Class and ideology: The bourgeoisie and its historians

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of European Ideas, in Great Britain.

Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 267-286,

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CLASS AND IDEOLOGY: THE BOURGEOISIE AND ITS HISTORIANS VICTORG . KIERNAN* In torpid times a sense of history, awareness of the past, can be a dead weight on the present, as it seems to have been in old China. In more stirring days, how history is written becomes an index of a changing world, like the shadow on a sundial. A restless, enquiring curiosity about bygone things awakens when men are disturbed and uncertain about thingsnow, whereas unquestioning acceptance of society as it is makes for acceptance of its accompaniment, a stereotyped view of the past. Modern Europe has raised the study of history to a level never occupied by it before, because bewildering alteration of every aspect of life has made the past a lifeline to hold on to, or an oracle to forecast the future. Before the nineteenth century history-writing had seldom ranked high among intellectual activities. ‘Great abilities,’ in Dr Johnson’s opinion, ‘are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand. . . .‘I Wordsworth dismissed historiography more succinctly as ‘time’s slavish scribe’.’ Thomas Carlyle, by contrast, writing in 1830 could extol it as ‘the true fountain of knowledge; by whose light alone . . . . can the Present and the Future be interpreted or guessed at’.3 Europe was learning to study itself and its ancestral self side by side. Economic and political upheaval involved growing numbers of people in the history-making process, which the commonalty had been accustomed to endure passively. In the lead were the expanding middle classes; in time others lower down would join in, and the history of labour would come to be written. With feminism there would come scrutiny of how women have fared in other times and places. ‘For women, history does not exist’, Pavese could write a generation ago;4 if he was right, it was because history had always been made by men and imposed on women, much as it was imposed in Asia on the masses. Now that women are able to feel that they too are or can be a historical force, history, their own in particular, takes on a fresh meaning for them. Industrial revolution ushered in a new industrial capitalism, more energetic than any forerunner and marking a sharper turn than any earlier form of money-making had done. With it came a heightened sense of a changing world. By and large, historiography expanded in nineteenth-century Europe along with the establishment, by spasmodic stages, of bourgeoisie and capitalism as the most important class and as the dominant mode of production. It may not be fanciful to see an affinity between the bourgeois spirit of accumulation and the history-writer’s or reader’s feeling for the past, *27 Nelson Street, Edinburgh EH3 6LJ, U.K. 267

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as an intimate part of himself, his reluctance to let anything of it slip out of his hands. More obviously, historical study when taken seriously is a laborious business. Noblemen, even monarchs, might write or dictate their memoirs, but grubbing through dusty archives is a different matter, demanding the readiness for hard work proper to the middle classes; also respect for fact, to which blue blood easily feels superior. Sir Arthur Wardour, the baronet in Scott’s novel, complains that his argumentative neighbour Oldbuck, scion of a family of printers, ‘avails himself of a sort of pettifogging intimacy with dates, names, and trifling matters of fact’, an accurate memory ‘entirely owing to his mechanical descent’, but surely useful, Miss Wardour observes, for ‘historical investigation’.5 A cognate endowment was the commercial honesty without which - often though it might be flouted - capitalism could not have made its way. There are always features in common between an intelligentsia and the prevailing standards of the society it belongs to. In bourgeois life, to falsify a statement of accounts is the sin against the Holy Ghost; though to arrange its figures so as to suggest certain conclusions is quite laudable. Historians were groping towards a more reliable, objective method which would enable their craft to hold up its head among other ‘sciences’. But they were also, consciously or not, combing the past for evidence to endorse their views of the present, or what the present ought to be. One facet of the bourgeois order was an intensified nationalism. Stendhal tells us that when the French were entering Italy in the Revolutionary wars it was drummed into the soldiers that Milan was founded in 580 B.C. by their forefathers from Gaul, and they were heard repeating this story among themselves. ’ Nineteenth-century patriots wrangled about whether Charlemagne was a Frenchman or a German. Not without warrant, an Indian historian of today quotes the epigram of Paul Valery: ‘History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect’.’ Europe has never been a single entity, except by virtue of some unlikenesses to Afro-Asia. Nineteen-seventeen only deepened a very old dividing-line between east and west. Since the Reformation there had been another, between north and south, the one Protestant and progressive, the other Catholic and stagnant. Historiography in nineteenth-century Spain had a very retarded growth. A general unevenness of quality reflected the patchy success of the bourgeois order in establishing itself here or there over the continent; the new trend took on a variety of guises, often far removed from the straightforwardness of its clearest statements. Even these were imperfect, because the bourgeois outlook was never completely itself, even in Britain, where the aristocracy was allowed to remain so influential, or France where Catholicism kept many older ways of thinking alive. But everywhere this outlook on the past had a negative, critical side, in its exposure of feudal shortcomings or survivals, and a more positive one in the attempt to chart history as a process of change brought about by comprehensible causes. The bourgeois ethos, with all its innate contradictions, found more direct expression in history-writing because the impulse came mainly, in the formative years, from outside the academic cloister. As history came to be a

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recognised vocation its practitioners were quick to make themselves at home each in his own little speciality, in the spirit, again bourgeois - or kulak - of individual proprietorship, and interest in broader panoramas dwindled. We may hope for a clearer view of underlying tendencies, and of the dilemmas history was encountering, by turning to representatives of a less fully professional sort. Some of these were active participants in political or other movements. Men of action have had special reason to be conscious of the moulding influence of the past, and of analogies between its problems and their own. During the French Revolution they often turned their eyes back to Cromwell and the Long Parliament; during the Spanish civil war Communists and their Anarchist rivals alike claimed to be the true heirs of the Jacobin tradition of 1793, and the POUM party denounced the Communists, in Trotsky’s vein, as ‘Thermidorians’. An American scholar has noted Hitler’s fondness for historical parallels and examples.8 Men of action have no doubt had their own defects of vision. For too long, under their patronage, the staple theme of history-writing, like that of poetry as Milton complained in Paradise Lost, ’ was war and conquest, armies always galloping up and down. Horace said the same thing nearly two thousand years earlier when he humorously expostulated with a historian who was detailing the Trojan wars but had nothing to tell him about the cost of firewood or Chian wine for a domestic celebration.‘” ‘There is too much fighting in history’, someone in another of Scott’s novels says.” Historical novelists were multiplying. They had precursors in the historical drama, in England going back to Shakespeare and the beginnings of the bourgeois era. Verse plays on similar themes lingered on, past Goethe and Schiller to Byron, Ibsen, Tennyson; they grew increasingly stilted, but Byron worked his way through to Don Juan, Ibsen to Peer Gynt, which may both be called satirical novels in verse about nineteenth-century men and manners. Prose novelists travelled lighter, and did much to free history from its iron mask. In Jonathan Wild, in 1743, Fielding derided the notion that ‘the quintessence of history’ lies in chronicling the great men from whom all grand events flow; he exhibited the protagonists of his story as so many great scoundrels. In many ways novelists took the lead in clothing bare bones with the flesh and blood of social detail, as Jane Austen did with clerical life, or Dickens with law and lawyers. For years after the Napoleonic wars, novels were being written about them in Britain, often mines of information about army or navy life. Most of these writers came from the middle classes and wrote for a middle-class public; often with serious purposes as well as for entertainment, like Marryatt’s advocacy of reform of conditions in the navy. Thackeray as essayist and historical or social novelist was often an undisguised spokesman of his class, satirising aristocratic pretensions, snobberies, vices; though his viewpoint, like the fox-hunting Trollope’s, was a shifting one, revealing the ambiguities of a bourgeoisie half trimmed up into gentility. One Spanish novelist, Perez Galdos, may deserve to be called the best historian his country was capable of producing. His Episodios Nacionales were offered as a serious experiment at an alternative mode of history-writing. In his narrative of the revolution of 1854 he speaks of the discordance between the living flow of

