’ aceste grupuri explozive.
• Pentru a caracteriza JIÎrsta de aur a lslamului, isto­ ric�l A. Mez a folosit cuvîntu.l ambiguu Renaştere.

Aceasta pentru a sugera 1că strălucirea ei nu se poote compara decît cu cea a minunatei Renaşteri italiene. Îil. orice caz, comparaţia are avantajul că atrage atenţia asupra , amestecului de bogăţie materială şi bogăţie intelectuală care au constituit momente de glorie excepţi­ onală pentru civilizaţia Islamului, la fel ca şi pentru cea a Italiei secolului al XV-lea. ,
Şi una şi ceaÎaltă se sprijină pe societăţi urbane privilegiate de comert şi bogăţie; şi una şi cealaltă se dezvoltă în• cercuri strălucite şi foarte restrinse a unor spirite de excepţie’ care, adăpîndu-se masiv de la civili-

1 12

zaţia antică pe care o glorifică şi o y�nerează, trăiesc cu secole înaintea propriei epoci. în vreme ce în exterior, în ambele cazuri, barbarii ,abia îşi maschează ameninţă­ rile.

Pentru Italia de la sîrrşitul secolului al XV -lea barbarii sînt muntenii eantoanelor elveţiene, sau germaniiaflaţi la nord de Pasul Brenner, sau francezii, sau spaniolii încălţaţi cu espadrile, sau turcii (ocuparea fortăreţd Otranto în 1480) . Pentru Islamul lui Avicenna sau Aver� roes, barbari sînt ttJrcii selgiukizi, berberii, saharienii sau cruciaţii . din Occident. Deseori barbarii sînt •chemaţi, sol’icitaţi, cum se va întîmpla în Italia. Din primele momente ale califatului de la Bagdad s-a făcut apel la sclavii şi mercenarii turci. Sclavii sînt oferiti cumpără­ torilor chiar de părinţii lor, “preocupaţi de viitorul lo�. în Spania, multă vreme nu a fost nevoie decît de cîteva monede•de aur pentru a scăpa de creştinii invadatori din nord• şi â-i trimite înapoi la ei. Âpoi, într-o bună zi lupta devine serioasă. Atunci regele Sevillei, al-Mu’tamid este constrîns să se apere de barbarii creştini făcînd agel la ajutorul altor barbari, almoravizii din nordul Africii.
• Văzută în ansamblu, între datele pe care le-am reţinu.t (813- 1198), civiliiafia islamică •se afirmă – ceea ce •este contradictoriu doar în aparenjă – ca universală şi în acelaşi timp regi(Jnală, adică unitară şi în acelaşi timp diferită.

Unitară: vedem pretutindeni construindu-se moschei, şcoli superioare potrivit unei arte uniforme, voit “abstrac­ te”. Ele prezintă un model regulat (curte centrală, arcade, bazin pentru abluţiuni, mihrab, nişă indicînd direcţia în care trebuie îndreptată rugăciune!\, şi minbar, amvonul pentru predică în nava• hipostilă a c�edincioşi­ lor� minaret); ele folosesc aceleaşi elemente arhitecturale: coloane cu capiteluri, arce (în forme diverse: frînte, în formă de potcoavă, ttilobate; multilobate, în formă de carenă de corabie, stalactite), cupole cu nervuri, mo­ zaicuri, cerarnici, în sîrrşit decoraţia caligrafică insinuan­ tă a arabescurilor.

‘ 1 13

O mie şi una
Unitară: pretutindeni ascultăm o poezie fidelă aceloraşi procedee şi aceloraşi locuri comune. Ea glorifi­ că pe Dumnezeu (trandaf’rrul fără pată, Dumnezeu), natura, dragostea, vitejia, shtgele nobil, calul, cămila (“masivă ca un munte . .. O centură face pămîntului. paşii ei”), ştiinţa, vinul interzis şi florile, toate florile. în întreaga lume islamică circulă, de asemenea, aceleaşi povestiri populare, provenite din India, cele pe care le

putem citi în culegerea de nopJi, redactată

�it,•în secolul al XIV-lea, la capătul unei îndelungate
gestaţii .
. Unitară: filpzofia ifa lsafa) este pretutihdeni reluarea gip.diriielene a lui Aristotel şi a peripateticienilor, ea constituie efortul imens de a-1 situa pe Dunmezeu într�un cosmos care, după exemplul grecilor, este declarat etern, nefiind prin urmare rodul nici unei creaţii.

Unitară: întîlnim de asemenea .L}retuti.tideni aceleaşi tehnici, aceleaşi meşteşuguri şi, după cum aflăm din săpături (ca cele de la Madinat az-Zahră’, lîngă Cordo­ ba), acelaşi mobilier, ace!eaşi obiecte indu�triale. •şi pretttindeni aceeaşi modă, dictată de gustul Bagdadului care dă tonul. în întreaga Spanie, această ţară-terminus, poate fi urmărită sosirea acestor b\muri culturale în deplasare, moda supranumelor preluată , de . la poeţii ce.ebri ai Orientului şi de care s� face exces, g�nerali­ zarea bumusului o dată cu sosirea almomvizilor; temele literare la modă sau reţetele medicale …

Pentru a . încheia cu cîteva imagini fugitive, să semnalăm, din Persia pînă în Andaluzia, peregrinările jonglerilor, de obicei egipteni, sai.J ale cîntăreţelor şi dansatoarelor formate la Medina sau Bagdad, îmbrăcate în galben în Orient, în roşu în Occident şi despre care vorbesc toţi poeţii. Pretutindeni îi găsim pe jucătorii de şah şi de kurăg, a cesta din urmă, – foarte la mod� folosind figuri de cai drapaţi, făcute din lemn. Jocul em captivant: “Căpitanul din •al Mu’tamid, lbn Martin, a fost surprins la Cordoba, în casa lui, de un detaşament de soldaţi duşmani în mo�ntul în care juca kurăg.”

încă două imagini: cea a vizirului – regent al Khurăsănului la începutul secolului al X-lea – ‘ care “a trimis emisari în toate ţările pentru a se informa despre

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al X-lea
obiceiurile tuturor curţilor şi dregătoriilor din Imperiul grec; Turkestan, China, lrak, Siria, Egipt, tata zengilor, din Zabul şi �buL El a cercetat cu atenţie info �tiile şi a retmut toate obiceiurile. pe care le-a considerat a fi cele mai bune” pentru a le ilnpune la curtea şi in 3dmi­

nistraţia din Buhara; sau, ca să răminem de astă dată in limitele stricte ale ‘lwnii musulmane, imaginea califului Hakam al II-lea . din Cordoba; care cwnpăra cărţile al:­

cătuite în •Persia, fu Siria sau aiurea de cwn apăreau şi care “a trimis o mie de dinari de aur pur la Abu’l-F&radj

ai-Isfahăni pentru a obţine primul exemplar din celebra antologie a acestuia” (Relian).

• Totuşi, tlceastă unittltecu�rtdă iau distruge particu­ larităţile evidente şi pline de villţă.

în timpul marii frămintări a Imperiului, in secolul al X-lea, fiecare regiune redobindeşte puţină aqtodetenni­ nare şi dintr-odată respiră după cum doreşte, reafrr­ mindu-şi geniul particular care, deşi a Sacrificat şi a împrumutat mult de la ansamblu, s-a conservat totuşi cu tenacitate. O geografie deosebită se conturează atunci. •

Spania musulmană, după diverse adaptări, elaborări şi contaminări, ti.nde să devină ea insăşi o Spanie in succesiunea multiplelor Spanii din istorie.

Miri mult incă, Iranu l îşi afumă particularităţile vii şi• puternice. Califatul de la Bagdad i-a redat elanul, respiraţia proprie: Bagdadul este un oraŞ iranian. Epoca abbasizilor face avere din pămintul ars emirilat, •a cărui patrie este Persia, şi din faianta cu reflexe metalice, una din celelalte giuvaeruri . ale sale. Pridvoarele imense, iwdn, amintesc palatele lui Chosroes. Araba işi IJ1enţine poziţia lingvistică dominantă, dar persana, . scrisă de altfel cu caractere arabe, devine o altă mare limbă literară care nu va inceta să radieze departe, miri ales spre India (şi mult miri tîrziu in întreg Imperiul otoman). Fiind o limbă pe jumătate populară, ea •are avantajul că este accesibilă unui pUblic •destul de vast; ea profită de asemenea de dispariţia aproape totală a limbii greceşti.

Poetul Ferdousi scrie • ta sfll’Şitul secolului

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Cartea Regilor,
spre gloria vechilor iranieni. Vulgarizarea

ştiinţifică a persanei devine puternică începînd din secolul al XI-lea.

Persia se prezintă cu siguranţă drept o civilizaţie

naţională, un individ viguros, dar de acum înainte în interiorul vastei civilizatii islamice. Magnifica expoziţie de la PariS din octombrie 1961 asupra artei iraniene este
seinnificativă sub acest aspect: ea ‘deosebeşte net două perioade – înaintea Islatn11luişi în timpul Islamului, între ele existînd o ruptură clară, o profundă transformare,•

dar şi citeva continuităţi.

Această opoziţie – universalitate şi regionalism – se regăseşte în întreaga lume ţslamică, dacă ar fi să ne) g�dim doar la cazUrile extreme care au fost India musulmană, Indonezia musulmană, Africa neagră, plămădită de Islam şi care totuŞi rămîne. uimitor ea insă§i.
In India, contaminarea a două civilizaţii a dat loc
unei veritabile arte indo-islamice, ale cărei momente de glorie nu vor începe decît abia în secolul al XII-lea şi

mai cu seamă in al XIII-lea. La Delhi mai ales au rămas vestigii uimitoare, a căror; ciudăţenie se explică, de exemplu, prin faptul că pa moschee a oraşului, construită în 1193, a fost �oncepută de musulmani şi executată apoi de zidari ş� sculptori indieni care au amestecat volutele fi orale • fu stil indian cu ornamente caligr.uice arabe, Se proftlează o artă particulară în care, potrivit secolelor şi locurilor, influenţa hindusă sau influenţa musubnană domină rind pe .rînd, contaminate mereu una de’ alta pînă cind, in cele din urmă, în secolul al XVIII-lea, devin imposibil de diferenţiat una de cealaltă. .

La etajele sale superioare, civilizaţia musulmană constituie în aceste secole de aur un imens succes ştiinţific şi o relansare excepţională a filozofiei antice. Aceste succese nu sînt singure (să ne gindim• la literatu-ră), dar ele le �lipsează pe celelalte.

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Ştiintă şi filozofie

• Mai întîi, ştiinţa este domeniul în care’ ;sarozilrii” (cum sînt numiţi uneori musulmanii din aceste secole excepţionale) au adus cele mai multe noutăţi.

Cîtuşi de puţin .trigonometria şi algebra (numele este caracteristic). în trigonometrie ei au inventat sinusul, tangenta; se ştie că grecii nu măsurau unghiul decît plecînd de la coarda cercului înscris: sinusul este jumă­ tatea acestei coarde… în 82q Chosranien (supranumele lui Muhammad Ibn Musa) a publicat un tratat de algebră care ajunge pînă . la ecuaţiile de gradul doi; tradus în latină în secolul al XVI-lea, el va fi cartea de iniţiere a Occidentului. Ulterior, algebriştii musulmani vor re�olva ecuaţiile bipătrate…

La fel se poate aduce elogiu geografilor matema­ ticieni, observatoarelor astronomice şi instrumentelor lor (mai ales astrolabul), măsurătorilor dacă nu perfecte, cel puţin excelente pe care le�au obţinut pen� hititudini şi longitudini, corectînd erorile flagrante ale lm Ptolemeu. Chiar dacă sînt profesori şi nu elevi, să le dăm note foarte bune în optică, în chimie (distilarea alcoolului, fabricarea elixirelor, acidului sulfuric ), în farm acie (peste ju,mătate dfu leacurile pe care le va utiliza Occidentul vin din Islam: sena, reventul, cătipa roşie, nuca vomică, cîrmîzul, camforul, siropuri� poţiuni, plastuti, pomezi, unguente, apă distilată …); medicina lor este incontestabil excelentă. Chiar dacă descoperirea lui a rămas . nefolo­ sită, egipteanul lbn an-NafJS a pus în lumină mica circulaţie san�ină, circulaţia pulmonară, cu trei secole înaintea lui Michel Servet…
• In domeniul fiJozofiei, trebuie vorbit despre recuce­ rire, despre o reluare a esenţialului •temelor filozofiei• peripateticiene.

Elanul acestei recuceriri nu se limitează însă la reluare

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şi retransmitere – chiar şi atît rieftind un merit mic -, ci această reluare esli in acelaşi timp• prelutlgire, elucidate, creâţie. •

Filozofia lui Aristotel, transplantată in mediul musul­ man, se prezintă evident drept o explicaţie periculoasă a omului şi a lumii, faţă de o religie revelată, Islamul, care este o explicaţie generală a lumii de o rigoare ex­ tremă. Dar Aristotel îi obsedează, îi • subjugă pe toti

acei falasifaţi (adepţi ai falsafei, adică ai filozofiei gre­ ceşti). Şi aici comparaţia lt,Ji A. Mei cu Renaşterea are

senS: a existat un umanism musulman, sinuos� preţios, pe• care din lipsă de spaţiu îl vom prezenta sumar.
Fste vorba despre un indelung curent de gîndire, care
trebuie situat atît în timp cît şi in spaţiu. ti vom reduce la cinci nume esenţiale: Al-Kindi, Al-Fărăbi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazăli, Averroes. Avicenna şi Averroes siiitcei mai celebri, acesta din unnă fiind desigur cel mai …unportant prin repercusiunile imense, in intreaga Europă, � ceea ce
,se va numi averroism. _ .
Al-Kindf (nu cunoaştem decît data morţii sale, 873),
s-a născut in Mesopotamia, unde tatăl sau era guver­
nator la Ktîffah. Datorită locului său de naştere, • el este
numit “filozoful arabilor”. De origine turcă, născut in
870, Al-Fiirăbi aparţine secolului următor; el a trăit Ia.
Alep şi a murit la Damasc unde � însoţise pe protectorul său, Sayf al -Dawla, cu prilejul cuceririi acestui oraş (in 950). El este . “al doilea Maestru” (adică după
Aristotel). Avicenna (după numele adevărat Ibn Sină,
s-a n.ăscut la Afshena, în apropiere de Buhhara,in980,
şi a murit ‘ta Hamadhăn în 1037. Al-Ghazălfs-a născut în 1058 lîngă Tous şi a murit în 1111 la Tous. Spre sf’rrşitul vieţii lui, el devine mai degrabă anti-ftlozof, • avocatul pasio1,1at al religiei tradiţionale. Averroes, pe numele adevărat lbn Ruşd, s-a născut la Cordoba in
1126 şi a murit la Marrakeş la 10 noiembrie 1198.

Aceste predzăti topografice şi cronologice atestă că este vorba despre o cale prin timpul şi spaţiul lumii musulmane luate in intregul său, cu atît mai mult cu cît . în. jurul fiecăruia din_ marii actori au acţionat şi gindit grupuri de alţi filozofi, auditori, cititori pasionaţi. •
•Acest rezumat semnalează, in sf’rrşit, că ultima

118

flacără ftlozofică musulmană a ars in Spania; nu a fost cea mai înaltă, am mai Spus, dar ea i-a făcut cunoscuţi Occidentului pe filozofiiarabi şi pe insuşi Aristotel.

în această îndelungată perspectivă, adevărata întrebare este cea pe care Louis Gardet o pun:e cu forţă (răspunzînd de altfel negativ): A existat o filozofie musulmană? Ceea �e vrea să insemne în acelaşi timp: 1) a existat, de la Al-Kindi la Averroes, o filozofie continuă, unitară? 2) se explică această filozofie prin insuşi climatul Islam].llui? 3) este ea originală? Ca de multe ori, răspunsul tircumspect şi ambiguu (şi da şi nu) se dovedeşte mai mult decît o abilitate, o necesitate.

Da, această filozofie este unitară: închisă fără speranţă între gindirea greacă pe de o parte şi revelaţia corarucă pe de alta, ea se loveşte de aceste ziduri şi se întoarce, fără încetare, la punctul de plecare. Greciei, înclinaţiei Islamului pentru ştiinţă îi datorează ea tendinţele raţionaliste evidente, dar nu exclusive. Toţi filozofii sînt ceea ce am numi astăzi savanţi, preocupaţi de astronomie, de chimie. de matematici, întotdeauna de medicină. Prin medicină şi-au cîştig�t ei adesea favoru­ rile prinţilor şi şi-au asigurat existenţa. Avicenna a scris o enciclopedie de medicină (Canonul). Averroes va scrie şi el una şi multă vreme medicina musulmană va fi in Europa ultimul cuvint al Ştifuţei, pînă la, şi inclusiv, ,,medicii lui Moliere”.

Influenţa greacă dă filozofiei musulmane o unitate internă: “Autorul acestei cărţi – scrie Averroes in prefaţa pe care o face la Fizica – este Aristotel, fiul lui Nicomah, cel mai înţelept dintre greci. El a fondat şi a desăvîrşit logica, fizica •şi •metafizica. Spun că el le-a fondat pentru că toate lucrările… scrise inaintea lui despre aceste ştiinţe nu merită efortUl de a vorbi despre ele… Nici unul din cei care I-au. urmat pînă în zilele noastre, adică timp de peste 1500 de ani, nu a putut să adauge nimic la scrierile sale, şi nici să găsească in ele o eroare de o oarecare importanţă.” Admiratori ai lui . Arist�tel, ftlozofii arabi sînt constrînşi la un dialog cu o mie de avînturi şi reveniri între o revelaţie profetică, cea a Coranului, şi o explicaţie filozofică umană, cea a grecilor� explicaţie şi revelaţie ce impun, într-o dispută

119

angoasată, concesii reciproce între r-aţiune şi credinfă. Credinţa, revelată prin intennediul lui M�ad, a

transmis oamenilor un mesaj divin: va putea oare gîndito­ rul, singur, să descopere adevărul asupra lumii şi să facă din raţiunea lui judecătorul valoriidogmelor? în faţa acestei dileme, toţi ftlozofri noştri se dovedesc dialecticieni abili, prea abili poate. A vicenna, spune Maxime Rodinson, ,,nu a fost în van un geniu, el a găsit cheia.” Iată aproximativ soluţia lui, care propriu-zis nu-i aparţine: profeţii au revelat adevărurile superioare ,.sub formă de mituri, fabule, simboluri, alegorii, rellrezentări în imagini”. Este un limbaj pentru mase, menit să ‘le asigure fericirea. Filozoful, în ce -l priveşte, are dreptul să meargă mult dincolo de acest limbaj. El îşi rezervă astfel o mare libertate de opţiune, chiar atunci cînd, de la un limbaj la altul, contradicţia este formală, ireductibilă.

De exemplu, la fel ca grecii, filozofiicred de obicei

în veşnic ia lumii. Or, dacă aceasta a e�istat dintotdeauna, cum se poate înţelege creaţia,ftXată în timp de tevelaţie? Mergînd pînă la capătul logicii sale, Al-Fărăbi va afirma de asemenea că Dumneze� nu poate cunoaşte obiectele sau fiinţele individuale, ci numai conceptele, “universal urile”, în vreme ce Dumnezeul Comnului, ca şi cel din Vechiul Testament, “ştie tot ce se află pe pămînt şi .în tp.are. Nici o frunză nu cade fără ca El să nu ştie. Nu există nici un grăunte în tenebrele pămîntului, ilici un frr de iarbă, nici un pai care să nu fie consemnate într-o scriere explicită” (Coranul}. Alte contradicţii: Al-Fărâbi nu crede, fără îndoială, în nemurirea sufle­ tului. Dimpotrivă, Avicenna crede� dar nu crede în -reînvierea trupului, aşa cum afmriă Coranul. După moarte, sufletul ajunge �n.universul său – cel al fiinţelor imateriale. Deci, în mod logic, nu.poate fi vorba nici de pedepse şi nici de răsplată individuală, nici de Infern şi nici de Paradis… Dumnezeu, fiinţele imateriale, sufletele constituie lumea ideală în faţa căreia materia este incoruptibila, veşnică —veşnică’ întrucît “mişcarea nu a precedat repausul, şi nici repausul mişcarea … Orice mişcare îşi are cauza într-o mişcare anterioară … Dumne­ zeu nu are motiv să fie nou.”

Acest� citate, pe care le-am împrumutat �e la Renan,

120
sînt suficiente pentru a ne trezi curiozitatea, dar nu pentru a o satisface. Ar trebui multă migală, un mare efort pentru • a unnări îillănţuirile, întOtdeauna discutabile, ale acestor sisteme. de explicaţie.

Nici .filozofti care, de la Renan încoace, s-au interesat de aceste probleme retrospective nu le tranşează cu uşurinţă. De tendinţele lor, raţionaliste sau idealiste, va depinde de fapt in�etarea pe care o dau; sau, ceea ce înseamnă acelaşi lucru, predilecţia Secretă pentru un filozof Sau altul: Al-Kindi navighează Pe ape religioase neînvrăjbite încă de vreo furtună; Avicenna este incontestabil idealist; Averroes -este •filozoful sîrrşitului lumii. Al Ghazăli, apărătorul credinţei, al tradiţiei, a preluat în numele său scolastica obstinată a primilor teologi musulmani; el doreşte să ignore filozofia peri-‘ pateticiană, să o distrugă chiar, căci gîndir�a il îm­ pinge spre o cale foarte diferită, cea a misticii. Atunci, el renunţă la lume şi îmbracă • haina de lînă albă (�uj) pe care o poartă sufii, adepţi ai unei credinţe mistice mai degrabă decît raţionale, ,.nebunii Domnului”, cum au fost’ numiţi.

Averroes, doctorul din Cordoba, s-a făcut comenta­ torul şi editorul fidel al operelor lui Aristotel. Meritul său constă în faptul că citează .in extenso traducerea arabă a textului grec şi în acelaşi timp îi adaugă pro­ priile-i idei, sub formă de remarci şi digresiuni. Textul şi comentariile 1 vor fi traduse din arabă în latină la Toledo şi vor ajunge astfel în Europa, dezlănţuind aici imenSa revoluţie din secolul al XIII-lea. Deci filozofia musulmană nu a murit imediat sub loviturile viguroase şi disperate ale lui Al-Ghazăli, în pofida celor spuse uneori în acest sens. Ea va muri totuşi, ca şi ştiinţa musulmană, şi încă înainte de a se . încheia secolul al XII-lea. Atunci Occidentul va prelua torţa.

Oprire sau decadentă: secolele XII-XVIII

• Cfvilizapa “sarazină”, după această înfl orire extra­ ar:_din ară, este brusc întreruptă în secolul al XIUea.; Chiar şi în Spania, progresul ştiinfific şi filozofic,

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puterea l’ieţiimateriale nu continuă dincolo de ultimele • decenii ale secolului.

Această întrerupere bruscă se pune ca o problemă generală:

1) Esţe oare vina, aşa cum s-a spus ieri, a atacurilor pasionate (şi care ar fi fost prea efi cace) îndreptate de
Al-Ghazălffmpotrivafilozofiei şi gîndirii liberţ? Nimeni ,

nu va crede ‘ cu adevărat aceasta. Al- Gbazăli a fost w1 produs al timpului • său: el este atît consecinta . cît şi cauza. De altfel reacţia împotriva ,.filozofiei” a existat întotdeauna, înc.ă de la primii săi paşi, după� cum o dovedesc de-a lungul timpului nenumăratele condamnări la rug ale cărţilor, de neimaginat fără violente ostilităţi populare� după cum o dovedesC atitea dizgraţii spectacu­ loase în care au crezut ftlozofii condamnaţi .la exil, chiar dacă ei au revenit cînd circumstanţele s-au schimbat; cum o dovedesc perioadele de dominaţie a ştiinţei

coranice a dreptului, fiq, care reduce ftlozoful la •tăcere. Şi apoi, după Al-Ghazăli, falsafa a mai strălucit încă,
şi nu numai cu Averroes. ,
2) Este oare vina barbarilor? AŞa a susţinut recent-un

istoric, S.D. Gothein. Barbarii, adică chiar cei care au salvat cu armata un Islam ameninţat pretutindeni de Occident şi de Asia şi care 1-ar fi ucis astfel din interior.

Aceşti periculoşi salvatori sînt, în Spania, almoravizii, apoi almohazii, primii – berberi din Africa de nord, ceilalţi – sudanezi, sabarieni, berberi. ln Orientul Apro­ piat sînt tUrcii selgiukizi, nomazi veniţi din “stepa rece” a Asiei centrale, sau foşti sclavi veniţi din ţările cauca­ ziene.

Decadenta se va instaura deîndată ce noii veniţi vor pune mîna pe putere, ,.when power was tilken over by barbarian soldiers slaves in almost allof the Muslim States”. Căci atunci ;.unitatea lumii mediteraneene este ruptă”, unitate din care s-a hrănit Islamul şi pe care o ignoră ,.aceste popoare barbare care\ nu au nici un rol în tradiţiile Mediteranei”.
Se poate replica c� aceşti barbari, în Vest ca şi în Est, nu erau, cu mult mai mult decit majoritatea arabilor, agenţii primelor cuceriri� şi că, la fel ca ei, mai mult sau

122
mai puţin rapid, s-au civilizat in contact cu vechile ţări

islamice. Califti almohazi sint protectorii lui Averroes. în istoria tradiţională a cruciadelor, Saladin, marele sultan

de origine ,kurdă, adversarul lui Richard Inimă de Leu, face o imPt’esie deStul de b’un ă, cel puţin in ochii
barbarilor creştini în sfirşit, Islamul, graţie Egiptului, şi-a restabilit autonomia zdrob�du -i pe mongoli Ia Ayn Djăliit, în Siria, la 3 septembrie 1260, şi cucerind Saint­ Jean-d’ Acre, ultima fortăreaţă creştină din Ţara Sfmtă,
in 1291.
3) Este mai degrabă vina Mediteranei? La sfrrş itul

secolului al Xl-lea, Europa a inceput recucerirea Mării Interioare. Marea hrănitoare iese atunci de sub controlul Islamului, iar celebra teorie a istoricului Henri Pirenne v2 avea de astă -dată un rol – invers. H. Pirenne consideri că, in cursul cuceririlor musulmane, Occidentul, priva• de libera circulaţie in Mediter�a, se retră.Sese in sine, din secolul al VIII-lea pînă in al IX-lea. Or, invers, în •secolul al XI-lea Mediterana se inchide pentru Islam şi
acesta este împiedicat iremediabil.in avintul şi respiraţia
lui cotidiană. ‘ • •

Este curios că E.F. Gautier care, primul, a semnalat cu tărie oprirea bruscă a civilizaţiei sarazine, nu căutase atunci (1930) să folosească explicaţia lui Henri Pirenne care, in aceeaşi epocă, era in mare vogă. La nivelul actual al cunoştinţelor ;noastre, este probabil cea mai bună .explicaţie de ansamblu pentru• reculul brusc al Islamului.

