I would like to take exception to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s characterizations of American academic historiography as contributing to a “sentimentalized and idealized version of American history” [NYR, December 16, 1999]. He believes that what the historians featured in The Oxford History of the British Empire reveal about how colonial settlers treated Indians and blacks will “shock some of their readers,” accustomed as they allegedly are to a historiography in which “the darker side of history tends to be phased out.” Those who have read only popular history or the works of Dumas Malone (the only academic historian O’Brien mentions) may indeed be shocked, but no contemporary undergraduate history major, graduate student, or serious reader of early American history is likely to be at all shocked or surprised. For more than thirty years American historians have thoroughly explored “the darker side” of race relations in colonial America. Is Mr. O’Brien familiar with the work of Winthrop Jordan, David Brion Davis, Edmund Morgan, Gary Nash, James Axtell, Ira Berlin, Philip Morgan, and James Merrell, to take a few examples among many? One of the great achievements of the American historical profession in recent years has been the very candid and unsentimental way that it has dealt with the cruelties and injustices perpetrated by British settlers on Indians and blacks before the revolution took us out of the purview of historians of the British Empire.

George M. Fredrickson
Professor of United States History
Stanford University, and Past President of the Organization of American Historians

Conor Cruise O’Brien replies:

Professor George M. Fredrickson will no doubt be surprised to learn that I am completely in agreement with his opinion that “one of the great achievements of the American historical profession in recent years has been the very candid and concentrated way that it has dealt with the cruelties and injustices perpetrated by British settlers on Indians and blacks….”
I devoted an entire chapter—Chapter Seven of my book The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution 1785-1800 (Random House, 1998)—to the work of a number of such American historians and gave their objective work the full praise it merits.

Unfortunately—as I can now see—I failed to refer to this body of work in my recent review. What Ihad in mind when I wrote that was what I thought of as the whitewashing approach prevailing in more popular writings on historical subjects and circulating mainly among younger readers. I am grateful to Professor Fredrickson for giving me this opportunity to correct that misleading emphasis by reference to the scholarly work.

The post ‘The Darker Side’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

It must be said immediately that its first two volumes get The Oxford History of the British Empire off to a strong start.[^*] Both books consist of essays that break much new ground and do so with a confidence based on extensive research and with refreshing lucidity and frankness. The authors, rightly, often use direct quotation. There is none of that extensive resort to paraphrase, which can so easily be used to inflect an account in a particular direction that the documents in question, when directly examined, fail to sustain. The most flagrant effort in this respect in modern American historiography was Dumas Malone’s six-volume Life of Thomas Jefferson. With copious resort to paraphrase, Malone managed to produce a sanitized and sanctified Jefferson, one not borne out by the original documents once they were carefully scrutinized. There has been quite a lot of that kind of writing, but there is none of it in these volumes.

These two books are likely to shock some of their readers. For example, the sentimentalized and idealized version of American history, which luxuriates in popular works and is more subtly present in much academic history, finds no favor with the contributors to these volumes. This is very clear in the matter of the dealings of the settlers with the native inhabitants of the American colonies. Consider, for example, Anthony Pagden’s account of the different approaches of three sets of European colonizers:

The Spanish sought to integrate the Indians into a miscegenated society, albeit at the lowest possible social level, and the French attempted to “Frenchify” their indigenes. The English, after decades of moralizing, sought only to exclude the Indians or, where expedient, to annihilate them.

Pagden also writes that

Early contacts, which had made the settlers dependent upon native agriculture, soon gave way to policies of either segregation or, when the Native Americans seemed to threaten the existence of the settlements, attempted genocide.

The attempted genocide was mostly the work of the settlers, but it was justified by respected British commentators. Pagden quotes Locke’s presentation of the comparative rights of European settlers and of American natives:

The association between the historical need to press the claim to res nullius, and what is sometimes called “the agriculturalist argument” became, in effect, the basis for most English attempts to legitimate their presence in America. That so many of the examples Locke uses in his Second Treatise are American ones shows that his intention was to provide the settlers, for whom he had worked in so many other ways, with a powerful argument based in natural law rather than legislative decree to justify their depredations.

Also, Pagden observes, “since any man who refused to accept the Europeans’ right to appropriate ‘vacant’ lands was in defiance of the natural law, he might [wrote Locke] ‘be destroyed as a Lyon or a Tyger, or one of those wild Savage Beasts, with whom Men can have no Society nor Security.”‘ Similarly the eminent British jurist Sir Edward Coke held that infidels were aliens, perpetui enimici, “perpetual enemies,” “for between them, as with devils, whose subjects they be, and the Christians there is perpetual hostility, and can be no peace.”

In another essay Peter Mancall quotes the account by Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, of a massacre of Pequots: “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and stench thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.”

The period of the most ferocious doctrines—and practices—on the part of the settlers toward the natives was about the middle of the seventeenth century, when the settlers were already fairly solidly installed, but the natives were still strong enough to obstruct and sometimes threaten the settlement. In the early periods of the settlement, when the settlers needed to conciliate the natives, the tone of the settlers is understandably propitiatory. At a much later period, in the eighteenth century, when Indians are no longer a threat (except in the West), references to them are more relaxed. But in the crucial period—namely the first half of the seventeenth century—the pressure is toward genocide.

The first volumes also devote much more attention than previous histories have done to the growth and fate of America’s black population. I propose here to follow up this theme in some detail, both for its intrinsic interest and as illustrating the richness and depth of the historical work involved in these two volumes. James Horn, examining “Tobacco Colonies: The Shaping of English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” writes:

The size of the black population was initially small, no more than a few hundred before 1650, but from the 1680s, as the supply of [white] indentured servants began to decline, numbers increased rapidly to about 13,000 by 1700 (13 percent of the total population). Apart from emigrants from London or Bristol, most settlers probably encountered blacks for the first time in the Chesapeake, and in this context made the “indelible connection” between slavery and race. Yet the response to blacks in an everyday context was more complex than the general framework of prejudice and the institution of slavery might imply. Especially in the early years of settlement, when numbers were small and blacks worked alongside servants and masters to bring in the tobacco crop, relations between the two races may have been relatively relaxed. Occasionally slaves were freed or purchased their liberty, and some acquired property and were able to live peaceably side-by-side with their white neighbours. The limited opportunities for blacks, slave or free, to improve their condition in this period should not be exaggerated, however.

From the 1660s, when Virginia began legislating “stringent racial laws” to regulate black-white relations, conditions for blacks began to deteriorate sharply. Mass shipments of slaves after 1660 and their changing origin (brought directly from Africa rather than from the Caribbean) served to intensify discriminating legislation and further debase the status of blacks.

Hilary McD. Beckles writes of the condition of black slaves in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century:

Sugar meant slaves, and in the Lesser Antilles, as in Hispaniola and Brazil, it meant black slaves. Those acquainted with sugar production in Brazil would have known that the work regime was so severe that it would not be endured by any free labour force, and that planters had resortedto slaves imported from Africa…. Workers were required not only to clear the ground of lush natural vegetation, and to sow, tend, and harvest the sugar cane in the tropical sun, but also immediately to crush the juice from the cane in a sugar mill and then to boil the juice in cauldrons before it had time to ferment….

By 1660 the African slave trade was the “life line” of the Caribbean economy. In 1645, some two years after the beginning of sugar production, Barbados had only 5,680 slaves; in 1698 it had 42,000 slaves…. The mortality of these slaves was high. Overwork, malnutrition, resistance, all contributed to this. The planters therefore needed an annual input of fresh slaves to keep up their stock.

By the late seventeenth century, the slave trade had become central to economic development in the New World, with royal support from Britain. John C. Appleby writes of

the development of a powerful syndicate linking prominent city merchants with leading naval officials and well-placed courtiers. The Queen was also an investor in several of these ventures, providing unprecedented royal support for such an aggressive challenge to Portuguese trade in Africa.

Both the Portuguese trade in question and the British challenge to it were overwhelmingly a trade in slaves.

2.

Opposition to slavery was slow in developing. The editor of The Eighteenth Century, P.J. Marshall, says in his introduction, referring to North America: “There was little opposition from British opinion either to the trade in slaves or to the institution of slavery before the rise of the popular anti-slavery movement in the 1780s.”

Yet well before that, in 1698, with the establishment of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, concern for the treatment of slaves began to emerge and became a force among evangelicals, both in Britain and America. In his essay “Religious Faith and Commercial Empire,” Boyd Stanley Schlenther writes: “No other agency throughout the Imperial eighteenth century worked as assiduously to convert and secure humane treatment for the victims of slavery. This activity was most pronounced where it was most needed: in the plantation colonies of the mainland south and on the islands.”

Some Quakers had been active directly against slavery well before 1698, though some Quakers were also slave owners. Ned C. Landsman writes (in Volume 1):

The same well-to-do merchants who claimed authority within the quarterly and yearly Meetings were also among the leading Quaker slave-holders. Yet from the very beginning some Friends questioned that trade. As early as 1676 the English Quaker William Edmundson, then at Newport, Rhode Island, recorded the first such attack on slavery, among the very first anti-slavery statements to appear in English America. The first such pronouncement to appear in Pennsylvania appeared in 1688, signed by four Germantown Friends, on the grounds that slavery violated the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would that they should do unto you”), encouraged sinful rather than Christian behaviour, and was founded on violence.

It was not, however, until the last quarter of the eighteenth century that the decisive turn took place toward the abolition first of the slave trade and then of slavery itself within the British dominions, which, of course, after 1783, no longer included what had been Britain’s Thirteen Colonies and had now become the United States of America.

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, played a decisive part in the movement of enlightened opinion in Britain against slavery. And the influence of Adam Smith worked in conjunction with the evangelical movement toward the eventual abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the British dominions (what remained of these after 1783). Writing about the antislavery movement in the West Indies—where the densest slave populations by then were—Boyd Stanley Schlenther has this to say:

[In the West Indies] it was the status of the slaves which constituted the continuing challenge to the churches. In the face of a generally quiescent Anglican establishment that was loath to undermine the plantation economy, it was the activities of evangelical Christians that would contribute to change. The Moravians, taking full advantage of their freedom of movement and action within the British Empire, had established a mission to slaves on Jamaica in the 1750s. Now, thirty years later, Wesleyan Methodists, led by Thomas Coke, commenced similar activities throughout the West Indies. These religious impulses, together with the implications of radical political ideas emphasizing human freedom, coalesced with the economic arguments of men such as Adam Smith—which challenged slavery as a negation of free trade and commerce—to contribute to the abolition of the slave trade and, ultimately, [of] slavery itself in the West Indies.

Adam Smith’s pivotal influence is also acknowledged by J.R. Ward, first referring again to the West Indies and then more widely:

A more fundamental challenge to the West Indians’ political standing came from the thesis elaborated by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), that artificially promoted colonies and the associated structure of regulated trade diverted resources which might better be deployed at home. Some time would lapse before Smith’s arguments affected the specific detail of commercial policy, but they quickly achieved great intellectual prestige, and by his remarks on the economic disadvantages of slave labour he contrib-uted to a powerful social movement that offered the planters a more immediate threat.

Antislavery doctrine was gaining a limited circulation by the 1760s. In 1787 a vigorous public movement was launched to abolish the British slave trade from Africa, as the first step toward reforming and eventually eliminating the West Indian slave labor regime. In 1788 Parliament voted to regulate conditions on the slave ships. In 1792 a bill for gradual abolition passed the Commons but was rejected by the Lords. Abolition was finally enacted in 1807, and no significant deliveries of new African slaves reached the British West Indies after 1808.