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events and their academic version, ‘covered with artificiality like an old woman with painted face, unnatural in language and everything else’.12 Impatience with heroics and curiosity about the concerns of common life were gaining ground as the eighteenth century went on, and what the French Revolution termed ‘active’ as distinct from ‘passive’ citizens grew in number. They helped to fertilise the hypothesis, worked out largely by French and Scottish thinkers, that history could be conceived as a series of stages, determined by the ‘mode of subsistence’ prevailing at different times: basically, hunting economies, agricultural, commercial or manufacturing.” Scotland’s share in this theorising is notable. It was a country with very different experiences from England’s to look back on, and a culture as much European as British, and it was passing rapidly through a transition from feudal to capitalist which in England had been far more gradual: a sensation of metamorphosis came more naturally to Scats. The theory was strong in its conception of history as a process unfolding through a sequence of economic phases; it had less success in explaining their political or ideological accompaniments, or how one mode of subsistence came to supplant another. Its logical sequel was the Marxist theory of history. In writings of the years following the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, when men could weigh up the immense changes that had come over their world, fragments of what may be called unconscious Marxism are frequently to be met with. Southey tells us in his life of John Wesley that ‘those men who become for posterity the great landmarks of their age, receive their bias from the times in which they live, and the circumstances in which they are placed, before they themselves give the directing impulse’.‘4 An anonymous English commentator on the Second Empire, quite conventional in most of his thinking, dissected it purely in terms of class relations,” not very far away from Marx’s own analysis. In fiction we can see the Spirit of the Age pointing more informally in the same direction, and men’s habits of mind, patterns of conduct, social values, shown as arising out of their economic positions, the material fabric of their existence. Marxism can be said to have offered the clearest interpretation of history attainable within the new framework of things, with its expanding horizons and intellectual possibilities. Marxist thought was from this point of view the most complete within the reach of the European bourgeoisie: not of its unloved companion, the new industrial working class, which might occupy much of the scene that Marx’s mind worked on, but itself made no contribution to his ideas. By a paradox for which analogies might not be hard to find, the bourgeoisie could not accept, but had to do its best to evade, what was in this sense its own crowning discovery, but one prophetic, therefore, of its demise. There is always a distinction to be drawn between a class considered in the abstract, as a continuing entity, and the individuals or groups composing it, with all their froth of greeds, interests, foibles; and those who formulate its ideas are not always members of it, or even closely connected with it, but may be drawn from anywhere in the ranks of a miscellaneous intelligentsia. A capitalist era could be no more than a comparatively brief interlude

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between the long pre-industrial span of human evolution, and some kind of rational organisation of society to harness its new resources to the common good. With this intermediate character it suffered from a pervading insecurity, that ‘sense of the provisional’ that Burckhardt recognised as a legacy of the French Revolution.i6 It was obsessed with the past, which might furnish some comfortable thoughts of progress, and with a future which looked more and more problematical. Always engaged with opponents on two fronts, the bourgeoisie could not single-mindedly follow up its intuitions to their conclusion. It had to applaud its assaults on its predecessors, while denouncing attacks by the lower orders on its own ascendancy; hence a two-facedness in all its approach to the history at least of modern times. Eighteen forty-eight was the fatal year, the loud thunderclap that halted or staggered the whole class in its onward stride, and enabled conservatives to frighten it with the prospect of a coming revolt of the proletariat everywhere, a new ‘barbarian invasion’.

In Britain where it led the field industrially it could not bring itself to complete its work by sweeping away the parasitic gentry and nationalising the land, as its more consistently bourgeois representatives wanted it to do. In France, where 1789 had pushed it into the political lead, it was soon ready to take refuge with a Napoleon III. The writer already quoted on the Second Empire found ‘the great crowd of the middle classes unprincipled, timid, egotistical, and politically the most uneducated and most prejudiced class of the country’.” In Germany and further east the bourgeoisie was content to find its Lebensraum, as Shakespeare’s Henry IV came to his throne, ‘by indirect crook’d ways’, by ignominious compromise with older ruling classes and institutions instead of by wresting power from them. Capitalism came to be more and more solidly established, but a capitalist class with a conscious mission to transform the world was fading away. Inevitably this blurring of identity would bring with it a dim or squinting vision of the past. Of this, Carlyle is a striking example. A peasant from a backward corner of Scotland still in the grip of poverty and theology, he had only the most negative view of the Enlightenment to which his native land contributed so much. He was a ready-made expositor of the moods of faltering selfconfidence of a bourgeoisie falling far short of what it might have accomplished. He had no faith in its mission, no belief in its parliamentary and party politics; he was more inclined to look to an enlightened aristocracy (with well-chosen teachers like himself) than to any other class, and breathed a more than Calvinist contempt for the common mass of humanity. As a historian he could discern only the Great Man bestriding the narrow world like a colossus, or else - when the warnings of Providence and Thomas Carlyle went unheeded - social prostration and anarchy. His approach to history was scarcely more scientific than Walter Scott’s. What he had, as abundantly as anyone who ever thought about the past, was an intense feeling for it, an achingly poignant awareness of the gulf between present and past, living and dead, across which men can only stretch out their