• Civilizaţia �lamică rezistă acestei retrageri. Ea nu va mai cunoaşte înflorirea şi recoltele de otli’nioară, dar supraviejuieşte.

Cind Paul Valery aftrma (1�22): “Civilizaţiilor, ştim că sinteti muritoare!”, dramatiza, cu siguranţă. Nu smt muritoare, la bunul plac al anotimpurilor istoriei, precum

• florile şi fructele – copacul rămîne. Cel puţin el este mult mai greu de ucis.

• După secolul al XII-lea, Islamul va cunoaşte cu

siguranţă momente foarte întunecate: faJă de Occident, indelungatele încercări ale Cruciadeloţ (1095-1270) din care iese, aşa cum am mai spus, cu un semiavantaj,.,după

124

recucerirea fortăreţei Saint-Jean-d’ Acre -(1291). Dar dacă a redobindit continentul, a pierdut marea; faţă de

Asia , invaziile feroce, sălbatice şi indelungi ale mongo­ Iilor (1202-1405), care-I inundă pe jumătate: Turkes­
tanul, Iranul, Asia Mică spulberate nu-şi vor mai reveni ti.iciodată coinplet. Căderea Bagdadului, in 1258, consti­ tuie simbolul acestor devastări. Islamul se va vindeca de pe urma rănilor, dar nu cu totul.
. Pe, de altă . parte, in acreste se<;ole sunibre – al
XIII -lea, al XIV-lea � dificultăţi economice, de această dată cu caracter mondial – se adaugă dificultăţilar

particulare ale Islamului. O criză de lungă durată s-a abătut atunci asupra întregii Lumi Vechi, din China pînă in India şi Europa. Totul se ruinează, pentru secole.

• î nEuropa, criza apare mai tirzie (începînd din 1350 sau 1375) şi va fi mai scurtă (se incheie între 1450 şi 1510), dar ea este evidentă: războiul numit de O sută de ani (1337-1453) este semnul ei, o lungă înşiruire de războaie străine, civile, sociale, de devastări şi neferi� ciri.
în dezastrele Islamului trebuie făcută deci distincţia dintre ceea ce are- caracter ,.mondial” şi ceea ce este pur musulman.

În orice .caz, Î1;l acest .climat general de nefericire, de pesimism negru se poate înţelege gîndirea semeaţă a lui Ibn I(baldlin, considerat nu fără motiv drept ultimul uri�ş al gîndirii musulmane. Istori� (astăzi am spune “sociolog”) de origine andaluză, dar născut in Tunisia

in ‘ 1332, el .va cunoaşte o viaţă agitată, fiinddiplomat şi om d.e stat, hi Grenada, Tremcen, Bugia, Fes, în Sir:ia; era
cadiu Ia Cairo cînd a murit, in • 1406, la un an după
Timiir Leng, pe lîngă care fusese trimis ambasador.
Compilaţia istorică vastă pe care a lăsat-o, Kitab
El-/bar, tratează într-un mod original istoria berberilor.

Ea era precedată de o introducere, care a fost tradusă in franceză în secolul a XIX-lea sub titlul Prolegomenes: ea
este in sine o operă fundamentală, un eseu de metodolo-•
gie şi sociologie a istoriei musulniane, luate in intregul
ei. / .

• o dată cu revenirea fru moaselor vremuri seculare ce feanimă întreaga economie a lulliii, în secolul al

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XVJ..lea,Islamul profită din nou de situaţio lui inter­ mediară între Vest şi Est. Grandoarea turcă Jla dura pînă în “epoca lalelelor”, pînă în secolul al XVIII-lea.

�ub aspect polit�c, această reînsănătoşire se află sub
semnul cuceririlor ‘rapide şi fulgerătoare ale turcilor osmanlli, începute încă inaintea căderii Constantinopo­

ltuui, în 1453. Această victorie răsunătoare anunţă simbolic Pe cele care vor urma şi care vqr face din Tur­ cia una din marile puteri mediteraneene,• în secolul al XVI:..lea.

tslamul întreg sau aproape întreg, este curind•regrupat, de către • noii stăpîni ai Bi�ţului, inclusiv Locurile Sfmte din Arabia. După 1517, sultanul otoman, ,.marele senior”, devine califul credincioşilor. Turcilor nu le scapă decît Turkestanul îndepărtat, Marocul dincolo de ,.regenta” din Alger, şi Persia şiită, mai naţionalistă, dacă se poate spune, decît oricînd prin avîntul dinastiei safavizilor. ln acest timp mercenari musulmani, mongoli şi turci – sub conducerea lui Babur, un descendent îndepărtat al lui Timiir-Leng – ocupă Imperiul de la Delhi şi fondează în 1526 hnperiul Marelui Mogul,• care se va impune în cea mai mare parte a Indiei.

ln acelaşi an 1526, • în care turcii lovesc de ‘moarte Ungaria creŞtină (lupta de la Mohacs), este de netăgă­
duit că are loc o resurecJie generală a Islamului sub
forma turcă şi sunnită, care antrenează pretutindeni victoria fără replică a religiei tradiţionale şi ortodoxiei. Este vorba aici de o imensă afirmare a puterii, de
punerea strictă la pWÎct • a•• spi,ritelor: se instaurează un
regim de fter. .

În Balcani şi Orientul Apropiat dominaJia turcă a coincis cu o prosperitate materială evidentă şi o puter­ nică creştere demografică, cu proftlarea oraşelor

industriale. • ln 1453, Constantinopolul număra • abia 80 000 de locuitori probabil. ln secolul al XVI-lea,
devenit Istanbul, el regrupează 700 000de suflete între oraşul propriu-zis, cartierul grec Pera, dincolo de Cornul
de Aur, şi Scutari din Asia, dincolo de Bosfor. Această capitală în care se întîlnesc, ca în toate marile cetăţi, un mare ‘lux şi o mizerie îngrozitoare, a furnizat modelele •

1 26

radiază

5. Destinul Imperiului oto””!n.

Cu negru, posesiunile otom�e. Cu bllşuridese, Serbia. Cu haşuri mai rare, Ungaria. Conturate cu o linie neagră groasă, posesiunile

venetiene, apoi (1913) italiene.

invidiate ale unei civilizatii imperiale care

departe sub otomani, exportînd planul uriaşelor sale

moschei între care Sulaymănyye, moscheea construită pentru Soliman Magnificul. •

• încetul cu încetul, adevărata măreţie turcă, tăgădu­ ită ulterior, reapare gratie cercetărilor istoricilor: imensele arhive turce, clasate în sfirşit, încep să se deschidă pentru cercetători şi, . una după alta, dezvăluie angr’enajul unei birocratii multiple, precise, progresiste,

1 27

autoritare, capabile să întocmească recensăminte detali­ ate, să conceapă o politică internă coerentă, • să strîn­ gă enorme. rezerve de aur şi argint, să colonizeze siste­ matic (cu nomazi) Balcanii, scutul Imperiului in faţa Eu­ ropei. Un sistem de muncă forţată, o armată uimitoare cu instrucţie dură … Stranii modernităţi, într-adevăr.

Această maşinărie se defectează, in timp, dar nu înainte de sfîrşitul secolului al XVII-lea. Ultima tresărire
va fi asediul Vienei, in 1687 . . . Moare oare atunci Impe­ riul turc de asfixie maritimă, neavînd deschidere la marile spaţii maritime libere – Atlanticul de care îl separă Marocul, Oceanul Indian unde .ajunge greu prin Marea Roşie, şi Golful Persic, unde întîmpină opoziţia violentă a perşilor şi a noilor veniţi europeni, cu flotele lor superioare şi companiile comerciale solide?

A murit oare Imperiul, de asemenea, pentru că nu s-a adaptat rapid şi bine la tehnicile noi?

Sau, ceea ce este şi mai evident, pentru că din secolul al XVIII-lea şi mai aleS al XIX-lea impotriva lui s-a ridicat masa puternică a Rusiei moderne? .Pentru că victoriil� cavaleriei austriece din timpul campaniilor prinţului Eugen (mai ales din • 1716 pînă in 1718) nu puseseră in pericol decît marginile europene ale Turciei. O dată cu intervenţia rusă, un colos tînăr se ridică în faţa unui colos muribund, sau cel puţin obosit.

Oricum ar fi, Imperiul turc nu este de la bun început acel “bolnav” pe care-I va maltrata fără ruşine diplo­ maţia marilor puteri în secolul al XIX-lea. Islamul turc a avut pentru multă vrep1e o personalitate puternică, redutabilă, strălucitoare. La fel ca şi Persia safavizilor, pe care o admiră încă un călător francez din secolul al XVII-lea, bun observator ca Tavernier… La fel cum Marele Mogul, la începutul secolului al XVTII-lea, deşi supraveghe!lt de englezi şi francezi, a ocupat aproape la sud Dekkanul în totalitate.

Să ne ferim de asemenea judecăţi pripite asupra de­ cadenţei foarte precoce a Islamului! Şi să nu anticipăm!

La Istanbul, secolul al XVIII-lea este “epoca lalele� lor”, a celor vii şi a celor stilizate, ce pot fi recunoscute dintr-o mie: pe faianţe, pe miniaturi, p�• broderii,. motivul revine neîncetat. Epoca lalelelor, frumos nume pentru o epocă căreia nu i-a lipsit nici graţia, nici forţa!

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CAPITOLUL IV

RENAŞTEREA ACTUALĂ

A ISLAMULUI
Islamul . a intrat , dînd înapoi în acest infern, sau acest purgatoriu al oamenilor v.ii pe care din pudoare îl numim lumea a treia. Dînd înapoi, pentru că odinioară a cunoscut o situaţie relativ mai bună, indiscutabil.

Acest reflux mai mult sau mai puţin tîrziu, dar net, i-a adus în seco1ul al XIX-lea ‘o serie de umilinţe, de amărăciuni, de suferinţe, apoi • generalizarea dominaţiei străine. Faptele sînt binecunoscute. Doar Turcia va scăpa destinului comun, de unde .şi reacţia brutală şi

strălucită, înainte de a se întîmpla ce este mai rău, o dată cu Mustafa Kemal Paşa (1920–1938). Reacţie

exemplară ce se oferă ca model victoriilor naţionale care urmară. Eliberarea Islamului este astăzi totală, sau aproape.
Mai rămîne însă problema asigurării independenţei sale; şi o alta, mai dificilă, de a păşi apoi “în ritm cu lumea” şi de a privi deschis viitorul.

Sfîrşitul colonialismului şi tineretea nationalismelor

Nimic mai simplu decît a marca astăzi etapele cronolo­ gice ale colonizării, apoi ale “decolonizării” diferitelor pămînturi islamice, ajunse unul cîte unul (mai puţin republicile musulmane sovietice) ‘la deplina independenţă politică.

129

• ‘Un cţ�lonialism s(Jvietic? La acest capitol,. obiceiul este de a nu l’Orbi decît despre colonialiSmele englez, francez, belgiara, german sau olandez. Desigur, partea lor a fost imensă, dar a existat şi un colonialism rus, apoi sol’ietic, despre care se l’orbeşte mai puţin: se pare că nu şi-a slăbit controlul asupra a 30 milioane de musulmani pe puţin, adică mai mult de întreaga populaţie a Maghrebului actual.

Cuvîntul colonialism este oare potrivit în cazul de faţă? De la Revoluţia rusă din 1917 s-a depus un efort imens de eliberare şi descentralizare. Au fost făcute concesii autonomiilor locale, s-au înfăptuit imense programe materiale. “Astăzi, toate naţiunile musulnlane din U.R.S.S., mai ales turkestanezii şi caucazienii, au pro­

priile lor cadre ştiinţifice, administrative şi politice. intelectualitatea lor.• Ei au recuperat întîrzierea care-i

despărţea de tătari şi nu mai au nevoie să recUrgă la serviciul intelectualilor din Kazan”, fostul centru, exclusiv pînă ieri, al culturii mwiulmane în Rusia.

Acest joc a slăbit însă solidarităţile fireşti între diversele republici musulmane şi a dat uitării proiectul unui vast stat “turanic”. în actualul sistem federativ sovietic, cultura este “naţională în formă, dar proletară şi socialistă în conţinut”. Urmarea a fost o laicizare evidentă în detrimentul valorilor religioase ale lslamului şi, practic, un naţionalism limitat de acum la orizonturi provinciale, fără vreo legătură cu umma fraţilor întru Islam şi exprimat de .obicei prin revendicări pe termen scurt, �vizînd amenajarea instituţiilor” sau “exigenţele cadrelor de altă origine”.
într-un cuvînt, problemele musulmane din U.R.S.S. par a fi, şi pentru moment se află, în afara revendică­ rilor obişnuite ale Islamului rostite. cu voce tare pe plan internaţional. Republicile musulmane sovietice sînt independente, dar legate solid de ansamblul sovietic (politică externă comună, dependenţă în materie de apărare naţională, fmanţe, educaţia publică, căile ferate).

Iată-ne deci departe • de experienţa şi visurile lui Sultan Galiev, acel înalt demnitar comunist (1917-J923),

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iar apoi agitator antirevoluţionar pînă la oondamnarea lui la moarte (1929). Ca musulman, el a visat să- i unească într-un singur stat pe toţi musulmanii din ţările sovietice şi să transmită cu forţă� prin .lunga lor antenă îndrepta­ tă spre est, răsturnarea ideologică şi revoluţionară pînă • în inima Asiei – acest continent promis cataclismelor politice, în vreme ce Europa industrială şi muncitoare nu-i părea mai mult decit ,.un focar revoluţionar stins”. Putea fi Islamul această torţă aprinsă spre Asia?
• Panarabismul, vedetă politică a unui Islam divizat: pe planul disputelor internaţionale deschise, panara­ bismul se substituie astăzi, cu tot elanul, islamismului în ansamblu. Nu se mai aude,• nu se mai vede nimic decît eL

Lumea pur arabă este inima evidentă, exigentă a Islamului, punctul lui nodal. De aici pînă Ia a confunda’ Orientul Mijlociu (şi prelungirea lui maghrebiană) cu ansamblul Islamului, la a nu mai vedea decît această regiune şi doar acest personaj privilegiat, nu este decît un

pas: actualitatea 1-a făcut cu- uşurinţă. Înseamnă,
evident, să iei partea drept întreg.
• Dar trăsătura esenţială, insistentă a Islamului
actual, nu înseamnă oare tocmai dezbinarea insidioasă, fărîmiţarea spaţiului şi unităţii sale? Aici din cauza politicii, mereu în acţiune, dincolo din cauza geografiei, care plasează anumite sectoare ale Islamului sub . influ­ enţa exclusivă a altor civilizaţii sau economii deosebite.

• În arhipelagurile sud-est asiatice (ln5ulinda) cei 80 de milioane de musulmani care trăiesc suprapuşi sau amestecaţi cu straturi profunde de hirţduism şi animism, aflaţi pe deasupra într-o structură 1 economică foarte particulară, sînt copii pe jumătate pierduţi. în India, Pakistanul �te făcut • din două bucăţi enorme separate de întinderea şi multitudinea (deja ameninţătoare chiar şi numai prin număr) Indiei. În China,. cei 10 milioane de musulmani formează o categOrie aparte: copii ireme­ diabil pierduţi. În Africa neagră, un Islam învingător se lasă cucerit şi deformat de un animism viu şi multiform.

1 31

Islamismul acestor populaţii le serveşte adesea drept argument, naţionalist, drept mijloc de rezistenţă. Dar pentru Islam, luat ca întreg, toate ţările musulmane care nu mai privesc spre M�ca la fel de strict ca odinioară, care nu mai participă la fel de riguros la pelerinajele unitare sau la ideea politică a unui panislainism efectiv şi unitar sînt totuşi copii pierduţi sau pe cale de a se pierde. îndepărtarea, politica, progresele ateisţnului, lipsa de religie îşi aduc contribuţia. Din 1917 Mecca a primit cel mult cîteva sute-de pelerini sovietici.
• Poate fi “epoca lui Garibaldi” o formulă actualii a Islamului? In inima jărilor musulmane, în Orientul Apropiat, panislamismul se lol’eşte de najionalisme locale aScuţite, e�acerbate.

Un exemplu frapant îl constituie dizolvarea, în septembrie 1961, a Republicii Arabe Unite, formată ‘ prin fuziunea Egiptului tu Siria. Pakistan, Afgariistan, Iran, Turcia, Liban, Siria, Irak, Iordania, Arabia Saudită, Tunisia, Algeria,. Maroc, Mauritariia, Yemen – sînt tot atîtea unităţi ataşate prerogativelor particulare, adesea în ostilitate mai mult sau mai puţin mascată unele cu altele, ,chiar dacă uneori manifestă o solidaritate . de moment faţă de lumea dm afară şi pericolele ei.

Aceste naţionalisme exacerbate care-şi împing oamenii şi tineretul pasionat – în frunte cu studenţii – la

gesturi spectaculoase, dramatice, nu par decît prea deseori perimate fn ochii nedrepJi ai unui occidental. Avem prea

multe motive pentru a regreta noi înşine naţionalismele noastre de ieri, pe care Europa le-a plătit atît de scump, pentru a nu privi, la ora Pietei comune a Europei, cu o anumită lipsă de• elan şi, s- o mai spunem o dată, cu o anumită •_-ledreptate această înflorire de mişcări locale, cu atît mai mult cu cît aceste naţionalisme se ridică cu vehemenţă • îinpotriva Occidentului.
Nedreptate? . Iată, într-adevăr, ce afmnă, într-un
limbaj admirabil, wi intelectual afgan, Nadjm oud-Dine
Bammate (1959): “Islamul trebuie • să trăiască astăzi
concomitent o revoluţie religioasă compatibilă cu
•� 32

6. Musulmanii in lumea de astă�i.
(Schila nu indică extinderea dominaj{el vechi a Islamului asupra cvasitotalititii lndiei.)

Reforma, o revoluţie intelectuală şi tp.orală comparabilă cu Aujklărung (cuvintul . german care corespunde atît luminilor cît şi despotismului luminat din secolul al

XVIII4ea), o revoluţie economică şi socială compara­ bilă cu cea pe care a cunoscut-o Europa în secolul al XIX-lea (Revoluţia industrială) şi, în epoca marilor sisteme rttgionale (adică cele două blocuri, Estul şi Vestul) trebuie să traiască micile sale revoluţii naţio­ nale. în momentul în care, se încheie pacte planetare, ţările musulmane aşteaptă încă şi îl caută pe Garibaldi al lor.”

Bineinţeles, nu este vorba de a discredita amintirea luminoasă a lui Garibaldi. Dar războaiele de unitate naţională, necesare ieri, au avut pentru Europa urmările teribile pe care le cunoaştem. Oare divizarea naţionalită­ ţilor este, va fi ea mai profitabilă Islamului de astăzi? l’:’IJ riscă ea să ducă statele musulmane la impas, intr�o lume economică ce nu permitţ deloc asemenea fărîmi­ ţări? Apoi, nu este ea generatoare . de conflicte pericu­ loase? Fiecare ţară independentă ce dispune de o oarecare putere militară interpretează . în manieră

proprie şi în limbajul strict al intereselor şi pretenţiilor sale exclusi ve fie panislamismul, fie panarabismul. Astfel

acţionează, în văzul întregii lumi, Pakistanul, lrakul, Egiptul, iar competiţia este deschisă şi altora.
Aceste naţionalisme sînt nu mai puţin o etapă obligatorie, preţul rolului evident pe care I-au jucat în cursul unei independenţe dificile. Fiecare naţionalism a fost, ramîrie un “contra-colonialism”, un antidot la dominaţia străină. O eliberare în forţă.

Nu este, surprinzător faptul c’ă toate naţionalismele arabe se întîlnesc în ostilitatea lor faţă de Israel, vechiul lor duşman. Creat în urma celui de-al doilea război mondial, statul Israel nu pare oare chiar opera Occidentu­ lui, a celui mai vrednic de dispreţ Occident? Succesele sale tehnice admirabile – alimentate de capitaluri sosite din lumea întreagă -, demonstraţiile sale , de forţă îinpotriva Egiptului în 1948 şi în timpul afacerii Suezului, cu marşul victorios al micii sale armate de-a lungul vastei Peninsule Sinai (1956), suscită invidie, teamă şi animo­ zitate care se adaugă unui antagoni5m foarte. vechi.

134

Jacques Berque scrie pe drept cuvint: “Arabii şi evreii sint, şi unii şi ceilalţi, dacă îndrăznesc să spun, popoa­ rele . lui Dumnezeu. Două popoare ale Domnului in
acelaşi timp este prea mult pentru diplomaţi şi statele majore! Conflictul de nedomolit rezidă tocmai in înru­

direa adversarilor, • proveniţi amindoi din Abmhain,
irinobilati de acelaşi monoteism.;. Ei au unnat căi opuse faţă de. Occident l.!nii, in diaspora, şi-au păstrat idealul
comunitar, dar in acelaşi timp au adaptat şi individul Ia
tehnicile tenace ale goilor. Ceilalţi, rămaşi pe părillntul lor dar invadaţi, dislocaţi, au avut privilegiul, sau ne­

şansa, de a rămine in general ce erau. De unde inegalita­ tea actuală a mijloacelor existente, deosebirile de ţinută
şi discurs. Eseiştii arabi cei mai lucizi au meditat cu

amărăciune asupra a ceea ce numesc dezastrul… din 1948. La fel ca la noi Taine sau Renan după 1870, ei îşi

sfătuiesc compatriotii să aplice ajustări corespunză­ toare pentru a evita repetarea unor asemenea aventuri .”

• Naţionalismul are un rol de jucat în “Viitorul apro­ piat: toate Jările musulmane, oricare din ele, se “Vor 4jla în faja unor programe obligatorii de strictă austeritate.
De fapt programe de solidaritate, de disciplină socială; naţionalismul va ajuta deci pe fiecare din aceste tinere ţări să infrunte gravele dificultăţi economice care o presează. El le va ajuta să accepte inovaţiile necesare care se lovesc de structuri foarte vechi sOciale, religioase,. familiale – toate obiceiuri ancestrale seculare, perpetuate in arhaismul evident al Islamului şi, care pot provoca reacţii violente.

Or, indiferent cît ar costa, Islamul trebuie să se modernizeze, .să adopte o mare parte din tehnicile occidentale, devenite astăzi baza vieţii mondiale: viitorul. va depinde de primirea sau respingerea acestei civilizaţii mondiale. Tradiţia puternică este in favoarea respingerii; în favoarea primirii – mîndria naţionalistă care pOate determina popoarele să accepte ceea ce instinctiv respipg.

135
Deseori,. Islamrilui i-a fost contestată flexibilitatea necesară acestei adaptări violente, pînă acolo încît numeroşi observatori aftrmă că, prin inima, spiritul şi �ăşi civilizaţia lui, “impermeabilă”, “intransigentă”, Islamul va ft blocat în toate efortUrile de modernizare . Dar este atît de sigur acest lucru?

De fapt, Islamul a acceptat deja această lume moder­ nă care-I asediaz�, astfel încît o poate accepta în: ‘continuare. Nici creştinismul nu se acomodase deunăzi fără suferinţe şi fără reticenţe. în cele din urmă, n.:a pierdut nimic din originalitatea lui în acest joc şi după concesiile necesare pe care le-a făcut.

A atribui Islamului o intransigenţă religioasă excep­ ţională, o lipsă absolută de supleţe înseamnă • a uita nunieroasele lui erezii care� ele singure, sînt dovadâ îngrijorărilor, posibilităţilor de torsiune. De altfel, chiar Coranul deschide reformismului poarta nic iodată închisă a idjtihăd-ului. “Profetul a prevăzut cazul în care Cora­ nul şi Sunna (tradiţia) nu vorbesc: pentru asemenea sitUaţii el recomandă să se recurgă la mţionamentul prin analogie, . qiyas; dacă, acesta este inaplicabil, va trebui să se folosească judecata, ray, pe baza tuturor
precedentelor. Acest efort personal de interpretare, idjtihăd, va ocupa un loc considerabil tD elaborarea

viitoare a• gîndiriimusuhnane. în zilele noastre reformis­ mul înţelege expres să redeschidă poarta” (Pierre Rondot). Pentru că ftecare religie îşi are porţile sale de salvare. Islamul poate frina, obstrucţiona, dar în egală măsură el poate ft schimbat, se lasă transformat.

EconomiŞtii, în luptă cu realităţile cotidiene, mi încetează de altfel să protesteze împotriva acestor explicaţii şablon şi “caricaturale”, constante imuabile ale
vieţii musulmane. .
în realitate, aftrmă ei, dificultatea • provine mai degrabă, concret, în saltul imens ce tre buie făcut. Islamul are faţă de Occident două secole întîrziere, tocmai secolele care au transformat Europa mult mai mult decît perioada dintre Antichitate şi secolul al XVIII -lea. Cum ar putea atunci Islamul să treacă, la rîndul său, dintr -un singur pas această etapă imensă, să zguduie, să-şi zdruncine societăţile arhaice cînd nu

1 36

dispune decît de o agricultură săracă, precară, de o industrie inehistată, izolată, stingheră în mijlocul unei economii incapabile să atingă şi să pună în niişCare întreaga masă a unei populaţii prea prolifice şi prea greoaie? Apoi, ca 0rice societate, cea musulmană îşi are bogaţii săi, puţin numeroşi, dar cu atît mai puternici. Credinţele sau tradiţiile nu sînt adesea decît alibiurile acestor privilegiati care au . interesul să menţină în funcţiune unele societăţi cu adevărat “medievale” ca cea
din Y emen, feudale ca cea din Iran sau arhaice ca cea
din Arabia Saudită, în pofida ‘ petroluiuir sau din cauza
�i. ln faţa acestor dificultăţi, opera reformatorilor oferă

un test . indiscutabil: cea brutală şi genială a lui Mustafa Kemal, în Turcia; cea violentă în cuvînt a lui Kassem în lrak; sau chiar, sub semnul obstinaţiei, cea a lui Nasser în Egipt; sub se�ul abilităţii şi unei aniJ1ll’ite. înţelep­ ciuni, ca a lui Bourguiba •în Tunisia. Oricare ar fi natura sau accemul lor, obstacolele sînt adeseori aceleaşi. Toate aceste reforme au distrus o serie de pretinse t{lbuuri ale civilizaţiei musulmane. Testul care nu înşală este în primul rînd emanciparea femeii, pe cale de a se afirma, deşi lent. Dispariţia poligamiei, îngrădirea repudierii unilaterale de către soţi, suprimarea vălului, accesul Ia universităţi şi la cultură, Ia muncă, la dreptul de vot: toate aceste detalii au un imens efect în perspectivă.

Ele dovedesc că reformisniul nu este o cauză pierdută dinainte, ci că-i trebuie susţinători, luptători hotărîţi. Lupta care începe va fi multiplă. Pericolul cel mai grav va t1 de a cădea victimă farmecelor, facilită­ ţilor sau necesităţilor unei actualităţi politice dramati­ zate exagerat.