Something needs to be added about the political situation in Britain in which the turn against slavery occurred. The best minds in the British Parliament were strongly influenced by The Wealth of Nations, which Edmund Burke called “probably the most important book ever written.” Burke, Fox, and Pitt—men widely separated in their politics in the 1790s—all supported the abolition of the slave trade. At a much earlier period, in 1765, Burke had opposed a proposal for seating American elected representatives in the House of Commons because these would include slave owners: “Common sense, even self-preservation, seems to forbid that those who allow themselves an unlimited right over the liberties and lives of others, should have any share in making laws for those who have long renounced such injust [sic] and cruel distinctions.”

J.R. Ward considers an important objection to the view that the weakening of slavery was due primarily to “a public affected by a general growth in philanthropic sentiment.” Ward writes:

The most celebrated challenge to this “moral” interpretation of abolitionism was made by Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, which argued that while individual campaigners such as William Wilberforce may have been sincere in professing humanitarian concern, their cause only prevailed because it served national economic interests. According to Williams, by the later eighteenth century the British West Indian sugar colonies, their soils exhausted after decades of monoculture, had become hopelessly uncompetitive with the French islands. So initially many British politicians favoured abolition in the hope that it could be applied generally.

Ward is skeptical about Williams’s thesis, but he is also rather skeptical about theories that emphasize a shift in moral values. He acknowledges that

eighteenth-century British empirical philosophy put special emphasis on sympathy and fellow-feeling between individuals as the basis for ethical behaviour. This notion of “benevolence” was hard to reconcile with slavery. Theologians developed the argument that God revealed his purpose to mankind in stages, so the slave-holding sanctioned in biblical times might no longer be tolerable. Such ideas were common themes of European Enlightenment thought, but they gained their widest currency in Britain through the evangelical movements that affected the established church and the main Dissenting sects.

Ward allows some weight to this interpretation, but on the whole he is skeptical about it. He writes:

Yet while in Britain abolitionism certainly became a popular cause, to a degree unmatched elsewhere, the fact remains that the decision to end the slave trade was taken by Parliament, where evangelicalism was only a minority sentiment and where practical, strategic considerations were paramount. The widespread enthusiasm for abolition had some influence, but on this issue legislators did not feel themselves to be under irresistible pressure from agitation “out of doors” as would be the case with electoral reform in 1832, and with slave emancipation in 1833.

Ward’s interpretation of parliamentary motivation, I think, is too narrow and mechanical. Parliamentarians would have tended to share views that were prevalent among the educated classes, to which they belonged, and these included an aversion to slavery, both on the part of evangelicals and on the part of the growing number of the middle class who were affected by Enlightenment values.

Broadly speaking, what Adam Smith was telling those whom he influenced was that pushing people around was often unrewarding even for the pushers. Some people were undoubtedly influenced by all these currents: Burke was inclined to an ecumenical version of revealed religion and to a specifically English version of Enlightenment values, and he was an ardent disciple of Adam Smith. All these strains led him to condemn and oppose the slave trade and slavery. Burke was unusual in many ways, but he was certainly not unique among the parliamentarians of his day in being influenced by some combination of these currents in coming to oppose the slave trade and slavery.

3.

I have concentrated here on the handling of the issues of treatment of Indians and of slavery for two main reasons. The first is that to follow the treatment of a limited number of selected and relevant issues in a significant number of individual essays, with quotations, seems to me a good way of illustrating the richness of the text and the consistently high quality of the writing and reasoning. The second is that the treatment of these issues sheds much more light on dark aspects of American history than popular versions of American and British historiography do, and also rather more light than many more serious accounts of American and British history, aimed at the general reader, manage to shed.

American historiography, for the period of the Founding Fathers, has long had a tendency to emphasize what is called “civic religion,” an alleged consensus on public values. And “civic religion” has had a corrupting and euphemizing influence on historiography. The darker side of history tends to be phased out, to such an extent that the examination, in these volumes, of the treatment of native Indians and slaves is likely to shock some American readers.

In the development of the American civic religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Thomas Jefferson has played a central role and has been idealized in the process. The spotlight has been on the benign things that Jefferson said, from time to time, about—for example—Indians and slaves and not on what he actually did, and refrained from doing. He said many benign things about American Indians, on familiar “noble redman” lines. But his instructions to American officials dealing with Indians were free from such sentimentality. Finding that such officials were trying to check the access of Indians to firewater, in order to save their lives, he instructed such officials to desist from such interference with the natural course of things. The sooner the Indians died out, or at least declined into helplessness, the better it would be. The custodians of the civic religion tended to dwell on the nice things he said and to ignore the lethal harshness of his actual policy.

The same is true, to a more dramatic extent, about his policy toward blacks. The Jefferson who became a deity of the civic religion was notably compassionate and benign. The locus classicus for this view is the inscription on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, dedicated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, April 13, 1943. According to the official brochure: “Inscriptions at the memorial were selected by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission and were taken from a wide variety of his writings on freedom, slavery, education and government.” The section of the inscriptions that deals with freedom and slavery runs as follows:

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep for ever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.

All of this passage except for the last sentence is taken from Notes on the State of Virginia. The last sentence, which is taken from Jefferson’s Autobiography, continues: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Native habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”

In my book The Long Affair I commented on that distortion:

In short, these people are to be free, and then deported. Jefferson’s teaching on that matter is quite clear and often repeated.

Those who edited that inscription on behalf of the Jefferson Memorial Commission must have known what they were doing when they wrenched that resounding sentence from the Autobiography out of the context which so drastically qualifies its meaning. The distortion, by suppression, has to be deliberate.

In that inscription on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. the liberal-Jeffersonian lie about Jefferson’s position on liberty and slavery assumes, literally, monumental proportions.

It must be acknowledged that Roosevelt and his collaborators had powerful reasons for assenting to that distortion. America was then at war with Nazi Germany. To inculcate national unity, and discourage regional and racial discord, was then of fundamental importance. So to present the great Virginian as a champion of black people in the United States must have seemed a salutary unifying myth.

Eighty-four years earlier, on the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln had made similar use of Jefferson as a unifying myth, though he must have been aware that the real Jefferson had been passionately committed to his native Virginia—and to the defense of slavery—as the drift toward civil war began in the last years of his life.

In both cases the distinctions were understandable at the time; and they were made under the most terrible of pressures. But the inscription on the Jefferson Memorial is still there, and still deceives people, when the motives that put it there have long since faded into history. The Oxford History of the British Empire has little to say about Jefferson, and that little is discreet. But it does situate the different positions of slaves and Indians and whites; and those positions are not compatible with the mythic versions of history that have been associated with Jefferson and many others after him.

The post Buried Lives appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Of the 20 million or so Catholics who are of Irish or partly Irish (and often mainly Irish) descent, most are no more than vaguely and intermittently aware of the Ireland of today. Few are actively sympathetic to the IRA. But many are conditioned, by the Irish Catholic folk-memory, to believe a large part of the IRA’s case, whenever they happen to think of it. They can readily believe that anything bad that happens in Ireland is caused by the British. And they are conditioned not to believe that the reason why Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom is that this is what a majority of the population of Northern Ireland want.

The more sophisticated, among those who take much interest in these matters, know the politically correct Irish-nationalist answer: Northern Ireland is an artificially created entity (unlike the island of Ireland) and therefore has no right to exist. The less sophisticated (among those who know the facts of the matter) have a less complicated and more honest answer: that the people who want to remain part of the United Kingdom are Protestants, descended from settlers, and so have no right to be in any part of Ireland in the first place. A white American might find that argument a bit incongruous, coming from people who are themselves descendants of settlers. And as it happens, the ancestors of the Ulster Protestants settled in Eastern Ulster at about the same time as the first whites settled in North America.

Other nationalist interpretations of Northern Ireland are available. Near the beginning of the present troubles, in the early Seventies, I heard the New York lawyer Paul O’Dwyer offer one such, in a radio interview. He had been going on, at first, in an accustomed vein: that all the deaths in and around Northern Ireland, including those inflicted by the IRA, are “caused by British imperialism.” Then his interviewer’s line of questioning led him to break some new ground. “What,” the interviewer wanted to know, “about the Ulster Protestants?” “What about them?” said Paul. “The Ulster Protestants are fine, hard-working people who can make a great contribution to a united Ireland.” “Why aren’t they making it, then?” the interviewer wanted to know. O’Dwyer’s answer was: “The British won’t let them.” Paul O’Dwyer is an intelligent, well-informed man, and he knew that statement to be untrue. But he also knew that many of his listeners were so poorly informed about Ireland that they might believe what he said. And what fervent nationalist, of any nation, would refuse to tell at a thumping lie, in the good cause, if there was even an outside chance that somebody out there might be fool enough to believe it?

The actual news from modern Ireland finds it impossible to pass through the grid of the Irish American folk-memory, to reach modern Americans of Irish descent. Certain events that occurred in Ireland in late March of this year stuck in that grid and caused pain to some Irish Americans. The New York Times carried a report of these events, dated March 28, under the headline: “20,000 Rally in Dublin for Peace in North and Against I.R.A. Killing.” The report datelined Dublin and signed James F. Clarity opened as follows:

An estimated 20,000 Irish men and women rallied today in favor of peace in Northern Ireland and against the Irish Republican Army, whose bombs eight days ago in Warrington, England, killed two children.

Since Monday, throngs have come to downtown Dublin to sign condolence books and leave gifts of teddy bears and bouquets in memory of the two boys, 3-year-old Jonathan Ball and 12-year-old Tim Parry. The successive demonstrations, including the one today, have been the largest and most intense public expression of anger at the I.R.A. and of demands that politicians work harder for a peaceful settlement of the Protestant-Roman Catholic conflict that has killed 3,053 people since 1969.

The events faithfully chronicled by Mr. Clarity are of course exceedingly distasteful to fervent Irish nationalists. I can see vividly in my mind’s eye the scornful grimaces with which they hear of “condolence books…. teddy bears and bouquets,” all from Irish people, in tribute to a couple of British youngsters who happened to be killed in the course of an action undertaken by brave Irish patriots. The correct response of proper nationalists to Warrington is of course: “The two deaths are deplorable, but the IRA is not to blame for them. The boys, like all the other victims of the violence, are victims of British imperialism and the British occupation of Northern Ireland.”

Yet there is no doubt that the actual response of most Irish people to the deaths of the boys was not the “correct” one, but that described by Mr. Clarity. For Irish American nationalists, contemplating such developments, the lesson is that the Irish in Ireland have grown soft, and out of touch with their own history. And on April 5, a little more than a week after that report from Dublin, The New York Times carried an article which interpreted the events described in the report precisely along those lines. Whether or not the article was published in response to Irish American nationalist pressure I cannot say, but it was certainly satisfactory to that section of opinion.

The New York Times article was published under the headline “Ireland’s Troubled Sleep” with the more pointed subheading “British policy sustains the cycle of terror.” The article was by Andrew O’Hehir, described as senior editor of San Francisco Weekly. At first sight it might not seem clear why The New York Times should turn to San Francisco for an authoritative interpretation of a report from Dublin. Yet there is a kind of logic in the choice. If the Irish living in Ireland are as dopey a lot as the author of “Ireland’s Troubled Sleep” depicts them as being, then if you are in quest of clear Irish thinking, the further you can get from actual Ireland the better. Mr. O’Hehir, at a distance of six thousand miles from the scene is, on this reasoning, exceptionally qualified to interpret it. And he does so with confidence, and a spicy dash of radical chic:

The rally represented a repudiation of the shadowy organization that claims to represent the Irish soul, that proclaims its legacy of bloodshed and martyrdom to be entwined with the deepest Irish sense of self.

But the I.R.A.’s claim, I’m afraid, is not easily dismissed. The group is best understood as the product of two forces; centuries of British colonial oppression and Irish denial of the meaning of that experience.

Respectable Irish opinion has long opposed the I.R.A. campaign of violence aimed at ending British rule in Northern Ireland. However, the relationship between the Irish and the I.R.A. is a complicated psychological transaction that can’t be addressed by speeches or captured in opinion polls. Many who oppose I.R.A. terrorism privately admit to halfburied feelings of anti-British resentment and to a grudging admiration for the group’s resolute defiance.

