Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
 

Volume VI, Number 3
 

Franklin Knight, "President's Corner"

Anthony Harkins, "The Hillbilly in the American Imagination"

POSTMODERNISM AND HISTORICAL INQUIRY: THREE VIEWS
--C. Behan McCullagh, "Postmodernism and the Truth of History"
--Beverley Southgate, "Postmodernism and Historical Inquiry: Spoiled for Choice?"
--Willie Thompson, "Postmodernism and Historiography" 

THE USES OF CLASSICAL HISTORY FOR CONTEMPORARY THEMES: A FORUM
--J. Peter Euben, "The Uses of Classical History for Contemporary Themes" 
--Richard Ned Lebow, "Ethics and Foreign Policy" 
--Danielle Allen, "Response to Euben and Lebow" 
--Mary Lefkowitz, "Response to Euben and Lebow"
--Josiah Ober, "Democracy, Knowledge, and Moral Change"
--Loren J. Samons II, "Ancient Lessons for (Post)Moderns?" 
--Barry Strauss, "Commentary on Euben and Lebow"
--Carol Thomas, "Captured by Greece? Terms of Imprisonment" 
--J. Peter Euben, "Responses to Responses" 
--Richard Ned Lebow, "The Dangers of Rampant Individualism"
 

William Anthony Hay, "Reconsidering Herbert Butterfield" 

Harold D. Woodman, "In Memoriam: Daniel J. Boorstin" 
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Volume VI, Number 3

THE PRESIDENT’S CORNER 
Franklin W. Knight

Let me begin my first official message to my colleagues by admitting candidly that being elected president of the Historical Society constitutes for me both a signal honor and an intimidating challenge. 

The honor derives from the rewarding experience of participating with a varied and dynamic group of scholars, along with the humbling confidence that many of these, either misguided or simply malicious, have faith in my ability to lead this august group over the next two years. I joined the Society because I share its fundamental belief in open intellectual dialogue largely devoid of hollow posturing and vapid ideological grandstanding. The Historical Society has always subordinated conventional hierarchies and disciplinary categories in its unyielding quest for intellectual integrity. At the first general meeting in Boston in 1999, our esteemed president, Eugene Genovese, boldly encouraged members of the Society to “refuse to impose a particular ideology, or to privilege trivial work over significant work under the guise of righting old wrongs.” And he certainly connected fully with his audience (as I recall) when he continued, “In women’s history, Afro-American history, and no few other subjects, we distinguish the significant issues from the spurious, distinguish world-historical developments from the parochial, and, above all, distinguish interpretations based on conscientious research from ideological pronouncements based on ‘theories’ that turn out to be little more than opinions.” That magnificent Patton-like exhortation motivated the entire audience to greater endeavors. It certainly moved me greatly. I have, over the years, enjoyed the biennial meetings for their uninhibited approach to serious discussions and spontaneous camaraderie. That more than justified my modest subscription and zealous participation. I harbored no great ambition to rise above the anonymity of the Lake Woebegone-like majority. Moreover, everyone knows that “heavy is the head that wears a crown.” I had led other organizations of scholars before and the experience was always sobering. But having been called to service, like a superannuated plough horse, there is no other recourse but to reconcile experience and ability and execute the duties required. Anything less would be unacceptable. 

The intimidating nature of the challenge of this office is self-evident. First, it is invariably difficult to follow in the wake of giants. The Historical Society has been extremely fortunate to have had a succession of intellectual giants as presidents—Eugene D. Genovese, George Huppert, and Peter Coclanis —and each has made a tremendous contribution to the development of the Society as well as the formal discipline. They were all bold, imaginative, energetic, and creative leaders who accomplished a great deal in a very short time. Despite the lofty sentiment of the American Declaration of Independence, all men are not created equal. Nor will social, political, and biological engineering result in a common equality. Napoleon Bonaparte made France great, politically as well as territorially. He was followed (not directly) by Napoleon III whose political and military careers constituted a succession of unmitigated disasters for France. This led the perceptive François Guizot to scoff, “Because we have a Napoleon the Great must we now have a Napoleon the Little?” I will work hard to avoid a comparable observation. We all do the best that we can within the limits of our varied abilities and the unpredictable circumstances of our tenure. The important requirement in any position of responsibility is to be the best that one can be. I pledge to do that in my capacity as your president. 

Good intentions, however, will not eliminate the inescapable problems of any organization. No association, however large and financially secure, can afford to rest on its laurels and become prematurely complacent about the future. The Historical Society is neither rich nor large. It has undoubtedly accomplished much in its few years of existence, and we can justifiably congratulate ourselves and take pride in these magnificent achievements. The Society has rapidly congregated an impressive number of enthusiastic, internationally distributed members and a small, devoted, miracle-working staff. It has created a highly respectable, well-received journal that is exciting to read, reflecting both the consistent quality of the submissions and the exemplary, exacting professionalism of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Historically Speaking, the Society’s bulletin, skillfully edited by Joseph Lucas and Donald Yerxa, stands without peer for lucidity, originality, and lively short articles of topical currency. The user-friendly web page is updated regularly. All this represents the good news. 

We have much to do—and you will note the deliberate use of the first person plural. Success in our goals will only come from the cooperative assertions of all members of the Historical Society. No president, however gifted or lucky, can do it all alone. Ultimate success will depend on each and every member putting forth fully in the collective efforts required. This is of paramount importance. Please send to the staff and to me your ideas. We promise to take every idea seriously and respond as best we can. Participate in the general meetings for fellowship and for profit. Let us embrace the urging of President John Kennedy and think not what the Historical Society can do for you but what you can you for the Historical Society. And there is a lot that you can do. 

We need to make a concerted drive to expand our membership, especially among younger scholars and graduate students. The virtues of youth are many and attracting more young scholars to the Society will benefit all of us. Without the constant infusion of new blood we will lose our cutting-edge intellectual excitement as well as the inherent dynamism required to resolve the issues that will inevitably confront the Society. Membership in the Historical Society is one of the last true bargains in the academic world. We need to share the news among our colleagues, in our departments, and at gatherings of the other organizations to which we belong. Evangelism in the cause of good is always a virtue. 

We need to strengthen the financial foundation of the Society. We urge our members to pay their regular dues promptly and to consider the practical advantages of life membership. We have a good base in our present membership, and I warmly congratulate those who have opted for lifetime membership in the Historical Society. The staff will vigorously explore new avenues of support from foundations and other institutional benefactors around the world. We have a very good track record of institutional support without which we would not exist. But that is not enough. It is imperative that we think seriously over the next two years of creating our own endowment. Of course, an endowment per se is no guarantee of permanence, but it does enhance greatly the eventual possibility of economic flexibility and autonomy. In any case, the important point is to encourage our present generation to make a start, and earmarking contributions to the endowment fund is one way to ensure its reality. 

We also need to revitalize our regional seminars and conferences. Since the Society meets biennially it is imperative that the members keep active during the intersession period with activities that reflect and extend the goals of the Society. Some regions are more active than others, but for the regions of lesser activity, a good idea might be to begin with seminars on the works, published or unpublished, of local members. Such activity would not only strengthen the historical community at large but also mutually enhance our individual work. 

Another idea would be to explore at the regional level aspects of the upcoming theme of the Historical Society conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, scheduled for June 1–4, 2006: “Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” As the call for papers indicates, this is a subject that has attracted enormous attention over the last few years and on which the literature is frightfully extensive. The inexhaustible dimensions of this heated debate could provide fruitful preparation for what we hope will be another exciting and illuminating series of discussions at Chapel Hill next year.

One of the goals of the Historical Society is to encourage scholarly works fully accessible to the general public. That is part of our mission statement. We think we already do this in both our publications The Journal of the Historical Society and Historically Speaking. But there is room for new efforts. There are two areas in which I would like to see some programmatic development in the next two years.

