- Email: [email protected]
Divided Britain
470
Book Reviews
such as his talk of the herd instinct of the German people, do (pace Mr Ridley) appear both dated and unfortunate today, others, such as his extension of liberal principles to international relations and our involvement with the natural world, are highly relevant to and offer novel insights on contemporary problems. This is not to say that all of Collingwood’s thought is likely to prove congenial to contemporary philosophers. The scale of forms, in particular, is likely to cause some bafflement and not a little embarrassment for someone seeking to be a Collingwoodian today. Indeed, if I have any criticism to make of Boucher’s careful and scholarly study, it is that he sticks too closely to the terminology of his subject. Just when a lucid piece of exposition would be useful, there is a tendency for him to give us a Collingwoodian paraphrase of Collingwood. However, this is not to detract from the very real service he has performed in bringing Collingwood’s politics to light and in making numerous unpublished lectures and little known writings available. Richard
Bellamy
University of Edinburgh
Divided Britain, Ray Hudson and Allan M. Williams (London Press, 1989), viii +227 pp., $15.00.
and New York: Belhaven
Hudson and Williams are two geographers who share the task of writing about ‘Divided Britain’. Their book purports to be a sober and solid analysis of this subject but it is clear that the authors do not like what they think they see. They feel obliged at the end to argue that there are alternatives to the society they think they observe and, in a highly generalised fashion, urge the merits of these alternatives. They think it is appropriate to end their book by saying that Mrs Thatcher’s governments have brought discord where there was harmony and despair where there was hope; an inversion of what she aspired to achieve in 1979. In chapter after chapter they hammer away relentlessly at their central theme. The introductory chapter-a divided realm?-does contain a question mark but doubt is not allowed to linger long. The succeeding chapters discuss, successively, division by class (wealth and income on the one hand, consumption and life-styles on the other), gender, race and location. The problem with their approach is that it appears to lack any serious historical or comparative dimension. In a vague kind of way the framework must be supposed to be post-1945 Britain, but the statistics and illustrations jump about in unpredictable fashion. It proves quite impossible to follow through any of the alleged accentuations of division in a systematic manner. Things are not helped by the theoretical underpinning that is disclosed. We start with the glorious Marxist conception that members of the working class have to work for a wage in order to live, whilst capitalists reap the rewards of their labour, but then concede that actual capitalist societies are more complicated than the two-class model. The trouble clearly is that they wish that this was not the case. They keep wanting to pin all the evils they discern upon ‘Thatcherite’ policies but they have reluctantly to admit that this is not altogether the case. They pose a question at the conclusion. So is the U.K. divided forever? To which they give the short answer ‘yes, for as long as the U.K. society remains a capitalist one’. And it must be said that they do not get much beyond this short answer.
Book Reviews
471
This reviewer is not suggesting that there is not some significant substance in many of the divisions which are alluded to, but the authors never seem to ask themselves what they mean by ‘division’ or even to consider that some divisions have positive as well as negative aspects. What would it mean to say that Britain was ‘united’? Experience of other societies which have departed from the capitalist path and have at least been supposed to be socialist do not in practice seem to lack profound divisions, even if not the same ones. Britain is indeed divided, as it has always been. What we might like to know is how far our authors think that those divisions give Britain a peculiar position among Western capitalist societies. Is it substantially more divided than France or Italy, to name but two? The complete absence of any discussion of such points leaves one with a feeling that this book is long on rhetoric and short on thought. Keith Robbins University of Glasgow
Marc Bloch: A Life in History, Carole Fink (Cambridge: 1989), xix + 371 pp., S25.00/$29.95.
Cambridge
University
Press,
The history of that intently humanistic subdiscipline of European social history has itself been humanised by this careful and truly complete biography of a pioneering medieval historian. Readers of all kinds will share the author’s admiration for the murdered resistant already known to nonmedievalists through his poignant memoire of France’s Strange Defeat of 1940 (London, 1949) and his enduringly wise meditations on The Historian’s Craft (New York, 1953). As Carole Fink depicts Bloch’s preference of a French to a Jewish identity, his refusal to flee Vichy France without his entire family, and his option for an initially modest resistance role, each choice prompts a memorable scrutiny of heroism’s meaning and imperatives for a French intellectual facing Nazism and its accessories. Critical rigour came naturally to the historian’s son and normalien descended on both sides from long assimilated Jews. Yet the ferment of Neo-Kantianism, Durkheimian sociology and Bergsonian philosophy freed Bloch’s generation from the conceptual stodginess of France’s reigning political historians (Fink ambiguously terms them positivists) whose chief scholarly taboos were contemporary usefulness and authorial presence among ‘the facts’. Bloch knew history as essentially ‘psychosocial’ phenomena which inevitably engaged the historian personally in their reconstruction. This sense begot a ‘strong modern voice mixing sympathy, irony, and outrage’ (p. 120) and an openness to both the poetic and the socially relevant in history. It accounts too for Bloch’s impatience with the customary distinction of political from social and economic history, and for his eagerness to pose questions revealing their unity. Here, before World War I, were the seeds of the Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale (founded by Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929), famous for its interest in the materially based structures of societies and the psychological climates they fostered. Fink traces the ultimately tragic convergence of Bloch’s life and work to the First World War’s trenches, where hearsay concerning enemy movements bred a credulity of the scale he later detected among early modern believers in their kings’ healing touch, and where the tenacity and patriotism of a shopkeeper and a miner showed him a dignity in average Frenchmen he thereafter sought to convey in his writings on medieval societies. Theirs was the true France, whose full history Bloch was contemplating when the German conquest of Paris called forth his frank indictment of his country’s decadent elites.
