Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Randall J. Stephens, Associate Editor
 
 
  Volume VII, Number 4

--THE VICTORY OF REASON: A FORUM
--Rodney Stark, "How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science"
--Jack Goldstone, "Knowledge--Not Capitalism, Faith, or Reason--Was the Key to 'The Rise of the West'"
--James Muldoon, "The Intelligent Design of Modern Rationalism"
--Joel Mokyr, "Christianity and the Rise of the West: Rodney Stark and the Defeat of Reason"
--Ricardo Duchesne, "Christianity Is a Hellenistic Religion and Western Civilization is Christian"
--Rodney Stark, "Rejoinder"
--An Interview with Rodney Stark [full text]

--Anthony D. Smith, "The Biblical Origins of Nationalism"
--Kenneth E. Hendrickson, "The Big Problem with History: Christianity and the Crisis of Meaning"
--Paul Jankowski, "Guilt by Association: The Disgrace of Narrative History"
--An Interview with Bryan Ward-Perkins on the Fall of Rome [full text]

--THE UNHAPPY WARRIOR OF THE FUTURE? A FORUM
--Christopher Coker, "The Unhappy Warrior"
--Michael Evans, "Of Arms and the Man"
--Brian Holden Reid, "The Civilianized Warrior"
--Peter S. Kindsvatter, "The Biotech Soldier: America's Future Warrior?"
--Christopher Coker, "Rejoinder"

--Donald A. Yerxa, "In Memoriam: Clark G. Reynolds"
--Letters
 
 

Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

THE VICTORY OF REASON: A FORUM‡ 
In a recent address at the University of Pennsylvania, W. Robert Connor asked “where have all the Big Questions gone?” Connor must not have been aware of sociologist Rodney Stark’s work. In his widely discussed new book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005), Stark announced that Christianity, especially medieval Catholicism, led to the rise of capitalism, freedom, science, and the Western miracle. His bold claims run against the grain of almost everything coming out of the world history community for the last couple of decades. 

Rodney Stark is one of the most prominent and controversial sociologists of our time. University of Chicago sociologist, Roman Catholic priest, and novelist Andrew Greeley has gone so far as to compare Stark to the giants of sociology, Weber and Durkheim. His substantial work in sociology of religion has certainly shaken things up. Will his historical work do the same?

We begin our forum with Stark’s essay drawn from The Victory of Reason. A panel of scholars (Ricardo Duchesne, Jack Goldstone, Joel Mokyr, and James Muldoon) respond to Stark, who concludes the forum with a rejoinder. Historically Speaking co-editor Donald A. Yerxa’s brief interview of Rodney Stark (conducted on February 7, 2006) follows. 

‡This forum is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
 

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How Christianity (and Capitalism) Led to Science*
Rodney Stark

When Europeans first began to explore the globe, their greatest surprise was not the existence of the Western Hemisphere, but the extent of their own technological superiority over the rest of the world. Not only were the proud Maya, Aztec, and Inca nations helpless in the face of European intruders, so were the fabled civilizations of the East: China, India, and Islamic nations were “backward” by comparison with 15th-century Europe. How had that happened? Why was it that, although many civilizations had pursued alchemy, the study led to chemistry only in Europe? Why was it that, for centuries, Europeans were the only ones possessed of eyeglasses, chimneys, reliable clocks, heavy cavalry, or a system of music notation? How had the nations that had arisen from the rubble of Rome so greatly surpassed the rest of the world?

Several recent authors have discovered the secret to Western success in geography. But that same geography also long sustained European cultures that were well behind those of Asia. Other commentators have traced the rise of the West to steel, or to guns and sailing ships, and still others have credited a more productive agriculture. The trouble is that those answers are part of what needs to be explained: Why did Europeans excel at metallurgy, shipbuilding, or farming?

The most convincing answer to those questions attributes Western dominance to the rise of capitalism, which took place only in Europe. Even the most militant enemies of capitalism credit it with creating previously undreamed of productivity and progress. In The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that before the rise of capitalism, humans engaged “in the most slothful indolence”; the capitalist system was “the first to show what man’s activity can bring about.” Capitalism achieved that miracle through regular reinvestment to increase productivity, either to create greater capacity or improve technology, and by motivating both management and labor through ever-rising payoffs.

Supposing that capitalism did produce Europe’s own “great leap forward,” it remains to be explained why capitalism developed only in Europe. Some writers have found the roots of capitalism in the Protestant Reformation; others have traced it back to various political circumstances. But, if one digs deeper, it becomes clear that the truly fundamental basis not only for capitalism, but also for the rise of the West, was an extraordinary faith in reason. . . .

Rodney Stark is university professor of  the social sciences at Baylor University.

* From Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. © 2005 by Rodney Stark. Published by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
 

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Knowledge—Not Capitalism, Faith, or Reason—Was the Key to “The Rise of the West”
Jack Goldstone

Rodney Stark is a remarkable scholar, whose insights into religion, its origins, and its spread have changed the thinking of sociologists and economists. Yet Stark is now advancing onto new ground, arguing about the consequences of religion. It pains me to say that the results are a tissue of gross historical errors and illogical conclusions. It is hard to know where to begin. His numerous mistakes on the history of technology? Serious errors about the role and importance of capitalism? Or his wholly false conclusions about the role of Christianity and capitalism in world history? . . . .

Jack Goldstone is the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel Jr. Professor at the George Mason School of Public Policy. Among his recent works are “More Social Movements or Fewer? Beyond Political Opportunity Structures to Relational Fields,” Theory and Society 33 (2004): 333-365 and “Response: Reasoning about History, Sociologically,” Sociological Methodology 34 (2004): 35-61.
 

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The Intelligent Design of Modern Rationalism
James Muldoon

Rodney Stark has written the most pugnacious defense of medieval Catholic Christianity since the work of Hilaire Belloc and James J. Walsh almost a century ago.1 The brief excerpt under discussion here from Stark’s The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success even ends with a line that recalls the final words of Belloc’s book: “The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.”2 Stark ends his volume with a long quotation from a Chinese scholar who asserted that after careful analysis of all the reasons for Western domination of the world, he came to the conclusion that 

The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.

Stark then adds forcefully: “Neither do I.”3

Stark’s book is short, just under 300 pages and, like the excerpt here, pulls no punches. He provides a contrarian account of how the inhabitants of the western margins of Eurasia became the dominant force in the modern world—the Rise of the West. According to Stark, Western success hinged on “faith in the power of reason.” Controversially, Stark traces this faith in reason to the medieval scholastic tradition, specifically to the theologians who developed a body of thought based on the premise that the world operates according to a set of rules that man can comprehend. Furthermore, the universe has a purpose, a goal toward which it is moving, and this notion provided the medieval scholastics with the foundation for a theory of progress . . . . 

James Muldoon is emeritus professor of history at Rutgers University and an invited research scholar at the John Carter Brown Library. He is the author of Identity on the Medieval Irish Frontier: Degenerate Englishmen, Wild Irishmen, Middle Nations (University Press of Florida, 2003).

1 Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (Constable, 1920); James J. Walsh, The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries, 2nd ed. (Catholic Summer School Press, 1909). More recently, a French scholar wrote in the same vein: see Régine Pernoud, Pour en finir avec le Moyen Age (Editions du Seuil, 1977); Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths, trans. Anne Englund Nash (Ignatius Press, 2000).  Harold J. Berman made a similar argument, one restricted to legal development, in his Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1983), esp. 175.

2 Belloc, Europe and the Faith, 331.

3 Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House, 2005), 235.
 