The first idea is a series of short summer seminars designed for doctoral students writing their dissertations. Here we could try to bring together a manageable number of national and international doctoral candidates exploring a common theme along with some faculty in the specialty, who could create an intellectually fertile atmosphere. Such an activity would advance scholarship as well as further cement our collegial relations in an increasingly global academic community. 

The second idea would be to try to find sponsors for bringing college and high school teachers to the biennial meetings of the Historical Society. The format of the meetings is perfect for this dialogue. The principal theme is advertised more than two years in advance. The location moves around the country. A large proportion of the papers are available online before the meeting. Most sessions are dominated by free-flowing discussions in an intimate, collegial atmosphere rather than the preacher-and-congregation format so utterly subversive of public participation and contemptuously dismissive of intellectual equality. At the Historical Society the audience is the star. In such an atmosphere good ideas can genuinely find root. 

Over the next two years I hope that you will frequently send to me and to the staff ideas and initiatives that you feel we should pursue. Tell us what you are doing and how your activity advances the mission of the Historical Society. We truly welcome your input. This is your Historical Society and we are all going together on this great intellectual journey. With your help the next years should be enormously exciting ones. 

Franklin W. Knight, the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University, is the fourth president of the Historical Society. He has published eight books and eighty-two scholarly articles, chapters, and forewords in books dealing with Caribbean and Latin American history, including Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 1990); Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850 (University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Slave Societies in the Caribbean (UNESCO/Macmillan, 1997); and the forthcoming Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context (2005). Professor Knight is a past president of the Latin American Studies Association. 
 
 

THE HILLBILLY IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION 
Anthony Harkins

Musicians today like Dwight Yoakam and Marty Stuart call their brand of “roots” country “hillbilly.” Snuffy Smith remains a popular comic strip seventy years after its creation. Nearly everyone can immediately identify the first few notes of the banjo song from the 1972 film Deliverance. And the Fox television show The Simple Life has garnered a huge audience partly by playing off of stereotypes about plain folk in the Arkansas hills. The hillbilly has been one of the most pervasive and enduring icons of American popular culture. 

The hillbilly has served such a role because this image and identity is a fundamentally ambiguous one that includes both positive and negative features of the American past and present. Central to this ambiguity is its unique racial and cultural status. As a depiction of what I call a “white other”—impoverished, isolated, and primitive Americans who nevertheless possess a supposedly pure Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage—“hillbilly” signifies both rugged individualism and stubborn backwardness; strong family and kin networks but also inbreeding and bloody feuds; a closeness to nature and the land but also the potential for wild savagery; a clear sense of self and place but, at the same time, crippling geographic and cultural isolation . . . . 

Anthony Harkins is assistant professor of history at Western Kentucky University and author of Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford University Press, 2004).
 

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POSTMODERNISM AND HISTORICAL INQUIRY:THREE VIEWS 

HAS POSTMODERNISM RUN ITS COURSE? After all the sound and fury did postmodernist thinking make any substantive impact on historical inquiry? We asked three authors of recently published books on postmodernism and history to offer their thoughts.

POSTMODERNISM AND THE TRUTH OF HISTORY 
C. Behan McCullagh 

The great contribution of postmodern thought to our assessment of human knowledge has been to remind us that our knowledge is generally couched in language, so it does not mirror the world as we believe most of our perceptions do. Our knowledge is constructed from elements of our culture, employing concepts and forms of argument that we have learned and believe to be appropriate. Our descriptions of the world reflect our interests, values, and purposes, so they are not perfectly impartial and complete accounts of the subjects they describe. They seldom capture every detail of the subjects we describe, so they are, in that sense, almost always incomplete. Furthermore, the meanings of the words we use, which depend upon their relations to other words, cannot be fixed with any precision, so that the descriptions are always vague. 

These are true and important points, and they have been used by some to cast doubt upon the truth of historical descriptions. Frank Ankersmit, Beverley Southgate, and Alun Munslow, for example, have all denied that general interpretations of past events can be true for these reasons, though they have, rather inconsistently, allowed that descriptions of particular historical events can be true. Robert Berkhofer and Keith Jenkins have gone further, arguing that when descriptions of particular historical facts are embedded in an interpretative narrative, they fail to provide us with reliable information about the past.1 

If these facts make narrative interpretations of the past unbelievable, then they make descriptions of particular events incredible as well. Why on earth should we think that historical knowledge, a culturally bound linguistic construction in the present, bears any particular relation to past events at all?

The trouble is, that if we insist upon skepticism toward statements of particular facts about the past, we will have to abandon almost all the beliefs we live by. In practice we have developed very reliable methods of distinguishing statements about the world that are worthy of belief from those that are not. To defend the credibility of singular descriptions, we should study those methods and carefully consider their significance.2 . . . .

C. Behan McCullagh is a reader and associate professor in philosophy at La Trobe University. His most recent book is The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective (Routledge, 2004). 

1 F.R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language (Martinus Nijhoff, 1983); Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom? (Routledge, 2003); Alun Munslow, The New History (Pearson Education, 2003); Robert E. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Harvard University Press, 1995); and Keith Jenkins, Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline (Routledge, 2003).

2 This I have attempted to do, most succinctly in my recent book The Logic of History (Routledge, 2004). 

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Volume VI, Number 3

POSTMODERNISM AND HISTORICAL INQUIRY: SPOILED FOR CHOICE?†
Beverley Southgate 

For me, postmodernism definitively arrived on December 12, 1997. On that day the London Times reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair had gone beyond the bounds of conventional diplomatic generosity by offering the Irish negotiator Gerry Adams nothing less than “a choice of history.” For a mere mortal to claim to have such dispensations in his gift may sound extraordinarily hubristic to historians brought up to assert their own unique rights over a past, the nature of which it was for them, and only them, to determine. But for those attempting to assess the implications of postmodernism for historical inquiry, Blair’s offer does at least make a start. And as we grope our way through something of a conceptual fog, the key word “choice” does provide one useful beacon. 

What Blair implied with his offer of historical choice was that, while the events of the past (with all their anger and frustration and violence) are undoubtedly there—or rather here, in our present—what actually matters is not their existence, their presence per se, but rather our responses to them. We can look at them, respond to them, remember them, either in such a way as will lead to further disruption or one that will facilitate reconciliation. What Adams had, and what historians have, is a choice of narrative—a choice of the way to “emplot” those past events or put them in a story that leads from them, through our present, and forward to the future. 

That seems to me to get to the heart of what postmodernism implies for historical inquiry—where postmodernism represents an attempt to theorize, and make some intellectual sense of, our actual situation in postmodernity; and postmodernity I take to be simply a chronological category, with disputable boundaries like any other, but one that enables us at least provisionally to locate ourselves in the ever-rolling stream of time . . . .

† For comments on an earlier draft, I am grateful to Dennis Brown and John Ibbett.

Beverley Southgate is reader emeritus in the history of ideas at the University of Hertfordshire. His most recent book is Postmodernism in History: Fear or Freedom? (Routledge, 2003).
 

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POSTMODERNISM AND HISTORIOGRAPHY
Willie Thompson 

The theoretical origins of postmodernism are primarily located in the poststructuralist philosophy that emerged in France during the later 1960s and blossomed in the 1970s. At the end of the decade the initially separate concepts of postmodernism and poststructuralism coalesced, the critical text in this regard being Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition Postmoderne: report sur le savoir, appearing in 1979. In it he defined postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarrative.” 

In the historiographical context, while debts are acknowledged to writers such as Jacques Lacan (psychoanalyst), Hayden White (historian of ideas), Jacques Derrida (philosopher/critic), unquestionably the principal influence has been Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Foucault always denied being a postmodernist or postructuralist, and indeed ridiculed anyone who described him in these terms, but that may have been no more than a postmodern joke; nobody has done more to establish postmodernism as an intellectual presence. Foucault, always working within a linguistic framework and a concept of all-pervasive power relations constituted through discourse (it was he who popularized the term in that sense), surveyed a series of broad themes such as madness, medicine, social science, penal regimes, and sexuality, and had interesting things to say on all of them as well as much of dubious value. His publishers have claimed him as the most influential thinker of the 20th century, and he has been the principal source of inspiration to historians of a postmodern sensibility, as well as to those who do not accept the validity of his approach but have found useful insights in his writings. 