Ic;Jealul ar fi să nu fie făcut decît un lucru odată şi, de fiecare dată să fie ales esenţialul. Dar politica nu este o speculaţie carteziană. Progresul economic. pretinde pentru el, în Islam şi aiurea, o politică preferenţială, ba chiar exclusivă. Dar •lumea în care trebuie să trăieşti te obligă adesea să abordezi dificultăţile, vechi şi noi, în ordinea în care ele se prezintă.

Toate aceste state, mîndre de independenta lor, au astfel opinii politice revendicative, dfamatiza:rite ce

137�

trebuie satisfăcute, deturnate de la ariumite temeri fără rem�u; au orgolii ce trebuie menajate: Islamul are la fel lţ-, multe ca şi Europa, ceea ce nu inseamnă puţin� Islamul are tinerii săi, studenţii nerăbdători � mear� înainte: ei seamănă cu politehnicienii noştri din 1830; are militarii săi, capabili de fapte necugetate şi lovituri de stat, ca şi militariidin America latină înainte de 1939; are partidele sale politice avide de putere, oaineniisăi politici • ameţiţi de propria lor imagine, de violenta propriilor lor discursuri. Nu trebuie ridicată vocea pentru a domina zgomotul lumii?

Evident, st.iăinii sînt prezenţi: Franţa • în Africa de nord; Anglia în Kuweit şi în sudul pe jumătate nepopulat al Arabiei; Statele Unite pretutindeni, imperturbabili furni zori de sfaturi Şi credite; U.R.S.S., generoasă sau rezervată, după caz, întotdeauna vigilentă în acest vast cîmp de lupţă. În sfirşit,. pretutinden.i revoluţia socială îşi face simţită prezenţa şi îşi formulează pretenţiile.

Ea are de partea sa sţ�flul istoriei:• în Turcia, unde lovitura de stat militară din 27 mai 1960 a trezit atîtea speranţe de reforme sociale, • dar care întîrzie; in IFan, unde o revoluţie de sus, cotiservatoare şi progresistă, marchează p\Jlicte în pofid8. tineretului ostil şi parti­ zanilor fostului ministru >Mossadagh sau teticenţei partidului comunist, Tudeh; în Transiordailia, unde ull rege curajos înfruntă toate peri�lele care-I încerc.uiesc; în Liban, care în momentele de înţelepciune se doreşte a fi Elveţia Orientului Apropiat; în Irak, unde revoluţia este mai mult verbală decît reală, dar unde revolta kUrdă este o plagă profundă; în Egipt, unde, după secesiunea de Siria, Bikbaşir a ales hotărît calea unui comunism social pe jumătate realizat deja şi care poate fi ca o pată de ulei… Tabloul ar fi complet dacă mai semnalăm îngrijorarea Pakistanului alarmat de o Indie mai beii­ coasă decît se bănuia pînă acum şi care • doreşte să ocupe Caşmirul; Indonezia care, încurajată de succesul indian împotriva Goa, ar dori să ia Guiţ}eea olandeză – Irian – sub protectoratul său; Africa de nord în Q1tre­ gime, care, după deznodămîntul tragediei algeriene� aşteaptă să vadă ce linie va urma …

Toate aceste preocupări influenţează politica statelor

1 38

islamice, expunindu�le la izbucniri pasionale neaşteptate care, de fiecare dată, le dau lovituri serioase, nu fără contralovituri grave pentru ceilaJti. Cine ar putea stabili cît a costat afacerea pasionată Bizerte (1961) Franta (care este însă bogată) şi Tunisia (care este săracă)? tn această criză, soarta oraşului-port era oare cu adevărat singura miză, sau ea a fost complicată de două orgolii, rănite unul de altul? Franta estll supărată pentru că ea consideră că a făcut mult pentru Islam, ceea ce este cît se poate de adevărat; Islamul este supărat pentru că el conside�;ă că independenţa • care i s-a aoordat nu este totală, şi este adevărat că nici o ţară nu •este cu totul independentă dacă • economia ei o aruncă• deîndată• in
lumea a treia.
Fostele metropole nu sint decît’ în parte răspunză­ toare de această dependenţă economică. Această inferioritate • se datorează de asemenea multor motive particulare, trecutului Islamului, sărăciei lui naturale, demografiei sale exuberante. Sint boli teribile, chiar dacă• nu fără remediu.

Diferitele state musulmane confruntate cu lumea actuală

• O dezvoltare dificilă: pentru Islam, dilema este aceeaşi care se pune întregiilumi a treia. Pentru a se integra în viaja economică a lumii, el trebuie să reali­ zeze cît mai rapid posibil.revolujia industrială.

Sarcină simplu de formulat, dar pentru care va trebui să plătească fo� scump, cu pretul unei munci dure ale cărei roade nu se vor vedea imediat şi nu. se vor reper­ cuta deîndată asupra nivelului de trai. Episodul coloni­ zării nu le-a pregătit pentru această sarcină. şi cu siguranţă aici se află C�”a mai gravă răspundere a ţărilor coloni-zatoare.

Fără îndoială, nu se poate nega, cu toată buna credinţă, că aportul colonizatorilor in ţările . colonizate a fost important. Ţări foarte arhaice, a căror viaţă nu se

1 39

schimbase de veacuri, au fost asociate brusc la civilizaţii foarte evoluate. Ele s-au ales cu ceva. Mai întîi cu o medicină Şi o igienă moderne, care au redus în proporţii imense mortalitatea; un învăţămînt mai mult sau mai puţin important, după caz (sub acest aspect, colonizarea franceză este una din cele ‘mai’ puţin reproşabile); numeroase instalaţii materiale: porturi, drumuri, căi ferate; o organizare agricQlă modernă, deseori cu diguri pentru irigaţii; uneori un proiect inteligent de industriali­ zare.

&te mult, s-ar spune. Da şi nu. Căci pe de o parte acest proiect a distrus parţial vechile structuri, iar pe de altă parte le-a reconstruit imperfect. Reconstrucţia nu a avut loc în perspectiva unei economii naţionale, ci în cea a unei economii asociate, dependentă de metropolă şi de viaţa lumii. De unde şi neregularităţile dezvoltării potrivit sectoarelor şi necesitatea în care se află astăzi tinerele state independente de a-şi reforma structurile pentru a răspunde ansamblului nevoilor lor naţionale. Această dificultate se adaugă tuturor ce lorlalte, nume­ roase, care ţin de propria lor civilizaţie; de sărăcia celei mai mari părţi a teritoriului lor.

Pentru înfăptuirea acestor sarcini,. ţările musulmane au nevoie de ele însele şi, nu mai puţin, de alţii. Ele trebuie deci să se adapteze la politica schimbătoare, destul de feroce a lumii privilegiaţilor, lucru de care ele sînt în mod admirabil capabile şi conştiente. Nu le lipseşte nici inteligenţa şi nici şiretenia politică. în plus, ele mai trebuie să se adapteze la ele însele şi să se agaţe de viaţa reală a lumii. Aceasta este cea mai dificilă sarcină, cvadratum cercului.

• Economie şi petrol: nu există soluţie uşoară, unică. Nici măcar cea oferită de petro� în aparenjă un binefăcător.

Petrolul este o bogăţie incontestabilă şi efectele lui benefice se fac simţite pe plan economic in toate statele petroliere. Se ştie că cu această bogăţie, Orientul Apropiat a fost generos înzestrat.

140

Cu toate acestea, principalii beneficiari rămîn marile companii internaţionale, singutele care şi-au putut asuma

cheltuielile imense de prospectare şi dare în exploatare: ele obţin petrolul la sursă în schimbul unor redeyenţe; ele îl rafinează, ele• îl distribuie. A-1 reţine la sursă – cum a încercat Iranul să facă un moment (195 1) şi cum preconizează Irakul astăzi (1961) — este o încercare eşuată din start: petrolul nu are valoare decît dacă este vîndut. Astăzi nu mai există penurie de petrol in lume, ci dimpotrivă, iar în era atomică domnia lui .riscă să nu dureze la nesfirşit.

Un mic amănunt în plus; exploatarea . străină, detestabilă, nu este singura în cauză. Redevenţele creează in ţările musulmane privilegii sociale. Banii nu se distribuie în mod egal, ei alimenteazij. cel mai adesea luxul material al unei caste şi acest lux nu stimulează producţia locală: banii se irosesc ,cumpărînd în străină­ tate bunuri care în ţară nu vor fi niciodată productive. Arabia Saudită datorează petrolului omşele sale noi, şoselele noi, căile femte, aero.dromurile sale, progres ce este evident. Dar îi datorează . şi luxul nestăvilit, ana­ cronic al familiei tegale şi principalilor şefi de trib. Acest spectacol nu este !Je natură să bucure nici tineretul exaltat de revoluţia egipteană, nici burghezia ce aspiră să-şi joace rolul în afacerile publice.

Pentru un bun• observator, petrolul din Orientul Apropiat pare imaginea însăşi a argintului din America în secolul • al XVI- lea: el a traversat Spania fără a-i însufleţi economia, pentru a -i depăşi frontierele şi a pătrunde în economiile active ale Europei.
În orice caz, petrolul este şi ya constitui prilejul . a numeroase dispute în Orientul Apropiat. Cea mai recentă este cea care opune Pe de o parte Irakul şi şeful său, generalul Kassem (Zaimul) şi, pe de alta; principalele opt companii intet;naţionale petroliere (the Majors, cum se spune), al căror reprezentant esenţial Ia faţa locului este
I.P.C. (lrak Petroleum Co).

Discuţiile purtate de-a lungul a trei ani au fost diri nou suspendate. Companiilor li s-au retras terenurile concesionate neexploatate. Fără îndoială, reconcilierea rămîne pbsibilă şi Irakul va obţine avantaje şi o depă-

1 41

şire a partajului tradiţional al beneficiilor (fifty fifty ). Neîndoielnic, el a avut deja posibilitatea să introducă în prospecţiunile petroliere, şi mai ales în instalaţiile spectaculoase submarine din Golful Persic, corilpariii japoneze şi italiene, mai binevoitoare dat fiindcăsînt ultimele intrate în cursă. Dar în aceste domenii,ţările producătoare de petrol din Orientul Apropiat riscă unele calcule greşite, în pofida atuurilor _pe care le deţin ..

• Toate statele musulmane s -au pus pe treabă, au fost obţinute deja mari realizări, progresul producţki este generaL Totuşi,” creşterea populaţki repune neîncetat totul i’n discuţk. Totul progresează şi, cu toate acestea,• mîine totul trebuie refăc�t.

Un demograf, Alfred Sauvy, se referea la acest lucru în legătură cu Orientul Apropiat într-un articol apărut în Le Monde (la 7 august. 1956), care nu şi -a pierdut nimic din actualitate: “Lumea arabă. – scria el (ar fi putut. spune lumea musulmană în ansamblul ei) – se. află în plină erupţie demografică: natalitatea a atins \ma din cele mai ridicate oote din univers, a,proximativ 50 la mie, ceea ce înseamnă 6 sau 7 copii per familie. Departe de a se reduce, ea a beneficiat mai degrabă de pe urma restrîngerii poligamiei .şi a progreselor în domeniul igienei. în paralel cu această natalitate-record, morta­ litatea este în puternică scădere datorită • diminuării epidemiilor, foametei şi războaielor intertribale. Rata actuală a mortalităţii nu este cunoscută cu precizie, dar

ea se apropie de 20 .la mie. O creştere a populaţiei cu 2,5-3 la sută pe an nu mai este ceva excepţional. Este cazul Algeriei, Tunisiei şi fără îndoială al Egiptului. Acest ritm (dublarea populaţiei în decursul unei gene­ raţii) este mult superior celui care a făcut să fiarbă Europa în zilele ei de glorie (1 – 1,5 pe an) şi nu are nici derivativul emigrării sau al colonialismului. Lumea musulmană combină mortalitatea din Europa anului 1880 cu• o natalitate atinsă în cele mai bune perioade ale Evului Mediu� Acest amestec este exploziv.”

Deci “ar fi naiv să • se creadă că aceste ţări ce

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cunosc creşterea populaţiei, şi deci şi a nevoilor, care dispun una de petrol, alta de conducte, cealaltă de canal (Suezul) vor asista resemnate cum fluxul bogăţiilor iese din teritoriul lor, sau doar îl traversează, îar ă a reclama o parte importantă din ele.”

• Incidenjele sporului demografic privesc in primul rind creşterea, sau mai bine spus frecventa stagnare a nivelului de trai în Jlirile musulmane, în pofida creş�

terii producjiei. Fenomenul. este frecvent în pirile .lumii a ��

Cu toate acestea, pretutindeni �u fost luate măsuri pozitive. Astfel numărul şomerilor a scăzut. în Tunisia, pentru a nu lua decît acest exemplu, doar prin mijloace proprii, şi fără investiţii prea mari, 200—300 000 de şomeri sau semişomeri au primit de lucru graţie con­ strucţiilor de drumuri, terasamentelor împotriva eroziunii solului, deschiderii de şantiere urbane sau prin simple plantări de arbori. Din calculele recente ale unui econo­ mist se constată de asemenea că producţia agricolă în Orientul Apropiat a progresat în general în ace.aşi ritm cu restul lumii între 1952 şi 1958. în ce priveşte indus­ tria, nu este ramură care să nu fi progresat. Dacă luăm cazul Egiptului, indicele general pentru industriile

manufacturiere (1953= 100) dă nivelurile următoare:
1951 – 95; 1952. – 98; 1953 – 100; 1954 – 107;
1955 – 1 17; 1956 – 125; 1957 – ‘132; 1958 – 143 … în Pakistan, producţia industrială sporeşte de la 100 în 1952 la 128 în 1954, la 215 in 1958 …

Se înregistrează de asemenea creşterea masei globale a venitului naţional .Şi , deci, se pare, a posibilităţilor sporite de a consacra fonduri suplimentare investitiilor şi de a menţine o mişcare de creştere. Dar se constată şi contracurentul sporului demografic. Masa oamenilor sporeşte mai repede decît masa bunuriior de repartizat, iar în aceste conditii venitul pe cap de locuitor scade ca orice raport în care numitorul (populaţia) creşte mai repede decît numărătorul. La fel ca înotătorul cifre merge contra curentului – cu cît încearcă să avanseze,

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depune eforturi mai mari şi avansează mai puţin. Islamul, unde totul progresează, constată cum nivelul de trai scade, �u este abia menţinut.

Să adăugăm totuşi că aceste calCule privitoare la venitul naţional pe locuitor nu sînt de o rigoare absolută. De8tul de des chiar, cifra populaţiei este nesigură (uneori cu o probabilitate de 20 Ja sută). Cuantumul veniturilor

se estimează, -mai mult decît se <;alculează, cel mai adesea în absenţa oricărei contabilităji naJionale rigu­ roa.se. Mai mult, cum s- ar putea evalua. exact veniturile’ unui artizanat dispersa� adeseori arhaic, şi cele ale unei agriculturi ce cuprinde vaste zone primitive de auto­ �onsum?

Deci întotdeauna în aceste calcule este vorba de evaluări, de ordine de mărime, de nimic altceva. Dar este deja mult.

• Dată fiind creşterea demografică, singur faptul de a menţine la acelaşi nivel venitul pe locuitor demon­ strează deci o anumită vitalitate economică, capabilii să facă faţă imensei creşteri biologice.

. .
Pe ansamblu, ţările musulmane dovedesc această
vitalitate, şi dacă uneori există un res::ul, acesta este moderat. În medie, oamenii consumă sub 2600 calorii pe zi (pragul ţărilor • înstărite), dar în general se află deasupra minimului vital şi pretutindeni (în afara zonei sahariene) nu cunosd domeniul necruţător al foamei: •deci sub limita dintre bogăţie şi sărăcie, dar deasupra ljmitei sărăde-mizerie. Iată un prim punct eîştigat.

Între aceste două frontiere, poziţia diferitelor ţi!ri variază. Clasate după cifra venitului naţional pe cap de locuitor (în dolari SUA), succesiunea lor de jos în sus este următoarea: Libia – 36; Afganistan –: 50; Nige­

ria – 64; Pakistan —-66;: Indonezia – 88; Iordania — 100; Siria – 110; Iran � 115; Egipt – 122; Tunisia •–

132; Irak ‘ 142; .Maroc – 159; Algeria – 210; Tur­ cia -•219; Liban – 247. Cifrele sînt modeste. Orice
comparaţie cu cifrele europene. (peste 1000) &au din Sta­ tele Unite (2200) este zdrobitoare. Ele pot fi comparate

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dar jocul rămîne dificil şi
doar cu cifrele mici ale continentului negru, de exemplu. De remarcat . că ţările asociate ieri. sau astăzi cu Franţa (Liban, Siria, M.aroc, Algeria, Tunisia) se află aproape pe locurile cele mai bune. Meritul nu revine cu siguranţă colonizăriifranceze în sine, deşi ieri aceasta a avut meritele sale, în esenţă în fonnarea unei anumite clase de intelectuali şi de cadre, a unei asocieri mai intime decît în alte părţi a civilizaţiilor şi oamenilor
existenţi.
Libanul îşi datorează relativu1 record puterii emigra­ ţiei sale comerciale, capitaliste şi culturale în intregul

Islam, în Africa neagră şi Amefica latină•şi ambivalen­ tei sale religioase (creştină $i musulmană); Algeria – investitiilor franceze şi internaţionale (importante S]Jccese agricole, diguri, drumuri, şcolarizare, servicii medicale, realizări petroliere în Sahara, emigrarea muncitorilor spre Franţa) pe care, îndelungatul război declanşat în 1954 nu
le-a întrerupt. .
în lupta pe care trebuie să o poarte, fiecare economie are şansele sau atuufile sale: Irakul, lranul, Arabia Saudită, Algeria – au petrolul; Egiptul – apa fertiliza­ toare a Nilului, canalul Suez, bumbacul’de înaltă caliţate, induStria textilă;• Turcia şi Marocul – o industrializare foarte adesea inteligentă; Indonezia – cauciuc, petrol, mine de cositor; Pakistanul – vaste res1Jrse de grîu, de
iută.
Atuurile sînt excelente aleatoriu.

• Problemele de reţolvat sînt arzătoare. Economice şi în acelaşi timp soCiale, ele se întrepătrund atît de strîns unele cu altele încît pare imposibil să fie abordate una cîte una. Toate la. un loc, ele propun un program redu-tabiL

Astfel, ar trebui: _

a) in primul rind; ameliorarea agriculturii. Atacarea

deci cu violenţă a regimului arhaic de• proprietate; atacarea numeroaselor probleme ale irigării,eroziunii devastatoare a terenurilor arabile. Adică tehnici şi politici agrare.

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b) Implantarea întreprindţrilor industriale (grele sau

uşoare, private sau de stat) şi, pe cît posibil, legarea lor de întreaga economie a fiecărei ţări. Este necesar ca ele să se sprijine pe structura globală a acestei economiişi să o însufleţească prin acţiunea lor.
c) Reglementarea chestiunii investiţii/o;-, arzătoare

pentru că implică ajutor extern (capitaluri internaţionale’ private•- prin intermediul băncilor elveţiene -, ajutoare­ guvernamentale sovietice, americane sau franceze, în••. curînd capitaluri europene diri Piaţa Comună).

d) Crearea unei pieţe. Aici dificultatea este dublă: nu •există piaţă decît .cu preţul •unui anumit nivel de trai. (ceea ce ne face să ne întoarcem la problema pe care tocmai dorim s-o rezolvăm) şi nu există piaţă valabilă decît dacă ea se întinde mult dincolo de piaţa naţională. De unde ideile, lansate cu mai multă insistenţă decît succes, de piaţă panarabă, piaţă maghrebiană, piaţă africană. Visuri înţelepte, realizări dificile.
e) Educarea, formarea mîinii de lucru, cu atît mai

mult cu cît automatizarea, posibilă în cadrul unei industrii care pleacă de la zero, neglijează actuala supraabtindenţă de mînă de lucru, problemă crucială şi
care trebuie rezolvată inaintea oricărei alteia.

f) Formarea cadrelor: tehnicieni, ingineri, profesori, administratori … învăţămîntul şi formarea tehnică sînt la ordinea zilei. Este o operaţiune de anvergură, şi numai entuziasmul popular puternic ce se manifestă faţă de învăţămînt va permite depăşirea dificultăţilor imense.

în concluzie, vor trebui făcute investiţii enorme, care uneori nu-şi vor arăta roadele decît după foarte . multă vreme. “Generaţii întregi sfut sacrificate dinainte. Doar cîţiva ştiu acest lucru, ceea ce constituie un trist privit� giu. Unii poeţi siriano-libanezi tineri fac apel, pentru a-şi explica ‘un asemenea fenomen, la mitul lui Thannus, zeu! oriental hărăzit unei morţi •dureroase, dar şi renaşterii. Astfel justifică ei anxietatea penuanentă şi amărăciu­ nea actuală ale poporului lor.” (J. Berque).
• Trebuie făcută o alegere: în faţa clarităţiiproble­ melor, a dific ultăţiişi stringenjei soluţiilor, a amploarei

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sacrificiilor inevitabile, liderii diferitelor state ezitiiîn ce priveşte strategia de unnat. Lumea 18 propune cel puţin două şi alegerea ce trebuie făcută comandă şi transcende întregul destin al lslamului.

în mare, este vorba fie de a rămîne în cadrul unui capitalism de tip • occidental, pe jumătate liberal, pe jumătate intervenţionist, sub semnul unui• anume libera­ lism politic; fie de a• opta pentru experi_enţele socialiste care pot fi sovietice, iugoslave sau chineze. Mai simplu, este vorba de a menţine societatea şi guvernul aşa cum sînt, ameliorîndu-le cît de cît; sau de a dărîma edificiul dintr-o lovitură, pentru a-l reconstrui pe o altă bază.

Din nefericire; aceste opţiuni nu sint pur intelectuale, nici chiar empirice. Ele depind de o •mie de factori, unii interni, alţii exterill.

Pretutindeni, sau aproape pretutindeni apare o burghe­ zie, o mică burghezie, clasă de intelectuali în ascensiu­ ne, adesea de tineri intelectuali. Ea se resimte încă.de pe unna puternice lor decepţii la care a fost supusă de . imitarea Occidentului. în domeniul politic de exemplu: în afară de Afganistan şi Yemen, �ate statele musulmane au parlamente, dar ce a ciştigat ea din aceasta? Burghezia decepţionată şi nerăbdătoare să participe• la afaceri “se întoarce spre comunism pentru că vede în el un mijloc de a-şi instaura într-o bună zi hegemonia; •cadrul biro­ cratic şi idealul de planificare ale lumii sovietice ii par tot atîtea garanţii de stabilitate şi mij loace de a rezolva problemele economice . cvasi-inextricabile… Tînăra intelectualitate musulmană eSte tentată de aparenţa modernistă a ştiinţei •şi gindiriimarxiste; nu este decît o reacţie, desigur, împotriva cadrelor medievale care parali�ează încă gîndirea islamică, dar ea este cu ati’t mai periculoasă cu cît• promotoriisăi au căutat deja – fără succes – în gîndirea liberală şi democratică a . Occidentului mijlocul de .a accede la o cultură raţională modernă. Marxismul le pare de acum înainte a fi singura cale pqsibilă” (A. Benigsen).

Occidentul . este prea înclinat să creadă că gesturile şi tîrguielile statelor islamice cu U.RS.S. nu sînt decît şmecherii pentru a obţine maşini, •arme, cr&:lite ieftine.

147
De fapt, problema merge mult mai departe. Experienţele socialiste fascinează tineretul ţărilor islanţice. Occiden­ tul nu se sprijină adesea decit pe aristocraţii retrograde, pe un decor social de teatru din mucava. Aici ca şi aiurea îi lipseşte o adevărată “politică planetară”. • . •

In realitate, problema nu este de a convinge Islamul că soluţia occidentală este• Sllperioară în sine, sau preferabilă alteia. Şi nici de a deschide, mai mult sau mai puţin, robinetul creditelor. Ea este, pe scurt, de a

ofe� ţărilor subdezvoltate un model valabil de planifi­ care care să le fie adaptat şi care să le deschidă calea
speranţei şi viitorului.

Civilizatia musulmană în secolul XX

Această criză profundă pune oare în pericol civilizaţia însăşi a Islamului? Chestiunea poate fi• pusă în mai
multe feluri:

1) Mai există oare, în iinensa fracţionare de naţiona­ lităţi şi de rivalităţi politice, o civilizaţie mu8ulmană, una identificabilă?

2) Dacă ea mai există, această civilizaţie nu este oare ameninţată de “achiziţionarea unui veşmînt planetar de .tehnici şi de comportamente”, cum spune Jacques Berque, adică• de accesul la civilizaţia . industrială, fabricată de Occident şi care se întinde acum în univers?

3) Şi nu este şi mai mare riscul ca; pentru a o atinge, Islamul s ă ‘opteze pentni calea unui marxism capabll să distrugă una din cele mai bune• surse ale sale de coeziu-ne, religia?

• Mai există () ciVilizaţie musulmană? Dezbinările politice ale lslamului par să excludă, pentru multă

vreme încă, visurile panislamiştilor. Dar ca /{l]l t, ca realitate de civilizaţie, panislamismul există, astăzi ca

şi ielj.

în viaţa de • zi cu zi veţi întîlni incontestabil această civilizaţie, de la un capăt la altul al spaţiului său. într-o

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similitudine de credinţe, de cutume, de obic�iuri, de raporturi fami liale, de gusturi, de distracţii, de jocuri, de comportamente, chiar de bucătărie… Transportat deo­ dată dintr-un oraş în altul al Islamului mediteranean, ca european eşti mai frapat de asemănări decît de deose­ biri. Dacă ajungi în Pakistan şi Insulillda, deosebirile se vor accentua, şi vor fi chiar mai mari în Africa neagră musulmană: pentru că aici civilizaţia musulmană întÎlllplină alte curente de civilizaţie, la fel de puternice
sau chiar mai puternice decît ea. •. 1

în Africa neagră legătura nu este \decît religioasă.

Predicile (căci Egiptul a întreprins în numele panarabis­

mului o amplă experienţă ,,misionară”) âu loc• adesea, în ţările francofone, în franceză. Aceasta înseamnă că
legătunle de cultură sînt aproape inexistente, sau cel puţin fragile, indirecte. Şi nici nu este sigur că această

legătură religioasă se dovedeşte eficientă în masa africană care, de fapt, •transformă puternic, africanizţa­

ză religia lui Muhammad cu aceeaşi libertate ca şi pe cea a lui Christos. Pe scurt� în Africa neagră amprenta panislamismului, cînd există, este politică, socială ,cel mult; ea nu este cu adevărat un fapt de civilizaţie.