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Christianity and the Rise of the West: Rodney Stark and the Defeat of Reason
Joel Mokyr

Rodney Stark argues that Christianity created Reason and Reason created the Rise of the West. If Reason means anything, it must mean that hypotheses need to be confronted by facts and rejected if the facts prove inconsistent. It also means that we take Einstein’s famous dictum that “everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler” seriously. By those tests, Stark’s essay seems as good evidence against his own hypothesis as can be found, since whatever else one can find in it, Reason is not it.

Stark is a noted expert on the sociology of religion. But when it comes to economic history, he seems to be somewhat elastic in his reliance on the facts. Slavery (to say nothing of other forms of unfree labor such as serfdom) did not disappear in the Christian West in the 11th century; windpower was not introduced in Europe “by the 10th century”—but at the earliest by the middle of the 12th century and in all likelihood copied from Islamic societies; and surely by 1450 or so Europe was still inferior to China with regard to shipbuilding, metallurgy, and (possibly) farming.1 The proud “Maya” (sic) and other indigenous American empires were not “helpless” in the face of European technology but rather were wiped out by disease. Other statements are simply howlers, presumably introduced for dramatic effect, e.g.,  “Capitalism had arrived.” The cartoon version of Max Weber’s thought, and the bland announcements that “he was wrong,” and the rant against the deadest of all dead horses, the “fiction” of the “Dark Ages,” also qualify.

More seriously, the causal logic of the essay and the books on which it is based employs a highly simplistic “correlation is causation” methodology, without much attempt to specify how this is supposed to have worked. The West was Christian, the West developed “modern science,” hence the two were related. By what mechanism? . . . . 

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton University Press, 2002), which in 2003 received the American Political Science Association’s Don K. Price Prize for the best book on technology, science, and politics. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the 2006 Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for History for “his research into the origins of the modern industrial economy.”

1 For slavery, see for example David A.E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: From the Reign of Alfred until the Twelfth Century (Boydell, 1995); Susan Mosher Stuard, “Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery,” Past and Present 149 (1995): 3-28; and Robin Blackburn,”The Old World Background to European Colonial Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 65-102. It might give Stark pause to read in Blackburn’s essay that slavery in medieval Spain declined as a result of the struggle with Islam, which prompted the beginnings of a “new doctrine, copied from the Muslim foe, barring enslavement of fellow believers.” Neither the essay nor the books by Stark gets around the minor issue of New World slavery established by Christians, except for the feeble objection that some popes and other Christian notables spoke against it. As to the technological gap between the West and Rest by the 15th century, the evidence on metallurgy suggests that the Chinese were casting iron since the 3rd century B.C., an art not attained in Europe until about 1380. The large Chinese seaworthy junks of admiral Cheng Ho (early 15th century) were of a quality not to be matched by the Europeans until centuries later. The Chinese ships were carvel built (planks laid out edge to edge), equipped with multiple masts, and benefited from a technique called bulkhead construction,  which features watertight buoyancy chambers to prevent the ship  from sinking in case of leaks. 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Christianity is a Hellenistic Religion, and Western Civilization is Christian
Ricardo Duchesne

The one virtue I can find in Stark’s essay, as it was adapted from his book Victory of Reason, is that it might stimulate a serious discussion about why Christianity was the only religion to cultivate a philosophical outlook consistent with the rational investigation of nature and the rise of a liberal democratic culture. Right from the opening paragraph, his essay sprays out too many sweeping statements about medieval Europe’s technological superiority over the rest of the world that can only be judged as expressions of someone not familiar with world economic history. I have defended David Landes’s contention that sometime in the medieval/early modern era Europe took a path that set it on a special historical course, but I cannot support Stark’s flat statement that medieval European technology and science “overtook and surpassed the rest of the world.” Sung China (960-1279), rather, was the world’s most advanced civilization at that time. The irrigated fields of China gave far higher yields per seed and per unit of land than the rain-fed grains of Europe. In terms of preparation of soil and methods of soil preservation, rotation of crops, selective breeding of seeds, transplanting and winnowing, and water control techniques, Chinese—and possibly Indian—farmers were ahead of their European counterparts well into the modern era. Stark shows no awareness of current arguments made by Bin Wong, A. G. Frank, Ken Pomeranz, and others that many “modern” economic trends attributed to Europe, such as rising total output and per capita productivity, growing urbanization, and global trade networks, were also experienced in China, India, and Japan throughout the modern era.

I do agree, nevertheless, that by the 12th century Europe was entering a period of cumulative progression in all spheres of social life,  richer in originality and spiritedness than any other cultural efflorescence witnessed since the ancient Greeks. While I do share Stark’s belief that Christianity was a major factor in this progression, I have deep reservations about his contention that the rise of modern science was rooted directly in the religion of Christianity . . . . 

Ricardo Duchesne is associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John.
 

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Rejoinder
Rodney Stark

When I first ventured into social history, I worried whether historians would regard me as an untrained interloper. But almost without exception historians have written remarkably generous reviews, and the better known they are, the more favorable they have been. Truth is that my relatively few nasty reviews have been by social scientists who have felt no need to know much history since their ideological commitments assure them of what must have been the case. Nowhere has this been better demonstrated than in this set of responses. While one of the historians is very generous, the responses from the two social scientists are as remarkable for their venom as for their ignorance. The basis for their outrage is clear enough: what could be worse than a book that finds virtues in three such blatant evils as Christianity, capitalism, and Western civilization . . . .

End of Forum

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Interview with Rodney Stark
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Donald A. Yerxa: You have earned the reputation of being a fearless scholar who enthusiatically takes on the received wisdom on big ideas. What attracts you to such big topics as the rise of Christianity, the historical consequences of monothesism, and the origins of science? 

Rodney Stark: Let me start off by saying what I am and what I am not. I’m not a historian who works with primary materials and discovers new things. Years ago Thor Heyerdahl said that archaeologists are inclined to sit in their own holes surrounded by the artifacts they’ve dug up. And he thought that somebody should walk from hole to hole and make something larger out of all these small collections. There is a way in which historians are like archaeologists. There are marvelous subspecialities in history with very good people doing wonderfully inventive things that almost nobody hears about. Being a history buff, I started encountering these studies, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why they weren’t being pulled into the big picture.

For example, several people have been working on the Spanish Inquisition, and they’ve documented more than 40,000 cases that came before the Inquisition. They’ve created an astonishing data base. It turns out that the Inquisition was primarily concerned with matters of justice and the rule of law. There were very few executions. The place to get convicted of witchcraft was in Spain by the Inquisition because the penalty was to say you were sorry. And if you had been particularly snotty about it, they’d make you carry a sign confessing your evil ways in front of the church on a Saturday morning. Bonfires and stakes were really rare events. Did they burn some books? Yes. Were they scientific books? No. Were they Lutheran books? Some of them. Calvinist books? Some of them. Do you know what most of them were? Pornography. Good Lord, you look at Hollywood these days and you say: “Torquemada, where are you now?” The point is that here’s this wonderful stuff that I never heard about. My colleagues don’t know about it. The term “Spanish Inquisition” still sends chills down everybody’s spine, despite all this work to the contrary.

Another example is the claim that there really wasn’t  a “Dark Ages.” I didn’t know that. I was raised on the Dark Ages and the notion that idiots in the church tried to prevent Columbus from sailing west because they thought he would fall off the edge of the world. No, they knew the world was round. These kinds of things come along, and the next thing you know, I’m writing a book pulling a bunch of them together.

I confess that there is a lot of self-indulgence in what I’m doing. I do this because it is incredibly fun. I’ve had an enormously privileged life. I have been able to spend most of my mature years doing whatever I want. And writing books like The Victory of Reason is what I really love doing.

Yerxa: You have been credited with recasting the study of the sociology of religion over the past several decades. Could you briefly describe how your work has challenged prevailing assumptions in the field?