Postmodernism as we have come to know it can therefore be treated appropriately as the product of a great disillusion: disillusion with science both social and physical, disillusion with the idea of historical progress, disillusion with the possibility of far-reaching social change. Its attraction was enhanced greatly by the dramatic collapse of the Soviet-style regimes, polities that purported (however falsely) to embody such ideas and aspirations . . . .

Willie Thompson is visiting professor at the University of Northumbria at Newcastleupon- Tyne. He is the author of Postmodernism and History (Palgrave, 2003). 
 

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THE USES OF CLASSICAL HISTORY FOR CONTEMPORARY THEMES: A FORUM 

OVER THE PAST DECADE, the state of the field of classical history—particularly its relevance in the “curricula wars”—has been a matter of intense debate, spilling occasionally outside the academy in jeremiads like Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom. The authors of two recently published books, Richard Ned Lebow and J. Peter Euben, make the case that intense engagement with ancient Greek thought continues to pay dividends, particularly as we assess contemporary political thought and public policy.

Lebow and Euben anchor our forum on “The Uses of Classical History for Contemporary Themes” with essays drawn, respectively, from The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Platonic Noise (Princeton University Press, 2003). We invited six distinguished classicists (Danielle Allen, Mary Lefkowitz, Josiah Ober, Loren J. Samons, II, Barry Strauss, and Carol Thomas) to respond. Lebow and Euben conclude the forum with their replies. 

With heavy hearts we report the passing of Howard Nostrand, emeritus professor of romance languages at the University of Washington, who had planned to participate in our forum. Our sympathies are extended to his family and colleagues.

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RESPONSE TO EUBEN AND LEBOW 
Danielle Allen 

The relative usefulness of any body of knowledge is a question for adults about how to pack their bags for a journey through unmapped land. Every generation answers differently the question of what it should take into the future. We should note that both Euben and Lebow argue for the value of Greek (read Athenian) history and culture; neither advocates for Rome. Yet 200 years ago, the equation worked in just the other direction. The authors of the Federalist Papers thought Athens was relevant only for its experience in organizing a multi-city alliance, this perhaps being a precursor to federalism; Rome was the point of reference for the internal structure of the new republic. This change across American generations confirms our sense that there is no single, final use for classical history that justifies its value once and for all. Its relevance is properly re-argued by each generation; this is how each generation determines what it needs to know and why. 

Both Euben and Lebow argue that we currently need Athenian history for ethical and political reasons: so that we can resolve the paradox between ethics and security (though I’m not sure the Athenian case yields an answer quite as easily as Lebow proposes); so that we can learn the limits of human action and agency and become more egalitarian citizens at home and abroad (Euben). Interestingly, the early American intellectuals looked to Rome for lessons about institutions, whereas we seem now to look to Greece for moral culture . . . . 

Danielle Allen is professor of classics and political science at the University of Chicago. She became dean of the University’s Humanities Division in July 2004. A winner of a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2001, Allen has written The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton University Press, 2000). 
 

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RESPONSE TO EUBEN AND LEBOW
Mary Lefkowitz

As Peter Euben says, “we have no choice but to engage the Greeks because we have done so in the past and continue to do so today.” As both he and Richard Ned Lebow suggest in their essays, we remain connected to the ancient Greeks because they framed the essential questions we are still grappling with: How can we tell right from wrong? What do we do when our individual needs conflict with those of our society? How can we describe and characterize the forces beyond our control? How can we bring ourselves to recognize the limitations of our abilities to come to terms with these questions? Like Euben and Lebow, I believe that ancient Greek writers still can help us understand these problems, even though ultimately they cannot always help us to find practical solutions. 

Euben and Lebow concentrate on major social trends, but the Greek writers whose works they discuss concentrate mainly on the actions of certain individuals, the people (almost exclusively male) who are in positions of power, and who have the ability to affect the lives of others. Although Thucydides in his speeches explains thoughts and motives in abstract terms, most of his history of the Peloponnesian War consists of narrative about the actions of men and armies. As Plato knew, stories are easier to understand and remember than abstractions. Educated Greeks and (later) Romans, boys and also some girls, learned about human emotions, war, and death primarily from the Iliad, which they studied and memorized and copied out at school. In the 5th century B.C. Athenian audiences learned about how individuals confront the forces beyond their control from the dramas that were performed each year at state expense during the festival of the god Dionysus.

It was from these texts that they heard narratives about atê, the delusion that leads mortals to destruction. Aristotle was talking about ate when he spoke about the hamartia or error in judgment that causes a hero in tragedy to make terrible mistakes—the translation “tragic flaw” is inaccurate and misleading.1 If I were asked what was the most important lesson we could still learn from the Greeks, I would say it is their understanding of atê as a force that has a profound and lasting effect on almost every human life. To them, being mortal was to be vulnerable to delusion. Atê is particularly dangerous because at first she appears to be seductive and appealing . . . . 

Mary Lefkowitz is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College. Her most recent book is Greek Gods, Human Lives (Yale University Press, 2003). 

1 Poetics 1453a 8–17; see also R.N. Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 131–32. 

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Volume VI, Number 3

DEMOCRACY, KNOWLEDGE,AND MORAL CHANGE 
Josiah Ober

Whenever someone claims that the history of “the Greeks” can teach us about ourselves, we should ask “which Greeks?” Most ancient Greek communities are frankly irrelevant to the considerations brought forward by Euben, Lebow, and other modern theorists who engage with Greek political culture. In the classical and Hellenistic periods there were roughly 1500 Greek poleis. The great majority of these were what Greek historians call Normalpoleis—which means that they had very small populations (averaging a few hundred to a few thousand persons) and controlled very small territories (a few dozen to few hundred square kilometers). These tiny communities have no continuous recorded history and their material culture (from what we can make out from scattered hints and remains) was a mix of the “disembedded” economy discussed by Lebow and a much more traditional, regionally-centered, family- and neighbor-based pattern of exchange. They were face-to-face societies, in which most people knew (for good or ill) one another’s characters and habits. Most of these Normalpoleis were not fully independent: some were forced to join alliance systems (e.g. the Peloponnesian League or Athenian Empire, as discussed by Thucydides); some organized themselves into sophisticated regional systems (koina), sustained by shared economic interests, religious practices, and political institutions. The Normalpolis is of great interest to Greek historians, but it is of no greater moment than any other traditional pre-modern society to contemporary political thought. Were the Normalpolis the sum of Greek culture, there would be no special place for Greek studies in the post-ancient world, no interest in applying Greek history to modern concerns, and this set of essays would never have been conceived.1 

A few Greek poleis were radically different and much bigger. These super-poleis include (with the exception of Melos) all of the poleis mentioned by Lebow and Euben and virtually all poleis that anyone but a Greek historian is likely to mention: e.g. Syracuse, Corinth, Corcyra, Thebes, Sparta, and, of course, Athens.2 With a total population of perhaps a quarter-million and a home territory (not counting imperial possessions) of some 2500 square kilometers, Athens was roughly 50–100 times the size of a Normalpolis. The Athenian economy was much more “disembedded” than that of the Normalpolis, and Athens, qua polis, was much too large to be a face-to-face society. Its social and political institutions were correspondingly complex. Athens was also, unlike most other classical poleis, large or small, a stable democracy.3 In the 18th century, oligarchic/ aristocratic Sparta was the super-polis that attracted favorable attention from theorists. But since the mid-19th century, it has been Athens—anomalous in terms of its size and its democratic political culture, the latter of which has been of primary concern to political thinkers. The point is that today, when we say “the Greeks,” we usually mean “the democratic Athenians”—and it is important to remember that Athens was not a community that manifested a typical “Greek culture.” It is not generic “Greek culture” that is relevant to modernity; it is the culture that developed in Athens and spread to other poleis in the late classical and Hellenistic periods.4 . . . . 