în ce priveşte .Pakistanul, el face parte dintr- o civili­ zaţie numita pe drept cuvînt mdo-musulmană. Luhba naţională – urdu – amestecă cuvinte de origine irania­ nă sau arabă cu cuvinte venite din sahscrită. Scrierea este de la dreapta la stînga, ca araba,• dar nu seamănă deloc cu aceasta.

Or, unul din semnele cele mai sigure ale ţărilor care ating cu adevărat unitatea civilizaţiei musulmane rămîne limba. Această limbă, care odinioară forma cimentul
Islamului, araba “literală”; s- a menţinut în secolul al XX-lea; ea este limba scrisă comună, cea folosită în
ziare, în cărţi. Limbile naţionale nu sînt decît limbi vorbite. •
Altă legătură: problemele economice şi sociale se pun aproape pretutindeni în termeni identici, în măsura chiar în care se nasc, în esenţă, din şocul dintre o civilizaţie islamică arhaică, tradiţională, conservată pînă în zilele noastre, şi o civilizaţie modernă care o asediază din toate ‘ părţile. Că aici problema este abia

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schiţată şi că altundeva ea este deja puternic atacată nu schimbă cu •nimic faptul că soluţiile care se impun au mari şanse de a se asemăna, prin logica lucrurilor, din cauza ‘identităţii punctelor de plecare; ţările avansate în reformă prefigurează viitorul cel9rlalte.

Şi aici Islamul exilat – în Africa neagră, India, Insulinda, China – se diferenţiază de ansamblu pentru că soarta lui este legată d.e cea a altor civilizaţii.

• A doua întrebare: se Jla debarasa oare Islllmulde Jlechea lui cillilir.aţie tradiţională ca de o haină Jleche, pe măsură ci se Jla apropia • de industrializare şi .de tehnica modernă?

–

Această întrebare nu este deosebită pentru destinul Islamului. De fapt, -problema trebuie pusă astfel: Civili­ zaţia modernă, cea a maşinii şi în curînd a creierului electronic,, a automatizării, a atomului, această civiliza­ ţie, bună•sau rea,• va uniformiza oare lumea, va face să dispară civilizaţiile particulare? ,

Mâşţnismul, cu consecinţele lui nenumărate, este cu siguranţă capabil să rupă, să distrugă şi să reconstru­
iască numeroase struct\Jri ale unei•civilizaţii. Nu însă pe toate, pentru că el, singur, nu este o civilizaJie . A afmna

aceasta înseamnă a pretinde că Europa de azi s-a născut deodată, în timpul revoluţiei sale industriale, care a fost şi pentru ea � şoc brutal. De fapt, ea este mult mai veche, rădăcinile ei sînt mult mai adînci. De altfel, existenta naţiunilor eUropene pune cu tărie la îndoială puterea maşinismului de a unifica sau de � uniformiza universul. Participînd deja la o aceeaşi civilizaţie de ansamblu, cea a Occidentului creştin şi umanist, antre­ nată aproape în acelaşi moment, în urmă cu peste un secol, în aceeaşi aventură a industrializării, dotate cu aceleaşi tehnici, cu aceeaşi ştiinţă,cu instituţii analoage, cu toate formele sociale ale maşinismului, aceste naţiuni trebuiau. de mult să-şi • piardă acele particularităţi pronunţate care permit să se vorbească de o civilizaţie franceză, germană, engleză, mediteraneană•… Or, este suficient ca un francez să treacă Marea Mînecii, ca un
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englez să păşească pe continent, sau un gennan să ajungă în Italia pentru a-şi da seaina cu uşurinţă că industrializarea nu înseamnă qnifonnizare. Incapabilă să distrugă particularisme regionale, cwn ar putea tehnica să anihileze puternicele personalităţi care sînt marile civilizaţii, bazate pe religii, ftlozofri, valori umane şi morale funciannentediferite?

Dar întrebarea s- ar pune altfel dacă Islamului i s-ar oferi tehnica însoţită de marxism. adică de valori opuse valorilor spirituale tradiţionale ale Islamului? Răspunsul la această ititrebare mai precisă şi adesea pusă nu este nici comod şi nici perfect posibil. Nu este şigur că nu se schimbă însăşi esenţa întrebării.

Marxismul, trebuie s- o spunem, .nu este, luat singur, o civilizaţie de înlocuire; el este o orientare socială, un umanism voluntar, o raţionalizare. Dacă într-o bună zi el se va aplica Islamului, se va ajunge fără îndoială la o coexistenţă, la un partaj ca cel din ţara sovietică între civilizaţia rusă şi marxism, ca în China între civilizaţia chineză şi marxism ..Chiar dacă le- a zdruncinat puternic, marxismul nu a abolit. nici una din aceste civilizaţii şi nu acesta este programul său.

• Desigur, Y. Mubarak are dreptate să spună că, într-o asemenea încercare, “Islamul ar rezista cu mai puţină uŞurinţă decît creştinismul Ia o influenţă marxis­ tă, pentru că el nu distinge încă între spiritual şi secular. Spiritualul riscă să se estompeze mai uşor o dată cu materializarea tehnicistă a unei societăţi musulmane comunizate”. De ce are dreptate? Pentru că

creştinismul în esenţă, pretutindeni sau aproape pretutin­ deni, sup<?rtase, înaintea impactului unei revoluţii indus­

triale, şocul unui avint ştiinţific, raţionalist şi laic, la care s-a adaptat . în cursul acestei îndelungate perioade de iniţiere, nu fără a opune rezistenţă, dar menţinîndu-şi echilibrul, abandonînd ce trebuia să abandoneze. El este înannat in faţa tehnicii, în faţa raţionalismplui, în faţa marxismului însuşi.

Pentru Islam, unde viaţa religioasă comandă fiecare act’al :vieţii, tehnica (cu marxism sau fără) se prezintă drept un cerc de foc prin care trel;mie să treacă dintr-un salt, pentru a înceta .să inai fie o civilizaţie prea veche şi

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pentru a întineri la flăcările timpului prezent Drumul pe care-l va alege va depinde de el şi de lume, de lumea
dublă care . oscilează ca o imensă balanţă, cind .intr-o parte, cind ‘în cealaltă. Islamul, ca intreaga LuJlle aTreia, riscă să• se indrepte nu inspre ce ar dOri,’ ci spre cel mai greu dintre cele două bl�.

Partea a doua
CONTIN ENTUL NEGRU

CAPITOLUL 1

TRECUTUL
Africa neagră, sau mai bine zis Afri cile negre sint aproape închise intre două ocean� şi două deşerturi: foarte vastul deşert Sahara, la nord, iinportantul ‘deşert Kalahari, la sud; Oceanul Atlantic la vest, Oceanul Indian la est. Acestea sint bariere serioase, cu atît mai mult .cu cît Africa tabulară se deschide dificil spre spaţiile oceanice vecine: ea nu are porturi bune, nu are fluvii uşor accesibile din cauza coastelor abrupte, cataractelor, a faptului că estuarele sint pline de nisip.

Dar aceste bariere nu sint de netrecut. Oceanul Indian a fost foart� de timpuriu animat de corăbii cu pinze care foloseau vinturile musonice; Atlanticul a fost cucerit prin Marile Descoperiri europene incepind . cu secolul al XV -lea; Kalahari nu închide decît pe jumătate poarta spre sud; cît despre Sahara, a fost traversat încă din

• indepărtata antichitate; iar aducerea , dromaderului in

Africa de nord, o dată cu primele secole ale erei noastre, a intensificat traficul saharian: sare, şi mai tîrziu, ţesături venind din nord; sclavi negri şi praf de aur ve�d din

sud.

Îiltr-un cuvint, Africa neagră s-a deschis greu şi tîrziu spre lumea din exterior. Ar fi totuşi o greşeală să ne inchipuim că porţile şi ferestrele ei au fost ferecate timp de secole. Natura care aici comabdă intr-un mod impe­ rativ nu este totuşi .niciodată singura care să-şi dicteze ordinele: istoria a avut adesea cuvmtul ei de spus.

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Spaime

• Faptul că tktenninismul geografic nu comandă singur este demonstrat de la început de simpla analiză a frontierelor zonelor marginale ale continentului negru, care nu ocupă decît o parle din Afri ca.

a) Spre nord, nord-est şi est, Sahara, zid etanş sau nu, se impune ca o limită caracteristică a lumii negre. .

Africa neagră, aşa cum afmna un document al unei comisii a Pietei Comune, este “Africa aflată la sud de Sahara”. De la coasta mediteraneană pînă la Sahelul sudanez, populatia Africii este de rasă albă. Fără îndoială, la această Africă albă trebuia adăugată şi Etiopia. Aceasta are elemente albe de necontestat şi care

s-au amestecat cu populaţia metisă, foarte diferită totuşi de cea a adevăraţilor melano-africani. Mai mult, prin

civiliz;aţia sa, prin religia sa creştînă (incepind cu 350 p.H.), prin calitatea agriculturii sale care cunoaşte în

acelaşi timp creşterea animalelor şi plugul, griul, vita de vie, Etiopia este o lume originală� aparte, şi . care a rezistat tot atît de bine, cîndva; atacurilor Islamului care reuşise să o încercuiască, cît şi, odinioară, puterilor europene care au vrut să o izoleze de Marea Roşie şi de Oceanul Indian.

Specialiştii în preistorie şi etnografti cred chiar că, d�arte, în timp, Etiopia a fost un centru secundar de răspîndire a plugului şi a animalelor domţStice care ar fi provenit din India. Fără rolul de intermediar al Etiopiei, creşterea vitelor, privilegiu ne’aşteptat al atîtor ţărani negri care lucrau pămîntul cu săpăliga. nu ar fi fost de
imaginat. .
De fapt, nu există oare o vastă zonă a Africii
orientale a cărei inimă este Etiopia şi care s-ar• intinde la nord pină la ţările Nilului (pină la cea de-a şasea cataractă), spre est pină la diversele Somalii •deşertificate şi spre sud pină in Kenya, chiar dincolo de ea? Africa• intermediară, nici albă nici neagră, dar amîndouă in acelaşi timp, posedă ca şi Africa albă o scriere (şi deci o istorie), o civilizaţie legată de marile centre 4e propa� gare din . nord, prinsă in mod incontestabil in această

155

imensă aventură între Asia, Mediterana şi Europa. Vom remarea, în sfirşit, că Sahara se prelungeşte la esl de Etiopia prin Eritreea şi Somalii, o lungă zonă aridă şi pustie care şi ea marchează, de asemenea, O’ limită a
continentului negru. _
b) Spre sud, accidente istorice opresc şi vor opri încă:
multă vreme expansiunea naturală a Africii negre: în

secolul al XVII-lea, olandezii dornici să stabilească o escală pe ruta Indiilor s-au instalat la extremitatea • sudică a continentului, într-o ţară pe atunci practic goală; în 1815, englezii au cucerit această poziţie strategică: în curînd, coloniştii olandezi, burii (ţărani), ‘

au emigrat spre nprd şi au cucerit platourile – pline de iarbă ale Veldului, creînd aici o economie prosperă a
creşterii animalelor.
Astfel, o Africă albă s-a constituit încetul cu încetul în sud, ca şi în nordul continentului. Ea este prosperă,

îmbogăţită de minele de aur şi diamante, de industriile sale. • Ea înţelege mai degrabă să se apere împotriva mareei negre (3 milioane albi, 10 milioane negri, 1�5 mi­ lioane metişi). Uniunea Sud-Africană a dus o politică rasială disperată (Apartheid�ul – segregaţia) care a’ determinat -o să rupă legăturile cu Commonwealth-ul (1960). Această dramă este oare numai un episod, sau o ruptură definitivă? Ea nu va opri, nu poate• opri, singură, roata istoriei.

c) Ultima excepJie, şi aceasta istorică, �area itisulii a Madagasc{lrului treb_u-ie plasată în afara continentului

negru. Populaţia sa este formată, aşa cum se ştie, din două elemente: negrii bantu, veniţi din continentul apropiat, şi triburile malaieziene, venite în mai multe valuri din est. Amestecul între aceste două elemente a fost puternic, dar partea vestică a insulei este mai • degrabă bantu, cea estică • – malaieziană. Potrivit . cercetărilor încă foarte • incomplete,- majoritatea ar ft metişi. în acest amestec etnic, indone.zienii şi africanii ar ft în proporţie de 1 la 2, predominînd elementul african.

Cu toate acestea, diversităţii etnice i se opune o puternică unitate culturală _ şi care dă avantaj elemen­ tului indonezian. Limba malgaşă este indoneziană,

1 5 6

tehnicile agricole şi artizanale sint categoric indoneziene: “defrişarea prin intermediul focUlui, cazniaua cu coadă• lungă, orezăriile inundate, cultura . de\ taro, ignama, bananierul, creşterea cîipelui, a parcului negru, a păsă­

rilor de curte .. ., pescuitul caşalotului, al broaştei testoase, piroga cu balansier, vin,ătoarea cu lancea, cu sarbacana,

cu praştia; împletirea de coşuri şi rogojini, care consti­ tuiau elementele principale ale mobilierului…”. Fără
îndoială, aceşti navigatori au venit prin nord, . nu prin călătorii directe. Dovada (fragilă, dar totuşi dovadă) în acest sens este că ins�lele Mascarene – Reuillon, MaUritius şi Rodrigue – sint nepopulate pînă in secolul al XVII-lea, deşi ar fi fost etape frr eşti, chiar obligatorii, ale tinei călătorii în linie dreaptă, pe mare, intre
insulele din sudul Asiei şi Madagascar.
Pe scurt, istoria şi civilizaţia Oceanului Indian sînt cele care şi-au anexat marea insulă şi au smuls-o continentului african. Dar apropierea acestuia contribuie astăzi la unirea destinului• lui cu cel al tinerei Republici Malgaşe.
• Pentru înjelegerea lumii negre, geografia primează asupra istoriei. Cadrele geografice sînt cele mai semni­ ficative, deŞi niciodată nu sînt singurele ţare contează.

Cliniatul explică succesiunea vastelor zone de arbori şi stepă care implică moduri de viaţă obligatoriu diferite.

Spre vest, apa • ploilor ecuatoriale rămîne pe loc, form înd masa in:lensă a pădurilor virgine, similare pădurilor amazoniene sau indoneziene• existente Il! aceeaşi latitudirie.

Este vorba de “pădurea burete, mustind de. âpă, cu trunchhiri masive de arbori giganţi, cu plante formind o increngătură de nepătruns, întunecată şi silenţioasă, rezistentă la orice defrişare, ostilă instalării fiinţei uma­ ne şi chiar.circulaţiei, în afara aceleia care se practică pe ţărmuri; regiune cu viaţă precară, izolată, ba’zată pe pescuit şi vînat”. Este prin excelenţă zona refugiu unde subzistă pigmeii, supravieţuitorii acelor negrili care au fost, Iar ă îndoială, prima populaţie din Africa.

1 57

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7. Divirsitatea Africii: geografw.
Această pădure se dezvoltă mai mult la nord decît
la sud de Ecuator şi mărgineşte Golful Guineei pe latura
sa septentrională din Liberia pînă în Camerun. întreru-

158

perea mediană pe care o semnalează harta noastră corespunde, cu. savanele ei inalte şi plantaţiile de pal­ mieri, Dahomeiului meridional. Spre est, pădurea eeuatorială se opreşte în bazinul Congoului, la poalele reliefului înalt � Africii orientale.

în jurul imensei păduri se întind în mod concentric păduri tropicale din ce in ce � uscate, savane pădu­ roase (ierburi înalte, grupuri de arbori), păduri cordoane de-a lungul cwsurilor de ape,.savane deschise, în sfîrşit
– stepe. .
Din punctul de_ vedere al existenţei omuhti, se disting două zone: şi una şi cealaltă cu perioade alternative de ploi şi secetă, prima caracterizată de creşterea – anim­ lelor, a doua . fără această caracteristică .(din cauza
muştei ţeţe). .
în zonele. caracterizate de creşte� 8.!’limalelor, care

slnt cele mai animate din Africa neagră, aceasta eSte piactic un adaos la cultura cu săpăliga, .omniprezentă. Ailimalele nu sînt de fapt prezente ca animale de tracţiu­ ne. Culturile sînt, de la caz la caz, meiul, sorgul, ignama, porumbul, orezul; şi, – destinate mai ales exportului, bumbacul, arahidele, arborele de cacao, fără să uităm palmierul de ulei, una din bogăţiile, în special, ale
Nigeriei.

în orice caz, este foane evident că între aceste două
tipuri de viaţă• rurală s-a stabilit marea diviziune – cu
şi fără animale domestice. Şi că, spre nord şi spre est,
zona externă, practicînd creşterea animalelor, este prin
forta împrejurărilor, cea care, fiind cea mai bogată, mai
echilibrată .ş� de •asemenea, de mult timp cea mai
deschisă spre lumea exterioară, cea care deci a fost
marea scenă a istoriei.

, –

La această diviziune rurală a spaţiului se silprapune cea a zonelor etnice. Melano.africanii, desprecare este înţelept să nu credem nici măcar o clipă că sînt una şi aceeaşi rasă, se împart, foarte în mare, în patru grupuri: pigmeii, care sînt o rămăşiţă foarte mapoiată, sălbăti­ cită (limbajul lor este abia articulat); la marginea deşer� tului Kalahari, micile grupuri arhaice Khoi-Khoi (hoten­ toţi) şi Saan (boşimani); populaţiile sudaneze din Dakar

159

care se 1
pină in Etiopia,; din Etiopia pină in Africa australă – populaţia bantu.

Cele două mari grupuri sînt sudanezii şi populaJia bantu, şi unul şi celălalt unităJi lingvistice şi culturale
înainte de toate. Populaţiile. bantu, fără mdoială origi­
nare din Africa Marilor Lacuri, au păst.ritt o coeziune mai mare decît sudanezii. Dar şi unii şi ceilal•ţi cunosc
multiple şi profunde deosebiri, datorate fie avatarurilor istoriei, fie deosebirilor regionale. în ce-i priveşte pe sudanezi, trebuie, de asemenea, pusă problema ameste­ cului cu popoarel.e islamo-semite, datx fiin d . inftl trările

maurilor, fulbii berberi islamizaţi, păstori staQilesc tot mai mult pretutindeni.

O hartă etnică detaliată a Africii negre sfidează orice .aducere aminte care nu este susţinută de o experi­
enţă solidă la faţa locului; ea semnalează conflicte
fără s îrrşit, mişcări, migraţii, avansul unora, reculul altora. � aici, amestecuri de raSe şi tensiuni pe care le

găsim pe • întreg ‘teritoriul continentului negru, popularea realizindu-se, m vremuri de demult ca şi mai apropiate, prin valuri succesive care fie s-au asimilat, fie s-au respins unele pe altele. Nimic nu este încă absolut stabil. Este de presupus ititeresul pentru cunoaşterea • tuturor
acestor fluxuri migratoare, datele lor, direcţiile şi viteza lor. Or, acest lucru nu este imposibil pentru un cercetător avizat, căci este rar cazul cînd ,.locuitorii unui sat să nu
aibă cunoştinţă de satul de origine al fondatorilor
comunităţii lor”. •
.
Zona situată între 12 şi 15 grade latitudine nordică,
cu populaţie ‘sudaneză, este cea in care se dezvăluie poate punctul maxim al acestor tensiuni. Exemplul cel mai tipic este cel al populaţiilor respinse, pe care le numim paleo-negrite (presupunînd, ceea ce este probabil, că de sînt populaţiile cele mai vechi, cu excepţia pigmeilor). Populaţii de primitivi, trăind din: vfuat şi culesul fructelor; sau de ţărani hotărîţi. să fertili zeze

terenuri muntoase, . adesea foarte sărace şi reuşind, prin gră<ţinărit intensiv, să le menţină la 50 locuitori. pe

kilometru pătrat sau mai mult, ele ocupă in general poziţii puternice, uşor de apărat. Acesta este şi cazul dogonilor, cea mai nordică dintre aceste populaţii

160

puternic inrădăcinate, ca şi al �turor ac�tor “popoare despuiate” din Africa: ,”Coniaguis şi Bassarisdin Gui­

neea, Bobos şi Lobis din Coasta de Fildeş, Nankasas din Ghana modernă, Kabrei şi Sombas din Togo Dahomey, Fabis şi Angus din Nigeria”. Acestea continuă să fie mici grupuleJe etnice, pete minuscule pe o hartă.

La scara vastelor ansambluri, între pădurea ecuato­ rială şf Sahara, se. ţuvine _ să menţionăm următoarele populaţii: Toucouleurs, Mandingues, Ban1baras, Haous­ sas, Yoroubas şi Ibos, ultimele două formînd cele două mase dense ale puternicei Nigerii,tara cea mai bogată şi cea mai, populată din Afi;ica neagră..-

, Aceste popoare au fiecare credinţele lor, modul lor de trai, structurile sociale,. culturi care nu; sînt niciodată aceleaşi. Această diversitate constituie atractia imensă a Afri_di, unde experientele, de la un• loc la altul, vari�ă permanent, în mare măsură, şi unde prin forta impreju­ rărilor destinele de ansamblu se schiţează cu greutate. “Adesea, zonele de ‘refugiu ale indigenilor; care în rezistenta lor nu vor să accepte nici o autoritate din exterior, se găsesc în însăşi vecinătatea capitalelor celor tnai dezvoltate”. �

Pe scurt, diversitatea culorilor: pielii, care merge de la. negrul cel mai inchis al sudanezilor pînă la pielea deschisă, mai degtabă .galbenă, a hotentoţilor şi boşi­ manilor, nu este decit semnul antrop(>logic, fiZ iologic al unei diversităţi mult mai esenţiale a oamenilor,’ societă-

ţilor şi culturilor.
• Acest continent suferă şi a suferit de numeroase penurii, gral’ede slăbic_iuni de ansambl� •

Nu le putem enumera pe toate şi nici arăta cum, urmă­ rind epocile, ele au . devem’\ mai apăsătoare sau .mai lejere. Am semnalat dificila deschidere a lumii negre spre exterior, handicap serios, căci orice progres al civilizaţiei este facilitat de interferenţele şi relaţiile de. la civiliz�rţie la civilizaţie. Această relativă inchidere explică lacune importante, care nu au fost acoperite deloc înainte de venirea europenilor şi începerea marilor colonizări. De

161

pretutindeni rară şi

lor,. dar sacrifica.
notat, de exemplu, absenta roţii, a plugului, a vitelor (le povară, a scrierii (cu excepţia Etiopiei, dar aceasta nu face parte cu adevărat din Africa neagră; cu excepţia. ţărilor timpuriu isl�izate de pe coasta orientală şi a părţil sudaneze, dar aici scrierea tine de Islam).
Aceste exemple, ele singure, dovedesc că adesea, influenţele exterioare nu au pătruns decît picătură cu picătură spre imensitatea Africii, la sud de Sahara.

Acest lucru îl demonstrează problema atît de discuta� tă, şi niciodată elucidată tOtuşi, a influenţelor Egiptului faraonilot asupra societăţilor negre. Au fost găsite perle de sticlă în Gabon, o statue� a zeului Osiris la Ma­ longue, la sud-est de fostul Congo belgian, o alta la sud de. Zambezi: sînt dovezi fragile, dar ele • deschid totuşi pers�ve asupra J:l?Sibilităţii unor relatii slabe ca

volum, în special în vastul domeniu al artei şi tehnicilor ei (ca turnarea cerii topite).

, Dimpotrivă, trebuie admis că aducerea plantelor din afară, soiuri de orez din Extrem:ul Orient, porumb, trestia de zahăr, maniocul sînt fără îndoială achiziţii tîrzii. Ele nu privesc con�entul negru vechi, � probabil nu le-a•

cunoscut.

Alte deficienţe: slaba densitate (care nu explică totuşi totul) • a terenurilor arabile lateritice roşii (roşul intens

semnalează dimpotrivă soiuri arabile dense, dar rare); scurtimea zilelor bune ,pentru muncile agricole, din cauza
climatului; insuficienta constantă a unei alitnentaţ ii cu carne de care majoritatea populatiilor pare să fi fost

privată.

• în majoritatea triburilor africane nu se consumă carne decît la marile sărbători. Caprele Şi oile pe care agricul­

torii kikaiu din Kenya le cresc în jurul taberelor lor sînt rezervate sacrificiilor şi ceremoniilor publice. Veciniilor
nomazi, păstoriimasais, trăiesc din produsele turmelor

animalele lor sînt prea preţioase pentru a le Carnea, carnea care dă forţă şi virilitate,. este

mult rîvnită, aşa cum arată • clar

acest “Cîntec .de vînătoare al pigmeilor:

fn pădurea pe unde nu trece nimeni decît tu, _

Vînătorule, întăreşte-ti i.ri.ima, strecoară-te, aleargă, sări,

1 6 2

Carnea este in fata ta, enonnacarne voioasă,

Carnea •care se mişcă precum o colină,

Carnea care inveseleşte inima,

Carnea care va fi friptă in căminul tău, carnea in care se vor infige dintii,
Frumoasa �:arne �şie, sîn�ele pe fai€l il bem cald.

Cu toate acestea să nu exagerăm acest bilanţ negativ. Mai întîi, trecutul Africii nţgre semnalează progrese străvechi de o rapiditate care poate fi invidiată chiar de
progresele Europei antice. Reuşite evidente ‘sint semnalate astfel jn domeniul’ artei şi nu numai in ce priveşte

admirabilele bronzuri şi . statuete din fildeş din Benin (secolele XI-XV); sau nu mai putin admirabilele stofe ţesute din diverse fibre vegetale. în cele din urmă şi

înainte de toate, Africa a practicat foarte devreme metalurgia; din anul 3000a.H., în ceea ce priveşte fierul.

Este absurd şi mai ales inenct •să se almne că negriinu au cunbscut fierul decît după sosirea portughe:Zilor la Capul B6jador. Afmele din fier au fost cunoscute foarte de tiinpuriu. Procedeele metalurgice ale rodezienilor sint perfecţionate, f’rr eşte, cu incepere • din Evul Mediu. Prelucrarea cositorului este cunoscută .în Nigeria Superi­ oară probabil de peste 2000de ani. în sfirşit, detaliu semnificativ; s-a constatat adesea organizarea separată, in societăţile negre, a unor caste puternice şi de temut de
fierari, legate categoric de ţradiţii foarte vechi.
/
Trecutul continentului negru

Lungul trecut al Africii negre nu este prea cuooscut, cum se intîmplă cu cel al tuturor popoarelor care nu cunosc scrierea şi a căror istorie nu ne parvine decît printr-o tradiţie orală, prin cercetări arheologice sau prin relatările wior martori exteriori şi ocazionali.