Stark: Years ago John Lofland and I decided we really wanted to know what happened when people converted to a new religion. I don’t mean changing denominations, but really shifting in a major way, like Christians becoming Jews, Jews becoming Moonies, or whatever. We found a little group that was going out trying to convert people, and when we watched them closely, we made a remarkable discovery. Converts said that they joined movements because of what the ideology did for them, what the payoff was. Sick people were attracted to the possibility of healing; poor people were attracted to notions like “the last shall be first.” We discovered  that people joined new religious groups because their friends joined them (the convergence and network phenomenon). People put as much thought and as much care into joining a religion as they do almost everything else in life. They think about it. They try it on for size psychologically. And in the long run, they either trust their friends who have joined and join as well, or they trust their friends who have not joined and stay away. This led me to the point that is the basis of my whole sociology of religion: people are as thoughtful and as rational about their religious choices as they are about other choices in life.

If people want to call that “rational choice” and scream and holler, that’s all right with me. I’m not not putting “R” and “C” on rational choice. I’m simply saying that people are as rational about religious choices as they are about other things. And in saying this, I am trying to supplant what has ruled the sociology of religion for at least one hundred years or more: the irrational choice assumption, the idea that people make religious decisions because they are nuts, scared, stupid, whatever. If you assume that people make rational choices about religion, you can start seeing how the world works a whole lot better. One can immediately see, as I did, that pluralism and competition, rather than being bad for religion, are really good for it. We’re always told that when there is more than one church, people don’t know which one to believe, so they believe none. No. What you have when you have only one subsidized church is a very lazy church that doesn’t work at satisfying people or bringing them in.

I recently did a bunch of studies on ancient history, and this analysis stands up just as well. The average Roman was pretty religious, because Rome was chock full of religious organizations that had to fight for their own survival. They were not being subsidized. In  Sumer and Egypt, on the other hand, complacent priests wouldn’t even let common people into their subsidized temples:  “You’re not important enough.”

Oddly enough, one of the reasons I started to play with history in the first place is the fixation of the social sciences on the now. All the data that test our various theses were collected in the last 15 minutes in the United States. I began to work with history in order to apply some of my models to earlier and different times. My first stab was a book that I wrote with Roger Finke, The Churching of America, to see if the competition model works (the notion that with increased religious competition, church membership rates should rise). Well, if you go back to the late colonial period, somewhere from 15-20% of the people belonged to a church. Today it is better than 60%. 

Yerxa:  Since your highly acclaimed The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton University Press, 1996), you have written a number of books that emphasize the role of faith, especially Christianity, in the shaping of Western civilization. I’m refering to One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism (Princeton University Press, 2001); For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton University Press, 2003); and The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Science (Random House, 2005). Do you view these books as installments in a larger project? If so, what is the goal of the project?

Stark: In retrospect, I suppose so. I didn’t have a plan. It is the case that I started on a book that ended up being One True God, but because it got too long, I separated a part of it that eventually became For the Glory of God. These books are the result of various historical topics that interested me. The most important thing I was told in graduate school—by Philip Selznick—was that if you could write two finished pages per day, that’s two books per year.

Yerxa: Are you on that pace?

Stark: I’ll settle for one. I never sprint. 

Yerxa: Do you have any plans to explore other historical questions?

Stark: Yes. I’m working now on my biggest book. The provisional title is Discovering God: A New Look at the Origins of the Great Religions. I’m not attempting to do the history of these religions at great length; rather, I want to talk about how each started and then compare their origins. As I work with this material, I am finding a lot more evidence for diffusion than the specialists seem to be aware of. This topic is a vehicle for me to get in everything I know about conversion, religious economies—the whole thing. I’m having a wonderful time learning about Chinese and Indian religions. Frankly, I didn’t really want to do this, but I have benefited enormously from doing it. 

Yerxa: In your view, have historians on the whole missed the mark on religion and Western civilization? 

Stark: I’m not doing original research. So if I say that historians have been wrong on a given topic, my basis for saying so is the work of other historians. For example, the case that Christianity was fundamental to the rise of science has been widely believed among historians of science going all the way back to Alfred North Whitehead in the 1920s. My discoveries are literary discoveries, if you will. I think history might be lacking in generalists.

 

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The Biblical Origins of Nationalism
Anthony D. Smith

Nationalism is generally assumed to be a secular ideology and a modern movement. While there may be some debate about the nature and dating of nations, there is little or no disagreement about the character and modernity of nationalism. Yet, even here, things are not that clear-cut. Not only do we find strands of nationalist ideology in earlier periods of history, but closer inspection reveals an early modern form of nationalism, one with an ancient religious pedigree, which I shall term “covenantal” nationalism.1

What can such a term imply? Pacts and oath swearing were common enough in the French Revolution and its successors. In Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, and elsewhere the formation of more or less secret societies whose members were bound to each other by oaths and rituals was a common prelude, or accompaniment, to mass agitation. There were also open, public oath ceremonies. An early example was the celebration of the Fete de la Federation on the Champs de Mars in l790, when the tricolor was flown and the participants swore to defend the patrie using the selfsame gestures of the Roman oath sworn by the three Horatii brothers in Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Les Horaces of l784. The point of such oath ceremonies was not to enter into mutually beneficial contracts. It was to bind the nation to its own image of itself. As such it was an act of worship, and its god was as exclusive as that of any previous monotheism. As the Petition of Agitators put it in l792: “The image of the patrie is the sole divinity whom it is permissible to worship.”2

In other words, this secular doctrine was embedded in a sacred context and had a religious purpose. Of course, this was not religion in a transcendental mode. It did not seek salvation from a suprahuman, otherworldly cosmos. The salvation it offered was entirely of this world—to be part of the nation progressing through time and history. The immortality it conferred was equally terrestrial: the judgment of history and the praise of posterity. But it was not less religious for that . . . .

Anthony D. Smith is Emeritus Professor of Ethnicity and Nationalism at the London School of Economics. His most recent books are Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford University Press, 1999). He is editor of Nations and Nationalism: The Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and serves as ASEN’s president.

1 For definitions of nation and nationalism, see Walker Connor, Ethno-Nationalism, the Quest for Understanding (Princeton University Press, 1994), ch. 8; Anthony Smith, Nationalism:Theory, Ideology, History (Polity Press, 2001), ch. 1.

2 Robert Herbert, David, Voltaire, Brutus and the French Revolution (Allen Lane, 1972); Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Knopf, 1989). 
 

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The Big Problem with History: Christianity and the Crisis of Meaning
Kenneth E. Hendrickson

For the last decade and more I have made it my business to watch the “culture wars.” Though at times I have internally battled this conclusion, I am convinced that the polarization of American intellectual and political life is real, significant, and perhaps even dangerous. I have also come to the conclusion that these “wars” seem so intractable because, the multiplicity of participants aside, the conditions fueling them are not well understood.

On the one hand, social conservatives tend to miss the point about the nature of the social challenges facing us today. They like to argue that Americans suffer principally from an unwarranted abandonment of the transcendent vision afforded by general acceptance of Christian theism. Such people hope to remedy social ills by finding ways to restore the public understanding of and respect for religion. I prefer to argue that there never was such a golden age of faith and that we are merely experiencing something less than the apocalypse: life as it usually is, only better (and more sensationally) reported, and a culture which through experience and technology is readily and voluntarily leaving behind older certainties for seemingly more fruitful options. Conservatives seem to propose a “stab-in-the-back” thesis in which “bad ideas” like philosophical materialism and scientific Darwinism play the leading roles in an unjust and unjustified coup against reigning Christian theism. Though they don’t frequently use the word, in fact they like to write about apostasy.