Josiah Ober is David Magie ’97 Class of 1897 Professor of Classics at Princeton University. His most recent book is Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton University Press, 1998). 

1 Eberhard Ruschenbusch, Untersuchungen zu Staat und Politik in Griechenland vom 7.–4. Jh. v. Chr. (AKU, 1978); Mogens Hansen, Introduction to an Inventory of ‘Poleis’: Symposium August 23–26, 1995 (Munksgaard, 1996). 

2 One possible exception is Aphytis in the Chersonese, which will come to the mind of close readers of Aristotle’s Politics, as the model of a “best type” democracy. 

3 Of course stability is a relative term, but unlike Syracuse, Corinth, or Thebes, for example, which experienced democratic interludes, Athens was almost always governed democratically from 508 B.C. through 322 B.C. and more sporadically thereafter. Athenian democracy was not ossified; situations changed over time, but the core values —commitments to freedom, equality, and security —remained identifiably the same over this period. 

4 The agricultural community (“hoplite republic”) and traditional values assumed to be typical of the Normalpolis become the foundation of “Western civilization” in the work of some conservatives who distrust Athens as a non-virtuous “radical democracy” yet idolize the cultural products produced in Athens. Their solution is to speak generically of “Greek” wisdom, culture, literature, and so on. See, for example, Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (Free Press, 1998). 
 

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Perhaps Thucydides continues to seem so smart and so relevant because he lived and wrote in a time before the invention of jargon. That, at least, was my first thought upon reading these essays. 

Two fundamental questions confront anyone interested in whether classical history can be used for contemporary themes. First, does man have a nature? Second, were the classical Greek (and Roman) societies so alien from our own as to make comparisons and analogies between the two hopelessly flawed? 

Ultimately, the first question subsumes the second. Because if man does have a nature—as I, like Thucydides, believe he does—then that nature will allow us to draw useful lessons from other men’s experiences, as long as we make an (admittedly imperfect) attempt to allow for the peculiar cultural and historical factors that operated on that nature in different periods. Conversely, anyone who does not believe that man has a nature cannot believe that the study of antiquity will be relevant for us today: i.e., if everything about us is culturally determined and shaped, if nurture trumps nature at every turn, then only the study of our own (and our immediately previous) environment and circumstances will be relevant and useful. 

But if I am arguing that the study of classical antiquity can be “relevant and useful,” precisely in what ways is this study supposed to help us? Here, I think, our authors have let us down—or rather, they have not been as bold as I would like them to have been. For example, Euben’s call for “engagement” with the Greeks—an engagement that can “invigorate” our discourse or “deepen” questions and understanding—frankly leaves me cold. I expect virtually everything I read to sharpen my mind, so I cannot see how this claim puts ancient history in a privileged position. In any case, how precisely does one tell whether a discourse has been “invigorated” or not? And how deep does a question need to be before we can start to answer it? I suppose that questions can be infinitely deep, and that discourse can be infinitely vigorous; thus, at what points do we satisfy ourselves that we have attained sufficiently deepened questions and invigorated debate so that we can start searching for answers and drawing conclusions? 

Euben, I believe, would say that I am missing the point. That “political knowledge” is (or should be) “constituted discursively,” and that “answers” are not nearly so important as questions. But that doesn’t offer much help to those who would ask, for example, whether it is a good idea for the United States to attempt to impose democratic governments on previously undemocratic states. Is our “knowledge” on this matter simply to be the result of the current discourse on the subject? The Athenians certainly made foreign policy based on a “discursive” process, but the actual results of these decisions make one wonder about the wisdom of this procedure. Personally, I would prefer to profit from, rather than imitate, the Athenians’ mistakes . . . . 

Loren J. Samons II is associate professor of classical studies and associate dean for students in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. His book What’s Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship was published in October 2004 by the University of California Press. 
 

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Volume VI, Number 3

COMMENTARY ON EUBEN AND LEBOW 
Barry Strauss 

Once upon a time in America a man sat in traffic and watched. And what he saw was disturbing. Drivers were turning without signaling and, even worse, they were running red lights. To add insult to injury (reportedly more than 900 deaths and 20,000 injuries each year in the United States alone), these same narcissists of the fast lane talked constantly of community and family values. 

It was, the observer realized, a case of selfinterest run amok. “If only they had read Thucydides,” he went on. “Then those drivers would realize that rational self-interest entails a commitment to community.” 

Meanwhile, half a continent away, another man worked out at a health club. Like many people, he did some of his best thinking at the gym. And today he reflected on the paradox of contemporary American life. How could it be, he wondered, that so many Americans were content to let their elected officials run the country? And he used the word “elected” loosely, knowing how low voter turnout rates are. Didn’t his fellow Americans know that while the citizen cats were away, the elected mice were turning over the store to wealthy, right-wing elites? Didn’t his fellow Americans care? After all, since they worried enough about their bodies to keep fit, surely they loved their country enough to exercise their duty as citizens on its behalf?

“Oh,” he thought, “if only they would read Plato and Sophocles! Then they might well engage with the promise and possibilities of classical democratic citizenship. They would change their ways and make our representative government into a direct democracy.” 

I hope that Euben and Lebow forgive me for choosing these two vignettes as a way of summarizing their wise, learned, and stimulating essays. The authors themselves offered the stories, and the tales are too wonderfully evocative to let them pass by unnoticed. Each of the two essays from which they come takes a different approach, but the pieces share a conviction: American society suffers from an overdose of selfish individualism, but reading the ancient Greek classics can help restore civility, community, and ethics to the American polity, in both its foreign and domestic policies. Let me take gentle issue both with the diagnosis and the prescription . . . . 

Barry Strauss is professor of history and classics at Cornell University. He is author of The Battle of Salamis: The Naval Encounter that Saved Greece—and Western Civilization (Simon & Schuster, 2004). 
 

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Volume VI, Number 3

CAPTURED BY GREECE? TERMS OF IMPRISONMENT 
Carol Thomas

In responding to these stimulating papers, I am assuming two hats. One is my own as a student of Greek history; the other is that of Howard Nostrand, a scholar of all things French. Nostrand’s most recent book, From the Polarizing Mind-Set to Productive Discussion of Public Policy and Intercultural and Interfaith Relations: Finding Common Ground (Mellen, 2003), provided part of the context in which this forum emerged. Sadly, he died before he could provide his own contribution. In framing my response, I build upon both his wide-ranging interests and his own commitment to the forum’s theme of looking to parallels and possible solutions in the ancient world. 

Nostrand’s book grew out of a concern that American society at present is driven by a polarizing habit of mind that prompts confrontation, a condition as unproductive as it is unpleasant. Nostrand described a latent, alternate mentality—what he termed “a most resilient buried treasure”—in the ancient Greek pattern of mind that sought balance between the two extremes of the bipolar habit of mind. Balance exists at the mean between conflicting opposites, as, for example, courage is the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness or generosity is between avarice and lavishness. This mentality is more than a philosophical concept: it is revealed concretely in the nature of Greek, particularly Athenian, society during its classical age. Although Nostrand accepted the view that the bipolar framework is embedded in the human biological structure, he argued that the three-part mentality of seeking the mean between polar opposites can be acquired by later cultures, especially since the Greek heritage has been deeply incorporated into modern culture. Moreover, the example of Greece has been called upon regularly, and found valuable, by cultures addressing major challenges, both institutional and intellectual. 

Modern American society would be well advised to bring this latent mentality to the surface.

Assuming my own hat, I am reminded of a scheme employed in my edited study, Paths from Ancient Greece (Brill, 1988), which explored the debt of later cultures to classical Greece. That scheme recognized three chief categories of influence: the exemplary, the configurative, and the legitimizing. These categories can be applied to the studies of Nostrand, Lebow, and Euben in order to appraise their positions. 