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arms, like Virgil’s ghosts on the bank of the Styx, ripae ulterioris amore. It comes out as finely as anywhere in his essay on Baillie the Covenanter,‘s where he confesses his inability to find any meaning in the welter of the Cromwellian era, but conjures up in his picture of the trial of Strafford an incomparably lifelike impression of it. This hypersensitiveness to the past must have been related to his painful estrangement from it in his own life, as he drifted away from the cast-iron religious convictions he was brought up in. ‘For the past is all holy to us,’ he writes elsewhere; ‘the Dead are all holy.“” It was a drift into intellectual isolation, not into more modern ways of thinking. He was alert to the social atmosphere of his own times, with its tremors of class conflict, but had very little comprehension of what was going on under the surface. He was equally little able to penetrate the realities of the past, while he clung all the more tenaciously to every small survival of it: an old boot from the foot of a man long dead and buried could seem to him a precious relic. And this imaginative, emotional steeping in the past is something that every historian needs, and that today’s statistics and computerisings may be leaving too little room for. What Carlyle aspired to, he enshrined in a graphic sentence written in 1850: the historian’s task is to ‘smelt, in the all-victorious fire of his soul’, the ‘bewildering rubbish-mountains’ of facts ‘till they give up the golden ingot that lies imprisoned in them’.2” What the poetic or inspirational method amounted to was that history’s baffling complexities had to be simplified into the motives and doings of a few significant individuals. His soaring esteem for these can most indulgently be viewed as a protest against a fashionable tendency he found fault with, to degrade remarkable events, or men, like the Reformation or Luther, into mere by-products of the ‘force of circumstances’;” a protest, to borrow a modern term, against reductionism. There was a ‘vulgar Marxism’, as well as the dawning of a true Marxism, before Marx; championship of great men and high deeds was a cruder assertion than Marx’s of the part played in history by human intelligence and will. In his earlier years Carlyle had inklings of something better. It was time for politics and wars to retire to the background, he was writing in 1832, at the age of thirty-seven, and make way for ‘the Temple, the Workshop and Social Hearth’.22 But this was nullified before long - he aged quickly - by his dogma of great men being the prime movers of history, his continual thunderous chorus of ‘See, the conquering Hero comes’. His chosen supermen had little to do with workshop or hearth, and through his eyes appear manifestations of supernal rather than human power. An 1859 reviewer noted his obsession with ‘the demonic in history’, and criticised his heroes as being, like Byron’s, all very much the same.23 Carlyle’s residual religiousness obliged him to clothe the ‘demonic’ with the attributes of a presiding though inscrutable deity. As his latest biographer says, he postulated ‘universal and providential laws . not . accessible to logic His fondness for referring to them as Eternal Verities, and intellect’.24 Eternal Silences, and so on, was confession of his failure to make sense of history except in a naive moralistic fashion, and in effect condemned it to immobility.

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His French Revolution was an endeavour to convince the ruling classes of Britain that they were in danger of the same fate as those of France if they refused to turn over a new leaf. From that point his historical writing followed He could not carry out his projected work on a downward curve. seventeenth-century England, intended to contrast Puritan moral health and energy with Victorian materialism. He failed to write a long-meditated book on Ireland, and by the end of 1851 was falling back on the futile and not even very congenial undertaking, the interminable Frederick the Great, on which he wasted his remaining years. Despite this poor record, he had an appreciable influence, both on an occasionally historical novelist like Dickens and on a professional like Froude. Liberalism in nineteenth-century Spain was a feeble growth, and middleclass compilers of bulky biographies or narratives of recent happenings were apt to console themselves for the impotence of their class with appeals to the verdict of history in times to come, or what a diplomat called its ‘impartial, cold, and severe reasoning’.25 It is flattering to the narrator to see himself in fantasy as a Chief Justice, or a Rhadamanthus, condemning or rewarding or pardoning, and to a weak middle class like Spain’s to imagine itself some day strong enough to lay down the law. In Britain bourgeois spokesmen could feel sure of their ability to extend their sway over the past, as their class was doing over the present, and had less need to invoke shadowy tribunals of the future. A desire to explain history in plausible terms, and trace the pathway leading up to their own hegemony, is natural to any such class and its intelligentsia. Macaulay exhibits this inclination as clearly as anyone; he is the antithesis of Carlyle, that pessimist from a still semifeudal borderland, as an optimistic eulogist of England’s swelling riches and spreading enlightenment. In his essay of 1830 on another pessimist, Southey, who lauded the Middle Ages as a far better time than the present, Macaulay extolled the benefits of industrialism, and looking back into history maintained that the human race was born to prosper: private effort created wealth faster than any bad government could squander it. ‘History is full of the signs of this natural progress of society,’ he argued. ‘. . .We see the wealth of nations increasing, and all the arts of life approaching nearer and nearer to perfection.‘26 His History of England was to be a monument to the doctrine of progress, erected to convince his fellow-countrymen that it was ‘bliss to be alive’ in nineteenth-century Britain. Macaulay shared Thackeray’s relish for ridiculing effete aristocracy. Yet in the context of English political tradition, his reading of bourgeois philosophy was at the same time the ‘Whig interpretation of history’, stemming from 1688 and the landowning oligarchy which stagemanaged the Glorious Revolution without calling in the people. In point of theory, for which he had little aptitude, he cannot be said to have come up to the best standard of the eighteenth century. It was a weakness he shared with most English history-writing, the result of a much less sharp confrontation of bourgeois and aristocrat in his England, where agrarian capitalism had paved the way for industrial capitalism, by comparison with France. Carlyle attributed to his nebulous though noisy Providence a plan for gradually evolving order out of a chaotic universe; he credited the British

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empire with a civilising mission here below, a share in the divine master-plan. He knew very little about the empire; Macaulay is a rare case of a leading historian who spent some years working in it. His celebrated Minute on Education, written at Calcutta in 1835, had profound consequences for India by ensuring that higher learning would be in English, not in any Indian language, classical or vernacular. Historical studies had a lofty place in his argument. He deemed Sanskrit literature inferior in them to England’s even in Saxon or Norman times: Hindu annals were full of ‘kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long - and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’. Europeans going out to a country like India, proud of their now flourishing ‘science’ of history, would be disposed to look down on its inhabitants all the more for having so little knowledge of their own past. They were soon at work writing Indian history themselves from motives often utilitarian. Once in control of India, they had to shape an administrative system, and to know how to adjust this to Indian habits’and expectations they needed to know how the country was run in former days. They were well aware, as an Indian scholar says, ‘of the use or practical implications of their work for British rule in India’.27 Into this, with the better minds, the civilising mission entered prominently. At home the bourgeoisie might not be making a clean sweep of the an&en r&me, for fear of being swept away in turn by the masses; it could make up for this by priding itself on abolishing feudalism in India. (In reality its policies were in some ways having an opposite effect, - one more pointer to the limitations of the bourgeois mind.) James Mill, working at the India Office in London and from 1806 busy with his history of India, was one who took the removal of time-honoured anachronisms and abuses very seriously. His scrutiny of Indian societies has been called ‘an extrapolation of the Scottish sociological studies’ of the later eighteenth century;28 and he was up to date in not wanting to write history in terms of kings and their scuffles, or to lionise adventurers like Clive. The fact that India’s own chronicles contained not much else may have helped to strengthen European reaction against the old mode; and British works on India, mostiy written on the spot by men in the East India Company’s service, may be supposed to have reinforced tendencies in history-writing at home. History could serve political as well as administrative requirements. The many-volume anthology of native records and memoirs by H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson has been regarded by some Indians in our day as designed to make India feel shamed and inferior, and to set Hindus against Muslims by depicting the long epoch of Muslim rule as a soulless tyranny, only ended at last by the British assumption of power. Perhaps the aim was not really quite so Machiavellian, but the ‘contemptuous approach and hostile attitude’ of Elliot’s first instalment, in 1849,29 may indeed have marked a souring of British feeling towards India. (It may have owed something to the 1848 revolutions in Europe; tidings of them gave Anglo-India as well as the middle classes in Britain a fright.30) He died in 1853, four years before the Mutiny; Dowson continued and expanded his collection in the embittered years after 1857, when it could be counted on both to restore British confidence in the rightness of British rule, and to convince educated Indians that their own