On the other hand, political and social liberals seem to doubt the very idea of a crisis, excepting of course hysterical visions of some “victory of reaction,” currently personified in the administration of George Bush. Though I disagree with the conservative apostasy model, I believe that we do indeed face a crisis, of which politics is a symptom but not a cause. We face rather a crisis of meaning. In the West, Christianity has collapsed: intellectually, theologically, institutionally, if not numerically. It has certainly collapsed in its former role of metanarrative, or “super story,” organizing knowledge and the other day-to-day stories constantly afoot among Western cultures. While this collapse obviously concerns social conservatives, it should also trouble secular liberals.

The collapse of the Christian metanarrative is not just a crisis of religion. It is also a crisis of historical meaning . . . . 

Kenneth E. Hendrickson is associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University. He is the author of Making Saints: Religion and the Popularizing of the British Army at Home, 1809-1885 (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997).
 

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Guilt by Association: The Disgrace of Narrative History
Paul Jankowski

A whiff of disrepute, faint yet tenacious, still surrounds “narrative” history writing, even as the word itself daily conquers new ground in the columns of newspapers and the corridors of bureaucracies.

The Democrats needed a narrative instead of a litany, the former Clinton adviser James Carville reflected after the Democrats’ defeat in 2004, as though to lament his party’s inability to surpass particularisms and concede to its opponents a diabolical talent for rearranging reality. An article in USA Today about the trial of Saddam Hussein began by informing its readers that “the narratives of countries are inextricably tied up with the lives of the men and women who rule them”: out go national histories, in come self-serving pleadings, the stuff of many a learned dissection. The under secretary of state for political affairs, R. Nicholas Burns, announced recently that he wished to create among Bosnian Serbs and Muslims a “common narrative of what happened in the war,” that is, a rendition of history that both could live with—truthful or not, who was to say? At my university, a course description submitted to justify a new offering is grandly called a “narrative.” Historians themselves discern ubiquitous hidden “narratives” in the past, governed by unfailingly subjective points of view. Yet they renounce, oftener than not, the temptation to resort to such self-indulgent practices themselves, sometimes out of a postmodern aversion to constructed meaning, but more often out of a contrary conviction, a latter-day faith in their professional capacity to approximate objective truth . . . . 

Paul Jankowski is the Raymond Ginger Professor of History at Brandeis University. His most recent book is Stavisky: A Confidence Man in the Republic of Virtue (Cornell University Press, 2002). 
 

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An Interview with Bryan Ward-Perkins on the Fall of Rome
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

“At the hour of midnight the Salerian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilized so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.” The emotion and drama that flowed so eloquently from Edward Gibbons’s pen has been largely drained from our contemporary historical imagination. Recent scholarship has drastically transformed the subject that fascinated students of history for centuries, and Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins fears that something important is being lost. Historically Speaking editor Donald Yerxa asked Ward-Perkins to speak to some of his concerns, developed more fully in Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2005), winner of the 2006 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History.

Donald Yerxa: In your book you mention that there has been a “sea change in the language used to describe post-Roman times.” How has the language changed?

Bryan Ward-Perkins: There has been a very strong tendency recently—particularly, but not exclusively, among scholars working in the U.S—to play down any unpleasantness at the end of the Roman Empire and any negative effects of the end of Roman power. Until quite recently scholars were happy that the settlement of the Germanic peoples in the 5th-century West was the result of violent invasion and viewed the next few centuries as a “Dark Age” marked by the collapse of Roman civilization. Currently the use of such negative language is seen as very old-fashioned: “decline,” “crisis,” and “Dark Age” have disappeared from the titles of academic books,  conferences, and  university courses. They have been replaced by neutral words like “transformation” and “transition.” For instance, a recent, massive European research project on the 4th to 9th centuries A.D. was entitled “The Transformation of the Roman World,” as if Rome never really came to an end, but just changed into something different but entirely equal.
 
Yerxa: What has happened to the Roman Empire’s dissolution by “hostile ‘waves’ of Germanic peoples,” dare I say “barbarians”?

Ward-Perkins: Nowadays, what was once seen as invasion is often interpreted as a process of “accommodation,” entered into willingly by Roman hosts. The argument runs that the Romans got tired of fighting the barbarians, and decided to let many of them into the empire, in order to use them to defend it against further invaders. The former poachers became the gamekeepers. 
 
Yerxa: How has the new periodization scheme of “Late Antiquity” changed historians’ thinking about the fall of Rome?

Ward-Perkins: A groundbreaking book published in 1971, Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity, identified a cultural period (characterized primarily by the rise of two new monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, and the codification of a third, Judaism), stretching from the 3rd century right through to the 8th century and even beyond. This periodization, which is now widely followed, deliberately ignores the 5th-century collapse of Roman power in the West and the 7th-century loss of most of the Eastern (or Byzantine) Empire to the Arabs, events that conventionally were seen as heralding “dark ages” in both areas. Rather than viewing the 5th to 7th centuries as a time of crisis and rupture, historians of “Late Antiquity” see it as a period of continuous cultural growth.
 
Yerxa:  In what ways do you believe that the current view is flawed?
 
Ward-Perkins: The 5th century is portrayed as a time of peaceful accommodation. It is true that the Germanic invaders wanted reasonable relations with their Roman subjects (who were always in a massive numerical majority) and with the remnants of independent Roman power. Consequently, they were very happy to enter treaty arrangements with the empire, and generally treated their own Roman subjects reasonably well. But the evidence is unequivocal that most of the empire’s territory was taken over by Germanic rulers, either by force, or, at best, through the threat of force.  This was not one of those fortunate periods in which to be alive.
 
Yerxa:  You contend that treatments of the cultural accommodation between invader and invaded often read like accounts of “a tea party at a Roman vicarage.”

Ward-Perkins: While Germanic invaders and native Roman could sit down together and coexist, much recent scholarship makes the whole process far too genteel, as if the new settlers knocked politely at the door and were shown to an empty chair. The reality is that the invaders seized most of the power and much of the land of the empire. Roman landed families remained, and many Romans rose high in the service of the new masters. But the unavoidable truth is that by the end of the 5th century an entirely new Germanic aristocracy had been established, whose raison d’être was its military might. This establishment was achieved by the dispossession on a massive scale of Roman landowners. 
 
Yerxa:  Is there evidence that a civilization collapsed when Rome fell?

Ward-Perkins: This is an area where historians seem to be decidedly myopic. In looking closely at their texts, they have failed to notice that in every single area of the empire (except perhaps the Levantine provinces conquered by the Arabs) there was an extraordinary fall in what archaeologists term “material culture.” The scale and quality of buildings, even of churches, shrank dramatically—so that, for instance, tiled roofs, which were common in Roman times even in a peasant context, became a great rarity and luxury. In the 6th- and 7th-century West the vast majority of people lived in tiny houses with beaten earth floors, drafty wooden walls, and insect-infested thatch roofs; whereas, in Roman times, people from the same level of society might well have enjoyed the comfort of solid brick or stone floors, mortared walls, and tiled roofs. This was a change that affected not only the aristocracy, but also huge numbers of people in the middling and lower levels of society who in Roman times had had ready access to high-quality goods.

Yerxa: You discuss evidence from graffiti, coins, roof tiles, and especially pottery, whereas scholars from the Late Antiquity school point to religious texts. Why is it important to pay attention to material culture and economic history?

Ward-Perkins: However elevated our thoughts, we all live in a sophisticated material world, supported by a complex economy, and we all enjoy the convenience and comfort of high-quality goods (whether clothes, washing machines, or the latest laptop and Internet connection). So it seems very obvious to me that material change (and there was dramatic material change at the end of the Roman Empire) is well worthy of our attention. Even the saints were affected by material changes in this period: the new churches constructed in the later 6th- and 7th-century West, in places like Rome and Visigothic Spain, are tiny in comparison to those of the 4th century or of the later Middle Ages.