Book Reviews
such as his talk of the herd instinct of the German people, do (pace Mr Ridley) appear both dated and unfortunate today, others, such as his extension of liberal principles to international relations and our involvement with the natural world, are highly relevant to and offer novel insights on contemporary problems. This is not to say that all of Collingwood’s thought is likely to prove congenial to contemporary philosophers. The scale of forms, in particular, is likely to cause some bafflement and not a little embarrassment for someone seeking to be a Collingwoodian today. Indeed, if I have any criticism to make of Boucher’s careful and scholarly study, it is that he sticks too closely to the terminology of his subject. Just when a lucid piece of exposition would be useful, there is a tendency for him to give us a Collingwoodian paraphrase of Collingwood. However, this is not to detract from the very real service he has performed in bringing Collingwood’s politics to light and in making numerous unpublished lectures and little known writings available. Richard
Bellamy
University of Edinburgh
Divided Britain, Ray Hudson and Allan M. Williams (London Press, 1989), viii +227 pp., $15.00.
and New York: Belhaven
Hudson and Williams are two geographers who share the task of writing about ‘Divided Britain’. Their book purports to be a sober and solid analysis of this subject but it is clear that the authors do not like what they think they see. They feel obliged at the end to argue that there are alternatives to the society they think they observe and, in a highly generalised fashion, urge the merits of these alternatives. They think it is appropriate to end their book by saying that Mrs Thatcher’s governments have brought discord where there was harmony and despair where there was hope; an inversion of what she aspired to achieve in 1979. In chapter after chapter they hammer away relentlessly at their central theme. The introductory chapter-a divided realm?-does contain a question mark but doubt is not allowed to linger long. The succeeding chapters discuss, successively, division by class (wealth and income on the one hand, consumption and life-styles on the other), gender, race and location. The problem with their approach is that it appears to lack any serious historical or comparative dimension. In a vague kind of way the framework must be supposed to be post-1945 Britain, but the statistics and illustrations jump about in unpredictable fashion. It proves quite impossible to follow through any of the alleged accentuations of division in a systematic manner. Things are not helped by the theoretical underpinning that is disclosed. We start with the glorious Marxist conception that members of the working class have to work for a wage in order to live, whilst capitalists reap the rewards of their labour, but then concede that actual capitalist societies are more complicated than the two-class model. The trouble clearly is that they wish that this was not the case. They keep wanting to pin all the evils they discern upon ‘Thatcherite’ policies but they have reluctantly to admit that this is not altogether the case. They pose a question at the conclusion. So is the U.K. divided forever? To which they give the short answer ‘yes, for as long as the U.K. society remains a capitalist one’. And it must be said that they do not get much beyond this short answer.
Book Reviews
471
This reviewer is not suggesting that there is not some significant substance in many of the divisions which are alluded to, but the authors never seem to ask themselves what they mean by ‘division’ or even to consider that some divisions have positive as well as negative aspects. What would it mean to say that Britain was ‘united’? Experience of other societies which have departed from the capitalist path and have at least been supposed to be socialist do not in practice seem to lack profound divisions, even if not the same ones. Britain is indeed divided, as it has always been. What we might like to know is how far our authors think that those divisions give Britain a peculiar position among Western capitalist societies. Is it substantially more divided than France or Italy, to name but two? The complete absence of any discussion of such points leaves one with a feeling that this book is long on rhetoric and short on thought. Keith Robbins University of Glasgow
Marc Bloch: A Life in History, Carole Fink (Cambridge: 1989), xix + 371 pp., S25.00/$29.95.
Cambridge
University
Press,
The history of that intently humanistic subdiscipline of European social history has itself been humanised by this careful and truly complete biography of a pioneering medieval historian. Readers of all kinds will share the author’s admiration for the murdered resistant already known to nonmedievalists through his poignant memoire of France’s Strange Defeat of 1940 (London, 1949) and his enduringly wise meditations on The Historian’s Craft (New York, 1953). As Carole Fink depicts Bloch’s preference of a French to a Jewish identity, his refusal to flee Vichy France without his entire family, and his option for an initially modest resistance role, each choice prompts a memorable scrutiny of heroism’s meaning and imperatives for a French intellectual facing Nazism and its accessories. Critical rigour came naturally to the historian’s son and normalien descended on both sides from long assimilated Jews. Yet the ferment of Neo-Kantianism, Durkheimian sociology and Bergsonian philosophy freed Bloch’s generation from the conceptual stodginess of France’s reigning political historians (Fink ambiguously terms them positivists) whose chief scholarly taboos were contemporary usefulness and authorial presence among ‘the facts’. Bloch knew history as essentially ‘psychosocial’ phenomena which inevitably engaged the historian personally in their reconstruction. This sense begot a ‘strong modern voice mixing sympathy, irony, and outrage’ (p. 120) and an openness to both the poetic and the socially relevant in history. It accounts too for Bloch’s impatience with the customary distinction of political from social and economic history, and for his eagerness to pose questions revealing their unity. Here, before World War I, were the seeds of the Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale (founded by Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929), famous for its interest in the materially based structures of societies and the psychological climates they fostered. Fink traces the ultimately tragic convergence of Bloch’s life and work to the First World War’s trenches, where hearsay concerning enemy movements bred a credulity of the scale he later detected among early modern believers in their kings’ healing touch, and where the tenacity and patriotism of a shopkeeper and a miner showed him a dignity in average Frenchmen he thereafter sought to convey in his writings on medieval societies. Theirs was the true France, whose full history Bloch was contemplating when the German conquest of Paris called forth his frank indictment of his country’s decadent elites.