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rulers had been at any rate no better. They were being taught English history as well, and were expected to be impressed by it with the Englishman’s unique gifts of statesmanship; though a fear was sometimes expressed that it might unsettle them to hear too much about troublemakers like Hampden and Cromwell.31 In the upshot a good many Indians did feel constrained to accept a good deal of the British thesis - which was also Karl Marx’s - of an India rescued from inanition by British intervention. ‘Practically all existing “Indian history” written in English’, a Western scholar has asserted, rather too sweepingly, ‘can in fact be adequately characterised as “imperialist” historiography, in the sense that it reflects the outlook of foreign and alien invaders as conquerors of India.’ One evidence he cites is a disposition to find forerunners of the British in the Aryan settlers in ancient India, bringing with them the rudiments of a civilisation doomed to be overborne, in the course of ages, by aboriginal darkness3’ Much of the Cambridge ~isfory of Z~d~awas compiled by governors and generals, exchanging sceptre or sword for pen, not without thoughts, it may be suspected, of Julius Caesar composing his Gallic War. When such men wrote of things closer at hand and more within their range, they could be more realistic. Marx would have found little to object to in Sir W. W. Hunter’s account of the rebellion of the primitive Santa1 people in 1854.33 French memories had the still fresh stimulus of 1789, enigmatic but unforgettable. Historians were able to see it very early, if somewhat too simply and neatly, as the overturning of aristocracy by bourgeoisie. Soon they were turning their lantern on other events, as Guizot, that archbourgeois, did on the English civil wars, still a mystery to the English. His account of them did not entirely satisfy Marx, then engaged in putting together his own theory of history, with 1789 as one of its starting-points.34 ‘Michelet created the religion of the Revolution’,35 deviating in one direction from bourgeois realism as later Frenchmen like Taine did in the other. With Jaures socialism began to take possession of the subject; it has continued to do so, upholding the more ideal aims of a bourgeois revolution on which most of the bourgeoisie has turned its back. The division of wartime France between Vichy and Resistance was the translation of a schism from the realm of scholarship to that of blood and iron.

Germany, where History was to have the warmest welcome of all, in the early years of the century was economically far behind Britain or France, with too much of its progressive middle class in the half-French Rhineland, and with philosophical systems for its chief manufacture. Distortions of historical perception were correspondingly acute. Hegel inherited the evolutionary ideas astir in his boyhood, and lived through the tumultuously thrilling era of the steam-engine, the guillotine and Napoleon marching from Madrid to Moscow. But for him as a professor in a Prussian university, evolution had to end with a Hohenzollern state, doubtless not without some virtues of its own, and history could be expounded only in strange hieroglyphics. It was being

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written partly by the light of reason, partly under extrinsic influences, among which religion continued to make itself felt, if in a less orthodox fashion. Hegel had to strike a balance between old beliefs in a Providence guiding mankind, as Jehovah had once done, and newer ideas of change brought about by tangible forces. God had to be kept, in some shape, but Hegel invested him with a very impersonal shape, not unlike the Brahman or universal spirit of ancient Indian speculation. He has been called ‘the last of the great apologists for Christianity’, his Absolute Idea a substitute for the Word made Flesh, his dialectical triad for the Trinity.“h His book on the philosophy of history, one of his later works, contains many passages about material circumstances, from climate to wage-struggles, but as these things have no organic relation with his metaphysical apparatus it is never clear what part he considers them to have played in history. He has good things to say about psychology, where his fictions are less of an impediment. His contemporary, Goethe, showed a very clear recognition of the extraordinariness of the events he lived through, and the revelation they afforded of the workings of history. From contact with them, he told Eckermann in old age, ‘I have attained results and insight impossible to those who are born now and must learn all these things from books that they will not understand.‘37 Yet Goethe can scarcely be credited with a new and more mature understanding of history as a whole. His most vivid sense was of what he, and others following him, called ‘the Daemonic’; of every remarkable innovator - himself like the rest, Napoleon above all - being a man possessed, whirled along by forces beyond his ken, employed by them for purposes only glimpsed by him. 38 This notion of genius owing its feats to a dynamic somehow over and above itself might without much difficulty be traced by a Marxist to the social tides, the mass forces, that envelope the individual and sweep him and history forward with them. It does not seem that Goethe himself was able, any more than his disciple Carlyle, to identify the sources of human strength in any such way: his ‘Daemonic’ remains floating in the air, as inexplicable as Hegel’s ‘Absolute’. His chronic attempts and failures to come to terms with and fathom the true meaning of the French Revolution may be taken as an index of this. Jacob Burckhardt, who was to wrestle more systematically with some of the same problems, was a boy of fourteen - born in the same year as Marx when Goethe died in 1832. German Switzerland insulated him from the nationalism which too many of Europe’s intellectuals fell back on to stifle their misgivings, and left him a faithful embodiment of the hypochondria overtaking what may be called the higher self of a bourgeoisie that was gaining the whole world and losing its own soul. A compendium of his views can be found in the published set of his lecture-notes of 1865-85 on European history: they are enough to explain his reputation as ‘one of the great philosophical historians of the nineteenth century’.“” They show all the reverence that was coming to be paid to history; though Burckhardt calling ‘the contemplation of historical ages one of the noblest undertakings”O was far removed in spirit from Marx declaring that the business of philosophy was not to contemplate the world but to change it. The two men were at one in