I also believe—and this seems obvious from modern experience—that sophistication in intellectual life generally requires solid economic underpinning. In my book I attempt to show this by focusing on the evidence of graffiti (which were very common in Roman times, but virtually disappeared thereafter) in order to demonstrate that basic intellectual skills—reading and writing—suffered as dramatic a downturn with the fall of Rome as did the availability of high-quality material goods.
 
Yerxa:  Why is Roman pottery such a revealing source?

Ward-Perkins: The study of pottery isn’t to everybody’s taste, but (as a couple of reviewers have independently said of my book) it reveals “surprisingly interesting” results. Pottery was a basic item that played a central role in the storage, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food. And broken potsherds, which can often be both dated and provenanced, survive remarkably well in the soil. (They are discovered in the hundreds of thousands on archaeological sites in the Mediterranean.) This means that we can reconstruct with considerable accuracy changing patterns of production, distribution, and consumption of pottery vessels. The picture that emerges shows that in the Roman period potting was highly sophisticated, and that good-quality pots reached deep into society. It was, for instance, quite usual for a 3rd-century peasant in upland central Italy to eat off a fine pottery bowl manufactured in North Africa. Virtually all this remarkable sophistication disappeared in the post-Roman period.

Other products do not survive as well in the soil as potsherds or cannot be attributed with such confidence to particular places or centuries of manufacture. But it is, I believe, obvious that the picture provided by pottery—of Roman sophistication, followed by almost total collapse—can be extended to other goods, where the evidence survives much less well, such as textiles, metal tools, and specialized food products. Pottery offers a detailed snapshot of the wider economy.
 
Yerxa:  What is fueling the revisionist views of the Late Antiquity school? 
 
Ward-Perkins: There are probably a number of different forces at work. Scholarship does tend to progress by a process of revision and counter-revision. It was probably time that gloomy views of the end of Rome were tested; and now, perhaps, it is time to return to them. This game of scholarly Ping-Pong might seem a little pointless, but I don’t think so, because each time the ball is lobbed back over the net it lands in a slightly different place, and has always acquired some of its flight from the preceding debate. For instance, although I could be termed a counter-revisionist (or a “neo-con” as one reviewer put it), I have no problem in recognizing that Late Antiquity has opened up an extraordinarily fertile field of debate, and that, without it, my own thinking would never have gone in the directions it has.

A central underlying reason for the current revisionist view must be the fact that both “empires” and “civilizations” have gone out of fashion, undermining earlier assumptions that the Roman empire was a high point of “civilization.” In the modern postcolonial world, the very concept of “civilizations” has virtually disappeared and been replaced by that of “cultures,” which are seen as being all on a level. In this perspective, post-Roman “culture” is necessarily the equal of Roman “culture.”

Furthermore, some Europeans seem to have found the idea of the Germanic peoples being “accommodated” into the Roman world attractive—it provides a happier vision of Europe’s troubled past. It replaces a story of strife between Germanic and Latin peoples with one of peaceful coexistence and common enterprise, which is much more in keeping with the current ideals of the European Union.

Finally, I suspect that my own very materialistic and economic focus went out of fashion toward the end of the 20th century, in part because of the demise of communism, and with it Marxist theory. In the 1960s economic history enjoyed a central position in historical study because it was so central to Marxist thinking. But, unfortunately, this meant it went down with the ship of communism. In my opinion, for the reasons I have given above, I think it is high time for economic history once again to be a central topic of historical debate and of university curricula.

Yerxa: Is there a case to be made that the currently popular view of a Late Antiquity “transition” presents something of a corrective to earlier views? 

Ward-Perkins: There is no doubt at all that Late Antiquity has opened up new and very interesting areas of research, both geographically and thematically. Downplaying the centrality of the Roman empire and of Greco-Roman culture, has allowed local cultures (expressed in languages like Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Irish) to take center stage and has brought to the fore some very “unclassical,” but fascinating, heroes of the past, like the Stylite saints of 5th- and 6th-century Syria. 
 
Yerxa:  What do you think of the project of relocating the center of the 4th-8th-century Mediterranean world eastward to Egypt, the Levant, and Persia?
 
Ward-Perkins: I am a historian of the West, and I don’t have the linguistic knowledge to get seriously involved in the East. But I do teach Eastern history at an undergraduate level and find it absorbing. The entire Byzantine world was a flourishing region into at least the 6th century; and the 7th century, of course, spawned Islam and the civilization of the Umayyads. For Egypt, the Levant, and Persia, a long Late Antiquity probably works well—for instance, the Great Mosque at Damascus, with its considerable size, basilical plan, and marble decoration and mosaics, can quite reasonably be seen as a “late antique” building. It is very important—for modern-day reasons—that we seriously consider the possibility that it was the Islamic Levant, and not the West or Byzantium, that was the true heir to the sophisticated economy and culture of antiquity. My complaint is that a very long Late Antiquity, which can fit the Levant, is also being exported westward, where it really doesn’t fit. The 5th-century West and the 7th-century Byzantine worlds were characterized by political, military, and economic crises on a scale that cannot, and should not, be ignored.
 
Yerxa: Have the newer interpretations corrected the naive view that the fall of Rome was an affair between two great forces—Rome and the barbarians?

Ward-Perkins: As I have said, I have little patience with the view that the barbarians were peacefully “accommodated” into the West, and this same point has recently also been argued, with considerably more expertise, by Peter Heather in his Fall of the Roman Empire (also published by Oxford University Press). But it is true that the view prevalent immediately after the Second World War—that all Germanic invaders were solely destructive and brutal—needed some adjustment. Romans were as often at war among themselves as they were with the Germanic invaders. And the latter were often happy to ally with Roman forces against other Germanic tribes. This was not a titanic battle between rival and monolithic ideologies, but a very messy and confused affair, which left considerable scope for alliances between Romans and “barbarians.” Indeed, much of the personnel of the Roman army, including its high command, consisted of Germanic tribesmen.
 
Yerxa: What brought you to this subject?

Ward-Perkins: I was born in Rome, and my father was a classical archaeologist with a particular interest in the technological skill that the Romans deployed in their buildings.  For some fifteen years, I worked every summer as a field archaeologist in Italy, with a special interest in the post-Roman period (which I was also researching from written sources). It was blindingly obvious to me, working on an archaeological site like ancient Luna—where all the great Roman buildings were abandoned and torn down in the 4th and 5th centuries, to be replaced by very simple wooden houses—that something very dramatic happened at the end of the Roman world, something which can reasonably be called the “end of a civilization.” 

Yerxa: We cannot have a conversation about the fall of Rome without my posing the classic questions to you: Why did Rome fall? Could its decline have been reversed? And might we draw any lessons from the collapse of the Roman Empire?

Ward-Perkins: I believe the Western Empire was brought down by a specific military crisis—Germanic invasion, made more serious by the arrival in the West of an Asiatic people, the Huns, and exacerbated by civil wars within the empire—rather than by any irreversible internal decline. The Eastern Empire was then very nearly destroyed some two centuries later by the rise of Arab Islamic power. Probably with a bit of good luck and perhaps some better leadership both crises could have been reversed (as had happened in the 3rd century, when the whole empire was saved from a seemingly fatal spiral of invasion and civil war).  But all great powers (so far) have at some point or another declined, or been brought low, so it is reasonable to assume that Roman power would not have gone on forever!