Trei serii de fapte se conturează totuşi din acest trecut confuz:

a) avintul oraşelor, regatelor, imperiilor, toate cu civilizaţii şi populatii de sînge amestecat;
b) negoţul cu sclavi negri, foarte vechi şi care capătă

163
proporţii diabolice în •secolul al xyi-lea şi punerea in valoare a. continentului american, sarcină prea grea pentru ca Europa să o poată duce singură la bun �firşit; c) în �frrşit, instalarea brutală a puterilor europene, care, Ia Conferinţa de la Berlin (Act fma h 1885),’ d�ă­ virşesc împărţirea � o hartă a ceea ce .mai rămăsese încă teoretic’ fără stăpîn din va8tul continent,, • pe jumătate necunoscut şi de acum înainte în întregime

colonizat
• In Afri ca neagră, istoria nu a faJiorir.at înflorirea unor ]onne politice şi culturali! superioare decît acolo unde . existau, pe de o parle, resurse legate de agricul­ tUră şi creşterea Jlitelor, şi acolo unde, pe de altă parle, eta a$igurat contactul cu .• exteriorul, fie de-a lungul marginilor sahariene,fie de-:a lungul Oceanului Indian. Aici se găsesc J/echile • imperii,oraşele J/echi înflori• toare.

Se singularizează astfel o Africă specifică, al caret trecut este relativ cunoscut, cu sodeiăţi şi culturi organizate în state, faţă în faţă cu o Africă “interstiţia­ lă” şi care, istoriceşte vorbind, ne scapă. în legătură cu indigenii de pe coastele atlantice ale Saharei, un desco­ peritor portughez aftrma cu dispreţ în secolul al XV -lea: “Nu au nici măcar regj”. E: �tistă astfel Africa cu regi – pe care istoria o cunoaşte relativ – şi cealaltă, fără• regi, devorată de uitare.

Afric� neagră. s -a dezvoltat deci pe două dintre marginile sale foarte lungi, cele unde i -a fost dat să intre în contact cu Isla,mul. Acest contact riu a fost întotdeauna paşnic şi agreabil. Adesea a fost. colonizare, dar tocmai prin această colonizare Africa neagră• �ţ putut respira spre exterior.

Primele raze •lumineaz/i coasta orientală .a • Africii.

Aceasta ar ft fost în legătură cu Arabia şi India .peninsu­ lară cu secole înainte de era creştină. Cu ţoate acestea; numai o dată cu prlina •expansiune musulrilană din se• colul al VIT-lea se vor stabili relaţii foarte strînse între

164

Arabia şi Persia, pe de o parte, şi Africa�orienta lă. pe de alta. începînd din 648 apar o serie de pieţe de nlărfuri: Mogadiscio,..ofala,S Melinde, M01nbasa, Brava, Zanzibar, aceasta din unnă întemeiată în 739 de către arabii• din sudul peninsqlei, în _timp ce Kilva va fi înte�eiată în
secolul • al
X-lea de oameni din Siraz, Persia, numiţi
,.,şirazi”. . ‘
Aceste oraşe • au • cunoscut o activitate deStul de
intensă. datorită comertului cu sclavi, •cu ftldeş şi aur, acesta din unnă găSindu-se din abundenţă •în vastul

hinterland al Sofalei şi despre care aduc deja mărturii geografi arabi ca Masudi (916) şi lbn al Wardi (975).

Cîmpurile aurifere şi tninele par să se afle pe platoul Matabele, • între Zambezi şi Limpopo şi, fără îndoială,

deşi s-a susţinut contrariul, în actuala regiun� a Trans­ vaalului. Este vorba • de aur praf sau bucăţi.” Tot acest comert se face, graţie musonului, cu India, de .wide vin. fierul şi ţesăturile.

De. esenţă africană, aceSte oraşe nu au decît o• sJabă minoritate de colonişti arabi sau persani; de altfel, ele trăiesc mai mult datorită legăturilor cu India peninsu­ lară decît cu Arabia. Supremaţia lor va atinge apogeul în secolul al XV-lea, dar şi la aceaStă epoc ă economia lor rămîne încă premonetară (economie pe bază de troc), ceţ puţin in ce priveşte traficul spre interiorul continen­ tului african. Acesta a profitat şi eL A cunoscut în ptofunzimiie sale anumite structuri politice printre care regatul Monomotapa în RhodeJ;ia de sud (Monene Motapa: proprietar de mine), fără îndo�lă cel mai celebru, care ar fi fost distrus în secolul al XVII-lea de
Mambo (suveran) •din’Rowzi; •

Infiltrarea portughezilor în Oceanul Indian, qupă. călătoria lui Vase? da Gama (1498),• a dat �are o loyitură mortală oraşelor comerciale de pe coasta sud�africană? Nu s-a uitîmplat nimic de acest fel, .se consideră astăzi. Această ci vilizaţie mbi.tă, pe jumătate arabă pe jumătate africană, a continuat să str�lucească în mare măsură spre acest interior pe care oraşele de coastă nu au căutat să-I subjuge. Ruinele de pe coastele
Keayei • şi” Tanganikăi, care, odinioară încă, _erau datate

165

religiei islamice: este

Imperiul Mali
din Evul Mediu, par să provină de fapt din secolul al XVTI4ea, al XVill-lea, chlar al XIX-lea. Să reamintim

în trecere uri detaliu care caracterizează aceste oraşe: folosirea în mod obişnuit a porţelanului chin�z, alb •şi

aJbastru ..

Imperiile buclei Nigerului ne duc spre o altă frontie-.

•ră culturală cu Islamul, agitată şi. rodnică.
• Contactul cu ţărmurile şi traficul cu Sahara au

căpătat in mai mare măsură amploare la începutul a:ei creştine, o dată cu sosirea în _Africa de nord şi pe drumurile deşertului a dromaderuluî. Creşterea traficului (aur şi sclavi), i:pmulţirea carâvanelor au determinat
înaintarea Africii albe (şamito�semitică)• spre ţările negre
(Bled es Sr.ţdan-ul arabilor) .

Primul imperiu, Ghana, pare să fi fost creat în jurul anului’ 800 (contemporan cu carol cel Mare). Capitala sa. Ghana, avîDd un renunie proverbial pentru bogăţia sa, se situa la Kumbi Saleh, la 340 kilometri nord de Bamako, la frontiera cu Sahara. Este posibil să fi fost creaţia

.oiunenilor cu piele albă, deci veniţi . din nord; în orice caz, devine rapid . proprietatea populaţiilor negre care
‘aparţin rasei Soninke, raplUră • a populaţiei Mande (aceasta tinind de grupul mandingilor). Capitala, atacată de musulmani/ a fost cticentă şi distrusă în 1077.
Dar ewn traficul cu aur (pornind de la terenurile

aurifere din Senegal, de la Benue şi din Nigerul Superior) continuă, un alt imperiu apare curind, uşor deplasat spre
est, în folosul populatiilor mandingilor şi sub semnul

(el se va întinde pe

�ată • buc;:la Nigerului). Sub donu:lia lui Kankan M11Sll

(13q7-1332), care va face pelerinajul la Mecca, pe malurile Nigerului_ajung numeroşi negustori şi ştiutori de carte. Tombuctu este în acea vreme o capitală înflori­ toare, unde nomazii tuaregi vin cu regularitate. Aceştia, punînd mai tîrziu mîna pe oraş, vor contribui la destră­ marea imperiului.
O nouă extindere spre est va determina atunci pros­
peritatea Imperiului Songhai (capitale Gao şi Tonibuctu). Este favorizat de legăturile sale cu Cirene şi de acţiupi.i

166

le lui Sonni Ali (1464–1492), fără îndoială cea mai put�că personalitate dintre toti aceşti fondatori de
imperiu. El personal nu a fost un musulman foarte orto­

dox, dar înfrîngerea succesorului său de către uzurpa­ torul Mubammad Askia va marca victoria decisivă a Islamlilui în acest nou imperiu.

Cu to ate acestea, vremurile glorioase ilie imperiilor nigeriene sînt de acum revolute: ruta maritin1’ă descope­ rită de portughezi duce au�l ţărilor negre peste Atlantic şi, . îar ă a-l suprima, slăbeşte considerabil traficul saharian. Tocmai în cadrul acestui regres evident se situează cucerirea oraşUlui Tombuctu şi ruinarea Impe­ riului Songhai, în’ 1591, de către o. expediţie marocană condusă • de renegaţi de origine spaniolă. Sultanul

Marocului, . Miilay Ahmed, va datora succesului lor supranumirea de El Mansiir (Învingătorul) şi El Dehbi

(Aliritul). Expediţia a fost totodată o deziluzie totală pentru autoriiei, care crezuseră că au pornit la cucerirea fabuloaselor ţări .bogate in aur. Sultanul nu va menţine decît o suzeranitate fonnală şi indcpăr.ată asupra
ac estor ţări sărace unde se vor succede, din 1612 pînă în 1750, nu mai puţin de 120 de paşale, simple jucării in
mîinile �oanelor maure care îi al• ege-au şi, după cum era cazul, se debarasau de ei. .

• în secolul al XVIII-lea, in ţara nigeriană puterea este

împărţită intre nomazi §i populaţia bambara din Segou

şi din Kaarta. Epoca marilor imperii a trecut: numai bogatul trafic transsaharian a determinat şi le-a menţinut strălucirea şi apariţia timpurie. Ele. au murit o dată cu • acesta.•

Aceste mari state nq trebuie decît să creeze iluzi.t: eie.au fost o excepţie. Statul obişnuit din Afriea neagră nu a cunoscut decit rareori o asemenea amploare. Astfe�

Beninu� strălucind încă din secolul al XUca şi care a atiDs în secolul al XV -lea o anumită perfecţiune artisti­ că, are o suprafaţă foarte mică. tn esenţă, el este o străpungere, prost organizată altfel, prin masa densă a pădurii ecuatoriale, pe care vinturile ploioase au ingră­ mădit-o între apele Golfului Guineei şi platourile interi­ oare. El se şitueaiă în zona Yorouba, din Delta Nigetb-

167

lui, pe locul actual al oraşului Lagos, intr-o regiune urbanizată foarte de timpuri�.

R’eputaţia îi depăşeşte itltinderea pe care o are. A avut avantajul, care nu a rămas fără revers, de a intra foarte curind iil contact, pe rutele din Nord, cu bogaţii clienţi dirt Cairo şi artiştii acestuia, apoi, mai tîrziu, cu portughezii; el a a\’\It . avantajul, tot datorită ace5tor legături, dt a fi un centru artistic uimitor de sculptori în ftldeş şi turnători în bronz .. Nu istoria princiară fasti­ dioasă a Beninului ‘ este cea care va explica această uimitoare, prodigioaSă reuşită. Poate, . dacă dăm curs explicaţiei unui africanist, Paul Mercier, ar trebui Să menţionăm marea densitate umană a \inutului Yorouba

în general, şi a Beninului în special, structura sa urbană, în sirrş it, posibilitatea pe care o oferă climatul, in

vecinătatea Golfului Guineei, de a conta pe două perioade ploioase (dubla trecere a soarelui la zenit) şi deci pe două recolte anuale în loc de una.

• ComerJul cu sclavi: nimeni nu se îndoieşte . că, o dată cu secolul al XV-lea şi, mai mult încă, cu secolul al XVI-lea, elementul important a fost dezvoltarea comerjului cu negri care, în pofida interdicţiilor oficillle, s-a menţinut în Atlanticul de nord pînă aproape în 1865, în sudul Atlanticului poate şi mai
tîrziu încă şi .care, în sfirşit, va dura pînă în secolul
XX pe rutele ce duc . spre est, la Marea Roşţe. ,
Comerţul cu sclavi nu a fost o inventie diaboli�ă a Europei. Islamul a fost cel care, în contact foarteJtim­ puriu cu Africa neagră prin zonele dintre Niger .şi Darfour şi prin pieţele sale dţ mărfuri din Africa răsăriteană, a practicat primul la scară mare comerţul cu sclavi, de altfel din aceleaşi motive care vor determina Europa să procedeze ia fel mai Qlziu: lipsa de bărbaţi pentru sarcini multiple şi foarte grele. Dar comerţul cu oameni a fost o realitate generală şi a aparţ inut tuturor comunităţilor primitive. Islamul, ci vilizaţie sclavagistă prin excelenţă, nu a inventat el nici sclavia, nici comer­ ţul cu sclavi.

‘ ‘ 168

Comerţul cu sclavi a lăsat în urma sa documente

foarte numeroase (în arhivele comerciale ale Europei, în arhivele Lumii Noi) din care se pot extrage statistici şi
li�te de P..eturi . . Această istorie în cifre, neplăCută în sine, nu este. frr e”şte întreaga istorie a comeriului ‘cu sclavi; totuşi, ea este in această .privinţă o măsură necesară . .

în secolul al XVI-lea, sosirile anuale în America sînt de ordinul a 1 000 pînă la 2 000; în secolul al XVIIIea-l – de la 10 000 pînă la 20 000;•cel mai mare număr este atins în secolul •al XIX-lea, în. ultimii ani de comert tolerat cu sclavi, poate 50 000 pe an. Aceste cifre riu sînt certe, la fel ca şi calculele globale care ar putea fi făcute pentru evaluarea cifrei totale a negrilor. transportaţi în Lumea . . Nouă. Cele mai probabile sînt cele ale lui P. Rinchon : în jur de 14 milioane – mai. mult decît estima, în • 1842, este adevărat, Moreau • de Jonnes
(12 milioane) Şi mai puţin decîţ aprecia•demograful Carl Saundecs, care înclina spre cifra de 20 milioane, fără
îndoială, mai puţin credibilă. Ar reieşi practic o medie

de aproape 60 000 de sclavi pe an, pe parcursul a trei secole şi jumăta�, din 1500 pînă în 1850. Cifră care. nu pare să • corespundă nici măcar posibilităţilor de

transport.

Mai răniine de ştiut dacă în aceste calcule este vorba de plecări din Africa sau de sosiri• în Lumea Nouă•

Căci au fost !>rovocate pierderi considerabile atît prin capturarea, cît şi prin transferul de oameni în conditiile

unor călătorii extrem de ‘<lure. Ast{el, numai ravagiile provocate de comerţul european de sclavi depăşesC. făiă• îndoială în mare măsură evaluarea dată de cifrele de mai sus. Comerţul cu sclavi a însemnat o enorma deteriorare umană a continentului negru. , ‘

Această deteriorare este cu atît mai catastrQfală cu cit transferurile în favoarea Islamului ‘nu au încetat totuşi, ba chiar au cunoscut o amploare crescută începînd cu sfîrşitul secolului, al XVTII-Iea; atunci au fost văzute sosind la Cairo caravane de la Darfour aducînd, o
singură dată, 18 000 pînă la 20 000 de sclavi. în 1830,
numai sultanul din Zanzibar percepe taxe pentru 37 000 de sclavi anual; în 1872, între 10 000 pînă la 20 000 de

1 69

sclavi – părăsesc anual Suakim-ul, plecind in Arabia.

Comertul islainic cu sclavi priveşte deci, la prima v�. mase de oameni mult mai mari dect”t comertul european.

frinat prin forta lucrurilor de durata lungă a călătoriil ‘maritilne pe Atlantic, de dimensiunile relativ mici ale navelor, apoi de abolirea comertului cu sclavi, procJama ­
tă in mai multe rinduri in cursul secolului•ai XIX-lea,
ceea. dovedeşte că traficul • a continuat în pofida
interdictwor, dar cu toate dificultăţile• pe care le compor-
tă orice contrabandă.
V.L. Cameron (1877) �imează la 500 000efectivul
anual al i est, şi
acestor pierderi spre Islam,• prin nord ş
conchide; “Africa işi pierde singele prin • toti porii…
Aceste cifre enonrle nu pot fi acceptate deeît sub benefi­
ciu de inven’tar, dar acţiunea este fără îndoială de o
amploare extremă, iar . pierderea demografică – pentru
continentul negru – înspăimîntătoare. .
AtuDci se pune intrebarea: in ce măsură bilantul
catastrofal a fost sau nu• cothpensat de populaţia neagră,
de progresia sa demografică? • •
tn jmUI anului • 1500, populaţia Africii se ridică la
25 __. 35 milioane de locuitori, inclusiv Africa alţ>ă,
după calculele istoricului; in 1850, ea este de cel putin

100 milioane, Deci, în pofida importantelor transferuri

datorate comertului• cu sclavi, a avut loc o• creştere demografică. Este vorba de o omenire in dezvoltare care
a suportat ingrozitorul comert cu sclavi. Ceeaceexplică
durata acestuia,’ pină mai ieri� Aceasta, bineînţcles, nu
este decît o ipoteză.
Să recunoaştem deschis că acest comert• european ciJ

sclavi a încetat exact in momentul in care America nu a mai avut nici • o neyoie stringentă. Spre -lunlea nouă, emigranţii •europeni i:.au înlocuit pe. negri incepind cu prima jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea în ce priveşte Statele Umte, iar cu a doua jumătate – Amedca de Sud.

Nu este mai puţin adevărat că, spre lauda Europei, s-au înregistrat rea�ţii de milă şi de indignare faţă de

sclavia negrilor. Acestea nu au fost pur fonnaie pentrU că au dus totuşi, intr-o bună zi, la mişcarea Wilberforce,
din Anglia, pentru �liberarea negrilor,
la a,bolirea sclaviei.
Fără a afmna’ că un comert cu negri (cel spre

1 70

avansate ca în

populatia bantu a fost

cu cît aici
America) a fost mai unian, sau mai putin inuman dea”‘t altUl (spre lumea islamică), vom nota faptul, important pentru lui:nea neagră actuală, că astăzi exiStă Africi vii

în lumea noUă. Puternice nuclee etnice s-au dezvoltat şi perpetuat pînă în zilele noastre în nordul şi în sudul

Americii, în: timp ce nici una dintre aceste Africi exilate nu a supravietuit în Asia sau pe păminturi islamice.
• Nu este v�rba aici de a face FOC esul, şi ÎIU:ti şi mtli

puţin elogiul colflniuiri,i europene a A.{ri ci� ci pur şi simplu de a marca faptu l cti aceastti colonizAre com­
portă, ca aP,oape toate fenomenele care rezultă din

şocuri de ci’vilizaţie,unactiv cuhural şi un pasiv culturaL

Aceasta nu înseamnă �păfarea colonizării,a �pectelor

ei un”‘e. , chiar a atrodtăţilor sau bufoneriilor ei de necontestat (achiziţii de vaste teritorii înschimbul cîtorva baloturi de stofă sau al unor mici. eantităti de alcool), cit a admite că şocul a fost adesea deciSiv şi chiar în cele

din Urmă benefic pentni structurile sociale, economice şi culturale ale popoarelor negre colonizate. De fapt, aceasta a fost, în urma . actului final al Congresului de la . Berlin (1885), ultima mare aventură a expansiunii europene. Şi dacă această punere sub tutelă tardivă a fost de scurtă

durată (mai puţin de un secol), întîlnireQ. s-a făcut rapid,
în timp ce Europa şi economia mondial� se găseau în

plin avînL

Este o societate industrială adultă, greu de mulţumit, care dispune de mijloac� moderne de acpune şi de comunicatie, este cea care a rănit şi a 8sediat lumea neagră. Iar aceasta din urmă este receptivă, mai mobilă decit credeau încă ieri • etnografli, capabilă să înţeleagă
obiectele şi fonnele pe care i le propune Occidentul şi,

mai ales, să le reinle’rpreteze, să le încarce . cu sensuri noi, să le lege,- de fiecare dată cînd lucrul este posibil,
de imperativele culturii sale tradiJionale.

Chiar in Africa de Sud, unde

supusă unei aculturaJii cu atit mai accelerată
in4ustrializarea şi urbanizarea erau mai

alte părţi, negrul evoluat, care trăieşte în stil occident.ai,

1 71

‘g Grupul de la C.osobl�nco

� Uniunea Statelor africane

• Ullliii1I1G..;puldeoMonrpvici •

� Uniunea Alricană ti Malgo�ă

8. Africa şi diverSităţile ei interne.

• Peste diversitătile nationale se intind legăturile incă fragile ale statelor.

rămine, inţelege să rămlliălegat de tabuurile moştenite

din •trecutul siţu, fie şi numai• în ceea ce. priveşte căsă­ t�ria familia, rolul fraţilor, al fiului mai mare sau al fiulwt mai mic. Pentru a nu lua decît un exemplu, dota se

plăteşte a5tăzi tatălui logodnicei în bani, dar banii sînt transformati în capete de vite pentru a corespun�
practicilor v:echi.
• Vorbind de un anumi.t activ al coloniz?irii, nu ne
gîndim la acele bunuri pur materiale, drumuri, căi ferate, porturi, baraje, la punerea pe picioare a acelor exploatări ale solului şi subsol ului pe care colonizatorii le-au instalat

f12

m scopuri prezentind pentru ei itrterese deosebite. Aceste moştenirj, oricît’4e importante ar părea uneori, ar fi de utilitate redusă şi eminamente perisabile dacă, în cursul dificilei încercări a colonizării,•.moştenitorii nu ar fi învăţat de asemenea tot ceea <ie să le pemlită astăzi folosirea lor ţiiţională. învăţămîntu l, � anumit nivel al tehnicii, igienei, medicinei, administratiei publice, sînt cele mai bune bunuri lăsate moştenire de colonizatori, contrapartida pozitivă la di&trugerile provocate de

contactul european în vechile obiceiuri tribale, familiale, sociale, pe, care se bazează întreaga organizare şi întrea­
ga cultură. Nu vom putea Spune niciodată pînă . la ce punct au putut acţiona astfel consecinţele şi noutatea muncii salariitte, a economiei pe bază de bani, a scrierii, proprietăţii funciare individuale. Tot atitea lovituri date fără îndoială uilUi regim social vechi. Dar oare aceste lovituri nu sînt ele necesare evoluţiei care are loc astăzi?

• Colonizarea, dimpotrivă, a .ailut dezavantojul serio� de a decupa Africa într.-o serie de teritorii-franceze, engleze, gennane, belgiene• sau portugheze -; divizări care se perpetuează astăzi printr-o înflorire a statelor independente foarle . numeroase, o “balcanizare” a Africii, cum s-a spus uneori.

O;rre acestedecupaje, unele artificiale, altele geografice, rareori. culturale, trebuie considerate drept un, rău :fără remediu? Se poate pune intrebarea dacă ele nu vor stinjeni• serios realizarea unor visuri de unitate africană, sau cel puţin a unei Pieţe comune africane. -Dar• n,u este sigur că Afrj.ca este coaptă pentru unitatea politică sau chjar culturală. Nu numai vechile frontiere administrative coloniale sint cele care conturează• aici fărîmiţarea. Mai sînt şi diversităţile interne de �tnii,religii şi chiar lirribi. Principalul reproş care se poate aduce divizărilor naţio­ nale de astăzi este îară îndoială ‘ de a nu fi fost trasate in funcţie de. aceste diverSităţi cy1turale. Dar era oare posibil acest lucru acum wi secol şi ceva?

Un reproş şi mai grav: oferind popoarelor negre instrumentul util al unei limbi comune internaţionale şi moderne, colonizarea a jucat Africii farsa de prost gust de a-i da cel puţin două: franceza şi• engleza. Există

1 73
�;Ţ6rl asoci�le la Coml.l’liloleo
europeana : , . , .
� Ţ6ri oie Com.;.onweollh-o.ilul

9. Africa şi Occidentul
Aiături de o Aţrică de “expre5ie franceză” se conturează, mai putin

apăsat, o Africă de expresie >engleză. Leglturilor culturale le corespund legaturi economice.

temerea că tot acest; continu� pe care o li.inbă îl aduce cu ea şi îl deverseaz:ă . în învătăJnînt, dej>rinderile de

gîndire, tinde să. separe Afriţa în. efortul ei 4� ,:eunificare în două mase .:….franceză; pe de o parte; eng1eză, pe de alta. Nu ‘pare ca una să poată înghiti cu. uşurintă_pe
cealaltă, că avantajul -număruluj, de exemplu, detinut de
Africa engleză să . fi � . �uficient pentru �a . ‘sribjugâ . o Africă franceză . mai; •puternică •din . . p’uilt:t . de vedere
cultural, dotată de inul_t mai mitltă vreme .cU un învătă­ mînt autentic; care i-‘•� asigui:at �dre pqlitice• şi adminis- •
trative solide, în prezent cet:mai bun ata al succesului ei.
. Nu este mai putin re’gt etabil pentiu viitorul unităJii

africane . că această. diviZa!e: importantă • se adaugă la toate cele pe care iStoria. Şi geografia .sa s-au însărcinat să le ofere Africii cu prea mare .generozitate deja.

174

formele urbane
CAPITOLUL 11

AFRICA NEAGRĂ:
ASTĂZlŞI “MÎINE”

Pentru un studiu al civilizaţiilor, Africa neagră se •oferă

ca. un caz privilegiat: O dată cu cîştigarea independenţei, care s-a extiris în aceşti ultimi ani la cea mai mare parte

a spaţiului său, cu punerea îti. valoare a �egr!tudinii”, acest �umanism pe cale de aparitie” care incepe . să

capete conştiinţa propriilor vâlori şi a posibilităţilor sale,
o dată cu. căutarea pasionată a unei istoriipe care
trebuia să şi-o construiască, aproape să şi-o inventeze, Africa neagră are foarte marele avantaj de a se prezenta

ca o lume culturală in plină devenire. Ea oferă observa­ tiei noastre toate formele, de la cea mai arhaică pînă la
cele mai progresist�, precum şi toate
sudiile de aculturaţie.

Trezirea Africii •

Toti specialiştii în probleme africane par să fie de acord asupra următorului punct: că trebuie să se • acorde incredere exttemei maleabilităţi a caracterului omului negru, imenselor sale posibilităţi de adaptare, de asimi­

lare,• de răbdare. • Aceste posibilităţi îi vor fi” necesare pentru a străbate, din ce în ce mai singur, calea enormă care rămîne de parcurs de la o economie rudimentară încă la o economie cu adevărat modernă, de la un mod de trai închistat într-un trecut şi în tradjţii care-şi păs-

175

trează forţa de atracţieJa necesităţile dure ale transfor­ mării actuale; de la o societate în care organizarea tribală este •încă vizibilă la acele structuri ale unei diScipline nationale necesare modernizăriişi industriali-. zării. Trebuie creat totul, chiar mentalitătile.

Să nu uităm că Africa neagră abordează t\Ceastă mcercare de lungă durată fără nici o ordine, cu forte slabe ,şi potrivit unor căi care vor varia în functie de. regiuni şi de, popoare .
1 . Afai întîi, ea rămîne adesea un continent prea
puJin populat, privat de supraabundenta mîiniide lucru care copleşeşte şi animă în acelaşi timp • celelalte ţări subdezvoltate. în grupul .acestora, ea soseşte pe acest ultim loc care permite, fără îndoială, progresele cele mai spectaculoase; dar implică de asemenea căile cele mai lungi de parcurs.