According to Nostrand, adoption of the Greek mentality that sought the golden mean “could help to free our minds and our public discourse from the dominance of the dualistic perception of reality . . . . [W]e could find means to reclaim qualities of Athenian culture that can help us cope with our conflicts.” If actualized, the requisite mentality, now only latent, could serve to support departure from the immediate past as did those features of ancient Greece incorporated into Renaissance Italian culture . . . . 

Carol Thomas is professor of history at the University of Washington. Her most recent book is Citadel to City State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200–700 BCE (Indiana University Press, 1999).
 
 

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Volume VI, Number 3

RESPONSES TO RESPONSES 
J. Peter Euben 

I begin with an apology. Because Platonic Noise (the book from which my initial remarks were drawn) is a series of essays that makes an argument cumulatively rather than consecutively, I decided to make some general methodological and political points as a way of inviting debate. That may have been a mistake. I probably should have chosen one point and developed it in more detail and with greater nuance. Absent that, conclusions become mere assertions, and (hopefully) subtle arguments become mere platitudes. Perhaps that would have assuaged Samons’s complaints that my call for engagement leaves him “cold” and that I offer no alternative to Nussbaum’s liberal cosmopolitanism except a banal conclusion about thinking with the Greeks (though I must admit his churlish tone does not make me sanguine about this). In fact, Platonic Noise has a chapter on Nietzsche that elaborates the idea of engagement and another that develops a “critical cosmopolitanism” as an alternative to Nussbaum’s. 

Much of Carol Thomas’s response is sensible, but I do have a few caveats, which may or may not constitute more substantive disagreements. First of all, I am not convinced that confrontation is always unproductive, as the civil rights movement indicated. Second, I am more skeptical than she is that “the human element of all cultures has been relatively constant” because I am not sure how much or what kind of evidence could warrant such a claim, and because the human element has too often proved to be a projection of a particularly powerful class or culture. Finally, I wonder how much the idea that the emotions are hardwired is not itself a cultural construct, though I have no wish to associate myself with a know-nothing anti-positivism . . . . 
 

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Volume VI, Number 3

THE DANGERS OF RAMPANT INDIVIDUALISM
Richard Ned Lebow

. . . . Strauss attributes red-light-running to bad roads and frustrated drivers. I am not convinced, but even if I accept his explanation for the sake of the argument, it still supports my larger point. When people run lights and block intersections in heavy traffic, vehicular traffic grinds to a halt. It is another example of how the untrammeled expression of self-interest can be damaging to the very goals actors seek. Why should we believe that drivers run red lights out of frustration with inadequate roads? What motivates drivers is an empirical question that could be researched through interviews and surveys. In the absence of solid empirical evidence, we can only speculate, and arguments based on speculation are not very persuasive.

Neither Peter Euben nor I see the Greek classics as a panacea. Knowledge of Thucydides and Plato will not cure our social problems, or even point to possible solutions. At best, it might make people more self-reflective, constrained in their behavior, and open to other points of view. At the very least, it might reduce the incidence of running red lights as the corpus of both authors is heavy reading, even in translation, and time-consuming enough to keep at least some people off the roads. 
 

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Volume VI, Number 3

RECONSIDERING HERBERT BUTTERFIELD
William Anthony Hay

Contemporary Americans inhabit a present-tense culture. Events beyond recent memory lie shrouded in musty antiquity. While the past seems by definition irrelevant to current realities, individuals and societies still understand their identities by coming to terms with their history. Few have appreciated this fact as well as Sir Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979), the British historian and scholar of international relations who played a leading role in shaping ongoing debates on historiography. Butterfield’s factual mastery built upon a philosophical approach rooted in a keen awareness of the complexity of human experience. Rejecting the conceit of the contemporary, he insisted that true historical fervor lies in “love of the past for the sake of the past” rather than in its immediate utility.1

Butterfield was born and reared in a devout family of West Yorkshire Methodists. His nonconformist upbringing instilled a deep skepticism of authority. Gaining preferment either by cultivating the powerful or chasing after intellectual fashions affronted his scholarly integrity. Though never active in the church’s national affairs, Butterfield was a Methodist lay preacher in his native Yorkshire and the villages surrounding Cambridge for almost two decades. He received Anglican Communion in later years while holding to his old faith and showed an acute sensitivity to other denominations, including Roman Catholicism. Butterfield’s first work appeared during the years when Graham Greene, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Evelyn Waugh began publishing, and the collapse of secular idealism provides a common thread through these very different lives. Maurice Cowling believed that Butterfield’s historical thought reflected the sensibility of a Christian dissenter.2 

Butterfield began a life-long relationship with Cambridge University in 1919 when he arrived as a student at Peterhouse College. He later became the Master of Peterhouse and Vice Chancellor of the University before ending his career as Regius Professor of History. Although his research focused primarily on Hanoverian Britain, Butterfield’s interests ranged widely from the origins of modern science to the problems of diplomacy and statecraft. He wrote extensively on the interpretation of history, explaining once that “whenever our ideas on some large historical theme are in a state of disorder, we may find it useful to make ourselves acquainted with the historiography of that particular subject.”3

Popular undergraduate lectures and tutoring of aspiring academics gave Butterfield great pedagogical influence. His death in 1979 brought fond reminiscences from Cambridge alumni, and former students led the revisionist critique of liberal and Marxist history that has transformed the study of British history. The “High Politics” school of British historians that includes Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, and J.C.D. Clark drew heavily on Butterfield’s work, along with that of Michael Oakeshott and Sir Lewis Namier, in reexamining political history. Rejecting what they saw as the liberal fiction of parliamentary democracy—that power rests in institutions devised for its exercise—these scholars examined instead the informal structures of debate and intrigue that actually created policy. Their demonstration of how the interests and ambitions of individual politicians drove events more than institutional imperatives or the popular will contributed to a new sociology of politics.4 Butterfield’s heirs rejected both the Whig view of history and recent fashionable theories in which social and economic forces determined events. Their emphasis on narrative history and archival research revitalized the field, while their analysis of politics as a practice incapable of being distilled into universal laws offers insights on issues beyond British political history.

Butterfield’s popular reputation derives largely from The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), which examined the tendency among historians to adopt a Whig or Protestant view of the past as a ratification, or even celebration, of present ideals. What made the fallacy of organizing historical knowledge around a debatable set of assumptions so common? The teleological approach of Whig history provided convenient categories for explaining complex events, and Butterfield noted that history became more Whig the more it was abridged. The “pathetic fallacy” among historians of abstracting men and events and judging them out of context provided another clue. Above all, Whig history offered a meaningful and emotionally satisfying vision of events. However insular or dated it might be for today’s readers, the flaws Whig history shares with other interpretive schemes make Butterfield’s analysis especially pertinent to current debates on historical study and the humanities. 

Whig history is an interpretation of England’s past crafted by a political party in search of a pedigree—and with that pedigree an intellectual justification for its claim to power. Its underlying assumption employs analogy to produce a scheme that demonstrates the workings of progress so that the many strands of the past converge neatly into the present. In this story, Whigs and Protestants stand as the proponents of development toward a liberal, bourgeois society that Catholics and Tories seek to impede. Butterfield describes the popular misconception of the Middle Ages as a backward era “against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion” as itself a caricature of genuine Whig history, but even that distorted picture captures the essential approach. Although Whig history draws on Continental as well as British sources, it is essentially the story of the rise and triumph of British liberties told from the victor’s perspective.