What is so striking about the fall of Rome is the collapse of material sophistication that ensued. This happened, I believe, precisely because the Roman world was not entirely dissimilar to our own: complex economies are very fragile because they rely on hugely sophisticated networks of production and distribution. If these are seriously disrupted, widely and over a long period of time, the entire house of cards can collapse. Although I have a great deal of respect for the new Late Antiquity, it does seriously worry me that it smoothes over the very real crisis that happened at the end of the Roman world. The Romans, like us, enjoyed the fruits of a complex economy, both material and intellectual. And like us, they assumed their world would go on forever. They were wrong, and we would be wise to remember this. The main lesson I think we should learn from the collapse of the Roman Empire and of ancient civilization is not some specific panacea that can preserve our civilization forever (since modern circumstances and the threats to our well being are ever-changing), but a realization of how insecure, and probably transient, our own achievements are—and, from this, a degree of humility. 

 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

THE UNHAPPY WARRIOR OF THE FUTURE? A FORUM 

In our January/February 2006 issue, leading military historians and analysts debated the future of war in the 21st-century. We follow that forum with another focused on the human dimension, the warrior of the future. Our lead essayist is Christopher Coker, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and author of The Future of War: The Re-enchantment of War in the Twenty-first Century (Blackwell, 2004). He fears that though they will enhance the American military’s war-fighting capabilities, the information and biotechnical revolutions will also destroy the warrior ethos and render warfare soulless. History offers profound insights on these matters, and we have asked Michael Evans, Peter S. Kindsvatter, and Brian Holden Reid to engage Coker’s argument.
 

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The Unhappy Warrior
Christopher Coker

In the 1920s one of the greatest of American warriors, George Patton, wrote an article entitled “The Warrior Soul.” In criticizing the German performance in the Great War he acknowledged that no other people had sought so diligently for prewar perfection. They had built and tested and adjusted their mighty war machine and became so engrossed “in the accuracy of its bearings and the compression of its cylinders that they had neglected the battery”—that implausible something called the soul. Despite the physical impossibility of locating the soul, he believed that it could readily be discerned in the acts and thoughts of soldiers.1

Most know Patton from the 1970 film in which he was played to such telling effect by George C Scott. Its most famous line (one of the most famous lines of any war movie of the past fifty years)—“God help me, I do love it so”—fed a suspicion that he loved war too much, which has blighted his reputation. But the public loved him. He was charismatic, heroic, and fiercely ambitious for himself and his men. Franklin Schaffner’s film showed a man whose life was quite literally defined by war, by the spirit of wishing either to conquer or perish with honor in the attempt. It shows a man who had he survived into peacetime would have been lost without an enemy to confront.

Patton lived on the cusp of a technocratic era, one in which technology is an end, not a means to an end. The social order reflects this. The aristocracy from whose ranks warriors have traditionally been drawn in all but the last century has been replaced in the Western world by a meritocratic class that is technocratic in its mentality and management ethos. In Europe this class derives no status, no profit, and certainly no self-esteem from war, which is why the Europeans are, to all intents and purposes, now out of the war business. In the United States politicians still derive self-esteem from war, but there is increasingly less place for the human factors in war, the play of chance and contingency. This attitude to war is far from inhumane. Indeed, there is a tendency to think that everything in life, including war, can be rendered more humane through technology . . . .

Christopher Coker is professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent book is The Future of War: The Re-Enchantment of War in the Twenty-First Century (Blackwell, 2004).

1 Patton cited in James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War (Penguin, 2004), 80.
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

Of Arms and the Man: A Response to Christopher Coker’s “The Unhappy Warrior” 
Michael Evans

Fighting in man is as ineradicable an instinct as love, with which of course it has much in common: the chief common quality being romanticism.

 -Robert Graves

In Ridley Scott’s epic 2001 combat film, Black Hawk Down, there is a memorable scene in which a Somali warlord converses with a wounded American helicopter pilot captured during the 1993 fighting in the streets of Mogadishu. When the American declines the Somali’s offer of a cigarette, his captor remarks sarcastically, “That’s right. None of you Americans smoke anymore. You all live long, dull, and uninteresting lives.” The Somali warlord, rejecting the political and social values that his prisoner represents, warns that there can be no surrender to American liberal democracy in Somalia since the latter is a country in which killing is a form of negotiation. “There will always be killing,” concludes the warlord, “that is the way things are in our world.”

The above scene is a metaphor for the growing collision in the 21st century between two contending military cultures: that of the elemental Third World warrior, a “Mad Max” figure, adept with machete and Microsoft, and that of the trained Western military professional who is increasingly a postmodern technocrat. Scott’s film aptly depicts the gap between the two military cultures. The American pilot, severely wounded in both legs, lies helplessly on his back, while the tall, lithe Somali warlord stands over him dominating their exchanges. The power of American military technology, the film director seems to be suggesting, has been defeated by the efforts of traditional warriors whose actions would be recognizable to Homer and Virgil. War, in Scott’s picture, remains a profoundly human experience; a test of wills as much as techniques. It is this human dimension that is embodied in the quotation from Plato that prefaces the film: “Only the dead have seen the end of war” . . . .

Dr. Michael Evans is a senior fellow in the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre at the Royal Military College, Duntroon in Canberra. He is the coeditor of The Human Face of Warfare: Killing, Fear and Chaos in Battle (Allen & Unwin, 2000) and of Future Armies, Future Challenges: Land Warfare in the Information Age (Allen & Unwin, 2004). 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

The Civilianized Warrior
Brian Holden Reid

It is always a pleasure to read Christopher Coker’s thoughts on the future of war. His writing is invariably thoughtful, suggestive, provocative, and thought provoking (the latter qualities are by no means identical). His arguments are enriched by reading in literature and philosophy, and the result is striking and absorbing. His argument in “The Unhappy Warrior” is both simple and complex, exhibiting a delight in paradox that is characteristic of Coker’s best writing. He suggests that developments in cyber science, pharmaceuticals (that will improve the physical performance of the body), and advances in genetics that are “nudging us towards an instrumental idea of humanity” are rendering warfare “soulless.” This will have serious effects on our notion of the warrior ethos.  “Such radically reductionist approaches, if widely believed,” he warns, “would result in the idea that humans are no more than predictable, easily manipulated cyborgs. It would result in the end of the warrior ethos and what it allows: the warrior’s belief that he is a free agent because his actions are freely chosen.”

After many years of close acquaintance with soldiers (with many of Coker’s “warriors” among my closest friends), it must be conceded at once that there is much truth in what Coker says. Readers of Historically Speaking, though, will be interested primarily in one question: Coker’s views might be well grounded in literature and philosophy, not to mention strategic studies, but are they, to an equal extent, justified by historical experience? . . . . 

Brian Holden Reid is professor of American history and military institutions and head of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. His has recently completed a three-volume history of the American Civil War.
 

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The Biotech Soldier: America’s Future Warrior?
Peter S. Kindsvatter

Christopher Coker has written a thought provoking essay on the future warrior of the Western world. Of necessity, that entails a prediction of what warfare will be like. What will that warrior of the future have to face? Soldiers, military theorists, and a variety of scholars have not shied away from making such predictions, in many cases from an earnest desire to prepare their countries and their militaries for what lies ahead. The too-often heard cliché, “An army always prepares to fight the last war,” is simply not true in many cases. And as Coker’s essay indicates, today’s American military is making a considerable effort to understand and prepare for future conflict.

The problem with such predictions about future war is that they have varied from off base to abysmally wrong. None have been more wrong, unfortunately, than those predicting an end to war . . . . 

Peter S. Kindsvatter is command historian at the U.S. Army Ordnance Center and Schools, Aberdeen Proving Ground. He is author of American Soldiers: Ground Combat in the World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam (University of Kansas Press, 2003).
 