In this light, the guerrillas’ brutal acts can be seen as the stirrings of a dark medieval unconsciousness behind the facade of contemporary respectability. As long as Ireland refuses to confront the post-colonial trauma that distorts virtually all aspects of its social, cultural and political life this dysfunctional pattern is unlikely to end.

This in-depth analysis contains no reference to the basic fact that Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because most of its citizens want it that way. O’Hehir ignores that, even when he is speculating about Britain’s reasons for remaining in Northern Ireland:

Rational British policy would dictate jettisoning Northern Ireland. But nations rarely act on a rational basis alone. Perhaps abandoning the final lump of empire is too bitter a pill for the British Establishment to swallow.

In reality, Northern Ireland is one “lump of empire” that the British establishment, and most British people, would happily do without, as indeed the present secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, acknowledged in a recent interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit. But it would be difficult, and without international precedent, to expel from the United Kingdom a million people who want to stay in it, and who are in a majority in the province they inhabit. O’Hehir never refers directly to the existence of the Ulster Protestants. Anyone who thinks of the British “occupation” of Northern Ireland as sustained by force alone would find nothing in “Ireland’s Troubled Sleep” to disturb this illusion.

There is just one reference in the article, very near the end, to the sectarian-political divide which is at the heart of the violence in and around Northern Ireland. The reference is obscure and portentous, like much else in the article. It runs: “And Ireland must face its history of violence and victimhood if Catholic-Protestant peace is ever to be possible.” Immediately after providing that hasty and confused glimpse of the reality, O’Hehir goes happily back to his Britbashing theme, with this peroration: “But that process must not obscure a central fact: British policy created and feeds the cycle of hatred and killing in which the Irish and British remain trapped.”

When I read “Ireland’s Troubled Sleep,” I asked The New York Times, through my agent, to give me space for a reply. They told my agent that they were willing to publish an article by me about Northern Ireland, but stipulated that I was not to refer to Mr. O’Hehir’s article. This was no use to me, since what I wanted to do was to expose that specific and blatant exercise in disinformation. So I turned to The New York Review of Books. Hence the present article.

The thesis of “Ireland’s Troubled Sleep”—“British policy sustains the cycle of terror”—is untrue in the sense intended in the article. If Northern Ireland were to be expelled from the United Kingdom, and British troops withdrawn in consequence, the processes of “ethnic cleansing” already at work in Northern Ireland would speedily attain Bosnian proportions. The Protestant and unionist leaders would declare the independence of Northern Ireland and send their security forces into Catholic and nationalist areas to flush out the IRA, thus ending the “kid glove methods” and “no-go areas” for which Protestants at present denounce the British government.

From a Protestant point of view, the deployment of their forces in places like West Belfast would be a legitimate security exercise. But to Catholics, it would appear as an invasion of their home territory by their hereditary enemies, bent on genocide. There would be mass resistance which the Protestant security forces would try to quell by the uninhibited use of firepower. The Dublin government would be forced to react, and civil war would engulf the whole island. The death roll in the first week would exceed the total (a little more than 3,000) which the “cycle of terror” has exacted in more than twenty years. The British presence, far from “sustaining” the cycle of terror, has inhibited it from attaining its full and frightful potential. That would be demonstrated beyond doubt, at great cost to the whole people of Ireland, were the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland, as the “friends of Ireland” in America constantly urge them to do.

The British presence in Northern Ireland is indispensable, if general civil war is to be avoided. British policy on Northern Ireland is another matter. It is even questionable whether there is such a thing as British policy, in this particular context. But there is a fairly constant British pattern of behavior. That pattern is to stay in Northern Ireland, while giving the impression that they would like to get out of it, and will get out of it as soon as they can find a way of saving their face while doing so. And this pattern of behavior does indeed help to sustain the cycle of terror. It does so doubly by its effects on both communities, and specifically on both sets of paramilitaries.

As far as the IRA is concerned, it has received encouragement, from very early on, from both the major British political parties. The IRA offensive began in 1971. Harold Wilson, then leader of the opposition, met the IRA leaders secretly in Dublin in 1972. William Whitelaw, secretary of state for Northern Ireland in a Tory government, met the IRA leaders shortly afterward. Neither meeting led to any agreement. But for the IRA, the important thing was that these high-level encounters had happened. They were intoxicating demonstrations of the power that grows out of the barrel of a gun.

So far as is known, no member of a British government has actually met with the IRA leaders since the early 1970s. But indications of a British desire for disengagement have been frequent. Sir Patrick Mayhew’s recent interview with Die Zeit is not an isolated episode. Sir Patrick’s predecessor, Peter Brooke, had invoked a “Cyprus” analogy, implying that the British may decide to go and leave the natives to fight it out. Every such signal is a shot in the arm for the IRA. They are encouraged to believe that they will again meet with a British government representative, and this time to discuss the phasing of British withdrawal. Without that hope, inadvertently fostered by British politicians, the IRA could hardly have kept their “armed struggle” going for twentytwo years.

The same sorts of signals that raise hope on the side of the IRA engender fear of being abandoned among the Protestant community. And the fear, like the hope, finds expression in violence. The Protestant paramilitaries arose in response to the IRA campaign, but they have, until recently, been less active and less effective than the IRA. Traditionally the Protestant community supports the official security forces, to which many of its members belong, and this has tended to inhibit reliance on paramilitaries. But that inhibition is slackening, as more and more Protestants come to feel that Britain is abandoning them and that they must look to their own defense.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 was a turning point in this connection. That agreement—which accorded to the government of the Republic consultative status in relation to Northern Ireland—was advertised at the time as an exercise in reconciling the two traditions. As far as Northern Ireland is concerned, it is nothing of the kind. It is seen, in both communities, as a victory of Catholics over Protestants. Protestants in consequence see it as a betrayal by Britain. Years of Protestant agitation against the agreement had no effect, and the “talks on the future of Northern Ireland,” which Protestants (unrealistically) hoped might lead to the scrapping of the agreement, are deadlocked.

In these conditions, Protestants are increasingly pinning their hopes on their own paramilitary forces. The main paramilitary group—the Ulster Defense Association—underwent an overhaul at the beginning of the decade, replacing its old corrupt leadership with one better prepared for combat. The results are now clear. Last year—for the first time since the IRA offensive began more than twenty years ago—the number of Catholics murdered by Protestants exceeded that of Protestants murdered by Catholics. And that is still the pattern in the first half of the present year.

There is a tendency to classify murders of Catholics by Protestants as “sectarian” whereas murders of Protestants by the IRA are “political.” In reality the two sets of murders are both political and sectarian. Both sets of paramilitaries murder members of the other community at random. The objective, on the Catholic side, is to break the will of the Protestant community to remain in the United Kingdom. On the Protestant side the objective is to deter the Catholic community from harboring and helping the IRA.

One curious feature of the All-Ireland scene today is the apparent lack of emotional response, among the population of the Republic, to the developing Protestant offensive against the Catholics of Northern Ireland. The population of the Republic is 97 percent Catholic (but see below) and has traditionally aligned itself with the Catholics of Northern Ireland, often referred to by politicians as “our people in the North.” At certain times the sense of identification among the people of the Republic with the Catholics of Northern Ireland has come across as overwhelmingly strong. This was so at the time of the siege of the Bogside in Derry in August 1969. It was so again, and even more strongly at the time of Bloody Sunday, in January 1972, when British soldiers shot thirteen unarmed Catholic rioters dead in Derry. And the sense of identification was still there, in the mid-Seventies, at the time of what were, up to last year, the last serious outbreaks of Protestant violence. But by 1993, this sense of identification seems to have dwindled almost to vanishing point, as a result of disgust with the IRA’s prolonged offensive, and all its untoward consequences.

Immediately after the Warrington bombings, and while the protests against them in Dublin were at their peak, loyalist, i.e., Protestant, paramilitaries murdered six Catholics (only one of whom was a known member of the IRA) in a place called Castlerock in Northern Ireland. Murders of Catholics by Protestants might have been expected to evoke strong reactions in the Republic, as they did in the past. But not any longer; not in 1993. After Castlerock, the protests over Warrington continued, and Castlerock was almost completely ignored. Nationalists in Northern Ireland were understandably outraged. The Southern Irish were identifying with the English rather than with their own brothers and sisters in the North.

I write a weekly column in the largest-circulating daily newspaper in Ireland, The Irish Independent. In that column I wrote about the Republic’s silence over Castlerock. I said that it was as if a great unspoken message was hovering in the air, addressed to the Catholics of Northern Ireland: “Ye brought it on yourselves.” None of my readers wrote to challenge that interpretation; everybody knows the truth of it. There was outrage over the killings in Warrington, because the victims were seen as totally innocent. Catholic victims in Northern Ireland are not so seen, because of relatively high levels of Northern Catholic support for those whose “armed struggle” included Warrington.

There is a marked difference, in this matter, between Catholics, north and south of the border. In the Republic, in the last general elections, Sinn Fein—the IRA’s political front—got less than 2 percent of the vote, and did not even come near to taking a seat in the Dail. In Northern Ireland, on the other hand, Sinn Fein regularly gets about one third of the Catholic vote. Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, was for years the elected (but abstentionist) member of the British Parliament for West Belfast. He lost his seat at the last Westminster elections, not because of any falling off in his Catholic support, but because his Protestant constituents were smart enough to vote for the constitutional Catholic candidate of the Social Democratic Labor Party (SDLP), whom they detested only slightly less than Gerry Adams. Adams, for his part, complained that his seat had been “stolen,” apparently on the grounds that Protestants ought not to have votes.

The disturbing size of that Sinn Fein vote is sometimes taken as exaggerating the strength of pro-IRA feeling. Catholic clergy, who condemn the IRA, and are worried for the reputation of their flock, tend to take this line. Actually, the size of the Sinn Fein vote understates the extent of IRA sympathies among the Catholics of Northern Ireland. There are plenty of discreet sympathizers with the IRA in the ranks of the SDLP. The SDLP leader, John Hume, is generally thought of by outsiders as hostile to the IRA. This is a simplification of a complex phenomenon. Mr. Hume does condemn “the men of violence” with considerable eloquence, on appropriate occasions. But he always stops well short of advising his followers to cooperate with the security forces, on a regular basis. He knows that his followers dislike the security forces and the Unionist population much more than they do the IRA—those of them, that is, who have any degree of dislike at all for the IRA. In fact, Mr. Hume’s followers help the IRA by refusing to cooperate with the security forces. In this way the IRA have the run of the Catholic areas, with the assent of the SDLP, as well as of their own unequivocal supporters. And that is how John Hume wants it to be.

I have been criticized in the past, in the Republic, for drawing attention to the equivocal nature of Mr. Hume’s position in relation to the IRA. But some of John Hume’s own actions in the spring of this year demonstrated that his relation to Sinn Fein-IRA is now even cozier than I had judged it to be in the past. In April, Mr. Hume held prolonged talks with Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein and in that capacity chief apologist for the IRA and its “armed struggle.” Mr. Hume had talked with Mr. Adams before, about five years back, but this time there was something new. The leader of the SDLP and the leader of Sinn Fein actually issued a Joint Declaration, during the preparation for Northern Ireland’s local elections which took place in May—and did not show the hoped-for loss of support for the hard-liners, both Catholic and Protestant.

The Joint Declaration showed the SDLP and Sinn Fein as sharing one grand political objective: “national self-determination” for all Ireland. The Joint Declaration thus denies all legitimacy to Northern Ireland. Since one of the parties to the Joint Declaration—Mr. Adams—is publicly committed to the “armed struggle,” to attain that objective the signature of John Hume, as Gerry Adams’s partner, tends to legitimize the said armed struggle. Not a good augury for the success of the “talks on the future of Northern Ireland,” in which Mr. Hume is supposed to be seeking agreement with the Unionists. If he wishes to wreck all prospects of reaching such an agreement, then he found an ideal instrument for that purpose in the Hume-Adams Joint Declaration.