Founded on a narrative of British Protestant exceptionalism, the Whig interpretation developed in a particularly English context shaped by common law. 17th-century lawyers first made the case that English liberties and constitutional forms went back to time immemorial and that the Magna Carta guaranteed liberty for all. Their arguments justified opposition to Charles I in the 1630s and 1640s, and later became the basis of Whig propaganda as the fledgling party grew from the 1680s onward. Historical polemics that drew heavily on a providential vision of England as God’s chosen nation tested by hardship cast Whigs as the true defenders of English liberties and the Protestant religion. Ironically, the most substantive 18th-century exposition of the Whig view came from a French Huguenot, Paul Rapin de Thoyras, who explained for a foreign readership Britain’s rise as a great power after a century of internal conflict.5 

Another generation of party conflict from the 1780s to the 1830s sharpened Whig arguments. Charles James Fox, the charismatic politician who led the Whigs through their darkest years of opposition in the 1790s, planned a history of the Glorious Revolution to revive the party’s image and refute David Hume’s Tory history of England. A lesserknown Whig politician, Sir James Mackintosh, took Fox’s project further with the intention of showing how England had avoided the turmoil wrought by the French Revolution through a study covering the period from 1688 to 1789. Mackintosh incorporated sociological insights of the Scottish Enlightenment into a Whig framework and expanded its view beyond England’s history to encompass Britain as a whole. Although he amassed volumes of material, Mackintosh’s political career and an opium addiction acquired in India prevented him from completing the work. Mackintosh’s research instead provided a starting point for a younger Whig whose work came to dominate 19th-century liberal historiography: Thomas Babington Macaulay. 

Circumstances gave Macaulay a particularly receptive audience for what became the Whig interpretation’s definitive statement. Fox and Mackintosh had blazed the trail, while Sir Walter Scott, despite his Tory views, provided a literary model. While Macaulay’s narrative recounted lost opportunities and disasters along with triumphs, he insisted that Britain’s experience since 1688 had been the history of physical, moral, and intellectual development. The Whig party and its ideas lay behind the political achievement of combining order with freedom that made progress possible.6 Macaulay’s analytical framework appealed as much to readers as his vivid style and depth of knowledge, and his History of England provided the literary and historical counterpart to the Whig/Liberal dominance of British politics from 1832 to 1885. 

Macaulay presented a clear and obvious past ordered by the way in which it specifically prepared the way for the future. His books appeared not only when the British (and American) public was particularly receptive to such assumptions, but at a stage that influenced the development of history as a modern academic discipline in Britain. Even Victorian scholars like C. H. Firth who criticized Macaulay acknowledged his influence and operated largely within the framework he had created. G. M. Trevelyan, Macaulay’s greatnephew, practiced and defended Whig history well into the 1930s, and George V drew heavily on Trevelyan for a 1935 Silver Jubilee speech in which he took pride in the fact that British liberties and institutions had survived the shocks that had brought tyranny abroad. Although the Liberals who had inherited the Whig mantle under William Gladstone faded into irrelevance after 1920, and Macaulay’s work itself took on a dated air, Whig history remained the foundation of a liberal consensus in the English-speaking world.

Understanding the origins and impact of Whig history places Butterfield’s critique in perspective and underlines the similarities between the Whig interpretation and other teleological schemes. Butterfield insisted that historical writing would become more Whig as abridged narratives ironed out the conflicts and inconsistencies that complicate events. While partisan Tory or Catholic writers might offer their own abridgements, Butterfield saw that such tragic views would find fewer advocates than Whig triumphalism. The celebratory Whig perspective of British history as a benign teleology leading to parliamentary liberalism and representative institutions fit easily with the civil religion that underlay dominant forms of Anglo-American culture. This perspective provided a rhetorical form that deeply influenced academe and public consciousness on both sides of the Atlantic for much of the 20th century. 

The “Grand Narrative” taught in Western civilization and great books programs at Columbia University and the University of Chicago exemplified the phenomenon. Independently, Will Durant developed a popularized version of a progressivist Grand Narrative in his courses for working men. Differences in methodology and sophistication aside, each of these projects taught the history of Western civilization along Whig lines as an evolution toward liberal democracy, which culminated in the 20th-century United States. They were designed to make culture accessible to a mass audience and assimilate immigrants into America’s Anglo- Saxon Protestant culture, and the Grand Narrative provided an intellectual underpinning to the “vital center” of post-New Deal American politics that Arthur Schlesinger discerned in 1949. It also justified what Norman Davies has called the “Allied Scheme of History” that grew from the two World Wars and depicted the secular liberalism of Britain and the United States as the apotheosis of human development. However, as even sympathetic critics noted, the Grand Narrative transformed the richness of history into increasingly stale pabulum by the 1960s. Loss of faith in the American dream of meritocratic, assimiliationist liberalism cast the Grand Narrative into disrepute, but its influence lingered on into the 1990s. 

Marxism provided another powerfully attractive Whiggish teleology, even though it rejected liberalism and derived from a materialist rather than an idealist perspective. Although Butterfield welcomed the Marxist emphasis on the social and economic roots of conflict along with its challenge to Whig pieties, he rejected Marxist history as an oversimplified scheme of economic determinism. Radical sympathies that once had drawn historians to Marxism often survived the late 20th-century challenge to its economic theory as race and gender supplanted class as dominant categories of historical analysis. Multiculturalism can easily be lampooned as an inverted Whig history that proclaims the history of the West as a story of oppression and patriarchy. As such, it tells more about today’s preoccupations than it does about the past.

Butterfield presented history as a creative act of imagination, an effort to see the past on its own terms. The historian must enter into the existence and minds of those he studies, and that task requires an appreciation of the ideas, ambitions, and prejudices of the past. Realizing that the past lies in a world unlike our own, Butterfield saw that the ability to enter into minds unlike our own provides the avenue to understanding and appreciating history. To perceive the significance of events and discern the connections between them requires an imaginative effort derived from self-knowledge. Instead of subordinating the past to present concerns, true history engages the past on its own terms by making it the historian’s present. Like literature, historical writing at its best involves an art that makes it as much a venture of the personality as an act of the mind, and Butterfield thought creative writers like Scott and Thomas Carlyle best exemplified that imaginative effort. 

History involves science along with art because imagination draws upon technical knowledge derived from close study. The historian’s passion for manuscripts and sources reflects his desire to bring himself into a relationship with the past and all its particularities. Following Leopold von Ranke, Butterfield insisted that archival research provides the basis for seeing the past essentially as it was. Like a scientist, the historian begins with a hypothesis and then collects and examines evidence before adjusting the hypothesis to account for previously unknown facts. The scientific problem of how an observer’s presence might affect the subject of study resembles the way in which a historian’s perspective distorts analysis. Where the Whig interpretation diligently fits new material into the old story even when it should alter the bearings of the whole subject, authentic historical research readily submits its hypotheses to falsification. Butterfield saw research as an analytic project that assembled events, their chronology, and the connections between them into an “objective body of knowledge” as a preliminary basis for interpretation. 

Butterfield resembled Lord Acton in emphasizing the objective character of historical fact and method. Both men saw that close study of original sources was key to knowing the past, and Butterfield claimed that in Acton—who had introduced Rankean history into Britain—“the Whig historian reached his highest consciousness.” The difference between them lies in Acton’s wholehearted acceptance of the Whig “desire to come to a judgment of values, make history answer questions and decide issues, and to give the historian the last word in a controversy.” Butterfield warned that Whig history’s judgmental impulse pulls imaginative sympathy back short of understanding and impedes the task of elucidating the past. The desire for judgment transforms history into a prosecution brief. Acton envisioned history as “the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress.” He followed, consciously or otherwise, the Duc de Broglie’s charge to “beware of too much explaining, lest we end by excusing.” Butterfield saw this view as perilously close to the position that it would be better to be “unhistorical than do anything that may lower the moral dignity of history.” Historical study, he insisted, never enters the realm where the words “condemn” or “excuse” have meaning. The moral realm lies beyond the historian’s purview of discerning what happened and why.7

Butterfield’s argument may superficially resemble a pernicious relativism that seeks to explain away what civilized societies can only condemn, while Broglie’s injunction carries considerable moral weight after the atrocities of the 20th century. Ironically, it was Butterfield who deplored the Whig tendency to dismiss or overlook a generation’s sufferings by focusing on acquired advantages and happy readjustments. Admitting the limits of history, he described the search for moral understanding as a cry for prophesy. As a religious utterance, however, such a cry deals with divine providence more than with the empirical facts that are the historian’s only evidence and interest. The historian has no special insight into providence and its workings, and he can claim no particular standing for determining moral responsibility. Far from acting as a judge, the historian stands as an expert witness called to describe and explain the past. Ethics concern the historian only in the way faulty moral reasoning has affected human conduct. 