2. Ea nu este cu adevărat un tot organic, nici măcar in grupul culturilor sale străvechi, cu atît mai mult cu cît

Civilizatia sa tradiţională, cu multiplele ei credinte şi atitudini, . în acelaşi timp, elementară şi plină de viaţă, ‘a primit în plus contrjbutii religioase străine: Islamul înainte de toate, cu prestigiul său social şi intelectual, cu şcolile sale coranice, mediocre totuşi, dar care au trebuit să facă enorme concesii religiilor primitive (le traversea­ ză fără să ie • excludă); creştinismu4 care s-a dezvoltat în. general acolo unde schimburile economice erau deja cele mai active, suprapunîndu-se şi el peste un întreg, lot de credinţe şi obiceiuri . vechi.
3. AdăugaJi la aceste deosebiri pe cele create de

economie, opoziţii). prodigioasă între regiuni deschise şi zone închise, între oraşe şi zone orale.

• Această masă întrucîtva heteroclită este cea pe care am vrea să o urmărim în trapziţia ei accelerată spre viitorul pe care politicienii şi intelettualii negri par să-I privească cu curaj şi luciditate. .

Această aventură este categoric esenţială, mai mult

.ckcît politica şi luările de poziţie ale acestor tinere ţări faţă de lume sau fată de problemele pe care le ridică continentul afric:;.an însuşi, unitatea sa posibilă slm opoziţiile sale înverşunate, aşa cum le-au putut releva conferinţele de la Casablanca (ianuarie 1961), Monrovia

176

(mai 1961), Lagos (februarie 1962). .

– Fire§te, politica nu este neglijabilă, dar ea nu este decît un instrument. Ea variază, poate varia la cea mai mică adiere de vînt şi niai ales nu comandă, ea singură, acest vast destin care de fapt o antrenează.

• Obstacolul culturilor şi religiilor primitive: un întreg trecut tradiţional frînează eklnul general şi complică, sau cel puţin întîrzîe adaptările necesare.

Cea mai mare parte a populaţiilor din Africa neagră (mai ale5′ din satele sale, dar satele reprezintă enorma majori­ tate) este fucă închistată în culturi şi religii primitive, pe
care se bazează întreaga ordine socială. . ,
• Această religie tradiţională capătă forme variabile în funcţie de •regiuni şi grupuri etnice. Animistă, ea se bizuie mai ales pe -credinţa în spiritele care trăiesc în toate fiin ţele naturii şi supravieţuiesc morţii acestora, care există de asemenea şi în obiecte (fetiŞism). O altă. constantă: aproape _ pretutindeni se regăseşte cultul strămoşilor. Şefii sau eroii legendari, veneraţi mai întîi ca strămoşi, termină prin a se confunda cu zeii superiori cărora li se adaugă adesea Marele Zeu al Cerului, .al Pămîntului, sau al Creaţiei. Spiritele strămoşilor sau zeilor africani nu numai că se manifestă în fiinţele vii, dar pot .reveni pentru a pune stăpînire pe muritori:

aceasta este semnificaţia a numeroase dansuri sacre; de exemplu, în Dahomey, există acele dansuri rituale în

care zeii V odun sau Orişas “coboară pe capul” unor executanţi care cad în trarisă în momentul în care zetil intră în ei.

în toate cultele, în faţa altarelor ridicate în cinstea zeilor sau a strămoşilor “se incantează rugi şi invoca ţii, se aduc ofrande în alimente şi ulei de palmier, se sacrifi­ că arumale … “. Sînt “hrăniţi” strămoşii şi zeii. Prin reciprocitate, se aşteaptă de la ei intervenţii sau diverse protecţii.

Această organizare r�ligioasă este garanţia organi­ zăriisociale bazată în Africa pe noţiunea de rudenie, pe familia patriarhală, •urmînd o ierarhie strictă care dă patriarhului autoritate absolută asupra’ întregii comunităţi

1 77

1 78

iluzii).
bazată pe fami lie sau pe cJan {transmiterea acestor autorităţi se face in general urmind fili aţia paternă,• mai
rar cea maternă).

în societătile supuse odinioară influenţei maruor imperii,o ierarhie socială dă unor familiisuperioritate aristocratică faţă de altele, cu tot atîtea • ,.caste” care urmează profesiunile artizanale.Fiecărui grup ii .cores.:. pund zei şi străn’J.oşi a cător putere reflectă indeaproape pe -cea a grupurilor sOciale insele.

Legătura este atît de . puternică intre religie şi . societate incît in oraşele in care această ordine socială este perturbată de viaţa modernă {mai ales de şcolari­

zare), creştinismul sau islamismul; după caz, tinde să inlocuiască in propprţiimari animismul slăbit, care

rămine religia satelor.
• Fiecare oraş, fiecare regiune atinsă de şcok(rizare, • de modernizarea unei organizări muncitoreşti sau industriale, este afectată .de problemele dure ale cultu­ ralizării(intrarea într-o altă civilizaţie).

Vom da un exemplu in acest sens: . •sondajul făcut in 1958 la Porto Novo de un sociolog, Claude Tardits. Evident, nu este valabil pentru întreaga Africă, dar dă
o idee despre această problemă.
Porto Novo, actuala capitală a Dahomeyului, este un

o.raş vechi, care Jiu are legături bune cu marea şi pe care Kotonou, cu acces mai uşor la mare, l-a împiris Pe planul

•al doilea. Deşi decăzut, oraşul nu a rămas mai puţin viu, într-o ţară mai şcolarizată, mai intelectuală decît vecinii eL Dahomeyul, afirma Emmanuel Mounier, ,.este Car­ tierul Latin al Africii negre”.

Aceasta nu inseamnă că şcolarizarea asigură viitorul, odată pentru totdeauna, al celor pe care limba dahomeeană ii numeşte ,.evoluaţi”, al celor care au mers la şcoală şi care, potrivit unei expresii curente, ,.au văzut lumina” {în 1954, pentru intregul Dahom_ey, aceş­ tia reprezentau 43 419 copii, sau 15% din populaţia aptă de şcolarizare, dar această cifră – care este Un. record în

contextul Africii – nu trebuie să ne creeze

fi maximum
Există aici marii şi micii evoluaţi. în . vîrful piramidei
sOciale, pentru o populaţie globală de 1 500 000de persoane (probabil mai multe) şi o populaţie urbanizată

de numai 100 000de persoane, elita va de

1 000de persoane atrase de o adevărată cultură, de trei ori efectivul unei colonii albe care nu era, deunăzi, decît de 300 de persoane: Şi cite dificultăţi pentru a forma

această fmă, imperceptibilă peliculă! .
Chiar în oraşul Porto Novo, ceea ce constituie o
frînă, se poate presupune dinainte, este inerţia uriei

societăţi tradiţionale, diverse, cel puţin triple: populaţia gun, provenită din păstorii din Dahomey veniţi la oraş;

yoruba – negustorii .veniţi din Nigeria vecină; ,.brazili­ enii” în cele din urmă (negri reveniţi djn Brazilia, adesea creştini, uneori convertiţi la Islam în urma unor aventuri uluitoare). Fiecare din aceste grupuri are culorile sale proprii, susceptibilităţile sale, formele sale de rezistenţă. Toţi au ,,ascendenţele lor”. Or� să ne gîndim că tocmai în funcţie de ascendente se grupează locuinţele, în funcţie de acestea se făceau şi se fac încă adesea căsătoriile, prin acestea .se menţin regulile şi practicile religioase. în ce priveşte valoarea pe care o reprezintă acest liant social care este religia, vom cita aprecierea unui misionar la Porto Novo: _”Nu voi spune decît un: cuvînt despre fetişism, iar acest cuvînt va avea poate o anumită valoare venind de la un: misionar: este o fru­ moasă instituţie care va dispărea; nu aflnn,a adăugat el, că este o frumoasă religie”.

Femeia ş-a revolţat prima împotriva ascendenţei familiale pentru a face să triumfe (astăzi, un -eaz din două) căsătoria făcută cohform alegerii sale. Dar această emancipare rămîne înglodată într-un treCut poligamic şi teribil de conservator. Să apreciem că acest debut după o confidenţă feminină: “Cînd soţul meu şi-a luat alte soţii mi-a încreţ:linţat b8nii pentru că eu eram prima soţie şi eu îi împărţeam celorlalte co-soţii. Eu am fost cea care am ales celelalte doua sotii pe care le-a av’ut soţul meu la cîţiva ani după căsătoria noastră. Celelalte soţii mă salută în genunchi şi îmi fac serViciile pe care le cer”. O alta . declară: ,,Îi salut în genunchi pe socrul meu, pe -soacra mea, pe unchii,pe ţnătuşile, fraţii

179

şi surorile soţului meu. Nu îngen’unchez în faţa fraţilor şi surorilor mai mici, dar le datorez respect. Fac servicii întregii familii a soţului meu: fac cumpărăturile, mena­ jul, aduc apă pentru toţi� merg la piaţă, fac boiaua. C’m d pregătesc o • masă •ofer din timp in timp . puţin din mincarea pe care am pregătit-o unei mătuşi, unui unchi, unui frate al soţului meu, soacrei şi socrului meu”. •

• :Atunci imaginaţi-vă un “evoluat” in mijlocul unei asemen,ea familii, rămas – la oraş – mai mult decit pe juinătate ţăran:� Va fi prins intre noile sale obiceiuri culturale – adesea dobindite în străinătate – şi aceste J;itualuri care nu şi-au pierdut neapărat tot sensul pentru el, între ataşamentul familial şi imposibila supunere.

Ceea ce :Perturbă totul este mediul urban: lucrul, şcoala, chiar spectacolui �ăzii, în timp ce departe de oraş totul rămîne în loc cu încăpăţînare. o oarecare cioitoreasă, o .,.,evoluată” şi-a făcut ucenicia la surorile

din kotonou, apoi s-a căsătorit cu un funcţionar. lat-o fericită cu atelierul ei, cu clientela ei. ,;După un an de căsătorie; soţul meu, care este funcţionar în administra­ ţie, a fost trimis în nord, undo eu nu am mai avut de luciu, pentru că femeile se acoperă cu frunze sau merg goale”. în cele din urmă soţul este transferat. “Locuiesc de un an la Porto Novo .. : Soţul meu mi-a cumpărat o

altă maşini de cusut”. •

în sensul acestei mărturii, să ne gîndim la acele femei elegante ale oraşelor, la acel manechin din Dakar infăşurat într-un superb drapaj alb. Imagine de viitor, ca şi îndrăznelile moderne ale oraşului, mai puţin poetice fără îndoială decît vechile clădiri coloniale ale insulei Goree, situată vizavi, dar mult mai în vogă.

Oraşele şi statele au angajat dialogul, vechi de cînd • lumea,. cel al civilizaţiilor de sus şi al culturilor de jos. Dar oraşele nu sînt decît o mică fracţiune a lumii negre. Iar rapiditatea evoluţiei sale va depinde• în cele din urmă de avîntul sau de sincopa lor.

• Rapid instalate, guvernele independente s-au dovedit cu .timpul de o. s.oliditate neaşteptată.•

180

pe plan politic
întrucît fenomenul este general,; el necesită, dincolo de

cazurile .specifice, oricit de interesante ar fi ele, o expli­ caţie generală. Practic, faţă în faţă cu aceste guverne se află răbdarea fără limite a celor guvemaţi. Aceasta înseamnă mai mult decît supunerea, odinioară, a vasa­ lilor lui Ludovic al XIV-lea faţă de Regelti Soare. A gu­ verna în Africa neagră înseamnă categori« a do�. Ci­ ne ar fi crezut-o – practica puterii nu uzează aici, ea în­
tinereşte,. revigorează. • Preşedintele ‘Liberiei, M. Tub­
man, în funcţie din 1944, guverna încă în • 1962; aceasta

înseamnă o vreme• destul • de îndelungată la activul său. Se ‘ îndoieşte cineva că puterea • ar fi aici de o esenţă
specială, care o fereşte de inStabilităţile europene, să spunem de esenţă cvasiregală’?
În orice caz, pe soclul • statuii Osagyefo (traduceţi
“Victoriosul în toate”) din G�a – preşedintele N’Kru­ mah – se poate f iti această maxună âestul de izbutită: “Căutaţi mai întÎI Regatul politic şi restul va veni •de la sine”. Pe scurt, “poiiticul mai intii! “�

Deci cucereşte puterea şi păstreaz-o. Puterea nu. se împarte, nu se controlează deloc, opoziţia nu are nici o raţiune de a exista. Pentru ea a. se manifesta înseamnă

a-şi aspma riscul dispariţiei. Ghana, Sierra Leone, Guineea există toate pentru a ne spune clar acest lucru.

Tineri intelectuali deja, care au rupt cu guvernele dictato­ riale din ţările lor străbat . Europa sau universităţile
americane, mai puţin decît ambasadorii epuraţi eate

consideră că este mai bine să nu se întoarcă acasă. Situaţie care nu este deloc pe placul nostru, al Occidetţtu­ lui’. De unde şi următoarele cuvinte ale primului-ministru at Senegalului exact • în -sensul sensibilităţii noastre:
“Ghanocraţia tiu ne interesează”. Dovadă că nici măcar
Africa nu este uniformă.

• Totuşi trebuie să recunoaştem că este • nevo ie de muţtă înţelepciune din partea guvernanţilor pentru a nu ceda în faţa a. ceea ce se impune aproape de -la sine. Dacă noi, europenii, vreiD.să nu fim prea nedrepţi faţă de aceste guverne care ne ,deranjează, trebuie să fun atenţi la subţirimea • clasei conducătoare. în• jUfUl stăpînilor Africii negre sînt aceeaşi oam’eni rari care se agită, mult mai puţin numeroşi decît în jurul unui. Rene

‘181 –

d’ Anjou sau al unui Philippe 1� Ben, odinioară. Liberia
este administrată de fapt de afro-americani în procent
de 2%, şi nu ani putea jura că toţi sînt angajaţi într-a­
devăr. Masa populaţiei rămîn� inertă; în afara a ceea ce
. noi am numi “ţara legală”. Aceasta nu înseâmnă că
aceste grupuri’re� nu sînt divizate; ele sînt divizate
fără limită,• iar gesturile energice şi neaşteptate ale
puttmi au seuze. • , puţine
1 Pe de altă plute, dacă guvernarea pune
probleme politice, nu s-ar putea spune acelaşi lucru
• despre problemele administrative. Pentru a angaja
1 oamenii pe calea modeinizării,ar trebui Să fie convinşi,
• î n regimentaţi . . lncereîndu -şi fotiele in această sarcină
dificilă, unele guverne se lasă prinse in propriul lor joc,
un joc demagogic. .
P(!ntru a admin,istra cu eficienJă sînt necesari
oameni, cadre, devotament deplin, o disciplină; pentru
recollStrucJie – capitaluri, investiJii cu grij ă calculate şi;
de asemen�. estţ _ necesar ca raţiunea să prinfeze, dar
acesta este unul dintre cele mai rare lucruri in• toate
ţările lumii. .
în Guineea, prima dintre vechile posesiuni franceze
care a ales libertatea şi independenţa, cind această
opţiune le-a fost oferită de generalul de Gaulle ( 1958),
nu planul trienal al guvernului socialist al lui Seku Ture
a fost prost sau greşit in sine, ci el a fost prefabricat,
pornind <;le la norme economice şi de la o serie de cifre,
în timp ce societatea tradiţiolljliă este un element pro­
blematic �e trebuie luat intotdeauna în considerare.
Dacă ;,diferitele societăţi de stat însărcinate cu unportQl
unor produse străine au eşuat unele după altele – Ali­
mag, specializată în ălimeritaţie •generală; Libraport, în
articolele de librărie-papetărie; • Ematec, în material
tehnic; Pharmaguine, în produse farm aceutice şi toate
societăţile surori”, nu este numai din cauza scandalurilor
intenie (sau externe), ci pentru că organizarea J1U a fost
calculată in funcţie de elementul uman guineez . . Ea nu
presupunea numai oapteni oneşti şi educaţi, dar şi . o
ierarhie administrativă, cadre, controale etc. Orice
socializare reuşită presupune cadre deosebit de compe­
tente şi numeroase. Aici, trebuia să’ le formeze.

•182
Mizele eeonomice şi sociale
• Destinul statelor negre este încă slab conturat: pe e§ichierul afric an. şi pe eşichierul moiulial se disp ută.

partide, cu agerime şi oarecari iluzii.

Printre aceste j� nu neapărat ciştigătoare să plasăm imperialismele cu .ra.Ză scurtă de actiune viZind vecinul
imediat. Decupajele – artificiale, am spus-o – le favori­ zează, fără insă a le justifica.
• – Marocul reclamă întreaga Mauritanie, Rio . de Oro,

Ifni, o parte din Sahara algeriană. Guineea lui Seku Tw::e are privirile aţintite asupra Sierrei LeOne, • cu populaţia numeroasă. Ghana, • al cărei nume • se referă, nu fădi intenţie, la marele imped.u dispărut, are pretenţii istorice_ care i-ar pennitesă-şi adauge Togo şi Coasta de Fildeş; Mali (denumire de asemenea semnificativă) v�ă “să federalizeze� Voita Stiperioară, Nigeiul şi să-şi adjudece o bucată din Sahara algeriână. Jocuri mai largi, dacă nu mai solide sînt impărţirea statelor in do1,1ă grupuri, schiţate � cursul conferinţelor rivale din 1961. Grupul de la Casablanca: Maroc, Ghana, Republica Arabă Unită (uniune astăzi dizolvată a Egiptului şi Siriei), Guineea, Guvernul Provizoriu Revoluţionar Algerian (G.P.RA.), Mali •- aceştia sînt evident extremiştii. Grupul de la Monrovia: Tunisia, Libia, Mauritania, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Coasta de F’tldeş, Voita Supeţi.oară;

Nigeria, Niger, Ciad, Camerun, Republica Centrarrlcană, G!!.bon, Congo (Brazaville)� Etiopia, Somalia, Madagascar

– aceştia sint evident moderaţii, înţelepţii.
Nimic nu ne spim.e că aceste clasamente se vor menţine. Independenţa recentă a Algeriei va aduce un element nou, a cărui incidenţă nu poate . fi prevăzută. Jocul rămîne deschis, inClusiv cel al unităţii sau al căutăriiunităţii. Aceasta a foşţ. în orice caz •miZa: unei a treia conferinţe, reunite la Lagos, la începutul lui fe­ bruarie 1962� prost qrganizată de guvernul Nigeriei şi ca­ re a fost un eşec: cei � 12″ de la Brazaville s-au lovit de opoziţia grupului de la Casablanca, faptul că G.P.R.A. nu a fost invitat servindu-i drept un excelent pretext.

1 8 3

Este vorba de jocuri foarte complicate. Toată lwnea

este de acord cu principiul unei Africi în întregime libere, dar �ceastă �ibertate poate fi înţel�să în nu�eroase

feJun. Preşedintele N’Krumah ar Clon ca ocupaţia euro� peană, sau ceea ce a mai rămas din ea, să ia sf’rrşit cel tîrziu la 3ţ decembrie 1962, dar în acelaşi timp el doreşte

să obţină” din această ipotetică politică de om puternic poziţia de leadership pe care celelalte state sînt . puţin

dispuse să i-o acorde. Este cu siguranţă acelaşi lucru care a menţinut ‘la stadiul de preliminariiuniunea scbiţa­ tălîntre. Ghana şi Guineea …

Pentru moment, nu se Îl1trevede deloc ce teritoriu sau grup de teritoriiar putea prevala asupra altora şi ar putea impune Unitatea ansamblului. A domina – •este o chesti-1111emai mult de înţelepciune decît de brutalitate şi mai mult o chestiune de putere reală decît de forţă politică.

Cu abundenta de populaţie şi cu ceea ce aceasta reprezintă în echilibrul unui continent subpopulat, Africa engleză este categoric cea care cîştigă graţie marii densităţi şi oraşelor Ghanei; Sierrei Leone şi Nigeriei.

.Progres înseamnă oraşe: oraşele .Nigenei sînt cele mai

mari oraşe ale Africii negre. Lagos numără mai mult de 300 000 de locuitori şi Ibadanul – peste 500 000.

Africa neagră de expresie franceză, cu . excepţia Guineei (Mali tOcmai a căzut de acord cu guvernul de la Paris asupra unui program econotnic), se bizuie pe puterea Pieţei Comune. Or, nici• Nigeria, nici Ghana nu vor accepta probabil o asemenea. asociaţie, chiar dacă Anglia intră în CEE.

Africa fraflceză dispune, de asemenea, în pofida tmei densităţi demografice relativ slabe, de cadre culturale de valoare: aici, învăţămîntul este activ dezvoltat. în sf’rrşit, am vorbit de oraş: geograf’ti af’mnă şi repetă că un singur oraş este, prin puterea şi poziţia sa geografică, un oraş imperial şi mondial – Dakarul. El comandă Atlan­ ticul de sud şi, dincolo de acesta, axa aeriană transversa­ lă a Africii. Totul se poate, evident, schimba în funcţie de ritmul Comunicaţiilor mondiale.
184

• Adevăratul joc nu este oare cel al unei evoluţiicare se pune în tenneni de putere, număr, progres econo­ mic?

Economia continentului, foarte rămasă în Urmă, livrea­ ;ză produse minerale sau alimentare nţprelucrate (dacă se exceptează fabricile de ulei din Senegal, sau uzinele
de aluminiu din Guineea); ea cumpără produse industri­ ale. Totul depinde deci. în mod inevitab.il de achizitori şi
furnizori. Conform condiţiilor normale • ale balanţelor

comerciale, posibilităţile de dezvoltare, de investiţii’ anuale rămîn incă extrem de reduse, progresul lor.,­

lent. Dacă vrei să le depăşeşti, cazi intr-o politică de credite care deschid poarta dependenţelor imediate� fie că vrei sau nu.’ Dacă U.R.S.S. fumize�ţZă şine pentru

calea ferată de la Konakry la Kankan, care • trebuie intretinuta şi refăcută, iată că apare problema tehnicie­ nilor care o vor instala, cea a feroviarilor şi a sindicatelor

lor. Dacă ,senegaluJ, sau Dahomeyul vor proceda la întemeierea unei mari facriltăţi (pe care nu voi: şţi să o

conceapă altfel decît după normele franceze care le sint cimoscute, adie� cu o gratuitate aproape totală a ,invă­
ţămi:iltului), ele var avea nevoie” de profesot+ şi., de
credite venind din Franţa. precum şi de tehnicienii Şi
profesorii dinciclul secundar. Totul se leagă. •
Africa neagră nu va putea înceta deci să solicite
ajutorul celor două blocuri de ţări indtistri alizate, fără
a-l uita pe cel de-al treilea, blocul chinez, .care işi oferă
serviciile intr-un spirit de cruciadă, dar însoţite intotdea­
u
na de o in v e umană eate se explică prin prop
azi ria
suprapopulare. ‘ . . •
rn orice caz: trebuie optat pentru una sau alta dintre
soluţii, sau pentru ambele în acelaşi timp, alt.miQteri nu vor exista mari lucrări publice, planuri economice• în perspectivă. Chiar sacri ficii atît de spectaculoase ca acelea la care tocmai a consimţit Nigerul cu prilejul sărbătorii sale naţionale (19 decembrie 1961, aniver­

sarea independenţei) – �alarţi reduse pentru membrii guvernului, desftinţarea automobilelor gratuite �entru

funcţionarii administrativi, desfiinţarea orelor suplimen­ tare plătite, creşterea impOzitelor – toate aceste sacrificii

1 85

din clasa de miine.
nu vor fi suficiente. Sînt necesare utilajele indispensabile. Mali, odibioară după ruptura cu Senegalul, a fost salvat

de camioanele pe care i le-a livrat Bonnul şi care i-au asigui-at legătura cu oraşul Kankan, calea ferată •spre
Konakry şi mai” departe, pe ocean.
Apoi, toate materialele din lume nu vor însemna

nimic, nu vor fi nimic fără cadrele capabile să le utilizeze. Aceasţă problemă esenţială depinde de o
evoluţie internă prealabilă, • de un efort conştient.

în Guineell, sub regimul comunizant al lui Seku Ture, un �iarist elveţian relata o convorbire cu tehnicieni cehi:

“Vedeti,.,mi-a spus unul dintre ei, francezii aveau un avantaj faţă d� noi. Ei puteau comanda. Ieri, maşina mea
a avut •o banală pană de .baterie. Nu am fost ascilltat la garaj ul administrativ şi muncitorul negru a pus imediat mîna pe carburator. Este o manie la ei să atace piesa cea

mai delicată. RezultatUl, . de atunci eu merg pe jos şi această• stare de lucruri riscă să dureze. Un francez ar

fi făcut scandal. Noi nu avem dreptul să facem. Şi cu toate �cestea, ar fi scuzabil şi util sub acest cer, în această umiditate. Realmente, nu înţeleg de ce Franţa şi

Anglia şi-au agăţat această ghiulea. Am un contract de un an şi voi pleca cu mare plăcere, îară să fi format pe
�eni, căci categoric este imposibil”. O mică socio­
dramă, a cărei morală nu este alta decît următoarea:
orice educaţie nu• este utilă .decit dacă este acceptată cu
entuziasm . . •
. caretrebuie. pusă • fată în
Dovadă, o altă imagine
faţă cu aceasta pentru a nu . forţa sensul: un tînăr
profesor francez, sosit în Coasta de Fildeş în octombrie 1961, descoperă cu încîntare extraordinara sete de a învăţa, aplicaţia . spontană şi inteligeBtă a elevilor săi

a treia şi a patra. Aceştia ştiu că ei sînt Africa

Arta şi literatura

• Ce mărturiiaduc artQ şi literatura despre această lume în mişcare şi despre ruperea ei • întte . astăzi şi muneAo .?

186

Pentru orice observator, arta autohtonii cu cares-a desfătat Occidentul – măşţi, bronzuri, fildeşuri, lemn sculptat – se deterioreqzji şi moare sub ochii noştri. Ea

este deja moartă. Se întîmplă oare acest lucru peJ;ltru că, aşa cum se spune adesea …şi:…este adevărat în parte – reperele sociale şi mai ales religioase în care se înscrie

arta dintotdeauna se deterio�ză ele insele sub şocul violent şi repeţat al civilizaţiei urbane, industriale?
în orice caz, este indiscutabil că o anumită Africă se

îndepărte a’lii denoi, cu cîntecele, cu dansurile, cu concepJiile sak artistice, religiile, poveştile cin,tate saU.

psalmodiate, cu concepţia sa despre timpul indepăitat, despre Wiivers, despre oameni, despre plante, animâle şi zei, pe scurt, o civilizaţie tradiţională care, o ştim din însuşi exemplul OcCidentului, va fi spulberată cînd se vor accelera deteriorările in curs.