Mr. Hume’s admirers have always supposed that, in his talks with Mr. Adams, he has been seeking peace. But that hardly accounts for that Joint Declaration, issued while the armed struggle was still continuing. The population of the Republic was horrified by the Warrington bombings. But John Hume was not too horrified to sign a Joint Declaration along with the principal apologist for the organization which murdered those boys, as well as hundreds of others. And Mr. Hume’s followers, the rank-and-file of the SDLP, show no sign of being in the least worried by their leader’s act of solidarity with the leader of Sinn Fein.

The contrast between, on the one hand, the reaction of people in the Republic to the Warrington bombings and, on the other, the signing of a Joint Declaration associating the SDLP, through Sinn Fein, with the IRA, is a striking index of the gap that has developed between public opinion in the Republic and Catholic public opinion in Northern Ireland.

The public mood in the Republic at present is cool toward the Northern Catholics, and warm toward Britain. This is not as surprising as it may appear to some Irish Americans. The only major survey of attitudes carried out in Ireland—Father Micheal Mac-Greil’s Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland—has a table of Overall Social Distance Scores. “Social distance” is measured by responses to questions such as: “Would marry or welcome as member of my family“; “Would have as close friends.” Among nationalities “English” are tops in the popularity stakes, with 87.3 percent, “British” come next, with 82.4 percent. There “Northern Irish” with 77.5 percent “Nationalists N.I.” at 71.9 percent are considerably less popular than plain “Northern Irish.” Irish Americans will find it hard to credit that “Yanks” (sic) at 69.9 percent, are so far behind “English.” In San Francisco, no doubt all this will rate as evidence of “post-colonial trauma” and a discreditable failure to grapple with the same in the appropriate way, by hating the Brits.

Overall, what has been happening in our archipelago over the twenty-two years of the IRA’s “armed struggle” consists of the following broad trends. The British have been distancing themselves from the Protestants of Northern Ireland. The people of the Republic have been distancing themselves from the Catholics of Northern Ireland, and the people of the Republic are getting closer to the British. That last trend was appropriately symbolized by President Mary Robinson’s call on Queen Elizabeth II in May: the first meeting between the two heads of state since the office of president of Ireland was created in 1937. It is not in Mary Robinson’s power, as non-executive president, to issue a return invitation, but she expressed the hope that she might soon be in a position to receive the Queen in Ireland. Mary Robinson is prodigiously popular and none of this put the slightest dent in her popularity; on the contrary, it served to enhance it. She was loudly praised by virtually all sections of society and the mass media: the murmurs of dissent were few and forlorn.

Too much, however, should not be made of this. Everything that Mary Robinson has done since she became president has been popular, mainly because of her own immense personal appeal. Thus, when on a visit to West Belfast, she shook hands with Gerry Adams, the former Sinn Fein MP for the area, and in that capacity included in the group assembled to welcome her, with all of whom she shook hands in turn. That particular handshake cost her much of her surprisingly considerable popularity among Northern Unionists; but it did her no harm in the Republic, where most people regarded it as of no political significance. However that may be, the silent handshake en passant in a crowd certainly does not compare in political significance with the planned and deliberate conversation with Queen Elizabeth II.

On the whole nationalism in the Republic appears to be in relative decline. I suspect that the decline is associated with the more spectacular decline in the authority of Catholicism; specifically, in the authority of the Church over social and moral questions, particularly sexual questions. Against the known wishes of the whole Catholic hierarchy, the Irish Parliament, the Dail, at the end of May by a unanimous vote legalized the completely free sale of condoms, including sale by slot machine. One commentator, Bruce Arnold, hailed that vote as signaling the advent of “separation of Church and State.” He was not exaggerating.

Nationalism and Catholicism in Ireland have usually been depicted as in conflict. Sometimes they were, most notably in 1891, when, after Charles Parnell’s marriage to the divorced Katherine O’Shea, he was denounced by the Catholic hierarchy, and the Irish nationalists split into Parnellite’s and anti-Parnellites. But deep down nationalism and Catholicism were felt to be as one. It was not just that England had oppressed Ireland: Protestant England had oppressed Catholic Ireland. The Catholic schools emphasized the religious aspect, thus enlisting the force of nationalism in the service of the Church. Because of that association, the weakening of Catholicism weakens nationalism also. Catholic Ireland had good reason to hate Protestant England, and did so with a vengeance. But post-Catholic Ireland—now clearly beginning to emerge—has no reason to hate post-Protestant England. So that old hatchet can be buried, which is what the great majority in the Republic clearly want to do.

These trends create a window of opportunity over Northern Ireland if the government of the Republic has the sense and the nerve to see its chance and seize it. The opportunity is to break the logjam which is obstructing the “talks on the future of Northern Ireland” between the British and Irish governments and the constitutional parties in Northern Ireland: the two Unionist parties and the SDLP.

The logjam is over Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish Constitution: the articles which lay claim to Northern Ireland as part of the national territory of Ireland. The “reintegration of the national territory” referred to in Article 3 has been defined as “a constitutional imperative” by the Irish Supreme Court. The Unionists understandably refuse to reach agreement with Dublin until there is a commitment to amend those Articles which would have to be done by referendum. The Dublin government, so far, has refused to enter into any such commitment. So the only party to the talks which can now make the talks move toward agreement is the Irish government, by softening its position with regard to Articles 2 and 3.

It is clear that the people of the Republic are in no mood to refuse amendment of Articles 2 and 3, if that course is recommended to the people by the government. Something substituting “aspirations for an eventual unity of the people of Ireland” for the present naked irredentist territorial claim would be easily carried, and would be acceptable to Unionists.

So why don’t the leaders of the Irish government just go ahead, and move toward amendment of those articles? The answer is that they are afraid of John Hume, who wants those articles to stand, for the simple reason that the Unionists hate them so much. The national self-determination plank in the Hume-Adams Joint Declaration was intended (among other things) to copper-fasten those articles.

It is understandable that the Dublin government should be a bit afraid of John Hume. For two decades now, Mr. Hume has dominated the political thinking, over Northern Ireland, of all the successive Irish governments. He has been able to dominate because he was extremely popular in the Republic. People admired him as the peace-loving champion of the Catholics and believed him to be an enemy of the IRA. As long as that was so, to run foul of John Hume was to court political destruction; as I know from personal experience in 1972.

But that is not so; not any longer. Gerry Adams is detested by almost everybody in the Republic, and Mr. Hume’s penchant for hobnobbing with Mr. Adams has damaged his image. When I publicly attacked the Hume-Adams Joint Declaration (in The Irish Independent) there was no come back from Mr. Hume’s admirers in the Republic. Mr. Hume, personally, was constrained to reply: a sure sign that he is running out of friends in the Republic. (The Hume-Adams joint declaration is clearly a deliberate political act, and so seems, quite rightly, to be in all together different class from that Robinson-Adams handshake.)

If the government decides to move toward agreement with the Unionists, by a commitment to amend Articles 2 and 3, it can safely brave the wrath of John Hume. Such a move would suit the present mood in the Republic. John Hume’s reputation there would only suffer further, were he to oppose such a move, as he probably realizes by now. If the government were to make that move the talks would then be on course for a successful outcome. The outlines of that outcome are already clear: a large delegation of power to the representatives of both Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland to run a joint government—“devolved cross community government”—with the Anglo-Irish Agreement still in place, and with a Dublin commitment to move for the amendment of Articles 2 and 3. The Unionists want to get rid of the Anglo-Irish Agreement but they must know that that is not on the cards. The commitment to amend Articles 2 and 3 would remove from the agreement its most objectionable aspect in Unionist eyes: the fact that it is an agreement with a party that has a de jure claim to the territory of Northern Ireland. As for the SDLP, it doesn’t really want devolved government, in which it will be a junior partner. But if devolved cross-community government is being offered, the SDLP simply cannot refuse its share and leave the whole show to the Unionists.

So if the Irish government is prepared to take the plunge it can save the talks. A successful outcome to the talks would not be “the end of history” or even the end of the IRA. But it would strengthen the center in Northern Ireland against the two extremes, and would tend toward closer cooperation between Dublin and London, opening the way toward tougher security cooperation, against the paramilitary forces of both communities. So there is much to play for.

It seemed at one time that the present coalition government in Dublin might be genuinely anxious to secure an accord with the Unionists, something which would require a willingness to move on Articles II and III. By the end of July, those hopes had faded. Foreign Minister Dick Spring, in an interview with the Guardian, indicated that one of the options he is considering for Northern Ireland is Joint Administration by Britain and the Republic: a nationalistic notion tending in the opposite direction to repeal of Articles 2 and 3. The same idea had been put forward by Kevin McNamara, parliamentary spokesman for the British Labour Party on Northern Ireland. Joint Administration is basically John Hume’s idea—conceived as next step on the road to a United Ireland—and is consequently anathema to all Unionists. Any attempt to implement it would precipitate an insurrection in Northern Ireland east of the River Bamm: the Protestant heartland. But there is not going to be any attempt at Joint Administration, atleast during the lifetime of the present British Parliament. The talk about Joint Administration rebounded to the benefit of the British government and the Unionist parliamentary representation. Mr. Major wrote a letter, later published, rebuking Mr. McNamara for even considering Joint Administration, and urging Labour to “unambiguous acknowledgment of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom.”

Because of that letter, and because of Labour’s flirtation with Joint Administration, William Molyneaux’s Official Unionists, who have been estranged from the Conservatives ever since the Anglo-Irish Agreement on 1985, voted in Parliament for the government in the crucial Maastricht “vote of confidence” in July. The Conservatives can almost certainly count on their continued support for the duration of the present Parliament. That increases the government’s parliamentary margin of safety by 50 percent, which will probably enable the present Parliament to last its term—with about three years to go—during which period the Conservatives can hope to recover from their present deep unpopularity.

It follows that the British government is unlikely, in the lifetime of the present Parliament, to do anything that will displease the Unionists. Since the Dublin government is unlikely to do anything that will attract the Unionists, the politics of the province are likely to remain in their characteristic condition of deadlock for the next few years at least.

It is to be hoped that, during this particular deadlock, the British government will begin to take its responsibilities for security more seriously, and with a greater sense of urgency. At present the ordinary citizens of Northern Ireland are the prey, week by week, of two sets of political-sectarian terrorists: the IRA and the Loyalists paramilitaries—of whom the latter have been somewhat more aggressive for nearly the last two years.

It is now clear that such well-established and determined terrorist conspiracies cannot be defeated within the limits of normal legal process. There is a growing demand for selective internment, to be applied even-handedly to the godfathers of both communities. Rank-and-file members are sometimes arrested and convicted. Those who give the orders are seldom even charged, although they are known to the police. Since both communities are now suffering about equally from these regular terrorist atrocities, there would be a sigh of relief, from most ordinary people throughout Northern Ireland, if all the godfathers, of both lots, were put behind bars.

So far, the governments concerned have been putting the vain quest for a political solution first, hoping forlornly that the eventual success of this quest, if it ever happens, will lead to an improvement in security. It is time to reverse priorities and put security first. If both sets of terrorist leaders can be put out of business, politics could then have a chance. They don’t have one in the present atmosphere of terror and hysteria permeating both communities.

The post A New Ireland? appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Alan Ryan, in his (mostly generous) review of my book The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke [NYR, December 3, 1992] quotes the following passage, in which I refer to the two most influential works of Sir Lewis Namier:

” ‘It would be possible, I suppose, to read both books [The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution] without noticing that Burke is the prime target. The references to him are few; that is part of the strategy. The vigorous historian—and Namier radiates vigour—does not take Burke seriously, and lets this be known en passant‘.”