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deploring any parcelling out into compartments of ‘the great intellectual continuum of aff things’ in the human past.41 Burckhardt was not an amateur historian like Marx, but he was far less a professional specialist than most of those who came after. His reliance on the civilisation he belonged to and cherished fell away early and sharply, when he was shocked by the European uprising of 1848 that Marx threw himself into so wholeheartedly; he typifies the ensuing panic and defeatism of the bourgeoisie, due even more to fear of the insurgent masses than to the triumph of the autocracies. Burckhardt conceded the virtues of the modern State, such as its guarantees of ownership and the right to believe, but he pointed out that these were benefits for men as private beings, not collectively as citizens:42 they stood for legality without democracy. He deplored the outcome, though he had no alternative to offer to ‘the total egoism’ now reigning, the ‘enormous veneration of life and property’43 - to which 1914 was to be an ironic rejoinder. Burckhardt like Marx believed that with the gap between rich and poor widening, the middle classes were sinking into decline.44 It was natural to him, a descendant of the old city patriciate of Basel, to find one consequence in a declining culture. ‘Hurry and worry’ were spoiling life, under the evil literature was being turned into an spell of ‘universal competition’, ‘industry’. 45 But his dissatisfaction with the bourgeoisie projected itself far into the past; he seemed to see it as degenerate from the cradle, or from very early in life at least. Culturally it was going downhill by the seventeenth century, no longer capable of living a life of its own. It was another token of his scepticism about its pose as bearer of progress that he had very little good and much bad to say of the Reformation, and could sound more sympathetic to the Counter-Reformation. He dismissed the civil wars in England as ‘only a thinly disguised military revolution’, though he acknowledged their transforming effect. To him Levellers were no better than dangerous firebrands, and Cromwell’s party a mixture of fanatics and scoundrels.46 He admitted grudgingly some benefits of the French Revolution, but doubted whether it had left mankind happier. He was as censorious of the ‘Jacobin’ school of history-writing as of the Jacobins themselves, thus shutting his eyes to a vitally growing current of ideas which would carry many historians towards an approximation to Marxism. It was easier to look far back and pay tribute to the Roman empire.47 Inability to feel close to the bourgeoisie, to associate his own emotional self with its record and its prospects, left Burckhardt without an anchor, and hence prone to despondency about mankind at large. His case was the opposite to that of Macaulay, so firmly attached to a class and its ethos that all his judgments were cocksure, his predictions rosy, while his mind, as has been observed, stood still: his society might be progressing, his ideas were not. Burckhardt made a virtue of his isolation from his time by preaching that a historian should chart the conflicts of bygone times without taking sides; his task is simply to understand, keeping clear of ‘foolish joys and fears’.48 There is something here of a Buddhist spirit of non-attachment, something of Goethe’s Olympian posture. Burckhardt’s own case shows that such

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objectivity is impossible to maintain for long; and he could not help lamenting ‘the silenced moans of all the vanquished’, and the sad truth: ‘How much must perish so that something new may arise!‘49 Men’s satisfaction consists primarily of ‘material enjoyment’, with anything more refined only secondary:50 an obstinate vein of realism put him on the same track as Marx. Yet a hankering to escape from an unpalatable conclusion, to uphold like a true intellectual the primacy of ideas, peeps out in his predilection for the sixteenth century, that age of ‘tremendous innovations’, where it is possible, if it ever can be, ‘to view history as history of the intellect’.51 He could even indulge in a nostalgia for some obscure Providence, half-seriously guessing at a ‘dark supreme will of world history’ at work in the break-up of the Carolingian empire.52 Sometimes he falls back as heavily as anyone else on the great men who enable a historian to reduce his material to a chapter of accidents which he is under no obligation to explain; they also leave a back door open for the divine (or diabolical) purposes that can be supposed to have set them in motion. Gustavus Vasa was a ‘very extraordinary personality’ who propelled Sweden into its era of glory, a man in whom the nation could behold its image. For two decades the struggle for Dutch independence rested on William of Orange, and would have been inconceivable without him.53 In neither case is much said about the historical forces that could have moulded such leaders. Burckhardt makes very large room also for the spirited elites which have probably made more history than any solitary individuals however towering. A reference to the Jesuits leads to the reflection: ‘It is not so hard for firmly united, clever, and courageous men to do great things in the world. Ten such men affect 100,000’ - because, again, the majority are concerned only with material advantage.54 This sordid motivation he seems to attribute mainly to the empty-headed masses, with a tacit hint that the higher classes, or at any rate their cream, may rise to something better. He was beset by dread of a revolt of the many-headed beast that would put an end to civilisation, or what was left of it. He admired the Middle Ages for (among other virtues) their principle of ‘natural authority’, as against his own day when power belonged solely to the the Reformation for (among other faults) the fact, masses. 55 He condemned as he held it to be, that during it ‘The worst elements of the population rose to More realistically he saw that governments would seek to divert the top.‘56 the aspiration for ‘universal democracy’ kindled by 1789 and kept going by by provoking national feuds, for ‘the great social question of property’, instance over shares in the parts of the world not yet appropriated by imperialism. Proletarian mutiny, and militarism, were now ‘the two clamps of the vice’ within which civilisation was being crushed.“’ He foresaw popular despotisms, of which Napoleon III had given Europe a foretaste; like a good many latter-day critics of fascism he was sometimes ready to give the stupid mob most of the blame, instead of looking for what stupefied it and recognising in such dictatorships the final, total abandonment by capitalism of the liberal-bourgeois ideals of its youth. The shadow of the arms race and a coming explosion lay heavily on his mind. He even wondered how much longer the planet could support life,‘* before - like civilisation - reaching exhaustion.