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Rejoinder
Christopher Coker

Michael Evans begins his response to my piece with a scene from a film, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down. We are always reaching for the human center of war, and we can find it in a young warrior, Gary Gordon, who was awarded posthumously the Congressional Medal of Honor in May 1994. He was a member of the Delta Force Patrol that found itself caught in the crossfire in the battle that is the subject of Scott’s film. He was one of the soldiers who died that afternoon—not, however, before doing his best to rescue a downed pilot of a Black Hawk helicopter, Michael Duran. For the eleven days of his captivity Duran’s swollen, stricken face on TV haunted Americans. It was thought he would not survive.

Gordon may have given his life in vain, but he was undoubtedly a hero. He was the product of five years of rigorous training as a Western warrior. And although there was very little that was Homeric about the encounter in which he lost his life, Gordon did his duty and won a medal for going beyond the call. But he did not live in the same community of fate as the men who killed him. His body was hideously mutilated. Our world seems to be bifurcated into two. We still have a warrior tradition in the West but what of those we fight? Gone are those bygone days in which we once saw each other as members of a common fraternity, dedicated, perhaps, to each other’s death, but holding each other in respect even as we took each other’s lives.

My paper was addressed purely to Western warriors, and I am grateful to the discussants for pointing out those places where they feel I have erred historically or where I have been too pessimistic for the good of my own argument. We all wish to stress the human factor in war, and all I’m trying to suggest is that we run the risk of decentering it altogether given the attempts by some scientists, and even military professionals, to make war less stressful for those called upon to fight. On the one hand, it is admirable that society should be trying to ensure that a decade or two hence anxiety, depression, and other affective neuroses that have been essential to the experience of war will be optional, like physical pain itself. On the other hand, there’s clearly a danger in trying to eliminate low mood states without any clear idea of what unrecognized purpose they may serve. To eliminate fear from the battlefield, to take only one example, would be reduce the support that comes from affirmations of solidarity and friendship, which traditionally have made war life-affirming as well as deadly . . . .

End of Forum
 
 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

In Memoriam: Clark G. Reynolds
Donald A. Yerxa

Prominent naval historian and contributor to Historically Speaking Clark G. Reynolds died suddenly of a heart attack following a jog on December 10, 2005 at his home in Pisgah Forest, North Carolina. He was 65 years old. Reynolds was a recognized authority on the fast carriers of World War II. He is best known for his The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy (McGraw-Hill, 1968), a classic work of naval history recognized by the U.S. Naval Institute as one of the ten best English-language naval books published in its first 100 years. His biography, Admiral John H. Towers: The Struggle for Naval Air Supremacy (Naval Institute Press, 1991), won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize and the K. Jack Bauer Award. In addition to his work in 20th-century American naval history, Reynolds wrote three books that updated and refined concepts of sea power and command of the sea initially made famous by Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Reynolds earned his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1964 where he studied under Theodore Ropp. He taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, the University of Maine, the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, and the University/College of Charleston where he received the faculty distinguished teaching award and the faculty research award for 1999 and retired as distinguished professor emeritus in history in 2002. He served two five-year terms on the Executive Board of the International Commission for Maritime History and was a member of the Secretary of the Navy’s Advisory Committee on Naval History from 1987 to 1995, chairing it from 1987-1989.

A lover of jazz music of the 1920s-1940s, “Doc” Reynolds was a volunteer disc jockey for jazz radio programs from 1973-76 on Maine Public Broadcasting Network and from 1983-2002 on South Carolina Educational Radio. He is survived by his wife of 42 years, Constance Caine Reynolds (who was his typist and proofreader), two sons, and a daughter.

I will never forget the first day I met him in 1972 at the University of Maine, where with Robert Greenlaugh Albion he created an extraordinary, albeit short-lived, program in naval history. I was a very green graduate student interested in exploring naval history, and as I made my way down the hall to his office, a booming voice and the aroma of Borkum Riff whiskey blend tobacco greeted me. He was thoroughly intimidating that day. He told me that military and naval history tended to attract “weirdos” who had no concept of what rigorous historical inquiry entailed and that if I studied with him, I would have to be a serious historian with ambitions to make significant contributions to the field. I must leave it to others to assess whether I was/am a weirdo or whether my work in naval history ever reached the threshold of significance, but these were important words to hear at the outset of a graduate career. His deep love of naval history was infectious, and his expectations of high performance from his students showed respect not only for them but the important work of the historian. He was the best lecturer I have ever heard, and I left many a class excited with some new insight that altered how I viewed the past.

As the student-mentor relationship matured over the years, Clark Reynolds became a great source of encouragement. When I ventured into new intellectual waters related to the interface between science and religion, he was thrilled that I had recaptured the excitement of new inquiry. And when I became editor of Historically Speaking, he supported me with regular notes of encouragement and occasional submissions that were far from boring.  Just months before he died, Clark asked me to write a jacket blurb for his last book, On the Warpath in the Pacific: Admiral Jocko Clark and the Fast Carriers (Naval Institute Press, 2005). It was an honor.

Clark Reynolds, like the salty naval officers he loved to study, was a man of great character and enormous talent. I have never met anyone with greater command of military and naval history. And I will always be grateful for his ability to inspire and lead by example. Clark was an “old school”  historian, troubled by the direction that historians of my generation have taken the profession and unafraid to speak his mind. This sentiment led him to write two of the most provocative essays ever to appear in these pages. This was the feisty Clark Reynolds who was my mentor and friend. He will be missed.

 

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Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society

LETTERS

John Lukacs, Meet Monsieur
Jourdain

In “Counterfactual is Wrong” (Historically Speaking, January/February 2006) John Lukacs asserts at the outset that counterfactual “is a very bad word.” It is hard to decipher an argument in the rambling narrative that follows. But one thing is clear: Lukacs is very unhappy with both my contribution to the forum on counterfactuals in the March 2004 issue of Historically Speaking and Barry Strauss’s article in the July/August 2004 issue. I tried to demonstrate that counterfactuals are necessary to evaluate causal claims. If we argue that x caused y, we assume, ceteris paribus, that y would not have happened in the absence of x. Without a large sample of comparable cases with variation of the dependent and independent variables (i.e., outcomes and putative causes of them)—something we rarely find in history—we need to engage the counterfactual case. I further contend that the difference between so-called factual and counterfactual arguments is greatly exaggerated; it is one of degree, not of kind. Both kinds of arguments rest on the quality of their assumptions, the chain of logic linking antecedents to consequences, and their consistency with available evidence. Lukacs rejects my assertion that “good history needs counterfactuals.” “Good history,” he writes “is the result of good historians,” and they are people who understand “the complexity of human nature” and the limitations of their potential knowledge of history.

In his article Strauss elaborates the example of the Battle of Salamis, making the case for its contingency. In a forthcoming book Strauss and Victor Hanson debate whether Greek victory was essential for the survival of Greece and the subsequent rise of the West.1 Their argument is, of course, unanswerable, but it compels both of them to articulate a set of unspoken assumptions that underlies their respective claims. By doing so, they raise new questions that are amenable to empirical investigation and push the debate to a higher plane. Lukacs is uncomfortable with uncertainty. Strauss, he insists, should accept John Huizinga’s deterministic view of Salamis and its outcome.

How can Huizinga and Lukacs know that the Greek victory at Salamis was inevitable without considering counterfactuals? Unless we assert that everything that happened had to happen, which is patently absurd (and something, we will see, that Lukacs himself does not believe), we need to consider what might have led to an alternative outcome, or no outcome at all. To know just how contingent or determined any outcome was, we need general laws against which to assess individual outcomes. There are no historical laws, so we need to engage in thought experiments and ask how much context we must mutate to get a different outcome, and just how malleable that context was. If Themistocles had not convinced the Spartan commander Eurybiades, and with his support, commanders from other city-states—something Herodotus tells us was nip and tuck—non-Athenian forces would have evacuated Salamis and there would have been no battle in the narrow straits where the lighter, more maneuverable Greek ships had a decided edge. For this reason and others that Herodotus and Strauss lay out, both Salamis and the victory of the Greeks were contingent, not determined.  This knowledge is critical to evaluating the contribution Themistocles made to Athens, and Hellas more generally.