On this Ryan comments:

“This comes awfully close to the paranoid school of interpretation, where argument from silence can be turned to any end you like.”

If indeed my argument were entirely or even mainly from silence, that would indeed be “awfully close to the paranoid school.” But my main complaint about Namier concerns what he does have to say about Burke: the concentrated venom of his few and brief asides. I quote a number of examples. The most succinct and efficient is contained in England in the Age of the American Revolution. It consists of just ten words: “the man whose livery [Burke] happened to have taken.” That verdict qualifies the surrounding silence. We are to infer that Namier doesn’t have much to say about Burke because Burke isn’t worth writing about. Why devote space, in a serious book, to a mere lackey? And the few other references to Burke carry the same implication.

The “livery” theory concerning Burke is demonstrably untenable. The demonstration is contained in the ten-volume Cambridge and Chicago edition of Burke’s Correspondence (mostly published since Namier’s death in 1960). The Correspondence shows Burke as telling the men whose livery he happened to be wearing what they ought to do, far more often than any of them told him what he ought to do.

Citing the publication dates of some Namierite works, from 1930 to 1955, Ryan implies that the Namierite interpretation of Burke can be of little interest or importance to students of Burke today. I think this underestimates the authority, even if slowly waning, of Namier and his school over historiography, especially British historiography of the late eighteenth century.

Not many historians have given words, based on their names, to the English language. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary has “Namierean,” “Namierite,” “Namierize.” The illustrative quotations are themselves clearly from Namierite sources. For example: “The Namierite revolution in historical method…destroyed a long accepted view of the nature of political parties in the eighteenth century.” Also: Essentially, Namierization meant a rigorous substitution of accurate detail for the generalizations which had contented older historians.

The Namierization of Edmund Burke inverted that definition: it substituted slanted generalizations for accurate detail.

The reductivist approach to Edmund Burke, initiated by Namier, is still not without influence, at least in British historiography. Consider the Introduction to Volume VIII, The French Revolution: 1790–1794 of the Clarendon Press Edition of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Volume VIII was published in 1989. Its Introduction is, from beginning to end, an effort to return Burke to the insignificance to which Namier and his friends had sought to confine him. So if Burke’s greatness is to be seen clearly, his biographer has the duty of demolishing an accumulation of disfiguring Namierite rubbish around him dating from the second to the eighth decade of the twentieth century, although with fortunately a diminishing frequency of deposit, from around 1970.

Working on Burke, and contemplating his prodigious commitment to the four great causes of his life, I did experience indignation at the impudent “livery” version of his role. Indignation may, at a distance, sometimes resemble paranoia but the two are not the same.

Conor Cruise O’Brien
Dublin, Ireland

Alan Ryan replies:

I am not greatly at odds with Dr. O’Brien, and will be brief about what separates us. I know no evidence that would force Dr. O’Brien to yield to my view that the extremer forms of Namierism are too passé to be worth his shot, and leave it to his readers to decide between us. I am equally happy to leave Dr. Mitchell, the editor of Volume VIII of Burke’s Correspondence, to accept or repudiate the Namierite label as he chooses—though I shall be surprised if he accepts it. As to arguments from silence, I mean only that the general absence from Namier’s work of explicit discussion of Burke is hardly evidence that Burke is Namier’s main target. He is certainly a casualty of Namier’s methods, but that’s a different and a smaller matter.
Two other correspondents have set me straight on other matters: Professor Jeffrey Seward of Pacific University points out that de Maistre read Burke with pleasure, and drew on Burke’s Reflections in his own Considerations on France. I cannot now think why I was convinced of the opposite given the visibility of the evidence. Professor George McElroy of Roosevelt University complains that I mangled Goldsmith’s “And to party gave up what was meant for mankind” in paraphrasing it, changed Lord North’s title—First Lord of the Treasury—to Secretary of the Treasury, and should have called Burke’s first employer “Single speech Hamilton.” I am happy to acknowledge these slips and grateful for the information that “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom” is already to be seen in Washington, carved on the base of Burke’s statue.

The post ‘Burke’s Livery’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

I have just had the opportunity of reading Conor Cruise O’Brien’s splendid review of Isaiah Berlin’s The Crooked Timber of Humanity (NYR, April 25).

Professor O’Brien writes: “Early Utopias were theocratic in concept, like Thomas Münzer’s regime in Munster in the early sixteenth century” (p. 57).

But, as Norman Cohn taught us in The Pursuit of the Millennium, Thomas Münzer’s sphere of activity was Thuringia and Saxony, not the Rhineland. The regime in Münster was that of the Anabaptists, led by such prophetae as Jan Matthys and John Bockelson of Leyden, and such burghers as Bernt Knipperdollink. In fact, the error reinforces Professor O’Brien’s point: he has given us two theocratic Utopias when he thought he was citing only one.

R.T. Davies
Silver Spring, Maryland

Conor Cruise O’Brien replies:

I thank Mr. Davies for his courteous correction and am grateful for his verdict of felix error.

The post Error Felix appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In defining nationalism as “a conglomerate of emotions,” I have in mind the nationalism which has been a driving force in history, and especially in modern history. This form of nationalism almost invariably makes its appearance with an accompanying adjective of national identification: “French nationalism,” “German nationalism,” and so on. The various nationalisms have so much in common in their manifestations, however, that it is possible to use “nationalism” as a general term to refer to these common characteristics, collectively. The “conglomerate of emotions” I have in mind as composing nationalism are those that cluster around landscape, ancestors, language, traditions, and cultural patterns, often including religion.

Textbooks on nationalism often refer to the phenomenon as of modern origin, usually tracing it back no further than the late eighteenth century. What really happened during that period, however, is the separation of national feeling from religion, the emergence of secular nationalism. But nationalism, as a conglomeration of emotions, linking faith and fatherland, goes back very far indeed. It appears on both sides of our Judeo-Hellenic heritage. The Hebrew Bible was about a Chosen People in a Promised Land; in classical antiquity we have the cult of those who died for the “polis or the patria.” In Christian Europe certain powerful figures—for example Joan of Arc and Oliver Cromwell—derived their power from the fusion in them of religion and nationalism. The idea of a Chosen People in a Promised Land was taken by virtually every Christian nation and applied to itself. I can’t be sure of the full number but writers of the following nations explicitly referred to their peoples as chosen and their land as promised: England, France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and especially and insistently the United States, for both whites and blacks took up the theme.

I have been using the word nationalism up to now in the sense in which we normally use the word when we use it with an identifying prefix, as in “French nationalism,” etc. There is, however, a distinct sense in which nationalism is used without an identifying prefix. In this sense the word is used to refer to a theory or ideology according to which people of every nation are encouraged to take pride in their national identity, cultivate their national traditions, and so on. The father of this type of nationalism was Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). Those of Herder’s intellectual progeny who followed his path of nationalism-in-general were, however, very few. Mostly, the writings of Herder, which were influential both inside and outside Germany, served to stimulate and encourage the other kind of nationalism: the conglomerate of emotions around the idea of a particular nation. In Germany, this type of cultural nationalism entered into the ferment out of which rose the ominous cult of das Volk. East of Germany, it went into the ferment of many nationalisms which was to lead to the breakup of Austria-Hungary as well as to the First World War. That ferment is again at work both in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia. And if the project of turning the European Economic Community into a full-fledged Federal Union comes to fruition (which I think unlikely) then a similar ferment would be likely, in time, to manifest itself within the new union.

I will use here the term “nationalism” in the sense in which it is used in ordinary discourse—“nationalism as feeling”—and not in the sense of nationalism-as-theory, a sense which is mostly confined to academic discussions of nationalism as part of the history of thought. Nationalism, unfortunately, cannot be confined to the realm of the history of thought.

In the case of democracy, also, I shall be using the word as it is used in ordinary discourse. By “democracy” we understand a state of affairs in which all adult citizens periodically elect those who are to govern them for a given limited period, and in which the same citizens are free to reject the governors whom they formerly chose, and elect new ones in their place, at the end of the limited period, or earlier. And this state of affairs is linked—historically, though not necessarily logically—with other specific conditions: notably the rule of law and freedom of expression.

When the Soviet Empire first withdrew from the lands to the west which it had occupied at the end of the Second World War, and then became racked by the internal convulsions which are now increasingly shaking it, scores of millions of people hoped to see both the attainment of democracy and the fulfillment of their national aspirations. It often seemed to be assumed, both by the people concerned and by outside observers, that these objectives were essentially identical or at least easily compatible. In many cases, though not in all, it soon became painfully clear that these assumptions were open to serious question.

To illustrate some of the problems that can arise between nationalism and democracy, I should like to take a case history, that of my own country: Ireland. Like many twentieth-century Europeans, I was born in one state and grew up in another one, though without changing my physical location. I was, however, more fortunate than most other Europeans in comparable situations in that both the state I was born in and the one I grew up in were fully democratic.

The state I was born in in 1917 was called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. When I was four years old, that state broke up. Two successor states took its place: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, on one side, and the Irish Free State, now known as the Republic of Ireland, on the other. The manner in which this transformation took place has some instruction for us concerning the interplay of nationalism and democracy.

By the time democracy—in the form of adult male suffrage—arrived in the British Isles, a little over a hundred years ago, it was already apparent that democracy had a problem with nationalism. The problem—as is also the case in many other parts of the world today—concerned the extent of the territory which should form the unit for the purposes of democratic process and government. Most of the inhabitants of the British Isles assumed that the unit had to be the archipelago. On that view of the matter, the Irish already had full democratic rights, since they were free to elect representatives to the parliament of the United Kingdom.

Most Irish people were, however, nationalists and rejected the view that the archipelago should be the unit, for the purpose of democratic choice. Ireland, they held, was a separate nation and should have a parliament of its own. By the second decade of the twentieth century many British people—in the Liberal party—were ready to concede the demands of Irish nationalism; “If the Irish want to go, let them go,” was the general idea. But it soon became painfully clear that that was an oversimplification.

Most of the inhabitants of Ireland were Irish nationalists. But a sizable minority were not only not nationalists but were passionately opposed to being included in a polity in which Irish nationalists would be in a majority. There antinationalists—though a minority in the whole island of Ireland—were a local majority in the northeast corner. They opposed, in principle, any separate parliament for Ireland but they insisted that, if any such parliament should come into being, their own territory and population must not be included in its jurisdiction. Irish nationalists, however, insisted that the island of Ireland was a natural and historic unit, and the only acceptable basis for democratic choice. In the parliament of the United Kingdom, in the year before the First World War, a majority—made up of a coalition of Liberals and Irish nationalists—accepted the contention of the Irish nationalists, and rejected that of their opponents, the Ulster Unionists. An attempt was made to incorporate the refractory population of northeast Ireland into the jurisdiction of the Irish nationalists in a Home Rule parliament. This attempt was abandoned by the Liberals, after it had precipitated a crisis in the British Army, and brought the whole United Kingdom to the verge of civil war. Indeed the Home Rule crisis of 1913-1914 is among the causes of the First World War, since it led the German General Staff to believe that Britain would be incapable of intervening in Europe, even when Belgium was invaded.

Irish nationalists felt betrayed when their Liberal allies abandoned the thesis of the island of Ireland as a national unit, and allowed Ulster counties to opt out of an Irish parliament and remain in the United Kingdom, if they chose to do so. There would thus be two territories for democratic choice in the island of Ireland, and not just one, as the nationalists demanded.

Nationalist frustration at what nationalists regarded as the dismemberment of the nation led to two armed rebellions: one during the First World War, in 1916, and another in the immediate aftermath of that war, in 1919-1921. At the end of the second rebellion, the leadership of the rebellious nationalists found itself constrained to accept an Anglo-Irish Treaty which conferred statehood on the homogeneously nationalist area, leaving Northern Ireland as still part of the United Kingdom. The people of that area endorsed that decision. After two years’ experience of the realities of rebellion and repression, many people were feeling less nationalistic than they had believed themselves to be in 1918. A minority among the nationalist rebels, however, rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty and a civil war ensued. This, be it noted, was a civil war among nationalists in what is now the Republic. Northern Ireland was not involved.