Another problem with passing historical judgment involves the long-term impact of events. The way in which good can come of tragedy complicates the simple allocation of blame or the more complex question of an event’s meaning. Joseph Schumpeter’s description of how “creative destruction” drives economic development indicates the problem. Butterfield cites the great fire of London in 1666 as a catastrophe that allowed Charles II, Sir Christopher Wren, and others to rebuild the city on a better plan. More broadly, he also notes the split within Christendom created by the Reformation and the way in which American independence changed the British Empire as cases where people profited from the experience of what many at the time saw as a disaster.8 A historian who passes judgment on the past in the style famously parodied in Sellars and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That misses Butterfield’s point that providence enables man to redeem mistakes, “changing evil into good and necessity into opportunity.”9 More than the event itself, the reconciling mind that salvages a situation draws another veil before the factors that would inform an attempt at judgement. 

The sharpest rejoinder to Butterfield is that the historian can never really see the past as it essentially was. Historical research cannot provide a full corrective to the Whig fallacy because historians use documents and other sources for purposes other than those for which they were compiled. The original use of every relic from the past reflects a specific pattern of activity, and historians impose their own categories on those relics by putting them to a different use. But how else can observers draw different conclusions from the same object or document? Butterfield may identify the problem of anachronism, but he fails to resolve it because, given the nature of historical study, present-centeredness is inescapable. 

Such a tu quoque argument, however, falls short of a refutation since qualifications about what historians can know recur throughout Butterfield’s writings. He appreciated that history involves seeing the past as it essentially was rather than having a full and complete picture of events. If historians cannot see the past except through their own prejudices and assumptions, they can at least deliberately set those aside when undertaking historical writing. While not omniscient, historians have the advantage of hindsight. Understanding the past on its own terms means striving to see the past objectively.

William Anthony Hay is an assistant professor of history at Mississippi State University and a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute (www.fpri.org). He is author of The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 

1 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (G. Bell & Sons, 1931), 96. 

2 Maurice Cowling, “Sir Herbert Butterfield,” Proceedings of the British Academy 65 (1979): 596–97. C.T. McIntyre has made the dissenting notion the organizing theme of his new intellectual biography Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (Yale University Press, 2004). 

3 Butterfield, George III and the Historians (Collins, 1957), 9. 

4 Richard Brent, “Butterfield’s Tories: ‘High Politics’ and the Writing of Modern British Political History,” Historical Journal 30 (1987): 943–954. 

5 Paul Rapin de Thoyras, History of England, as Well Ecclesiastical as Civil . . . Done into English from the French, 15 vols. (James and John Knapton, 1727–1731). 

6 Thomas Babbington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, 5 vols. (International Book Publishers),1: 15. 

7 Whig Interpretation, 109, 64–65, 112–17. 

8 Christianity and History (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), 98–99. 

9 The Englishman and His History (Cambridge University Press, 1945), 116.
 

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Volume VI, Number 3

IN MEMORIAM: DANIEL J. BOORSTIN 
Harold D. Woodman

Daniel J. Boorstin, one of the 20th century’s most prolific, insightful, and influential historians, died at the age of 89 in Washington D.C. on February 28, 2004. While so many in the profession in the post-World War II era were narrowing their focus, Boorstin, like the Progressive historians early in the century, sought to provide broader visions of the past, first in his interpretations of American history and then in his investigations of aspects of the intellectual history of Western civilization. And like the Progressive historians, Boorstin was also a social critic, raising significant questions about both the development of American society as well as the evolution of the historical profession in the United States. 

Boorstin’s formal academic education was in the law rather than history. After earning his bachelor’s degree at Harvard, he studied at Balliol College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and read law at the Inner Temple in London. He passed the English bar examinations in 1937 and become a barrister-at-law before returning to the United States where in 1940 he earned a J.S.D. at Yale University and two years later was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. In the meantime he began his academic career in history, teaching briefly at Harvard and at Swarthmore College before joining the University of Chicago as an assistant professor in 1944. He remained at the University of Chicago for twenty-five years, becoming the Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of History in 1964. During his tenure at Chicago he was often invited to teach abroad. He was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Rome, a visiting professor of American history at the University of Kyoto in Japan, and he lectured for the State Department in Turkey, Iran, Nepal, India, and Ceylon. In 1961 he accepted an invitation to inaugurate the chair in American History at the University of Paris, and in 1964–65 he was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and a Fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge University. He left the University of Chicago in 1969 for the National Museum of History and Technology, a part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where he served as Director and Senior Historian. In 1975 President Gerald Ford appointed him Librarian of Congress, a position he held until retiring in 1987.

From the beginning of his long and illustrious career, Boorstin elicited both enthusiastic praise and sharp criticism. Because his degree was in law rather than history, a few questioned his credentials as a historian. Boorstin replied that his lack of formal training in history was a strength, not a weakness, because it made him an “amateur.” “With the good fortune to be permitted to be a historian without conventional credentials, I have delighted in pursuing history for the love of it,” he wrote, and this opened him to fresh and untraditional ways of thinking about the past: “An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.” This is, of course, more than a bit disingenuous. He was well aware of historical controversies, but he was impatient with many of them and chose to stay out of the “ruts” and instead investigate other matters he deemed more important. 

These other matters were more important for Boorstin not because they were so obscure or esoteric, but because they were so obvious, so self-evident, so commonplace that they were ignored or given inadequate attention by historians. Although he called himself an intellectual historian—at least, that was what his courses at the University of Chicago were called—he did not deal with the great ideas that occupied the attention of most scholars in American intellectual history at the time. Instead he centered his attention on the ordinary, on the commonplace, on those things that occupied the attention of most people in the past. Boorstin insisted that the study of such things provided important insights into what people thought and how and why they behaved as they did. In a brilliant essay, “The Historian: ‘A Wrestler With the Angel’” (he borrowed the phrase of the Dutch historian J. H. Huizinga) he noted how documents that are popular and widely used are apt “to have disappeared or been destroyed” as have homes, utensils, and artifacts used by ordinary folk. What remain and thereby get most of the attention of historians are religious and governmental documents and very valuable but often unused or little used artifacts. Even a casual glance at Boorstin’s writings reveals his remarkable ability to take the ordinary—an event, an artifact, a way of doing something, a new phrase entering the language—and give it meaning and significance by showing its importance to the lives of people. 

Boorstin’s status as an amateur arose again when President Ford selected him to be the Librarian of Congress. Some professional librarians opposed his nomination because he had no training or experience as a librarian. He decided to take the position, recalling Justice Felix Frankfurter’s words in a letter to FDR: “The person to direct the national library of a great nation need not be a professional librarian, but he should be someone who reads books, makes books, loves books.” This certainly described Daniel Boorstin—and during his twelve years as Librarian he sought to extend his love of reading to a wider audience by encouraging people to visit the Library, by organizing Library exhibitions, and by establishing the Center for the Book, which seeks to stimulate reading and literacy. “We must face and defeat the twin menaces of illiteracy and aliteracy—the inability to read and lack of the will to read—if our citizens are to remain free and qualified to govern themselves,” he wrote in a report to Congress in 1984. His successful effort to transform the library for congress into a library for the people is his lasting legacy as Librarian of Congress. 

I’ve already noted that Boorstin was in the tradition of the Progressive historians in the breadth of his vision and in his role as a social critic. But he differed from the Progressive historians in a number of important ways, which sometimes elicited criticisms in the academy. Unlike the Progressives and many of his contemporaries, Boorstin denied that history could be made scientific —a position well within venerable traditions of historical writing but at odds with recent historical scholarship. While many of his contemporaries spoke of the “new” history which sought to apply theories and methods from the social sciences to historical data to give scientific rigor to historical analysis, Boorstin insisted that these approaches were “alien to the historian’s search for nuance, flow, and the elusiveness of experience” and were “at odds with his role as a literary artist.” 