John Lukacs can be compared to Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was shocked to discover that he spoke prose. Despite his scorn for speculation about alternative worlds, Lukacs speaks counterfactually. His Five Days in London: May 1940 is riddled with “what ifs.”2 The first comes on page 6 where he describes Churchill’s declaration on May 28 that Britain would go on fighting as a key turning point in World War II. At the outset he insists that Hitler came close to winning World War II. Churchill was the leader who could have lost the war, and his decision to continue fighting at any cost “saved Britain, and Europe, and Western civilization.” The implicit counterfactual here is that Hitler would have won if Churchill had behaved differently, failed to convince his war cabinet colleagues to go along with him, or had not been made prime minister. How close was Churchill’s victory in the cabinet? On page 120 we learn it was very close. Lukacs argues that if Neville Chamberlain had sided with Lord Halifax (Edward Wood), “Churchill’s position would have been not only very difficult but perhaps untenable.” Even a victory in the cabinet after a cantankerous debate—if knowledge of the division had become public—would have “affected and threatened British morale at this crucial time” (162).

Hitler still came close to defeating Britain, and Lukacs (44) offers the counterfactual that had Calais not been defended, two other German divisions would have joined Guderian’s push toward the beachheads. He quotes approvingly (44-45) Airey Neave’s argument that had this happened, “there would have been no need for Hitler’s intervention which lost Guderian the historic chance of winning the Second World War almost in a morning (italics in the text).” On page 140 he repeats his judgment that “a fierce direct thrust into Dunkirk, if so ordered by Hitler, would have been possible. It would have meant the end, that is, the capture of the entire British Expeditionary Force and perhaps of much else besides.” He repeats this counterfactual on pages 195-96.

Why bother to write about Britain in May 1940 unless Churchill’s domestic political victory was a near thing? Lukacs finally addresses this question toward the end of his account where he offers not one, but two counterfactuals: “Had Hitler won the Second World War we would be living in a different world,” and “Hitler was never closer to his ultimate victory than during those five days in May 1940” (187). The first counterfactual, he rightly asserts, is self-evident. The second, he concedes, requires an explanation. Three pages of counterfactual speculation follow concerning the implications of alternative outcomes at Dunkirk, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Normandy, all designed to show how essential Churchill was to victory in 1940!

On pages 127-28 Lukacs recognizes that leaders use counterfactuals to work through problems. Historians also use counterfactuals to evaluate the decisions and policies of leaders. We are told that Churchill fought on because he was convinced that any settlement with Germany would reduce Britain to satellite status, and that public knowledge of any negotiations would fan the flames of defeatism, already acute among the upper classes. Defeatism was likely to bring David Lloyd-George to power (128-29). He was old, admired Hitler, and almost certain to reach a separate peace. Churchill’s speculation about the future—the logical equivalent of counterfactual thought experiments about the past—is now history, and Lukacs’s evaluation of his judgment is based on a counterfactual assessment of Churchill’s expectations. Lukacs relies on such counterfactuals, as did his hero, Winston Churchill who, looking back on the war, recognized that the spring of 1940 was the period when Britain was at the edge of the abyss and that things could have gone differently.

It is likely that all of Lukacs’s other writings are equally infected by counterfactual reasoning. Good historians need counterfactual history, and good historians are people who recognize this truth and conduct their thought experiments about history explicitly and according to the most robust protocols. 

Richard Ned Lebow
James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government, Dartmouth College. 

1 Philip Tetlock, Richard Ned Lebow and Geoffrey Parker, Unmaking the West: What-If Scenarios that Rewrite World History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

2 John Lukacs, Five Days in London, May 1940 (Yale University Press, 1999).
 

John Lukacs Replies

Richard Lebow writes that my argument “is hard to decipher.” So let me try again. To speculate “what if?” is legitimate and at times even necessary for the historian. The term “counterfactual” is not: because history does not consist of “facts” and because historical causality is not mechanical and mathematical. Lebow employs the contrary categories of x and y, but in mathematics x and y are unchanging and unmovable and forever fixed categories, wherefore they are abstract. In human life and history they are not. “What if?” is a more-or-less sensible question: “What if Napoleon had not lost the battle of Waterloo?”—whereas that bad word “counterfactual” suggests a definition, for example, “There was no battle of Waterloo.”

“Lukacs is uncomfortable with uncertainty.” This statement saddens me, since it comes close to being counterfactual. All through my life and writing I have both argued and tried to illustrate that the purpose of historical knowledge is understanding rather than certainty. What may be even more important: every human event involves a potentiality, together with its actuality. In Historical Consciousness, but also elsewhere, I wrote about the epistemological concordance of this with what Heisenberg found as indeterminacy and uncertainty (not simply in “matter” but in our knowledge of matter).

Yet there are not only limits of certainty but also of uncertainty—and this is important not only for the historian but for any sane human being. Potentiality must be plausible. Lebow prefers the term “thought experiments.” But there are thought experiments and thought experiments. What if Hitler had subdued England in June 1940? This is worth thinking about, since that was an evident possibility: the very potentiality that made Churchill’s actual decision to fight on so important. But a contingency must be plausible enough to think, let alone say or write about. That Lee won at Gettysburg because the Argentine Army had come up to fight on the side of the South; that Hitler lost the battle of France in1940 because the Chinese and the Outer Mongolians attacked him; or that at the end of Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet elopes with an Egyptian astrologer may be “counterfactual” but unworthy even of speculation because so implausible as to be senseless.

John Lukacs
Phoenixville, Pennsylvania
 

“The Future of War”: What Ancient History Should Teach Us

In the forum on “The Future of War” (Historically Speaking, January/February 2006),  Professor Victor Davis Hanson writes in a tone of utter despair:

The general credo of current Peace and Conflict Resolution Theory programs in American universities is that classical notions of deterrence no longer apply, since either education or evolution can change the nature of man and substitute Enlightenment principles of education and dialogue for the use of credible defenses against primordial enemies. 

Since Hanson is a teacher of ancient history, does it not occur to him that education and conversation were precisely what Homer and Thucydides hoped could possibly preclude war? They knew that war was tragic, and to be reminded of its fearful consequences could make possible the political deliberation to avert it. Perhaps Hanson is stuck with the war in Iraq, surely a misreading of Thuycydides. But how in the world did the Cold War come to an end if not by moving from deterrence to dialogue?

John Patrick Diggins
Graduate Center, City University of New York
Victor Davis Hanson Replies
 

Victor Davis Hanson Replies

I found what I wrote optimistic, since history instructs us about a tried and successful method of what to do—and not to do—when confronted with what I called “primordial enemies”—whether a Hitler or Osama bin Laden. The corpus of classical literature suggests to us to trust but verify, yearn for peace but be prepared for war, and talk constantly, but always from a position of strength.

As we learned from Thucydides, all the debates at Sparta and Corinth concerning the perceived grievances of the respective city-states did little to preclude war once the Spartans assumed there was little to restrain them from marching into Attica, in an apparent belief that they had more to win than lose—deterrence in the short term in this case being lost by the overly clever Athenians.

What is a misreading of Thucydides is to assume that the conflict resolution efforts involved in the so-called Peace of Nicias ended or even ameliorated the war that came to an end only with the abject defeat of Athens in 404. If John Patrick Diggins is serious (?) in asking “how in the world did the Cold War 

Victor Davis Hanson
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
 

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