The anti-Treaty nationalists lost that civil war, but their leader, Eamon de Valera, came to power, through free elections, ten years later. While accepting the partition of Ireland de facto, he rejected it de jure. The constitution of Ireland, devised by de Valera in 1937 and still in force today, reasserts the old nationalist claim to the entire island. That constitution was enacted in a referendum which was confined to the homogeneously nationalist population of the Republic of Ireland, but it is deemed to apply to the whole island on the “natural unit” theory: the Irish Supreme Court, as recently as March of last year, held that “the reintegration of the national territory” is a “constitutional imperative,” presumably binding on all inhabitants of the island, including those who are known to reject the claim in question.

The Provisional IRA, in a campaign of violence that has now been going on for twenty years, are attempting to enforce that claim. They have no democratic mandate, but they derive a certain credibility—and durability—from the fact that their objective, a united Ireland, is also the professed objective of all the democratic political parties whose members are drawn from the nationalist population.

The Irish case shows nationalism as productive of disruption and violence, even under conditions of unbroken democratic process. But the predicaments of people now creating or seeking to create democracies, after two generations of totalitarian rule, are more formidable. Some have problems, as Ireland has, about the unit of choice. Should there be a democratic Czechoslovakia, for example, or should there be a Czech democratic state and a Slovak one? And if there are two, where exactly should their boundaries run? That last is a very dangerous question, since it is apt to excite nationalist passions on both sides.

Both in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia, the spread of democratic ideas and the relaxation of restraints over political discussion led to—or were at least accompanied by—an explosion of nationalism. In multinational and multilingual polities, freedom of expression releases nationalism and inflames it. Gorbachev, in offering glasnost to the people of the Soviet Union, believed he would now learn what that people wanted. But what glasnost revealed was, that there was no such thing as a people of the Soviet Union: only a lot of different peoples, several of which don’t want to be part of the Soviet Union at all and almost all of which are radically dissatisfied with the Soviet Union, both in their past experience of it, and in its present form (and probably in any form which it is capable of assuming).

Movement toward democracy and freedom of expression, in multinational polities, releases nationalism. But once nationalism has been released, and is then inflamed, it has a tendency to smother democracy and freedom of expression. This tendency operates on two levels, with a negative interaction between them. At the top, among the people who are trying to hold the multinational polity together, democracy and freedom of expression come to be associated with the disintegrating forces that have to be combated. And in each nationality that is struggling to emerge, aroused nationalism is intolerant of dissent, especially the dissent of local ethnic minorities. “No free speech for traitors!” was a slogan frequently heard in Ireland in the Twenties and Thirties, in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War. That slogan would be readily intelligible today in Georgia and Azerbaijan, or in Serbia and Croatia. And if any of those nationalities becomes independent it is unlikely to be democratic.

Both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were held together only partly by terror. The other integrating force was the possession of a common multinational ideology: communism. I don’t mean of course that the population at large ever believed in communism. Nor do I mean that the members of the Communist party necessarily, or even probably, believed in communism. It is hard to know what, if anything, Party bureaucrats believe, or even whether the concept of belief conveys anything distinct to their minds. But to be a coherent force in the governance of multinational polities, communism does not have to be believed. It only needs to hold a monopoly of public discourse and to be the universal language of the ruling class—the nomenklatura—and of the bureaucracy at every level.

Communism is analogous in some ways to the Mandarin language spoken by the ruling class in imperial China. But communism did more than provide a common language for an imperial bureaucracy. Communism, as developed by Lenin and Stalin—followed by Tito—became a wonderfully flexible instrument for the governance of a multinational polity. Tsarism had been a Russian affair, the tsars were always Russian, and the ideology of the Empire—the Russian Orthodox Church—identified itself as Holy Russia. As against that past, the communism of the Soviet Union was a multinational ideology, with an appeal, and places, for ambitious members of minority nationalities. Lenin’s successor was just such a person.

Alan Bullock, on the second page of his recent book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, calls Stalin “a Great Russian chauvinist.” This is, of course, a deliberate paradox, but it lacks the inner truth that is needed to make paradox valid. Stalin was not, and could not be, a Great Russian chauvinist. Great Russian chauvinism was a force which threatened him and which he needed to combat. Many ordinary Russians must have wondered privately, after 1928, what a Georgian was doing, ruling Russians. Stalin needed to prevent anyone from raising that question in public. In doing so, he had to be seen to set his face against all forms of chauvinism, including Georgian chauvinism, and this he did. On this ground, Bullock calls him “a renegade.” Georgians don’t think of him in that way, as is shown by the fact that the only statues of Stalin that survive in the Soviet Union are those in Georgia. I remember a relevant conversation with a Georgian. This took place in Kraków, shortly after Khrushchev’s disclosure of Stalin’s crimes. The conversation ran:

“Do you admire Joseph Stalin?”

“I can’t really say that I do.”

“A pity. He was from Tiflis, you know.”

Communism, as it developed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and in Yugoslavia under Tito, was effective in sedating nationalism. As communism wore off, nationalism woke up again, and disintegration of the multinational polities set in. The early stirrings of nationalism appeared to be democratic, but later manifestations were more disquieting.

Democracy is more vulnerable than nationalism, in that, among people who have not grown accustomed to it, democracy is more likely to be judged by its immediate results. Thus economic hardship tends to discredit a new democracy. In the case of nationalism, on the other hand, the blame for hardship or defeat is likely to be placed on those who are believed to have betrayed the nation—as in the case of Germany, after defeat in the First World War. In Eastern Europe, many of those who are now attracted to democracy, because of its associations with success and economic wellbeing in the West, may well recoil from it when they find that democracy does not immediately deliver those good things. Also, the discovery of things like corruption in elected governments may be followed by a tendency to repudiate not just the particular people concerned, but the system they are felt to represent. Such conditions may be propitious for the emergence of national saviors, with military or paramilitary support. Some new democracies may therefore go under, at least for a time.

Yet democracy may also reassert itself, even against nationalism. That was seen in the case history I have considered, when the Irish electorate voted overwhelmingly in favor of the pro-Treaty forces in the general election of June 1922. And although nationalism reasserted itself ten years later, it was by then no longer a nationalism that challenged democratic institutions. Few people would have predicted in 1921 that the Irish State, then on the verge of civil war, would still be a functioning democracy seventy years later. And yet, that is the case: the Republic of Ireland within its de facto frontiers has been a fully functioning democracy throughout the seventy years of its existence, although its regrettable de jure claim to Northern Ireland lacks democratic validity.

I think that that case history, despite its many disquieting aspects, does carry at its core a somewhat reassuring message for the new democracies of Europe. Democracy in a newly emerging state can, after all, cope with nationalism, given a bit of luck. I would rate the chances for a democratic future as quite high, in most of the countries that were occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. I’m afraid I would not rate them so high for those who hope to achieve democracy and national self-determination within the Soviet Union itself.

The Baltic Republics, if permitted to leave the Soviet Union, would probably be democratic, but I would not now rate their chances of being allowed to leave as high. As regards Yugoslavia, both Slovenia and most of Croatia seem likely to extricate themselves from the wreckage of the present federation. If so, Slovenia is likely to be a democracy, and also to enter into confederal arrangements with Austria, Italy, and perhaps Czechoslovakia (if Czechoslovakia holds together). Croatia is a borderline case. If it has the good fortune to lose to Greater Serbia that portion of its territory which is most densely inhabited by ethnic Serbs, then it might evolve into a democracy, because the Croat leadership would know that unless it does so it will not be accepted by the West, or aided by it. For the rump of Yugoslavia, dominated by the manic nationalism of Greater Serbia, I see little democratic hope at all, in this century.

The post Nationalists and Democrats appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The title, as the editor tells us, is taken “from Isaiah Berlin’s preferred rendering of his favorite quotation from Kant.” The quotation, which is reproduced after the title page of the present collection runs:

Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.[^1]

(Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.)

According to the editor, Berlin

has always ascribed this translation to R.G. Collingwood, but it turns out that he has not left Collingwood’s version untouched. The quotation does not appear in Collingwood’s published writings, but among his unpublished papers there is a lecture on the philosophy of history, dating from 1929, in which the following rendering appears: “Out of the cross-grained timber of human nature nothing quite straight can be made.”

The editor adds that Collingwood orginally wrote “crooked” but later crossed it out and put in “cross-grained” instead. Berlin put “crooked” back, quite rightly. Krumm is the ordinary German word for “crooked.” To subsitute the fancy and opaque word “cross-grained” is a good example of the emollient tendency in English language versions of German thought. Berlin is by no means an abrasive writer, but he is no friend either to the emollient and the euphemistic. So “crooked” it is.

The Crooked Timber consists of eight essays. The first four are closely interrelated, and so are the last four. The two sets of essays are also interrelated, but less closely than each set is, internally. In the first part of this review, I propose to identify the main themes of The Crooked Timber—taking the two sets of essays in order—reserving most of my comment for the second part.

1.

The first four essays are “The Pursuit of the Ideal” (1988), “The Decline of Utopian Ideals in the West” (1978), “Giambattista Vico and Cultural History” (1983), and “Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought” (1980). The common theme of this set of essays is Utopia. The title and the full quotation from Kant suggest an anti-Utopian position, and this is not misleading. Yet, characteristically, Isaiah Berlin’s work does not abound in this sense. He has, in his youth, been attracted to Utopian idealism, and there is still a shade of wistfulness in his rejection of this.

In the first essay, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” there is a thread of intellectual autobiography. The author tells of his early—“much too early”—reading of Tolstoy and other Russian writers. In all these writers, the young Berlin found a common theme:

They all believed that the essence of human beings was to be able to choose how to live: societies could be transformed in the light of true ideals believed in with enough fervour and dedication. If, like Tolstoy, they sometimes thought that man was not truly free but determined by factors outside his control, they knew well enough, as he did, that if freedom was an illusion it was one without which one could not live or think. None of this was part of my school curriculum, which consisted of Greek and Latin authors, but it remained with me.

At Oxford Berlin “began to read the great philosophers,” and found, in Plato and Socrates, and in Western seventeenth-century rationalism and eighteenth-century empiricism, much to confirm him in the view that “societies could be transformed in the light of true ideals.”

The rational reorganisation of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted. All that was wanted was the identification of the principal human needs and discovery of the means of satisfying them. This would create the happy, free, just, virtuous, harmonious world which Condorcet so movingly predicted in his prison cell in 1794. This view lay at the basis of all progressive thought in the nineteenth century, and was at the heart of much of the critical empiricism which I imbibed in Oxford as a student.

At some point I realised that what all these views had in common was a Platonic ideal: in the first place, that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only, all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place, that there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths; in the third place, that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another—that we knew a priori. This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. In the case of morals, we could then conceive what the perfect life must be, founded as it would be on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the universe.

As Berlin was soon to find, there was a fault line in this attractive and impressive structure. The fault line consisted in the notion of the “necessary compatibility” of all truths. To that fault line, Machiavelli administered a hammer blow:

At a certain stage in my reading, I naturally met with the principal works of Machiavelli. They made a deep and lasting impression upon me, and shook my earlier faith. I derived from them not the most obvious teachings—on how to acquire and retain political power, or by what force or guile rulers must act if they are to regenerate their societies, or protect themselves and their states from enemies within or without, or what the principal qualities of rulers on the one hand, and of citizens on the other, must be, if their states are to flourish—but something else. Machiavelli was not a historicist: he thought it possible to restore something like the Roman Republic or Rome of the early Principate. He believed that to do this one needed a ruling class of brave, resourceful, intelligent, gifted men who knew how to seize opportunities and use them, and citizens who were adequately protected, patriotic, proud of their state, epitomes of manly, pagan virtues. That is how Rome rose to power and conquered the world, and it is the absence of this kind of wisdom and vitality and courage in adversity, of the qualities of both lions and foxes, that in the end brought it down. Decadent states were conquered by vigorous invaders who retained these virtues.