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Treitschke stands out as the salient example in central Europe of how the bourgeoisie and its ideologists could banish such shadows by exchanging the cosmopolitan outlook of their adolescence for the hysteria of nationalism. The son of a senior army officer, not in Prussia but in Saxony, he might have been happiest as a soldier; he may be looked upon as a hybrid of bourgeois-professional and ancien-r&me. He was in several ways a man of good sense and good taste; the best parts of his work on nineteenth-century Germany deal with topics off the political highroad, like painting or literature. He was at first distrustful of Berlin and Bismarck, before his conversion to faith in Prussia’s manifest destiny; his strident Prussianism in later years may have been needed to subdue lingering doubts. It went with the neo-feudal enthusiasm after 1870 of the bourgeoisie, Bismarck’s old enemies, strutting in the borrowed feathers of their Prussian uniforms. A new class demanding power, as the German Liberals had done, may instinctively wish to feel that it is arriving on the stage heroically, sword in hand. Treitschke with his military background was easily shocked by anything subversive, among students for instance; he wanted history made on the drill-ground. His image of the French Revolution is horrific, anti-French and superficial. National unity was his ideal; he cherished a fanciful picture of how in Prussia after the defeat by Napoleon ‘prince and people stood together, like one great family’.59 He could discern ‘the indestructible bond of economic interests’,a but only for nations, not for classes: social division was to be kept scrupulously out of sight. Glorification of war could displace the rebellious impulse strong in Germany before its diversion outward by Bismarck; the sweeping away of most of the petty principalities, and the compulsory federation of the rest, could be thought of as ‘revolutionary’, even if it was accomplished by Prussian bayonets, - and we may recall that this is how Engels regarded it, with Bismarck as a revolutionary malgrt Zui.(jl Treitschke looked back to the reforms brought to Silesia by Frederick the Great; he dwelt on the fossilised condition of his native Saxony, littered with feudal relics, before the union, and the misgovernment of Hesse in the early nineteenth century by the Elector William and his mistress the Countess Reichenbach.62 Prussia, renovated after the battle of Jena, could shine by comparison, and offer the German middle classes a comfortable, orderly, well-patrolled shelter. Treitschke shows some insight into the interplay of culture and society. He draws a useful distinction between the progress of man individually and men collectively. But he had no contribution to make to general theory. In the Hegelian inheritance he saw only the ‘beautiful sunset glow of German philosophy’,63 with no inkling of the new lease of life that Marx was giving it. His own formulations remained as idealistic, or lacking in substance, as any of Hegel’s. In this he was not far removed from another pillar of German historiography, Ranke, however opposite their leanings, the one a wholehearted partisan, the other detached and objective. Ranke, brother of a theologian, wanted ‘to trace the divine idea at the root of things’. He allowed for economic urges, but only as one of various elements in our social being, subordinate to ‘the Idea of the individual State, which is both cause and aim of its own existence’.a Treitschke had high praise for a professor for whom

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life in the East was swayed by religion, life in classical antiquity by beauty, in the Christian world by intuition;6” a truly professorial philosophy of history. Morbid moods spread from time to time, Treitschke wrote, as in Germany about 1820, and ‘even noble nations seem to be smitten by epidemic mental disorder’ .66 His reading of 1848 was equally abstract. Great men were his history-makers. He castigated Ludwig Borne for the demagogic opinion ‘that in this enlightened century history . . no longer fulfilled its ends through the instrumentality of great men, but through the reason of the masses’.67 He found fault with Ranke for not taking up national German themes, and added that ‘throughout the foreign world there was but one man, Thomas Carlyle, who understood German history’68 - a dictum revealing how little Treitschke understood it, and how faithful a mouthpiece he was of a class bereft of self-reliance. His own portrait of Frederick the Great, as a dedicated German patriot, was ‘quite unhistorical’; his talk of the superiority of northern over southern Germany, ‘the vigorous will of the North German tribes’, can fairly be called ‘racialist’.“’ In his later years he was a blatant reactionary, stupidly anti-socialist and imperialist. To deteriorate in their later years was a not uncommon fate of historians in the brief prime and speedy waning of the bourgeois era. No one was more critical of his blinkered chauvinism than Nietzsche, who complained that nowadays ‘To be German is in itself an argument’, and that history was being construed ‘according to the lights of Imperial Germany’. ‘At the Court of Prussia,’ he added sardonically, ‘I fear that Herr von Treitschke is regarded as deep.“” But Nietzsche suffered from still more gloom-laden moods than his colleague Burckhardt at Base1 university, and sought to dispel them by cultivating anti-popular, anti-socialist prejudices more extreme, and militarism more frenetic, than Treitschke’s. Loudly as he might repudiate the values of the new Germany, he had nothing better to put in their place; hence his protest was ineffective, and after his death he would be hoisted onto a pedestal among the new Germany’s prophets. His fullest discussion of history is the essay on ‘The Use and Abuse of History’, written in 1873-4.71 It is spee dil y clear that he thinks of it more as a burden than an inspiration. He speaks of ‘the great and continually increasing weight of the past’, which presses man down and bows his shoulders. Whether the living stand in need of any knowledge of it, he goes on, ‘is one of the most serious questions affecting the well-being of a man, a people and a culture’. Too much remembering goes against the human gift of forgetting, and ‘injures and finally destroys the living thing’. Life requires self-deception, belief in perfection, and ‘the historical audit brings so much to light which is false and absurd, violent and inhuman, that the condition of pious illusion falls to pieces’. Against all teaching of change and progress Nietzsche sets up an eternal Now: ‘the past and the present are one and the same, typically alike in all their diversity’. No doubt he has good warrant for turning away from mere dry-as-dust antiquarianism, from ‘the horrid spectacle of the mad collector raking over all the dust-heaps of the past’; also for warning us that ‘Great learning and great shallowness go together very well under one hat’. It is less clear what we are to make of his ideal historian, ‘the man of experience

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and character’ who knows how to interpret the ‘always oracular’ language of the past. This adage is followed by advice to read Plutarch and emulate his heroes. Sage counsel, very likely, but not throwing much light on the historical process. Eight years later, it is true, in a passage in The Joyful Wisdom, Nietzsche sounds much less positive, with a more open mind for benefits that may flow from continued study of history.72 On the whole however it must be said that he was compelled to turn his back on history in order to give free rein to his capricious portrayal of the present and his fantastic design of the future. Bourgeois thought was reaching, in him, the end of its tether. Philosophies of history and concepts of evolution were so integral to bourgeois existence that to abandon history was to renounce all claim to a higher destiny for the class. Nietzsche well knew the esteem that historiography had acquired, especially in his own native land, and how he could expect to be branded for his unfilial treatment of it.7’

Further east in Europe bourgeoisie and middle-class intelligentsia were born into a cramped space between peasantry and feudal landlord. It was being widened in some degree by the spread of bourgeois tendencies, if not the healthiest, both to a kulak stratum of peasants and to commercialising or professional elements among landowners always, in Russia, associated with State service. Poland’s special situation and misfortunes fomented historical and sociological speculation, in which August Cieszkowski - born in 1814 at Warsaw into a noble family - won a creditable place. Hegelianism made itself felt, though more slowly, in eastern Europe too; Cieszkowski was critical in some ways of its historical scheme, but he constructed a parallel one with three grand epochs: the ancient as ‘thesis’, the Christian as ‘antithesis’, and the present as potential synthesis, awaiting fulfilment.74 His distinction between ‘facts’, or mere happenings, and ‘deeds’,7” could suggest an increasing quantum of deliberate purpose in human affairs. He did not exclude ‘world historical individuals’, but he thought in terms of broader energies, holding that ‘mankind lacks neither great men nor great peoples each time they are needed’.76 Those peoples destined to inaugurate the third grand era were the Slavs. Cieszkowski shared the Polish messianism of his day, but he gave it a more democratic form by seeing the village commune as the essence of Slavdom, and declaring that destiny ‘calls different estates of society in turn to the arena of deeds’, as well as different nations.” At this point he was not far distant from Marx’s concept of hegemonic classes; and in a kind of way, in this century his forecast has been realised. Tolstoy lived in a Russia full of mutations and mixtures, like the Scotland of the eighteenth century. He was a businessman as well as a serf-owning landlord, writing books for sale and investing in land purchases in a frontier region where he resembled a colonial settler among a native population. He had taken part in and eulogised the conquest of the Caucasus; for modern-minded Russians it was even more needful than for Britons to have a civilising mission in their empire as makeweight for imperfections at home.