Cu .toate acestea, din trecritul său tradiţional, Europa a păstrat mai mult decît nişte vestigiiuşor de recunoscut, pe care continuă să le indrăgească, uneori fără să o ştie; ce va reţine Africa din. civilizaţia ei? .
• Cu cît arta ne trimite la o civilizaţie dispărută, mai

veche decit cea care se găseşte sub ochii noştri,cu atit
literatura, tînăra literatură neagră puternic occidentali­
zată (fie şi numai prin folosirea limbilor europene: nu există decît Cîteva eseuri literare iri limbile: africane: limbi orale, a căror transcripţie a fost tardivă şi difici­ lă), această tînără literatură ne trimite la celălalt capăt al evoluţiei negre, la ceea ce va fi mai l)lult sau mai puţin cînd majoritatea africanilor vor “fi văzut Jumina”. AceSte poveşti stufoase şi vii•sînt, practic, realitatea africană văzută de ,.evoluaţi” şi ele aruncă asupra acestei realităţi – în ceea ce are ea: mai original şi mi ireductibil faţă de valorile aproapelui -, lumini extraordinare .

. Să citim de exemplu Noile poveşti ale lui Amadu Kumba, aparţinînd scriitorului deja celebru care este Birago Dio. Conţinutul lor este bineînţeles din trecut, dar

forma lor, modul linear prin care sînt accentuate de o expunere echilibrată unhind regulile artei literare, nu mai aparţin, eum scrie Jean Duvignaud, ,.aces� • paradis pierdut” al poveştilor populare. Forma lor occidentală, ea

1 87

singură, este semnul unei literaturi “smulse comunităţi­ •lor, deşi continuă să viseze la acestea”. Mai bine să ne gindim la primii scriitori latini din Galia. Acolo unde se• marchează momentul unei literaturi noi a negrilor (fie în Africa, fie în Lumea • Nouă, în . indiferent care dintre limbile Occidentului, de la franceză la engleză, spaniolă sau portugheză) – c.u Lap.gston Htighes, Richard Wright, Aime Cesaire, Senghor (preşedintele Republicii Senegal), Diop, Panou, Glissant,• Oyono; Diole, Camara Laye -, acolo unde se anunţă acest moq�.ent, să nu vorbim de, trădare, ci: dimpotrivă, de ataşament pasionat, de, distanta obligatorie, de ‘etapă depăşită.

“Ei au modificat structurile profunde ale personalită­ ţii lor, afrrmă pe bună- dreptate Jean Duvignaud, in măsura in eate o limbă este o fiinţă, un mod de existentă particular. ln . . acest transfer, .ceva este moft pentru totdeauna: mitologiile imediate:” Fără îndoială. Dar limba nu este singura schimbare de strUctură

suferită de aceşti oameni. Es� UJ,l intreg angrenaj, cum povesteşte Copilul negru : de Camara Laye, această
autobiografie a unui tînăr sătean, fiu al “marii familii de fierari” care va merge .să- şi facă studiile. la Paris. Mama sa asistă neputincioasă la aceste plecări •succesive: “Da, ea trebu’ie s ă fi văzut acest angrenaj care, de la şcoala din Kurussa (şcoala din �t), a dus la Conakry şi s-a oprit în Fmnţa; şi-n tot timpul cit … a luptat, ea• a trebuit să privească cum se învîrte acest angrenaj: roata asta şi roata ai� mai intii, şi apoi a treia, şi apoi incă alte roti, multe alte roţi pe care poate nimeni nu le vedea. Şi ce se putea face pentru a opri acest angrenaj \să se învîrteas­ că? Nu puteai decît să-I priveşti cum se învîrteşte, să. priveşti destinul cum se învîrteşte :___destinul• meu era ca eu să plec!”.
Da, se degajă o nouă civilizaJie, de bine de rău,
fragilă sau sigură de viitor, din apele vechi ale unei
civilizaJii tradiJi.onale vii, mereu hrănitqar,e. Şi. a<;esta
este lucrul’ cel mai important. Africa abandonează o;
‘civilizaţie rţJ.ilenară, dar ea nu•şi va pierde civilizaţia ei.
Transfonnată, sfîşiată, ea nu va rămîne pentru aceasta
mai putin o civilizaţie particulară, mar�tă profund de
o -psihologie, de gusturi, de amintiri şi . de tot ce este.

188

propriu unui pămînt. Senghor vorbea chiar de o “fiziolo­ gie” care comandă o anumită “atitudine emotivă” in fata lumii, care face ca ,.luniea magică să fie pentru negrul african mai reală decît lumea vizibilă”. un mijloc de cunoaştere, ca să spunem aşa . . Scriitorii negri. cei mai ocddentaliza\i în aparenţă prin cultura lor sint de asemenea cei • care insistă cel �i mult asupra psihis­ mului particular al rasei lor.

Să apreciem acest • lucru prin alte citeva rinduri imprumutate din Copilul negru, care descriu cîteva daruri extraordinare şi aproape magjce ale mamei sale: “Aceste miracole .-:- în realitate erau miracole – le văd astăzi ca even4nerite fabuloase ale unui trecut îndepărtat. Acest trecut este totuŞi foarte aproape: el datează de jeri. Dar lumea se mişcă, lumea se schimbă, iar a mea mai rapid poate decît oricare alta, aşa incit se pare că noi încetăm să fim ceea ce eram şi că într�adevăr nu mai sintem ceea ce eram şi că dej� nu mai eram exact noi înşine în momentul în care; aceste miracole se săvîrşeau sub ochii noştri. Da, lumea se • mişcă, lumea se Schimbă; ea •se mişcă şi se schimbă în asemenea măsură ii:tcit propriul meu totem – am şi eu un totem – imi este necunoscut.”

Poate fi oare descrisă mai bine ruptura? Dar autorul adaugă: •�.Ezit întrucîtva să dezvălui care erau acele puteri (acelea ale mamei mele) şi nu• vreau nici măcar să le descriu pe toate: ştiu că povestea va fi pritnită cu scepticism. Eu insumi, cind mi• se întîmplă să mi le rememorez, nu mai ştiu cum trebuie să le pritnesc, mi se par incredibile; sint incredibile! Cu toate acestea, este suficient să-mi amintesc ceea ce am. văztit, eeea ce ochii mei au văzut… Aces� lucruri incredibile, le-am văzut; le revăd aŞa cum le-a:in văzut. Nu există oare pretutin­ deni lucruri care nu se pot explica? La noi există o infinitate de lucruri care nu se explică, iar mama mea trăia înconjurată de ele”.

,,Aceste lucruri care nu se explică” – acesta este poate secretul specific fiecărei civilizaţii. •

189

Partea a treia

EXTREMUL ORIENT

CAPITOLUL 1

INTRODUCERE

LA EXTREMUL ORIENT
Sropul nostru; este de a examina exclusiv trăsăturile de ansamblu, •convergentele Extremului O�ent, făcînd apel pe rind la geografie, istorie, apoi la foarte îndepă� origine a civilizaţiilor care trăiesc încă sub ochiinoştri. Această din urmă trăsătură este fără nici un fel de discuţie cea ,mai importantă dintre toate.

Ce ne arată geografia

A. examina Extremul Orient, a situa această imensă scenă, fuseamnă a-i înţelege, m,ai mult de jumătate, destinul şi civilizatiile sale stranii. Pentru această primă luare de contact, călătorii? ziariştii, geografri sînt cei mai buni •ghizi. Cu condiţia de a nu explica totul într-un mod autoritar, pornind de la un detenP.inism geografic absolut, care nu mai există nici în Asia, nici în Europa şi nici în oricare altă tară şlefuit’ă îndelung de istorie şi de efortul răbdător al <?amenilor.

• /n genera� Extremul Orient este o lume tropicală şi subtropicală.

Extremul Orient înseamnă• “cazanul” in�ei, pădurile şi junglele ei; Chipa meridională, ploioasă şi •caldă; • In-

193

sulinda ecuatqrilllăcu uriaşele ei păQuri şi cu plantele care cresc văzind cu ocJ:ili (unele fiane cresc un metru pe zi, la Grădina BotaDică din Buitenzorg, Jawa): •.

Totuş� India inseamnă de asemenea lndusul, Gangele Mijlociu, aridul podiş central Dekkan, la adăpostul gaţilor occidentali – cu alte cuvirite aridităţi şi semi­ aridităţi evidente; China inseamnă de asemenea China. de �ord, imensă . “cimpie” de loes sau de aluviuni

recente, cu iernile ei aspre, Manciuria impădurită, deşerturile îngheţate dit;t nord.•

Toată această Chină septentrională, cu Beijingul, capi�a imperială la extremitatea sa, este biciuită de frig. • Aici ţăranul doarme . iarna pe cuptor. Proverbul spune: ,.Fiecare să�şi măture zăpada din faţa uşii, fără să-i pese de• bruma de pe acoperişurile caselor vecine …”. ,.IMD.a, in Vremuri geroase, s-e afmnă intr-o• scrisoare din secolul al XVIll-lea, cind rudele. şi prietenii . săraci vor

veni la uşa noastră, vom umple mai întîi un bol mare cu orez pe care li-1 vom da in mîitii, şi vom adăuga o

farfuriută mică de ghimbit macinat. Este cel mai bun mijloc de a-i încălzi pe bătrini şi de a-i alina pe cei nevoiaşi… Vom fierbe bucăţi mari de rasol şi le vom savura stringind holul in ambele mîini şi vîrîndu-ne capul îiltre umeri: în dimineţile cu chiciură sau zăpa�, cÎl1d mănînci acest fel de ffiincare, simţi o ‘căldură binefă­ cătoare in tot corpul”.

Se intimplă ca aceste geruri puternice şi zăpezile să s� depiaseze spre Sudul tropical. ln 1189, ningea la Hangzhou, capitala regiunii Song din Sud, nu departe de Yangzijiang. ,.Crengile de bambus trozneau cu un zgomot Ciudat”.

Astfel,. geografia, la prima vedere, aduce mărturii privind diversitatea şi nu unitatea acestor ţări cu chipuri multiple. Dar poate ne ilidepărtăin şi intrebarea nu este bine pusă? Nu mediul geografic, foarte divers in sine, este cel care CPeează unitatea Asiei de sud-est, ci O civilizaţie materială d�tul de monotonă, care se impune

1 194
aproape pretutindeni şi care se adaugă la elementele geografice, fizice şi umane.’ Această civilizaţie este prea veche, . prea înrădăcinată’in îndepărt8rea timpului, ea eSte “produsur prea multor procese de psihologie indivi- . duală şi colectivă pentru a ne fi pen’nis să o conside­ răm rezultatul numai al mediului fizic local”. (P. Gou­ rou). Ea există in ea �şi, mult mai mult decît semiin­ dependentă, detennitiantă la rîndul ei.
• Această ciVilizaţie se afinnă direct, într-un mod monoton, oriunde am face sondaje, exclusili ca o cil’ili­ zaţie a l’egetalului.

Acest adevăr este înregistrat cu regularitate de toţi călătorii occidentali, odinioară ca şi astăzi, din mo­ mentul în care pun piciorul in Asia.

Japonezii nu mănîncă altă carne decît vinat, aflfillă unul dintre ei, un spaniol, în 1609. Un medic german
remarca pe la -1690 că ei nu cunosc laptele şi untui . Ei
se hrănesc cu gokost – “cele cind alimente ale pămîn­

tului” (ca şi în China;- şi în Japonia cifra cinci este

sacră): orezul ,.alb ca zăpada”; sake – rachiul fabricat din orez; orz – destinat în pritlcipiu animalelor, da! din .

care se . face făină şi prăjituri (aceste spice de orz, arată pe cîmp de “un roşu admirabil”, afmna acelaşi medic citat mai sus); in sfirşit,. mazăre albă, asemănătoare bobului de la noi. La acestea, se adaugă meiul, legumele, peştele, dar uitotdeauna puţină, foarte puţină carne.

Cu 20 de ani mai devreme, îD. Indii, unmedic francez, observînd uriaşul număr de oameni din cortegiul care ‘il însoţea pe Marele Mogul Aureng Zeb in voiajul său .de

la •Delhi spre Caşmir, a fost uluit de cumpătarea .so(dap� lor, “foarte simpli în modul lor de a se hiăni.� Din tot

acest număr de cavaleri, nici a zecea parte, nici măcar a douăzecea parte nu au mincat în cursul marşului lor carne. Cu condiţia să aibă porţia lor de kicheris sa� un

1 95

amestec de orez şi alte legume pe• care le stropeau cu unt încins.;. şi iată-i mulţumiţi”.

Nici • locuitoriidin Acbeiq, Insula Sumatra, nu sînt prea exigenţi. “Orezul este singura lor hrană, aftrina un

călător. în 1620; cei mai bogaţi îi .adaugă puţin peşte şi citeva ierburi. • Trebuie să fJi mare senior în Sumatra pentru a avea la masă un pui frip� sau fiert. .. Se. spune că dacă ar veni 2000de creştini în insulă ar curăţa-o de vite şi păsări”.

China trăieşte în. acelaşi fel. “Dacă chinezii ar fi mîncat tot atîta carne ca noi în Spania, notează P. de las Cortes (1626), nu le-ar fi ajuns nici pe departe tot ce produce ţara”. ,Chiar şi cei bogaţi se mulţumesc cu puţin;

..Ei ciugulesc la mese, pentru a-şi deschide apetitul, citeva bucăţele de carne de porc, de pui sau alt fel de carne, care sînt aşezate pe masă” – aperitive, am spune noi astăzi: Astfel, explică• un alt călător engÎez în secolul al XVIII-lea, chiar la Beijing, unde sosesc totuşi animale din Tartaria, “oamenii nu mănîncă decît foarte puţină carne pe care o amestecă cu legume pentru a-i da un oarecare gust Laptele, untul, brinza – sînt puţin cunoscute de chinezi”. Nu că ar avea o aversiune fată de carne, dimpotrivă. Dacă un animal a murit din accident sau boală, vită sau cămilă, oaie sau lllăgar, este mîncat imediat ,.Aceşti oameni nu cuno� deosebirea între �amea bună de mîncat şi cea care nu este bună,de mîncat”, conchide englezul nostru cu un ,oarecare dez­ gust. în China se mănîncă şeq)i, broaşte, şobolani, cîini, lăcuste …

. La aceste mărturii se adaugă nenumărate indicii lăsate de literatura chineză însăşi, foarte exactă în ce priveşte aceste subiecte ale vieţii cotidiene. Un perşonaj

de roman, o. t:îtiără văduvă sclifosită, “vrea într�o zi raţă, a doua � peşte, altă dată legume proaspete, supă
de muguri de bambus; cînd nu are nimic. de făcu�. mai vrea portocale, biscuiţi, nuferi. Ea bea mult vin (de orez); în fiecare seară mănîncă vrăbii fripte, saramură. de

196
raei, bea trei litri. de vin făcut dintr-o sută de flori”. Toate acestea sînt, evident, excese, capricii de om bogat ..

Zheng Bangia, poet ştiutor de carte, pictor şi caligraf (1693 – 1765), pe cît de generos era, dorea ca toţi cei din 1 casa sa să participe la zilele . de sărbătoare. •”De fiecare dată, scria el într-una din Scrisorile familiale, fie
că . este •
vorba de peşte, de orez fiert, de fructe, de
prăjituri, este bine să 1 se facă pe. ‘rind •o împăftire
echitabilă”. Alimentele la care şcrisotile sale fac aluzie sînt plăcinte de hrişcă, supe groase de orez… Aceasta este regula. Acest bogat cămătar, proprietar al unui Munte de Pietate, care ne povesteşte un basm din Evul Mediu, avar pînă la �xtrem, gata să se. bucure de fiecare �pec” (monedă măruntă folosită în Extremul Orient) pe care il găseşte p� jos, măt:!încă la dejun• ,.un fel de orez rece, stropit cu apă fierbinte”.

. Astăzi nu s-a schimbat, practic, nimic. Făcînd aluzie

la savanta bucătărie chineză, un ziarist scria în 1 959: �Ştiu foart’.e bine1 că bucătăria chinezească a fost

întotdeauna arta de a asezona nimicuri, . că un popor prea numeros, căruia creşterea vitelor – această formidabilă irosire de . calorii – îi este interzisă, se străduieşte să folosească tot ceea ce am arunca noi, ceilalti”.
Chinezii rămîn vegetarieni: 98% din caloriile pe care le folosesc provin din produse vegetale; niCi unt, nici brinză, nici lapte, foarte puţină caroo,foaite putin peşte. Hidratii de carbon sînt luati în parte din griu, mei – în nord; din .orez predominant în sud; proteinele – din soia, din boabele de muştar, din diverse uleiuri vegetale. •

O singură ţară se transformă în prezent în acest domeniu, sporindu-şi enorm consumul de peşte şi mai ales adoptînd carnea _.:. Japonia.
• Omniprez:;enţa orez:;ului în sud-est şi exportul acestuia spre nord sînt factoriirăspunz.ători pentru genera­ lizarea acestui regim . l’egetarilln.

1 97

în fiecare
Occidentul, consumator de griu sau de cereale inlocuitoa• re ale acestuia, a trebuit să •adopte foarte curind, din cauza acestei folosinţe, sistemul pîrloagelor şi al culturi­ lor prin rotaţie, . (ară de care pămîntul • se epuizează rapid, iar griul nu mai .are nici un randament. O parte din ogoare. a fost lăsată deci în mod �automat pentru păşUni şi îmete� cu atît mai mult .cu cît cultura grîului reclamă

un ajutor atiimalconsiderabil.

Dimpotrivă, orezul ocupă îh permanenţă,

an. acelaşi spaJiu, la infinit. Cea mai mare parte a muncii
se face manual. Bivolii nu serVesc decît pentru munci uşqare în noioiul orezăriei. Pretutindeni . se practică ma:ilual • un grădinărit meticulos, cu multă grij ă. în aceste condiţii, a te hrăni cu carne ar fi o irosire fantasti� că. Animalele ar trebui hrănite cu grăunţe – omul preferă să le mănînce el.

Prima consecinţă a acestui regilp este de a permite una dintre cele mai puteJ:ll,ice creşkri demografice în comparaţie cu orice alt sistem care foloseşte alimente de origine animală. Şase sau şapte ţărani se pot hrăni de pe un singur hectar dacă alimenta:ţia lor este exclusiv vegetariană. La suprafaţă egală randamentul uman al vegetalului se dovedeşte indiscutabil superior . altora. Aceasta explică puzderia “mulţimilor din Asia”.

Fără îndOială, la fel ca şi în India, formidabila populaţie a Chinei este un fapt relativ recent: adevăratul start al acestui fapt a fost dat în sudul chinez prin generalizarea, începînd cu secolele XI � XII, a orezului tiinpurlu, care• dă două . recolte pe an. m secolul al XIU-lea, populaţia atingea probab’il 100 de milioane. începînd cu sfirşitul secolului al XVII-lea, creşterea ei devine foarte puternică. Astăzi aceste mulţimi ar fi împiedicate de chiar numărul lor, să aleagă o altă alimentaţie, chiar dacă ar dori-o. “Ele sînt astfel înlăn­

ţuite de un • adevărat determinism de civilizaJie să
urmeze căile pe care aceasta le-a trasat pentru ele”. Din secolul al XVill-lea, şi India a depăşit cota de 100 milioane de locuitori.

1 9 8

• Teza lui Wittfogel: civilizaţia orezului implică un sistem de irigare “artificială”, care comportă o mare

. disciplină civică, socialiişi politică. •

Prin orei., popoarele din Extremul Orient sint legate tJe apă, de tancurile • (rezervoarele) Indiei meridionale; în

cimpia indo-gangetică, – de puţurile sau canalele de irigare provenite din cursurile de ape; la fel, m China,

irigaţiile imbracă toaţe formele: sînt legate în acelaşi timp de fluviile liniştite din sud (precum şi de inundaţiile regulate ale lacurilor Beiyang şi Dongding, din vecină­ tatea fluviului Yang-Tse), qe puţuri, canale – dintre care Canalul Imperial . este tipul desăvîrşit (in acelaşi timp cale de comunicaţie şi sistem de irigaţie), de fluviile sălbatice din nord, cum sint Bei He sau Huanghe, pe care a fost nevoită să-I indiguiaSeă, să-I imblinzea5că, şi ale• cărui revărsări brutale rămîn frecvente. Pretutin­ deni, atit pe terasele din Filipine sau din Java, �it şi .in. China cantoneză şi in Japonia, irigaţiile, adesea cu t:analele lor aeriene de bambus, cu pompele primitive sau moderne, implică o disciplină strictă de muncă şi o supunere după imaginea Egiptului antic, exemplu clasic de servituţi pe .care le impuneau irigaţiile.

începută fără îndoială o qată cu � doilea mile­ niu i.H. pe terenurile joase aduse la acelaşi nivel, cultura orezului s �a extins puţiil cîte puţin pe toate terenurile ce puteau fi udate, ameliorlndu-se in acelaşi timp graţie

boabelor selecţionate car� vor permite crearea de specii timpurii . De atimci, cult�ra .orezului a antrenat pentru

aceste populaţii 1 d i n Extremul Orient, aşa cum afmnă

. K.A. Wittfogel, regimuri autoritare, birocratice, cu o sumedenie de reprezentanţi ai statului..

Această . explicaţie, discutabilă . dacă sint abordate amănuntţle, aşa cum au subliniat cei ce o contrazic, ‘se dovedeşte mai curind a fi mult prea simplă. Dacă a existat, şi a existat • evident, un determinism al apei domesticite, al apei .necesare orezului, al •orezului însuşi,

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�ceste constrîngeri nu constituie decît unul dintre elemen­ tele unui edificiu mult mai complex – acest fapt fiind un adevăr ce nu trebuie pierdut din vedere. Dar constrîn­ gerile civilizaţiei orezului continuă să existe: ele au contat, ele contează în permanenţă.
• Imen�e zone rămîn primitive sau sălbatice în Ex­ tremul Orient, unde prosperă în •general civilizaţiile de cîmpie, legate de irigaţii.

Orezăriile inlllldatedin munţi sînt într-adevăr o realitate, e adevărat dar pe terase înguste, în regiuni supr�po’­ pulate, unde. a fost posibilă lucrarea acestor terase perfect orizontale (în Java de exemplu). ln mod regulat şi în măsura în care. a triumfat o cultură intensivă, omul civilizat.- în Extremul Orient – nu ocupă decît o parte minimă din spaţiu. Re.stul, mai ales regiunile înalte, cele izolate, anumite insule, constituie locurile de refugiu ale unor populaţii şi civilizaţii primitive.

Caţtea lui Georges Condominas, Nous avons mange la foret (Arridistrus pădurea) ( 1957), ne dm:e în apro� piere de Saigon, dincolo de Dalat, statiune estivală, la un trib primitiv a cărui cronică este relatată zi cu zi. Acest trib trăieşte într-o pădure din care în fiecare an •o bucată . este distrusă pentru a fi cultivat păplÎntul: arborii sînt “izola ţi”, doboriţi sau .arşi. Pe pămîntul astfel degajat, “plantarea se face cu ajutorul cazmalei; se face’ repede o groapă, se aruncă cîteva seminţe, se împinge ‘

la loc pămîtttulcupiciorul”. Grosul recoltei va fi furnizat de orezul provenit din cultură uscată. ‘ Este

distrusa astfel în fiecate an o bucată de pădure. La capătul a 20 d�? ani se revine, dacă totul merge bine, la

pllllctul . de plecare, • cu alte cuvinte dacă pădurea,•
“lăsată în pîrloagă”, se reface în acest interval.
Această agrieultură itinerantă (care se n�eşte
ladang în malaieziană şi pe .care o regăsim aproape

200

pretutindeni sub nume diferite)
este o agricultură pţimiti­

vă, făcută practic fără animale domestic�. De pe urma ei trăiesc 1 000de oameni foarte inapoiap. Vremurile prezente nu-i favorizează deloc, evident, dar ei supravie••-ţuiesc în regiunile izolate.

Occidentul, dimpotrivă, a ştiut foarte curînd să-şi

ashW.l�e populaţiile primitive. Zonele•iz�late şi înapoiate nu i-au lipsit, fireşte, nici lui, putînd fi recunoscute şi
astăzi încă, dar a reuşit să şi-i alăture, să-i convingă, să-i aducă pînă în oraşe, să le capteze forţele vii.

Nimic din acest gen nu s-a întimplat în E;'(tremul Orient. Această imensă diferenţă explică prezenţa in China a atîtor populaţii ,.sinizate”; în India – a atîtor triburi in afara sistemului castelor şi interdicţiilor lor (ca• să nu mai spunem în afara civilizaţiei indiene) .

Ea ne explică destul ‘de bine detaliile prezentului şi trecutului. în •1565, pe cîmpul de bătălie de la Talikota, regatul “hindus” Vijayanagar, în podişul Dekkan, în pofida faptului că av ea’ un milion de combatanţi, este lovit de moarte • de . cavaleria şi, mai mult incă, de artileria sultanilor musuhnani. Uriaşul, superbul oraş rămine atunci fără apărare, locuitoriisăi fără mijloa­ ce cu care să . fugă, toate animalele de tracţiUne ftin d luate de armaţă. Dar nu invingătorii �u fost cei care I-au jefuit, căci în timp ce ei, in loc să pătrundă in oraş, s-au grăbit să�i urmărească pe învinşi şi să-i ucidă, populaţiile priniitivedin împrejurimile oraşului, hoarde de brln dschari, lambadi, kurumba, au năvălit asupra capitalei şi’ au Jefirlt :-a.

Un medic german, în drum şpre Siam, ascultă confidenţele uaui negustor japonez . care, cîţiva ani mai inainte, în 1682, naufragiase, intr-o insulă pustie, în apropierea coastelor Luzonului. Erau vreo zece naufra­ giaţi care aq trăit cu ouăle păsărilor sălbatice, �e se găseau din abundenţă şi cu scriicile. care se aflau în bancuri mari de-a lungul coastelor. După opt ap.i de asemenea viaţă extravagarită, ei construiesc o barcă, îi
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pun piJize şi ajung in sfîrşit, extenuaţi, in Insula, Hainan din Golful Tonkin, pentnJ a afla că au scăpat de la o moarte sigură. �ula este pe jumătate chineză, pe jumătate primitivă. Au avut şansa să acosteze in partea -chineză. Sălbaticii i-ar fi făcut bucăţele. De asemenea, Formosa, cucerită de chinezi in 1683, a fost •şi a rămas divizată – chineză şi nechineză -, ca multe insule. şi “compartimente aproape etanşe ale continentuiui”.

Cifrele actuale referitoare la China şi populaţiile ei nesinizate . sint impresionante. Deşi aceşti primitivi nu.­ reprezintă decit 6% din populaţia totală (adică aproxi­ mativ 36 milioane de fiinţe),lor le aparţin 60% din teritoriul chinez .(inclusiv, este adevărat, aceste regiuni ciudate care sint Gobi, Turkestanul, Til>etul). în ce priveşte spaţiul, aceste populaţii continuă să fie majori­ tare.