But Machiavelli also sets, side by side with this, the notion of Christian virtues—humility, acceptance of suffering, unworldliness, the hope of salvation in an afterlife—and he remarks that if, as he plainly himself favours, a state of a Roman type is to be established, these qualities will not promote it: those who live by the precepts of Christian morality are bound to be trampled on by the ruthless pursuit of power by men who alone can re-create and dominate the republic which he wants to see. He does not condemn Christian virtues. He merely points out that the two moralities are incompatible, and he does not recognise any overarching criterion whereby we are enabled to decide the right life for men. The combination of virtù and Christian values is for him an impossibility. He simply leaves you to choose—he knows which he himself prefers.

The idea that this planted in my mind was the realisation, which came as something of a shock, that not all the supreme values pursued by mankind now and in the past were necessarily compatible with one another. It undermined my earlier assumption, based on the philosophia perennis, that there could be no conflict between true ends, true answers to the central problems of life.

The message of Machiavelli was reinforced, in different ways, by the reading of Vico and of Herder. The theoretical objection to the notion of the perfect state—that is, the objection from the incompatibility of certain truths—came to seem to Berlin “a fatal one.” But in addition to the theoretical objection—and, as it seems, at a deeper level—Berlin discovered what he calls “a more practical socio-psychological obstacle.” He was finding that Utopia can be not only philosophically dubious, but hideously dangerous as well. The notion of a perfect state was beginning to fuse, in Berlin’s mind, with the notion of a final solution.

Utopias have their value—nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities—but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal. Heraclitus was right, things cannot stand still.

So I conclude that the very notion of a final solution is not only impracticable but, if I am right, and some values cannot but clash, incoherent also. The possibility of a final solution—even if we forget the terrible sense that these words acquired in Hitler’s day—turns out to be an illusion; and a very dangerous one. For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious for ever—what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken—that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao, for all I know of Pol Pot. Since I know the only true path to the ultimate solution of the problems of society, I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even within the narrowest limits, if the goal is to be reached. You declare that a given policy will make you happier, or freer, or give you room to breathe; but I know that you are mistaken, I know what you need, what all men need; and if there is resistance based on ignorance or malevolence, then it mist be broken and hundreds of thousands may have to perish to make millions happy for all time. What choice have we, who have the knowledge, but to be willing to sacrifice them all?

In comparison with the gravity and the torment of that “socio-psychological” diagnosis, the “theoretical objection,” based on incompatibility, may appear relatively trivial. But for the young Berlin, the discovery of the theoretical objection—valid as it is—may well have presented a most welcome escape hatch from what was becoming a menacing philosophical prison.

However that may be, when the young Berlin had finished his wrestling with the dark angel of Utopia, he had become what he has always since remained: the liberal, humanist, pluralist thinker whom so many of us love, venerate, and—above all—learn from.

Henry Hardy was right to put “The Pursuit of the Ideal” first in the present collection. It is not merely a fine essay, in itself, on an aspect of the history of ideas in general, but it affords a unique and fascinating glimpse into the history of the ideas of Sir Isaiah Berlin in particular. One would like to know more though about chronology. Which came first, “the theoretical objection” or the “socio-psychological obstacle”? Or did they come together? The theoretical objection came mainly from reading Machiavelli and Herder. Where did the “socio-psychological” obstacle come from? From early experience, I should guess, combined with the news in the papers and on the radio in the 1930s. A growing perception of discrepancy between the arguments of so many philsophers and what was actually going on out there in the world may have been at the root of Isaiah Berlin’s lifelong concern with the history of ideas, in the form which that concern has actually taken.

The second essay, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” necessarily suffers by comparison with its predecessor in this collection, for it is basically an earlier rumination of the same themes. It was worth including, however, because it contains a number of distinctive aperçus, most of them illuminating, some of them stimulating to debate. Among the latter, I would include the contention that “the beginning of the modern attack on Utopia, Utopia as such,” is to be found in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder.

I don’t believe Herder was attacking “Utopia as such.” I think he was attacking a particular French, Utopia, which had come near to achievement: a culturally united Europe, speaking and writing the French language, and accepting the intellectual leadership of the French philosophes. As against that Franco-cosmopolitan Utopia, Herder proposed a new and ominous Utopia of his own: the Utopia of das Volk, based on soil and language.

It is true—and this is the basis of the conception of Herder as anti-Utopian—that Herder’s idea of the apotheosis of das Volk was formally pluralist. Das Volk was not just the German one. Other nations were encouraged to trust in, and develop, their own Volkstum. On the basis of this, several writers have drawn a distinction between the good cultural and ecumenical nationalism of Herder and the nasty political nationalism of later German writers, beginning with Fichte. But there are grounds for skepticism concerning this differentiation. Herder’s cultural nationalism had definite consequences which he must have foreseen. Not only did it tend to weaken French hegemony from the cultural side, but it also laid the cultural basis for eventual German unification. Herder’s ecumenical version of cultural nationalism also had insidious consequences of a political kind. Herder’s ideas were enthusiastically taken up by the various linguistic minorities of the multinational Habsburg empire and worked toward the dissolution of the same. Thus Herder’s teachings tended toward a greater Germany, with a diminution of the authority of the major powers to the East and to the West.

That view of the matter would place Herder as a precursor of the militantly völkisch thinkers of the nineteenth century, and those thinkers themselves generally saw Herder in that light, ignoring the inconvenient aspects of his thought (antimilitarism, anti-Prussianism) for the sake of his supreme merits as the founder of the cult of das Volk. And that cult culminated in the most ghastly of all Utopias.

It is a pleasure to read Isaiah Berlin when in agreement with him. It is, perhaps, an even greater pleasure to disagree with him, in the hope of provoking a response somehow, somewhere.

The third essay in the “Utopian” series, “Giambattista Vico and Cultural History” contains a splendid passage on the writing of history: a passage that ought to be framed and hung up in the lobby of every department of history truly worthy of the name. Vico’s concept of fantasia, crucial to this passage, is defined by Berlin as “imaginative insight.” The passage runs:

Everyone is today aware of the fundamental difference between, on the one hand, those historians who paint portraits of entire societies or groups within them that are rounded and three-dimensional, so that we believe, whether rightly or mistakenly, that we are able to tell what it would have been like to have lived in such conditions, and, on the other, antiquaries, chroniclers, accumulators of facts or statistics on which large generalisations can be founded, learned compilers, or theorists who look on the use of imagination as opening the door to the horrors of guesswork, subjectivism, journalism, or worse.

This all-important distinction rests precisely on the attitude to the faculty that Vico called fantasia, without which the past cannot, in his view, be resurrected. The crucial role he assigns to the imagination must not blind us—and did not blind him—to the necessity for verification; he allows that critical methods of examining evidence are indispensable. Yet without fantasia the past remains dead; to bring it to life we need, at least ideally, to hear men’s voices, to conjecture (on the basis of such evidence as we can gather) what may have been their experience, their forms of expression, their values, outlook, aims, ways of living; without this we cannot grasp whence we came, how we come to be as we are now, not merely physically or biologically and, in a narrow sense, politically and institutionally, but socially, psychologically, morally; without this there can be no genuine self-understanding. We call great historians only those who not only are in full control of the factual evidence obtained by the use of the best critical methods available to them, but also possess the depth of imaginative insight that characterises gifted novelists. Clio, as the English historian G.M. Trevelyan pointed out long ago, is, after all, a muse.

For more than sixty years now, academic historiography has been strongly influenced, and in some areas dominated, by the authority, the outlook, and the methodology of the late Sir Lewis Namier. A.J.P. Taylor said of Namier that he “took the mind out of history.” G.R. Elton, recently in the London Times, described that observation of Taylor’s as “impertinent.” It may, indeed, at least be imprecise. But Vico, through Isaiah Berlin, supplies the mot juste. It can hardly be denied that Namier took the fantasia out of history; Namier’s truculent hostility to anything resembling fantasia is evident in all his scholarly work. And it is surely time to bring back fantasia—with Berlin’s appropriate qualifications—into academic history.

The fourth essay, and last in the “Utopia” series, deals with alleged relativism in eighteenth-century European thought: Berlin defines relativism as “a theory of [or?] ideology according to which the ideas and attitudes of individuals or groups are inescapably determined by varying conditioning factors, say, their place in evolving social structures of their societies, or the relations of production, or genetic, psychological or other causes, or combinations of these.” Thus, in our own time, deconstruction is an application of relativist values. But Berlin, in this chapter, is not concerned with our own time, nor does he refer to deconstruction. He is concerned here with the eighteenth century, whose non-Utopians and anti-Utopians were, in his opinion, pluralists and not relativists:

There is, so far as I can see, no relativism in the best-known attacks on the Enlightenment by reactionary thinkers—Hamann, Justus Möser, Burke, Maistre.

I shall come back to this passage in relation to Burke in the second part of this review. In any case, Berlin makes it clear that he regards himself, in terms of his own definitions and categories, as a pluralist, and not a relativist. So this essay is important, not only for a view of eighteenth-century thinking, but for the insight it affords into Berlin’s own ways of thinking, and how he thinks about them.

The first essay in the part of the book which is more closely concerned with the origins of fascism and nationalism than with the (related) question of Utopia is “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism.” This essay, published last autumn in The New York Review,[^2] is the longest in the book and also the oldest. The editor tells us that it “was put aside in 1960 as needing further revision. However, it was nearly ready for publication, and contained so much of value, that it seemed right to include it here.” Most readers will applaud this decision.

The essay on Joseph de Maistre shows Berlin at work on the writings of a profoundly alien spirit, and concerned to give a fair presentation of doctrines that are deeply repulsive to him. What is perhaps most remarkable about Maistre is that, while he is violently hostile, in principle, to the French Revolution, he has a taste for the Terror. Berlin writes:

What matters is not reason but power. Wherever there is a vacuum, power must sooner or later enter and create a new order out of revolutionary chaos. The Jacobins and Napoleon may be criminals, tyrants, but they wield power, they represent authority, they exact obedience, above all they punish and thereby restrain the centrifugal tendencies of weak and fallible men. Consequently they are a thousand times preferable to the critical intellectuals, the destructive pedlars of ideas who pulverise the social structure and destroy every vital process until some force, however illegal, rises up in response to the claims of history to sweep them out of its way.

All power is from God. Maistre’s interpretation of the celebrated Pauline text is very literal. All force commands respect. All weakness is to be despised, no matter where it is found, even in the acts of an anointed monarch of “the fairest kingdom after the Kingdom of Heaven”—Louis XVI of France. The Jacobins were scoundrels and murderers, but the Terror re-established authority, preserved and extended the frontiers of France, and therefore counts higher in the scale of ultimate values than the liberals and idealists of the Gironde who let power slip from their feeble grasp.

I shall come back to Maistre, in connection with the French Revolution and Edmund Burke.

The title of the next essay, “European Unity and its Vicissitudes,” has become somewhat misleading with the lapse of time since the date of its composition (1959). This essay is not about the varying problems and prospects of the European Community. It is about the relation of Romanticism—and German Romanticism in particular—to nationalism, fascism, and Marxism in Europe. Perhaps the most remarkable passage in this very rich essay is the following, dealing with the leap of Romanticism from art into politics.