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But in Russia where civilisation was so precarious a growth it may not be odd that a man thinking about history should feel obliged to delve so deep into fundamentals; or that a novelist should be the man to take so seriously a problem with demands on imagination as well as intellect. War and Peace is one more monument to the 1789-1815 years, in whose electrifying events Russia had a far more decisive part to play than Germany. Tolstoy however - not yet a social reformer when engaged on this novel in the 1860s - saw both Revolution and European wars in their barbarous, destructive aspects, not as a vast though painful awakening. It was all the harder therefore for him to be content with any resort to a divine purpose when he wrestled with the question how all this turmoil, violence, bloodshed had come about. He rejected the older historians’ habit of discussing only the motives of men in authority, and reading into their actions ‘the immediate participation of the Deity in the affairs of men’. He was as little satisfied with ‘the newer history’, which dispensed with heaven but was still engrossed with great men, or men in office: it had not yet, in his words, ‘abandoned the study of the phenomena of power for the study of the causes which create power’.‘* All historians moreover were in his opinion prone to exaggerating the influence of ideas, of intellectual activity like their own, on the course of things, and falling back on abstractions like freedom, progress, culture.‘” M. S. Anderson points out that Russian historiographical tradition has been strong in most departments, but not in bi0graphy.s’ A lingering collectivism, a feeling of community mattering more than individual, must have been at work here, as against the atomised Western consciousness that Burckhardt was so poignantly aware of. It seemed to Tolstoy ridiculous to be told that in 1812 ‘millions of human beings rushed into the perpetration of every hideous crime’ because of the quarrels and manoeuvres of rulers, ministers or courtiers. To reproduce any typical sample of ‘the contradictory and irrelevant answers’ given by conventional historians of all schools was to make them look like ‘mere caricature’.*l Napoleon and Alexander were no more in reality than units in the million-fold medley of will, effort, cause-and-effect. It was ‘the sum of human energy’ that made both Revolution and Napoleon, and in turn confounded them.82 Tolstoy summarises Napoleon’s career, very unflatteringly, as the product of multiple accidents, for long fortunate, eventually disastrous. The business of history is to explore the forces that move men in the mass, not the doings of individuals, however imposing. s3 At one stage in the composition of the novel his mind turned to mathematics, and he asked whether the infinitesimal calculus (one of Marx’s leisure pursuits, it will be recalled) might not help us to uncover ‘the laws of history’ and analyse it as ‘the sum total of an infinite multitude of individual wills’ .a4 ‘There always exists a connection between historical personages and the masses.‘85 Marx would agree; but the factor of class and class struggle was with Tolstoy a missing link. At this stage of his life, limitations on the degree of social realism he could reach were more hampering than in his later years. In search of a way out, he entangled himself in the insoluble dilemma of free will and determinism; it enabled him at least to show a capacity for acute

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reasoning. All history-writing had gone astray through neglect of it, he maintained. 86 Every man is co nvinced of his own freedom, and hence subjectively he really is free, but looking at him from outside ‘we perceive the predestined and irresistible necessity of his every action’. Between these two postulates there is a basic antinomy. ‘Consciousness is not subject to reason,’ but reason tells us that ‘man is subject to the law of necessity’.s7 Here Tolstoy may seem close to Engels’s maxim that freedom is the recognition of necessity; but his lack of clarity about social-economic relations hindered him from reaching the viewpoint of a rational, progressive evolution. Each man has his own goals, but these ‘serve general purposes which lie beyond all human comprehension’.88 The vision of history expounded in the elaborate epilogue to the novel is akin to Thomas Hardy’s in his poetic drama about the Napoleonic wars, The Dynasts. At the end of it Tolstoy is calling on the historian to define the laws of motion of the process that merges human wills together; 89 but there seems no escape from the verdict he has given much earlier: ‘Fatalism is the only clue to history when we endeavour to understand its illogical phenomena.‘90 We may think of it as foreshadowing the spiritual crisis destined to engulf him before many more years, and transform the titled landowner into a Christian and a primitivesocialist. One feature he was aware of in contemporary scholarship was its multiplying of special threads of history - constitutional, ecclesiastical, military, and so on. It was not long before voices were raised against this splitting up; E. A. Freeman’s lecture on ‘The Unity of History’ belongs to 1873. Despite such remonstrances, subdividing has gone on, making it harder and harder for a historian to see anything outside his own cabbage-patch. To uncover links between separate fields required some kind of general theory. But Marx’s had to be rejected or ignored; and it has long been apparent that an overall view could not be supplied from outside by philosophers. A few years ago an Oxford seminar on the philosophy of history was debating such questions as ‘What historical meaning can be given to the statement: the present king of France is bald?’ Historians, for their part, were less and less disposed to look for a general theory, from indifference, or despair of finding one, or fear of where it might carry them. Some concluded that their only duty was to go on piling up mountains of factual information, in the hope that meanings would some day shine out from them by a sort of spontaneous combustion, instead of in the fire of the Carlylean historian’s soul. In his celebrated inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1903 on ‘The Science of History’, on which students a generation later were still writing essays, J. B. Bury exhorted scholars to toil for the benefit of a remote posterity, assisting it to rise to a loftier view of the past than was conceivable to them. Now that history had become an accepted academic occupation, its practitioners were fascinated by the wealth of evidence they were turning up. ‘We are still at the beginning of the documentary age’, said Lord Acton, architect of the Cambridge Modern History, in a lecture on ‘The Study of History’ in 1895, ‘which is destined to make history independent of historians and to develop learning at the