• Este vorba de populaţiHe zhuang din Guangxi, miao, li, tai şi yi (acesţe poimlaţii larg dispersate din Iunnan şi

pină la Kangsu); hewei din Gansu, yao. • Faţă de toţi aceştia, sau de aproape toţi, politica Chinei imperiale şi, mai aproape, a Chinei lui Jiang Jieshi a fo�t strict segregaţionistă. Pe porţile oraşului populaţiei yi se putea citi: “Este interzis pentru oamenii yi să se reunească sau să meargă pe stradă in grupuri mai mari de trei persoa­ ne”; “Este interzis oamenilor yi .să meargă pe cal”. China actuală le-a imbunătăţit soarta, le-a recunoscut o anumită autonomie, dar nu semiindependenţa pe care sovieticii au acordat-o minorităţilor lor etnice. în schimb, toate aceste societăţi _rămase in urmă (cu sclavi, ca la populaţia yi din l:..iangshan, cu iobagi; ula, la tibetani) au fost bulversate. S-au depus eforturi mari pentru a -i dota pe cei mai mapoiaţi cu limbi scrise. Astfel, astăzi numai China se preocupă (pentru binele:, şi, fără îndoiai�, spre nemulţumirea lor) de populaţiile ei inapoi�te.

• intre zonele civilizate, tărîmul oamenilor sălbatici este şi tărimul animalelcr sălbatice.

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Această ultimă trăsătură marchează Exţremul Orient in întregul său, animalele sălbatice nllşunîndpretu­ tindeni: lei în regiunea Pandjăbului, mistreţi pe .,coastele Sumatrei, crocodili, in riurile Filipinelor şi, pretutindeni, regţle animalelor feroce, tigrul, hoţuf şi mîncătorul de oameni.
Est.e un adevăr actual pe care îl regăsim, mai
colorat, în mii de poveşti de . alţădată. • Tatăl lui las Cortes, un ie�it spaniol care a naufragiat în 1�26 lîngă

Guangzhou, vorbea despre aceşti tigri care mişunau pe cimpiile chinezeşti şi veneau adesea pină în sate şi oraşe pentru a-şi lua prada umană.

Un medic francez, Fran�ois Bemier, vizitează Delta Gangelui în jurul anului 1660. Bengalul este categoric regiunea cea mai bogată, Cea mai populată din India ,,un dar al Gangelui”, aşa cum Egiptul este un dar al Nilului, o mare regiune producătoare de orez şi de zahăr. În mijlocul acestei prosperităţi – insule pustii, chiar Îfttre braţele fluviului, unde piraţii îşi fac veacul. “Acesti insule, povesteşte Bemier, nu au alţi locuitori decît tigrii, care uneori trec înot de pe o insulă pe alta, sau. gazele, porci şi păsări de curte sălbăticite. Şi din cauza tigrilor, cind călătoreşti mtre aceste insule cu mici ambarcaţiuni cu rame aşa cum se obişnuieşte, in multe locuri este periculos să pui piciorul pe pămînt; şi trebuie să ai mare grijă ca barca pe care noaptea o ancorezi de un copac să nu fie prea aproape de mal căci te poţi ciocni oricind de ceva; şi se spune că unii tigri sînt atît de îndrăzneţi încît au pătruns chiar in bărci de unde au răpit oameni adormiţi, alegindu -i chiar (dacă este să dăm crezare luntraşilor băştinaşi)• pe cei mai mari şi mai graşi”.
Barbarie împotriva civilizatiei: mărturia i’toriei

Civilizaţiile mari ale Extremului Orient – inaiîite de toate lndia• şi_ China .� ar fi trăit liniştite dacă •ar fi existat, pentru a le tulbura numai aceste zone interioare sălba-

203

tice, cu agricultOrii lot săraci distrugători de păduţi. Pentru ele furtuna, sub forma unor adevărate �Iamităti
biblice, a venit din vastele deşerturi şi stepe (din• vestu’l
• şi nordul Chinei, din nordul şi vestul Indiei), toride •sub soarele de vară, acoperite iMna de nămeţi de zăpadă.
Pe aceste teritorii inwnane, o populaţie de piştori: turci, turkmeni, kirghizi, mongoli. Valuri de călăreţi. De
cînd i-a înregistrat istoria, ei erau deja aşa cum vo.r rămîne –;- violenţi, prădători, Cruzi, de •UD curaj ;11ebun, – pînă fa sirrşitul măreţiei lor istorice, adică, în mare, pînă la mijlocul secolului al XVII-lea. Atunci, dar numai atunci, popoarele sedentare, graţie prafului de puşcă, au scăpat defmitiv de ei. Ele îi vor tine la distanţă; şi îngrădiţi, nepreaavind de . ales, nu vor face decit . să supravieţuiască şi să-şi ducă traiul de azi pe .miine pînă în epoca actuală. Nici cele două Mongolii (Inte­ rioară şi Exterioai-ă – chineză şi sovietică), nici Turkestanul (chinez şi sovietic) nu sint prin ele insele ţări esenţiale pe eşichierul lumii. Ceeace con,.tează sint numai spaţiile lor şi aerodromurile lor, care. nu le aparţin.
• D�r de ce ne interesează• aceşti nomazi pe planul actualităţii•civilizaţiilor? Pentru că fantasticele lor năl’ăliri din. tre.cut au întîrziat în: mod categoric dezvol­ tarea marilor cil’ilizaţiil’ecine.

HennannGoetz, in lucrarea sa cla8ică – Epocile civili­ zaJiei indiene, 1929 -, afmn ă acest lucru referitor 1�

India, dar remarca sa poate fi extinsă fără ezitare şi la China. India nu este cu adevărat deschisă 8pre lumea tiomaziloi: decit prin îngu8tul d�ftleu Khaiber, peste muntii afgani, ln timp ce China are dezavan�jul de a fi vecină cu vastul Gobi, impotriva căruia Zidul chinezesc, construit din secolul al ill-lea a.H., este un obstacol militar important, dar mai mult simbolic decit eficace, şi trecut de mii de ori.
�04

Pentru sinologul Owen Lattimore, aceşti nomazi sînt foşti ţărani. Practicarea unei agriculturi perfecţionate i-a împins pe tăranii cei mai puţin adaptabili spre zonele înalte ale mmcătorilor de păduri, mai ales spre marginile stepei şi deşertului. Aceşti ţărani respinşi din regiunile bogate nu a� avut la dispoziţie decît refugiul în aceste imense şi foarte sărace’ zone de păşune. Astfel, civiliza­ ţia a fost “mama barbariei”, ea a făcut din foşti agricul­ tori păstori nomazi. fp. pofida acestor refugii, barbarul revine în permanenţă, în urma unor crize interne, a unor revoluţii sociale, creşteri demografice explozive, spre zonele sedentarilor, iar această revenire este rareOri paşnică. El revine aici foarte adesea ca dominator; triumfător, jefuitor: nomadului neînţeles nu îi pasă atunci de sedentarul cucerit … Să cităm în .această privinţă Memoriile lui Babur care, în 1526, a cucerit India de nord:

“… Deşi Hindusu,nul este în mod natural o regiune plină de frumuseţe, locuitorii săi sînt lip.siţi de graţie, iar în comerţul cu ei nu găseşti nici plăcere, nici flexibilitate, nici relaţii închegate. Fără abilitate, fără inteligenţă, fără să fi e sociabili, ei nu cunosc generozi­ tatea şi , sentimentele bărbăteşti. în concepţii, ca şi în acţiunile lor, sînt lipsiţi de metodă, de ţinută, de reguli, de principii. Ei nu au nici cai buni, nici cărnuri suculen­ te, nici struguri, nici pepeni, nici fructe savuroase. Aici

nu e gheaţă, nu e apă potabilă. în pieţele lor nu-ţi poţi procura nici mîncărurile pteferate, nici pîine bună. Băi,

lumînări, torţe, sfeşnice, nimic din toate acestea nu le este cunoscut …
în . afara fluviilor şi rîurilor care curg în rîpe şi văioage, ei nu au – nici în grădini, nici în palatele lor – nici un fel de apă curentă. Construcţiile lor sînt lipsite de frumuseţe, de aerisire, de simetrie şi de elegan­ ţă. Ţăranii• şi oamenii de condiţie joasă umblă în general goi. Ei nu poartă decît langota şi care nu este altceva decît o scurtă bucată de pînză întaşurată cu
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două palme sub buric. Sub această scurtă bucată . de pînză poartă o alta, pe care o fixează intre coapse cu ajutorul cordonului langotei, prin care o trec şi care se leagă la spate; Femeile işi ptin in jl.lfUl cotpului aşa numita lang, pe care o lasă să atîrne jumătate peste şale şi cealaltă jumătate o pun pe cap. 1 1

• Marele avantaj pe care il prezintă HindustanUI �. in afară de vasta • intindere a teritoriului său, marea

cantitate de aur în . l i gourin sau în monede pe care o găseşti aici.” .
Iată deci cum judecă acest musulman din TurkeStan, de la înălţimea victoriei sale, pornind din deşertul său şi de la orgoliul său de • nomad, . de asemenea de la înălţimea grandorii islamice căreia ii aparţine, vechea civilizaţie a Indiei, arta, arhitectura• sa. Aroganta sa, deşi nu este “aroganţă occidentală”, nu este mai plăclită.
• Marile miş�ări de cucerire ale mongolilor nu• ne interesează aici în deteliu, ci numai în măsura în care ele au afectat China şi India, lol’indu-le de fiecare dată în plin. Astfe� aŞa s-a întîmplat în• ultimele două şi imense l’aluri de inl’azii, în secolele XIII – XIV şi
XY.l- XVII.

. 123, 234, . indică
Hărţile (de la paginile 271, 275)
limitele cronologice şi organizarea variabilă a izbucniri­ lor, fie•spre vest Ş i indepărtafa E�pă, fie spre,est, cu o variantă spre sud şi spre India, şi intotdeauna cu şocuri inapoi, spre China, îară îndoială, pentru că China, încă de la inceputul secolului al XV-lea, este “bolnavul” care atrage spre sine poftele jefuitorilor. Cind a murit, in 1405, Tamerlan pregătea un atac impotriya Chinei.
în orice caz, de fiecare dată cind lumea războinică a nomazilor izbucneşte, China şi India sint brutal lovite, pînă in capitalele lor. Acest lucru ni-l spun de la sine
numai patru date: în 1215, anul luptelor de la Bouvines –
,•
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Genghis Khan cucereşte Beijingul; 1644 – manciurienii, sprijiniţi de mongoli, cuceresc din nou Pekinul; 1398:­ Tamerlan cucereşte Delhi; 1526 – B’a�ur cucereşte din nou Delhi.
Aceste evenimente sînt catastrofe care nu pot fi calificate. De fiecare dată este vorba d� milioane de vieţi omeneşti. Occidentul nu oferă, nici pe • departe, pînă la războaiele tehnice din secolul al XX-lea, masacre atit de generalizate. Indi� unde aceste conflicte sînt complicate de lupta din� două civilizaţii (barbarii care o invadea­ ză sînt convertiţi la islamism) a avut o istorie înfricoşă­ toare în cursul acestor incursiuni multiple din care ea nu a ieşit triumfătoare în cele din urmă, cum s-a întimplat cu China, decît datorită exttaordinarei ei puteri de viaţă şi, de asemenea, pentru că nu a fost niciodată subjugată în întregime, pînă la punctul terminus al Capului Cormo­ ran, şi pentru că Dekkanul a trăit întotdeauna dintr-o ec�nomie (şi uneori o emigraţie) legată de ţările riverane Oceanului Indian.

Pentru India, ca şi pentru China, aceste năvăliri au însemnat distrugeri, frîne repetate. Fără îndoială că în timp i-ar fi absorbit pe invadatori, darr cu ce preţ? Este atunci •invadatorul barbar responsabil, în mare parte, de un decalaj crescînd în raport cu Occidentul? Este oare aceasta cheia esenţială a destinului Extremului Orient?
ln ce priveşte India, susţinem acest lucru cu plăcere. La origini (mileniul al II -lea a.H.), arienii •din Panjăb, erau la fel ca strămoşii elenilor, celţilor, italioţilor, germanicilor. “,liadei” şi “Odissţii” le corespunde cultura cavalerească a acestor războaie pentru cucerirea • cîmpiei superioare a Gangelui despre care vorbeşte Mahabharata. în secolul al V -lea înaintea lui Christos, în epoca lui Buddha, India de Nord este acoperită de republici • arisrocratice şi de mici regate similare celot din Helada, cu un început de comerţ, la fel ca în Grecia. ln secolţd al III-lea, Ceandragupta şi A5oka întemeiază primul Imperiu, care va uni Afganistanul şi întreaga Indie, cu

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excepţia părţii meridionale a Dekkanului, ca întotqeauna de necucerit; • Este epoca în care se făurea Im:periul greco!macedonean al lui Alexandru. O dată cu naşterea lui Christos incepe, prin poarta de nord-vest, invazia popoarelor scite, care vor ajunge in vastul lmperiu Gupta

intre secolele al III-lea şi al VIII-lea, careşi redeschide lupta, fără sirrşit Pentru . India, intre oamenii cu pielea deschisă şj oamenii cu pielea închisă la culoare. în

curînd; ca şr în Evul Mediu occidental, vor apărea•mase de ţărani aserviţi şi, începînd din secolul al X-lea pînă
in secolul al XIII-lea, mari state
feudale_, Nu există,
frr eşte, un paralelism riguros, mai ales în • ce priveşte
formele celOJ: două societăţi, dar, şi de o parte şi de cealaltă, nu este o deosebire prea pronunţată de D.ivel
in �lea şi pînă la marea invazie
pînă secolul al XIII
mongolă.

Atunci, decalajul va creşte progresiv. Iar problema este aceeaşi şi pentru China: în ce măsqră a fost ea întirziată in dezvoltare de către cucerirea mongolă încheiată în 1’279 şi de • cucerirea manciurienilor (1644 – 1683)’? Aflată în avans din punct de vedere tehnic şi ştiinţific cei puţin pînă în secolul al XIII-lea, C:hina se lasă apoi depăşită de Occidentul îndepărtat

Este totuşi evident că nu trebuie să ‘se atribuie invadatorilor din stepă întreaga responsabilitate a desti­ nului incurcat al .Extremului Orient. Distrugerile provo­ cate de invadatori au fost imense. Cu toate acestea, totul s-a reparat, s-a, cicatrizat cu timpul.

Am spune chiar mai mult: s-a cicatrizat prea bine. Inva.ziile care in Occident au insemnat rupturi şi naşterea
unor noi civilizaţii trec peste China şi peste India ca nişte catastrofe materiale, dar care nu . schimbă cu adevărat

nici formele lor de gîndire, nici structurile lor sociale., Niciodată aici nu a avut loc un salt comparabil cu cel pe care l-a adus civilizaţia antică a Greciei, Romei şi civilizaţia Romei – creştinătăţii; sau comparabilă cu trecerea Orientului Apropiat la Islam.
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Această extraordinară fidelitate a Extremului Orient faţă de el iQSuşi, imobilismul său ţin de asemenea de motive de ordin intern. Ele explică în parte rămînerea sa

in urmă, care, de altfe� este absolut relativă. Extremul Orient • nu a rămas cu adevărat in urmă; el . a rămas

acolo unde era, timp de secole şi secole, in timp ce restul lumii progresa văzînd cu ochii, distanţindu-se zi .cu zi tot maj mult.

Origini îndepărtate:- .
motivele unui imobilism cultural

Este neîndoielnic . că totul s-a hotărît mult inaintea

istoriei,. in zorii primelor civilizaţii. Civilizaţiile Extre­ mului Orient se – prezintă ca aitsambluri care au atins

foarte detreme o maturitate remarcabilă, dar intr-un cadru care a făcut cvasiimuabile unele dintre. structurile lor esenţiale. Ele au. obţinut din. aceasta o unitate, o coeziune uluitoare. Dar, de asemenea, şi o dificultate extremă in a se transforma ele insele, in a vrea şi a putea să evolueze; ca şi cum şi-ar fi refuzat sistematic schimbarea şi progresul.

• Ctle două mari cil’ilizaţiidin Extremul Orient sînt cil’ilizaţii milenare, iată ceea ce trebuie să înţelegem,• dînd: uită'”!i experienjele noastre din Occident.

în Extrem:ul Orient, unde monumentele se deteriorellză şi dispar foarte repede avind in vedere că adesea ele sint construite, ca •in China şi Japonia, din materiale uşoare, omul, socialul, culturalul par dimpotrivă; indestructibile. Ele nu sint de ieri, ci datează dintr-un timp foarte îndepărtat. Imaginaţi-vă ce ar fi un Egipt fara onic, miraculos conservat, adaptat de bine de rău Ia viaţa modernă, păstrîndu-şi credinţele şi unele dintre obiceiu­ rile sale.

Hinduismul, incă • foarte viu, este baza• aproape neschimbată a intregii civilizaţii indiene de peste un

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mileniu; în plus, el a împrumutat şi a transmis anumite noţiuni religioase, mai vechi cu cîteva mii de ani.

în China, cultul strămoşilor şi . zeilor naturii, care dateaz� cel puţin din primul mileniu dinaintea lui Christos, s-a perpetuat de asemenea d�a lungul taoisnlu­ lui, confucianismului şi buddhismului, care, fireşte, nu I-au suprimat. El este încă viu. . .

Or, la aceste forme religioase vechi şi persistente se adaugă structuri sociale care au avut o viaţă tot atît de dură ca şi ele; sistemul indian , al castelor, ierarhia familială şi socială chineză. Se pare deCi că este vorba, în ambele cazuri, de • o perenitate religioasă, dublată de o perenitate socială, strins legate una de cealaltă. Această trăsătură eşte caracteristică culturilor primi­ tive, ale căror forme de viaţă şi de • gîndire sînt total, direct angajate în supranatu,ral. Acest lucru este cu atît mai deconcertant – cînd este vorba de mari civilizatii atit de dezvoltate, şi în toate domeniile lor dife rite, cum sînt China şi India -, dar cu atît mai remarcabil.

• Contrar Occidentului, care separă net umanril de diJiin, Extremul Orient ignoră această diferenţiere.

Religiosul se confruntă cu toate formele de viaţă umană: statul este religie-, ftlozofta este religie, morala este religie, relaţiile sociale sînt religie. Toate aceste forme participă din plin la sacru. De aici işi • trag ele tendinta spre imuabilitate, spre veşnicie. •

Printr-o contradicţie explicabilă, acest div� ames­ tecat cu toate actele vieţii, şi chiar cu cel� mai ibanale, dă adesea occidentalului, obişnuit să plaseze religia pe o culme spirituală, impresia udei absente a sentimentului religios, pe care I-ar înlocui un formalism ritual. Aceasta pentru că unui • o ccidental ii este greu să mţeleagă importanţa, sensul real al acestor rituri.

‘ A le respecta înseamnă a te conforma un�i ordini divine, care domneşte asupra a tot ceea ce este uman. înseamnă a trăi în mod • religios. Astfel, hinduismul constă, mai presus de orice, în_ recunoaşterea• valorilor

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care reprezintă ierarhia castelor decît în “credinţa în fiinţe spiritualeşi în cultul zeilor care nu reprezintă decit un fragment din aceasta”.
La fel, chinezii . nu se preocupă să facă distincţia
între o infinitate de zei. Esenţialul este de a respecta faţă de • ei toate obligaţiile rituale, de a da cultului pentru strămoşi toată atenţia care i se . cuvine, în sfirşit, de a respecta în viaţa familială şi socială toate îndatoririle pe care le stabileşte o ierarhie complicată.

Este adevărat că contextul spiritual este foarte diferit în India şi în China,• că formele religioase şi formele soci�e legate de acestea nu seamănă • deloc. Dacă opunem în bloc Occidentul Ex�mului Orient, riscăm să

nu vedem puternicele opoziţii care îl vizează pe acesta din urmă. India nu este China, mai este oare nevoie să

o spunem? Şi dacă China, faţă de Europa, apare sub semnul unei vieţi religioase atotcuprinzătoare, ea se afirmă, dimpotrj.vă, faţă de India, ca o ţară raţionalis­ tă,’ marcată de trecerea prin puternica criză intelectuală a statelor combatante (secolele V – VIIIa.H.), asetnă­ nătoare, s-a spus, crizei ftlozofice fundamentale care a marcat naşterea, în Grecia, a spiritului ştiinţific. Confu­ cianismul, o vom vedea, a primit moştenirea acestei crize agnosticiste şi raţionaliste, a adaptat-o la necesităţile politice şi i-a permis să traverseze uriaşa criZă reli­ gioasă din secolul al III-lea, pînă în secolul al X-lea, pentru a o remodela în ceea va fi neoconfucianismul, triumfător începînd cu secolul al XIII-lea.’ .

• în China există deci două curente paralele şi imobi­ lismul societăţii ţine de �umite structuri politice, economice şi sociale, precum şi religioase, în timp ce în India supranaturalul joacă rolul primQJ:dial. Cum s-ar putea oare transforma, repune în cauză societatea oamenilor cînd organizarea ei se- aftrmă de esenţă divma..-?.

CAPITOLUL 11

CHINA CLASICĂ
Această Chină clasică de la care • trebuie să pornim, pentru că este departe de a fi dispărut în întregi!nţ, a avut nevoie de foarte multă vreme pentru a dobîndi şi a exprima cu preciz.ie trăsăturile sale origin�e. Imaginea sa se prezintă ca cea a unui ansamblu compact care scapă încercărilor obişnuite . de perioilicizare. De-a lungul atîtor secole, de-a lungul unei interminabile sticce-• siuni de catastrofe şi cuceriri, ea pare să prezinte un chip neschimbat.

Cu toate acestea, oricît de lentă ar fi evoluţi,â enor­ mei realităţi, aceasta nu este niciodată imobilă. Ca toate civilizaţiile, şi •cea chineză acumulează experienţe, face o opţiune permanent înnoită între propriile sale bogăţii şi tendinţe; în sirrşit, contrar aparenţelor, ea nu este închisă spre• lumea din afară. Sufluri exterioare ajung• pînă la ea . şi îşi impun prezenţ�.

Dimensiunile religioase

Primele dimensiuni, cele mai importante, cele mai greu de stăpînit, sînt cele ale vieţii sale religioase. Această ,viaţă religioasă nu are contururi clare. Ea • admite mai multe sisteme, ca şi religia occidentală, dar care nu se exClud unul pe celălalt. Pietatea unui credincios trece de la o formă la alta, admite în acelaşi timp misticismul şi raţionalisinul. Imaginaţi-vă un european oscilînd, fără

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a intimpina nici cel mai mic obstacol intelectual sau r-eligios, de la Reformă la biserica catolică şi la, ateism, simţindu-se pretutindeni ca la el acasă. “în chinezul cel mai agnostic sau cel mai conformist există un anarhist şi un mistic latent. .. Chinezii sint superstiţioşi sau poziti­ vişti, sau mai degrabă ambele deodatăn (Marcel Granet); Tocmai acest “deodatăn • este ade,sea greu de înţeles pentru un occidental.

Aceste constatări, care sînt valabile chiar şi . pentru China recentă, sint util de reamintit -la inceputul unei expuneri istorice. Ele explică dinainte ace�t adevăr fundamental şi anume că, implantîndu-se pe pămîntul chinez, confucianismul (se spune foarte rar confuceismul) şi taoismul (aproape în acelaşi moment), apoi mult mai tîrziu buddhisniul, ele nu s-au eliminat reciproc in pofida disputelor şi luptelor lor, niCi nu s-au deosebit intotdea­ una una de cealaltă. Ele se vor adăuga in realitate unei vieţi religioase mult anterioare, primitive, puternice. Se afirmă că “cei trei marin au navigat pe aceste ape reli­ gioase străvechi. În realitate, au naufragiat pe aceste ape.
• Bazele vieţiireUgioase în •China, sînt mult anterioare celor trei mari curente ak vieţiisale spirituale.. O moştenire multiformă, vie, se menţine la baza tuturor practicilor reU�ioase.

Este vorba aici de o veche moştenire, existentă dinainte de primul mileniu care l-a precedat pe Christos, in zorii primei Chine coerente, şi care nu va modifica nimic cu adevărat. ‘

Apariţia pluguloi permite stabilizarea unor populaţii mult mai dense, grupate in oraşe, in moşii . . Această primă. Chină practică dublul cult al strămoşil,or şi al divinităţilor pămfntului nobiliar, ceea ce ne duce, după

fantezia noastră; cu gîndul fie la. Grecia arhaică, fie la originile îndepărtate ale Romei; în însuşi climatul cetăJii antice.

Cultul strămoşilor acordă o impoftanţă excepţională grupurilor familiale patrilineare (unde numele se trans­
mite din tată in fiu). Peste aceste familii, grupul, mai

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mare, al gintei (in chineză xing) îi •reuneşte pe bărbaţii proveniţi din -acelaşi strămoş, purtind din această cauză aceleaşi credinţe. Astfel, pentru oamenii ji primul stră­ moş este suveranul Millet, pentru ginta sseu – Yu• cel Mare,• eroul legendar care a făcut să se retragă apele Potopului.

Această organizare şi cultul pentru strămoşi priveau, 1a origine, numai Jamiliile patriciene. Mai tîrziu, familiile plebee vor imita acest model străvechi şi îşi vor venera Şi ele str!Itnoşii, ca tot atîţia zei.

Alături de strămoşi se plasează, pe un plan abia diferit, zeii locali ai moşiei nobiliare, de la zeii fiecărei case,’ ai colinelor, cursurilor de apă, diverse forţe naturale localizate intr-un punct sau altul al teritoriului, pină la zeul Domeniului nobiliar, chO, care îi domină pe toţi. “Un prinţ din Chen, invins in 548 (a.H.) care s-a predat cerind clemenţă, s-a înfăţişat invingătorului său în haine de doliu, • ţinînd ‘ în braţe zeul domeniului . şi fri nd precedat de generalul său-care purta vasele templu­ lui strămoşilor săi: el oferea astfel domeniul nobiliar” (H. Maspero).

Cînd unitatea politică supune senioria autorităţii monarhice, un mare zeu al Domeniului Regal se impune
tuturor zeilor: • suveranul Pămîntului. A mai existat, absolut frresc, zeul morţilor: “îi ţinea închişi •în •monnin• tele sale sumbre, in mijlocul celor Nouă întunecimi; în apropiere de Izvoarele Galbene”. Au existat, de aseme­ nea, Zeul Cerului (Zeul de Sus), zeii munţilor, ai celor patru mări, ai fluviilor (Contele Fluviului este zeul teribilului’Huanghe) … Practic, zeii sînt tot atît de nume­ roşi precum miile de caractere ale chinezei clasice!

Acest politeisrh proliferant crede în. supravieţuirea sufletului, • fie la Izvoarele Galbene, loc infernal , fie in

lumea celestă a Zeului de Sus, fie pe Pămînt, in templul strămoşilor. Această .ierarhie a. sălaşelor vieţii de ap{)i este adesea calchiată după ierarhiile sociale din această lume. Prinţii, miniştrii, mai marii acestei lumi cunosc viaţa fericită a Cerului, wide cei mai importanţi conti­ nuă să fie slujiţi de servitorii lor. Marea masă a muritorilor vor merge la Izvoarele Galbene, in cele Nouă întunecimi: pentru ei – infernu l. Celor pe jumătate1

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