BOOKS
The Church, Marx and History
BY CHRISTOPHER HILL WHAT is the use of history? What, more worrying still, is the use of historians? When Voltaire discussed the subject two centuries ago he gave three examples of historical lessons which could hardly be forgotten. 'The history of the tyrant Christiern can prevent a nation from giving absolute power to a tyrant; and the undoing of Charles XII at Pultawa will warn a general not to plunge deep into the Ukraine without supplies. . . . Coalitions have always been formed against a too powerful state.' History has gone on teach- ing these lessons with monotonous regularity ever since; but it is not yet clear whether even the experience of Hitlerite Germany has enabled generals and politicians finally to learn them.
History has still not become an exact science, although 100 years ago Buckle -- one of the neglected great historians—had little doubt that `before another century has elapsed . . . it will be as rare to find an historian who denies the un- deviating regularity of the moral world, as it is now to find a philosopher who denies the regu- larity of the material world.' The high hopes of the Victorian have proved as unfounded as the optimism of the French rationalist. Most twentieth-century historians are more modest in their claims. They emphasise the negative rather than the positive value of history. Bury saw it as an increasingly 'powerful force for stripping the bandages of error from the eyes of men,' and Sir Lewis Namier says that 'the foremost task of honest history is to discredit and drive out its futile or dishonest varieties.' An older historian, Nie- buhr, thought this work of destruction only secondary. 'The critic might be content with the excision of fiction," the destruction of fraud : he only seeks to expose a specious history and he is content to advance a few conjectures, leaving the greater part of the whole in ruins. But the his- torian demands something positive : he must discover at least with some probability the general connectedness of events, and by a more credible story replace that which he has sacrificed to his better judgment.' The general connectedness of events' : it is a happily vague phrase for some- thing which many modern historians have ceased to look for altogether. Ranke, eschewing the 'high office' of 'judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages' wanted `only to show what actually happened.' But this is an even less attainable ideal : the process of writing down 'what actually happened' involves selection by the historian.
George Unwin produced an ingenious formula, one of the few which all historians can accept because of its flexibility. 'History,' he wrote, 'is an account of things that mattered most in the past.' Interpretations of what 'mattered most in the past' change from generation to generation, and so history is always having to be rewritten. Unwin said that the previous generation of English his- torians had thought the British Empire mattered most, whereas in 1924 'class conflicts and the interests of labour' mattered more. Hence the admirable Fabian school of the Hammonds, the Webbs and Professor Tawney. For our generation the equivalent phenomenon has been the rise of the state bureaucracy : this has helped to stimu- late the fashion for administrative history which began with Tout and Sir Lewis Namier and is now de rigueur for D. Phil. theses. But although society may determine historical fashions, Un- win's formula is ultimately entirely subjective : each historian decides for himself what 'mattered most.' Until historians arrive at agreement on 'the undeviating regularity of the moral world,' it is no more possible to obtain unanimity on 'what mattered most' than on 'what actually happened.' And we are as far as ever from 'the general con- nectedness of events.'
It is perhaps unfair to consider Christopher Dawson's posthumous book together with an anthology of pronouncements on history made by great historians from Voltaire to the present day.* The late Mr. Dawson was not a great historian : he was a diligent Roman Catholic publicist with a considerable and genuine interest in history. Naturally, articles written over thirty years tend to be repetitive, and by the time he reaches the end of the volume the reader will have had more than enough of Le Play, Spengler and Toynbee. Nor unless he shares Mr. Dawson's faith is he likely to be convinced by Mr. Dawson's philo- sophy of history. For Mr. Dawson had no desire to seek agreement with other historians on 'the undeviating .regularity of the moral world.' For him 'the [Roman] Church remains the guardian of the secret of history.'
But for all its intransigence Mr. Dawson's book links up with Mr. Stern's in one interesting respect, namely in its nagging (though of course hostile) interest in Marxism, since 'socialism alone possesses any kind of a sociology, and it derives considerable advantage from the fact.' Mr. Daw- son's object, of course, was to build up a Roman Catholic Sociology no less opposed than Marxism to those 'liberal-idealist philosophies' which he believed 20th-century experience had overthrown.
Marx, one of those historians who did try to see an objective connectedness in events, is inadequately represented in Mr. Stern's collec- tion; but his shadow hangs heavily over the * DYNAMICS OF WORLD' HISTORY. By Christopher Dawson, edited by John J. Mulloy. (Sheed and Ward, 25s.) THE VARIETIES OF HISTORY. Edited, selected and introduced by Fritz Stern. (Meridian Books, Thames and Hudson, 15s.) twentieth-century contributors. The liveliest of them are Unwin, Beard and Sir Lewis Namier' The first two own up to being influenced by Mail' and Sir Lewis's method, we are told by Sir John Neale, 'derives from Marx.' When Professor Namier declares that 'it certainly seems impossible to attach to conscious political thought the importance which was ascribed to it a hundred, or even fifty years ago,' he may be referring to the influence of Freud, but more to that of Marx' But Marx's influence, at least in western Europe, has been curiously one-sided, exclusively' economic : so much so that Mr. Stern even refers in his Introduction to Marx's 'economic deter" minism,' a phrase which would make Marx and Engels turn in their graves. Sir Lewis Namier has had to defend himself against the charge °I `taking the mind out of history,' of 'discerning self-interest or ambition in men, but showing i' sufficient appreciation of political principles and of abstract ideals.' The modern French monetary a school explains the ebbs and flows in the sixteenth" 1 century religious wars in terms of price fluctua- tions; an English historian suggests that the 1 Puritan Revolution was caused by the declining incomes of 'a section of the gentry. Curiously enough it is a Soviet Marxist, Pokrovsky, who points out that statistics, though necessary for historians, are not a substitute for history.
A corrective to the crude economic determinism of many modern historians is to be found among writers, less well known in this country, who have also clearly been influenced by Marx—thrise American cultural historians who are trying afresh to see 'the, general connectedness of events' 1) linking ideas to the societies which gave then' birth. 'The next generation,' one of them writes. 'may see the development of a somewhat ne° historical genre, which will be a mixture °I traditional history and the social sciences. It will differ from the narrative history of the past in that its primary purpose will be analytical. Itwig differ from the typical historical monograph °I the past in that it will be more consciously designed as a literary form and will focus on types of problems that the monograph has all too often failed to raise..'
I should not myself go all the way with these Americans, who 'love to talk about our culture 35 we do about our psyches.' I feel a little uneasy when Professor Barzun tells us that `the task of appreciating all that is historically wrapped up in a Cavalier lyric' brings the historian face to face with, inter alia, 'the origin of the fashion for Men to wear long hair in curls.' Sir Lewis is' more cautious. The unqualified practitioner must 1101 be let loose, not even on the dead, and a rare smattering of psychology is .likely to result in superficial, hasty judgments, framed in a nauseat' ing jargon.' But he, too, advocates use of the methods of modern psychology. The main impression gained from Mr. Sterns useful book is the lack of agreement among COal' petent historical practitioners as to what they are about. A distinguished historian of the last genera' tion said that the ideal history would have no readers, and many academie historians today seem to go to endless pains to live up to that hlgh standard. So it is agreeable to end by quoting from the first number of The English Historical Review: 'We believe that dull history is usually bad history.'
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