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expense of writing.’ Historians might have no proclaimed hypotheses, but they could not breathe without at least assumptions or axioms, and many of the figments discarded by Tolstoy have clung to life. Europe’s map of the past has fallen into a state of flux, along with its estimate of its place in the world and its guesses at the future. Amid this confusion there has been taking place in recent years a partial reception of Marxism, a belated admission that its mode of thinking is, after all, the rational counterpart of the mode of social living brought about by industrialism. Most history-writing has come to be half- or quarter-Marxist, as a rule in a depoiiticised form, sometimes a dehumanised form reminiscent of Tolstoy’s appeal to the calculus. ‘Quantitative’ or ‘scientific’ techniques have done wonders, but they bring the risk of a reduction of history to tables of figures, graphs, statistical subtleties - much as political economy is being turned into applied economics, useful for market research. Marxism nowadays may sometimes look like another owl of Minerva, flying after dark. Certainly it has been doing far more to elucidate the past than the future, the opposite of its founders’ intention. Left virtually alone in the historical field, it falls heir to all the difficulties of all other interpretations. At the same time it has been running into puzzles of its own, as knowledge accumulates and more refinement of method is needed to cope with it. Recognition of this, as well as respect for what it has accomplished, showed in the Marx centenary discussions of last year. Marxism cannot be satisfied with any eclectic solution like the half-way house to historical materialism recommended by R. H. Tawney: ‘The key to the heart of an economic age lies in economics, as to that of a religious age it is religion.“’ It used to assert too uncompromisingly the sovereignty of material forces in the past, while trying to push its ideas forward in the present; now, to make room for itself in the present, it is having to assign more place in the past to ideas and their carriers, the intellectuals. Non-Marxists meanwhile, who used to uphold the supremacy of ideas, from disillusionment with the present have been coming to see the past also in terms of mechanical forces and mindless greeds. Like Einstein, Marx could only grope towards the unified theory required to bind together all his variegated phenomena; he at least led the way. Victor G. Kiernan Edinburgh

NOTES 1. Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (s.a. 1763). 2. The Excursion (1814), Book 3. 3. ‘On history’, in English and Other Critical Essays, Everyman edn (1915), p. 85. 4. C. Pavese, The Business of Living, Diary, 19351950, trans. A. E. Murch (London, 1964), p. 145 (Nov. 1943). 5. The Antiquary (1816), chap. 5.

Class and Ideology 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 3X. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Stendhal, Vie de Napoleon (1837), chap. 7. K. Gupta, Spotlight on Sino-fndian Frontiers (Calcutta, 1982), p. 88. J.V. Compton, The S~vastika and the Eagle (London, 196X), p. 18. Book 9. Odes, Book 3, No. 19. The Surgeon’s Daughter (1827), Preface. B. Perez Galdds, La revolucidn de julio (Madrid, 1904), p. 97. See R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976). R. Southey, Life ofJohn Wesley (1920), VoI. 1, pp, 153-4. Ten Years of Iinperial~m in France (Zmpressio~zs of a ‘Flaneur’) (Edinburgh, 1862) pp. 172ff. J, Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, trans. H. Zohn (London, 1959), p. 204. Ten Years of Imperialism, p. 213. In Scottish and Other ~iscelianies, Everyman edn (1915). ‘Biography’ (1832), in Eng~~h and Other Critical Essays (see note 3), p. 75. ‘Jesuitism’ (1850). No. 8 of Latter-Day Pamphlets. ‘Signs of the times’ (1829), in Scottish und Other Miscellanies (see note IS), p. 289. F. Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle, A Biography (Cambridge, 1984), p. 412. ‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson’ (1832), in English and Other Critical Essays (see note 3), p. 19. Ibid., p. 208. B. Viva, ~emorias . . . (Madrid, 1856), p. 48. ‘Southey’s colloquies’, in Macaulay, Miscelhmeous Essays (Collins Pocket Classics), Vol. 1, p. 97. J. S. Grewal, Muslim Rule in India. The Assessment of British Historians (O.U.P. India, 1970), pp. 225-6. Ibid.. p. 226. Zbid., p. 231. See Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie, ed. J. G. A. Baird (Edinburgh, 1910). P. Narain, Press and Politics in India 1885-190.5 (Delhi, 1968), p. 197. A. K. Warder, An Introduction to Indian Historiography (Bombay, 1972), pp. ix, 9. Sir W. W. Hunter, Annals of Rural Bengal (1868). ‘The English Revolution’, in K. Marx, Selected Essays, trans. H. J. Stenning (London, nd.). E. Wilson, To the Finland Station (London, 1941), p. 37; and see generally. On French thinking about the ancien regime and the Revolution, cf. M. S. Anderson, Historians and Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715-1789 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 15ff. Wilson, To the Finland Station (note 35), pp. 126, 190. J. P. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. J. Oxenford, Everyman edn (1930), p. 43. Ibid., pp. 304, 392, etc. H. R. Trevor-Roper, Introduction to Burckhardt, History and Historians (see note 16), p. 11. Burckhardt, History and Historians (see note 16), pp. 24-5. Ibid., p. 157. Ibid., p. 7.5. ibid., p. 27. Ibid., p. 218. Ibid., p. 208.

286 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

Victor G. Kiernan Ibid., pp. 156, 183, 185. Ibid., p. 42. Ibid., pp. 160, 215. Ibid., p. 85. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., pp. 126, 147. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., pp. 78, 735. Ibid., p. 215. H. von Treitschke, History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, trans. E. Paul and C. Paul; selections ed. G. A. Craig (Chicago, 1975), p. 37. Ibid., p. 235. See The Role of Force in History. A Study of Bisrnarck’s Policy, trans. J. Cohen (London, 1968). Treitschke History of Germany (see note 59), pp. 25, 15873, 192. Ibid., p. 240. H. Liebeschiitz, Ranke (Historical Association, 1954), pp. 4, 12. Treitschke, History of Germany (see note 59), p. 102. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 275. Ibid., pp. 30%12. Anderson, Historians (see note 35), pp. 147, 149. Ecce Homo, Complete Works, ed. 0. Levy (hereafter Works) (London, 1911), Vol. 17, pp. 12%4, 128. Works, Vol. 5. Works, Vol. 10, pp. 263-5. Works, Vol. 5, p. 4; on the German addiction to history, cf. Vol. 4, pp. 118-20 (‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’). Selected Writings of August Cieszkowski, trans. A. Liebich (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 10, 49. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., pp. 56, 102. Ibid., p. 104. Everyman revised edn, 1932, Vol. 3, pp. 424-5. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 431-2, 440. Anderson, Historians (see note 35), p. 157. War and Peace, Vol. 2, p. 205; Vol. 3, pp. 427, 430. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 207; Vol. 3, p. 69. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 365 ff., 434. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 449. Ibid., p. 451. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 207; Vol. 3, pp. 453, 455. Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 371. Ibid., p. 466. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 207. Introduction to M. Beer, A History of British Socialism (London, 1929).