For Boorstin, the historian as literary artist meant that the historian had the obligation to write well, an obligation that he met in all his publications—from occasional essays and lectures published in newspapers and popular magazines to monographs and largescale studies of American and European history, including a high school textbook in American history and the two-volume Landmark History of the American People, a beautifully illustrated history for young people. But the notion of the historian as literary artist also meant writing in the pattern of Edward Gibbon, whose History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had “an especially intimate significance” for him, Boorstin wrote, because Gibbon’s work was free of the dogma and doctrine that dominated the historical writings of his contemporaries and of so much of later historical scholarship. For Gibbon “there are no trivia,” he wrote. “Human habits, utterances, exclamations, and emotions are the very essence of his history—not mere raw material for distilling ‘forces’ and ‘movements.’ The more vividly we see them, the better we know our subject.” Boorstin’s analysis of Gibbon explains his own view of the role of the historian as literary artist and his particular brand of conservatism: “Just as Gibbon was not imprisoned in the jargon and special conceits of his age, so perhaps we need not be imprisoned in ours.” 

Like the Progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner, Boorstin identified a unique American character, but, unlike Turner, he saw that character not merely as a response to the western frontier but rather as a response to the frontier of opportunity. Recognizing these available opportunities and, indeed, taking those opportunities wherever they were, Americans eschewed doctrine and theory, meeting and solving problems and molding their political and social institutions in a pragmatic and open-ended way. The result was an American character and way of life with many of the qualities—and weaknesses—that Turner had described. This American way of life therefore could neither be exported nor imposed upon others—even though Americans periodically thought otherwise. “The most fruitless venture on which any people has ever engaged is the effort to sell an ‘American way of life’ to people from the Himalayas to Timbuktu,” he wrote in an essay in New York Times (April 29, 1959), a position that seems relevant, if still controversial, today. 

Some of the criticism of Boorstin was based upon his political conservatism. While a student at Harvard he was briefly a member of the Communist Party; in his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953 he named other members that he knew. More than a decade later some students at the University of Chicago used his testimony to justify disrupting his classes and in other ways harassing him, actions that undoubtedly played a role in his decision to leave the university. Boorstin’s opposition to affirmative action and other policies that today we would term “politically correct” led to further attacks, including outrageously mistakenly charges by a few that he was a racist. In one of the few instances in which he entered in public political conflict, Boorstin answered these charges in a scathing satire, The Sociology of the Absurd (1969). 

Although conservative in his politics, Boorstin was adamant in his opposition to doctrinal ideologies, adopting a truly liberal, openminded, and tolerant point of view in his opinions and in his relationships with others, including, as I can personally vouch, with his students and colleagues: “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever,” he wrote.

Boorstin had ample personal experience with the intolerance he deplored—in his harassment at the university and in events from his youth. He was born in Atlanta where his father, an attorney, served as Governor John Marshall Slaton’s private secretary and became involved in the defense of Leo Frank, a local Jewish businessman falsely accused and then convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death. When Governor Slaton reduced Frank’s death penalty to life imprisonment, leading to the lynching of Frank and surging anti-Semitism, Boorstin’s father and his brother and other members of the family decided it would be best for them to leave Atlanta. They moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Boorstin grew up and went to school before leaving for Harvard. 

Boorstin’s published output was truly prodigious—more than twenty books—many translated into some twenty-five languages— and hundreds of essays in the public press. He also found the time to become a prolific editor: some thirty volumes in the Chicago History of American Civilization series; An American Primer, a two-volume collection of documents, each introduced and discussed by a leading historian; and several other volumes as well. His beautifully written books and essays reveal his enormous learning, his innovative approach, and his originality, which won him prizes and public accolades. His readership extended far beyond the academy; many of his books became best-sellers in days when most academic historians seemed to be writing for a few specialists rather than for the general public. 

In his first book, The Mysterious Science of the Law (1941), an analysis of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Boorstin argued that Americans used the conservative Tory views of Blackstone to understand and perpetuate ancient English law in order to justify their opposition to the English during the Revolution. The result, Boorstin concluded, was a revolution that was conservative and legalistic rather than ideologically revolutionary. An emphasis on experience rather than theoretical speculation was a central element in Thomas Jefferson’s thought, Boorstin argued in his second book, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948). 

In 1953 Boorstin published The Genius of American Politics, a revision of his 1952 Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures, in which he briefly extended his argument that law and experience rather than philosophy and ideology were the basis for American thought and politics. In the following two decades he spelled out his interpretation in detail in a massive, award-winning trilogy: The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958), winner of the Bancroft Prize; The Americans: The National Experience (1965), given the Francis Parkman Prize; and The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), awarded the Pulitzer Prize. 

With the publication of The Genius of American History and the trilogy that followed, Boorstin was labeled a “consensus” historian, and correctly so, although he did not use the term or acknowledge his being part of a “school” of historians that included, among others, Richard Hofstadter and Louis Hartz and scholars such as Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith in the emerging new field of American Studies. Critics argued that the consensus historians were exponents of “American exceptionalism,” that they glorified the American past by insisting that the American experience created a society that differed from that of Europe because it lacked the sharp class divisions and ideological conflicts; consensus history, some argued, was little more than Cold War propaganda. 

Boorstin did argue in favor of the notion of American exceptionalism in a 1944 essay, which he reprinted in a collection a half-century later. But to argue that his work was Cold War propaganda is nonsense. Americans did somehow manage to escape most of the horrors that overcame many countries, and an attempt to explain how and why this happened seemed in the aftermath of World War II a reasonable problem for historians to tackle. And it remains a reasonable problem to this day. 

It is truly a remarkable indication of Boorstin’s energy and ability that while writing his trilogy, The Americans, and working full-time, first at the University of Chicago and then at the Smithsonian Institution, he somehow found the time to write and publish several additional books commenting on various aspects of American history and contemporary society. The most famous of these is The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (1962), a study that shows how technology and the media transformed the ways in which Americans experienced reality, that is, what they perceived as reality. Heroes became celebrities who were well known for their “well-knownness” and news became manufactured “pseudo-events” rather than reports of real events. 

When nominated to be Librarian of Congress, Boorstin promised senators who were considering his appointment that he would not use his workday for research and writing. He kept his promise, leaving his typewriter at home—he never, to my knowledge, adopted the computer—but he continued to write on his own time on weekends and during pre-dawn hours before coming to work at the Library. Astonishingly, this schedule hardly slowed his scholarly productivity. During his tenure as Librarian of Congress, he published several books about American history, including a textbook, and in 1983 the first volume of a massive new trilogy. 

In this new trilogy Boorstin provided popular and accessible—but never superficial —analyses of what he considered to be key aspects of the intellectual history of Western civilization. The first volume, The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (1983) deals with people who found new places and new ways of looking at the world in which they lived. Two more volumes in the trilogy followed Boorstin’s retirement as Librarian of Congress. The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992) deals with the arts, and The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World (1998) deals with philosophers and other thinkers.

In his essay “The Intimacy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall,” Boorstin wrote: “Serious scholars do not doubt the originality or the significance of Gibbon’s work. Still, he has not become the founder of a ‘school.’ He has not taken a place as the originator of any large new conceptual framework, or any novel way of pigeonholing the human past. I will suggest that this is a clue to the intimacy of his message about that past, and what he can tell each of us about the role of people in the grand chronicle of empires and civilizations.” 

And I suggest that these words may apply to the work of Daniel J. Boorstin. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, three sons, four grandchildren, many friends, colleagues, former students, and millions of readers all over the world. 

We shall all miss him. 

Harold D. Woodman is emeritus professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800–1925 (University of South Carolina Press, 1990) and coauthor of Conflict and Consensus in American History, 9th ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

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