The origins of this [Romantic] revolt are well known. The armies of Richelieu and of Louis XIV had crushed and humiliated a large part of the German population, and stifled the natural development of the new culture of the Protestant renaissance in the north. The Germans, a century later, rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment. It took the form of glorification of the individual, the national and the historical, against the universal and the timeless; of the exaltation of genius, of the unaccountable, of the leap of the spirit that defies all rules and conventions, of the worship of the individual hero, the giant above and beyond the law, and an assault upon the great impersonal order with its unbreakable laws, and its clear assignment of its own place to every human function and group and class and purpose, which had been characteristic of the classical tradition, and had entered deeply into the texture of the western world, both ecclesiastical and secular. Variety in the place of uniformity; inspiration in the place of tried and tested rules or traditions; the inexhaustible and the unbounded in the place of measure, clarity, logical structure; the inner life and its expression in music; worship of the night and the irrational: that was the contribution of the wild German spirit, which broke like a fresh wind into the airless prison of the French Establishment.

This great revolt of the humiliated Germans against the dead and levelling rationalist pedantry of French thought and taste in the mid-eighteenth century had, in its beginnings, a life-giving effect upon art and ideas about art, upon religion, upon personal relationships between human beings, upon individual morality. Then the tidal wave of feeling rose above its blanks, and overflowed into the neighbouring provinces of politics and social life with literally devastating results. All forms of going to the bitter end were thought more worthy of man than peaceful negotiation, stopping half-way; extremism, conflict, war were glorified as such.

Not the least interesting aspect of this important passage is what it leaves out. The passage begins in the mid-seventeenth century and it ends (to judge from other references in the same essay) around 1820. Yet there is no reference either in this passage, or elsewhere in this essay, to the enormous fact—and enormous cultural and political impact throughout Europe in the period under consideration—of the French Revolution. This is a startling omission, in its context, and I shall return to it.

The penultimate essay, “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will,” deals with essentially the same themes as “European Unity” but the later essay (“Apotheosis” belongs to 1975) tends to be more positive in its view of Romanticism. “Apotheosis” ends with the words:

If some ends recognised as fully human are at the same time ultimate and mutually incompatible, then the idea of a golden age, a perfect society compounded of a synthesis of all the correct solutions to all the central problems of human life, is shown to be incoherent in principle. This is the service rendered by romanticism and in particular the doctrine that forms its heart, namely, that morality is moulded by the will and that ends are created, not discovered. When this movement is justly condemned for the monstrous fallacy that life is, or can be made, a work of art, that the aesthetic model applies to politics, that the political leader is, at his highest, a sublime artist who shapes men according to his creative design, and that this leads to dangerous nonsense in theory and savage brutality in practice, this at least may be set to its credit: that it has permanently shaken the faith in universal, objective truth in matters of conduct, in the possibility of a perfect and harmonious society, wholly free from conflict or injustice or oppression—a goal for which no sacrifice can be too great if men are ever to create Condorcet’s reign of truth, happiness and virtue, bound “by an indissoluble chain”—an ideal for which more human beings have, in our time, sacrificed themselves and others than, perhaps, for any other cause in human history.

I don’t find this contrast altogether convincing. It is true that Utopia, when people attempt to enforce it, turns out to be Moloch. But the apotheosis of the Romantic will also turn out to be Moloch. That apotheosis is indeed a form of Utopia. When “the political leader,” according to the aesthetic model, comes to power as “a sublime artist who shapes men according to his creative design,” then that creative design is that artist’s Utopia. In its specifications, it may be quite unlike the Utopias dreamed of by Enlightenment thinkers, but it is not so unlike those Utopias as they worked out in practice. Enlightened Utopianism and Romantic apotheosis tend toward similar, though distinguishable, horrors in practice: Gulag on one side and Holocaust on the other.

So I wouldn’t be inclined to give the Romantic Apotheosis people too much credit for any damage they may have done to the enlightened Utopians. We need not say “a plague on both their houses,” for the plague has already struck them. We can only hope that it does not return from their remains to strike us. There is some danger of that, from both directions, as the twentieth century draws to an end.

The last essay in this collection is called “The Bent Twig: Or the Rise of Nationalism” (1972). In this essay, Berlin repairs to some extent the large omission in the earlier essay “European Unity.” The “twig” of Germany is here “bent” by the French:

Under the impact of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic invasions, cultural or spiritual autonomy, for which Herder had originally pleaded, turned into embittered and aggressive nationalist self-assertion.

Berlin goes on:

The French dominated the western world, politically, culturally, militarily. The humiliated and defeated Germans, particularly the traditional, religious, economically backward East Prussians, bullied by French officials imported by Frederick the Great, responded, like the bent twig of the poet Schiller’s theory, by lashing back and refusing to accept their alleged inferiority. They discovered in themselves qualities far superior to those of their tormentors. They contrasted their own deep, inner life of the spirit, their own profound humility, their selfless pursuit of true values—simple, noble, sublime—with the rich, worldly, successful, superficial, smooth, heartless, morally empty French.

This mood rose to fever pitch during the national resistance to Napoleon, and was indeed the original exemplar of the reaction of many a backward, exploited, or at any rate patronised society, which, resentful of the apparent inferiority of its status, reacted by turning to real or imaginary triumphs and glories in its past, or enviable attributes of its own national or cultural character. Those who cannot boast of great political, military or economic achievements, or a magnificent tradition of art or thought, seek comfort and strength in the notion of the free and creative life of the spirit within them, uncorrupted by the vices of power or sophistication.

This is well said; one can even see how Berlin was led to leave out the French Revolution in the earlier retrospect. For he rightly sees German humiliation at the hands of the French not as something caused by the French Revolution and Napoleon, but as something already established for over a century before the fall of the Bastille. All the same, the earlier vague sense of humiliation was transformed by the French Revolution, and especially by Napoleon’s victory over Prussia, into something far more dynamic and dangerous.

Berlin is rather charitable toward the early proponents of militant German nationalism, after Napoleon’s defeat of Prussia at Jena (1807):

Even the fanatical early chauvinists—the Jahns, the Arndts, the Goerreses, and indeed Fichte, who is in part responsible for this mood, with his paeans to the un-contaminated German language as a vehicle for the uniquely liberating German mission in the world—even they did not consciously view nationalism as the dominant force in the future of Europe, still less of mankind. They were merely struggling to liberate their nations from disabling dynastic or foreign or sceptical influences. Jahn and Arndt and Körner are German chauvinists, but they are not theorists of nationalism as such, still less prophets of its universal sway; inferior nations, indeed, are not entitled to it.

I am not quite happy with the use of “nationalism” in that passage. The usage here suggests that nationalism is primarily a theory; for nationalism—as feeling—the pejorative term “chauvinism” is reserved. This usage probably comes naturally, within the domain of the history of ideas, with its inbuilt emphasis on theory. But in the world of ordinary discourse, the word “nationalism”—almost always with a national prefix, French or German nationalism, etc.—usually refers to a state of feeling. And it is also nationalism, as a state of feeling, that has molded so much of modern history, especially its wars and massacres. As against that, “theorists of nationalism as such” are extremely rare birds. The outstanding example is Herder, and Berlin here is showing that Herder, as a theoretician of general nationalism, had no disciples in Germany. I don’t think Herder had real disciples anywhere (nor would I take his theories at face value; see above).

The only other case I can think of where nationalism-as-theory exerted a significant influence on history is the case of South Africa in the present century. In 1936, a group of Afrikaner nationalist ideologues—Dr. N. Diederichs, Dr. P.J. Meyer, and Dr. A. Cronje—worked out a general nationalist program for South Africa. Not merely would the Afrikaner volk[^3] have its own land, but so would every other volk in all South Africa, and every other volk would be encouraged to be as proud of its own identity and traditions as the Afrikaner volk already was. This benevolent conception, when put into practice twelve years later, became known to the world as apartheid.

In the South African case nationalism-as-theory was a facade: the reality was Afrikaner nationalism, as a driving feeling. And I don’t think the case of Herder was all that different.

Berlin does not, however, consistently use “nationalism” with reference to theory. He often uses it in the ordinary way. The last paragraph of “The Bent Twig”—which is also the last paragraph of The Crooked Timber—contains a most illuminating reference to the driving force of populist nationalism:

In fact, nationalism does not necessarily and exclusively militate in favour of the ruling class. It animates revolts against it too, for it expresses the inflamed desire of the insufficiently regarded to count for something among the cultures of the world.

2.

I agree fully with Isaiah Berlin’s anti-Utopian position: that is, with his contention that the belief that a Utopia can be constructed on earth, combined with the urge to bring about its construction, has resulted in practice in a colossal multiplication of human misery. But I should like to pursue this argument into a domain that Berlin does not explore in this collection of essays. That domain is the French Revolution, considered as the first major effort to construct a secular Utopia, and the model for all subsequent efforts of this kind.

All revolutions in Europe, before the French one, were either not secular or not Utopian. Early Utopias were theocratic in concept, like Thomas Münzer’s regime in Munster in the early sixteenth century. The first English revolution, that of the mid-seventeenth century, was also theocratic, in its Utopian aspects: the Rule of the Saints. The second English revolution, of 1688, known to its heirs as the Glorious Revolution, was not Utopian at all, but deliberately limited, pragmatic, and pluralist. The double objective was to end the arbitrary and Romanist rule of James II, without reviving the theocratic Utopia of the Rule of the Saints.

The American Revolution began out of quite limited grievances and objectives, and certainly without any Utopian agenda. As soon as definite revolutionary purpose emerged, the model was England’s Glorious Revolution, with George III cast in the role of James II. It is true that the American Revolution, unlike the Glorious one, had millenarian overtones. The words Incipit Novus Ordo Seclorum on the Great Seal, as adopted by the Continental Congress, might be taken as indicating some form of Utopian design, but this would be misleading. The choice by the Founding Fathers of these words from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue—which European Christendom had held to be sacred prophecy—was essentially a claim to divine approval: a new chapter was opening in God’s dispensation for the world. The idea that human hands should radically transform the structure of American society, as that structure stood in 1782, was entirely absent.

The Glorious Revolution was essentially a dynastic and sectarian adjustment. The American Revolution was essentially the secession of colonists from an empire. The first real full-blooded secular revolution, the first large and determined attempt to construct a secular Utopia, after a wholesale destruction of existing arrangements—together with those people who were seen to represent and defend these arrangements, was the French Revolution.

Throughout the nineteenth century, and up to the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution was seen, by revolutionaries everywhere, not exactly as a model, but as a measure of what had to be surpassed or—as far as the French were concerned—completed. The French Revolution had been betrayed: by the Thermidorians, by Bonaparte, or—as Michelet believed—by priests and women. Next time, there must be no betrayal. In the meantime, the French Revolution remained as the great demonstration that it was indeed possible for people with ideas to seize power and put their ideas into practice. It was thus the license, the model, and the comfort of Utopians of every description.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Marxists were the most obvious heirs of the French Revolution, in the sense that their proletarian revolution was destined to surpass that bourgeois one. Bourgeois though it was, the Marxists loved it, especially in its bloodiest phase. It is said that Lenin and his followers, returning from exile in 1917, sang the “Marseillaise” as they crossed the frontier into Russia. In France itself, the Communist party long held the allegiance of the working class, through its claim to be the party which was the true heir to the French Revolution, and destined to complete and perfect its work.

That the left and the Marxists in particular were heirs to the French Revolution, in the sense described above, is generally accepted. What is not so obvious is that right-wing revolutionaries were also its heirs. Whatever your radical program might be, and however widely it might be at variance with the programs of any of the French revolutionaries, the French Revolution still demonstrated that it was possible to seize power and put ideas into effect. The exact nature of the ideas was less important than the demonstration of the possibility.

Isaiah Berlin points out—in “A Bent Twig”—that nationalism was not a monopoly of the right in Germany. Nor was the heritage of the French Revolution a monopoly of the left. The revolutionary proceedings in Germany in 1848 were profoundly ambiguous. The desire to make a German revolution that would be bigger than the French one was patently there, and also the desire to achieve a united Germany. But what would this revolutionary united Germany be like? We can find some clue to that in the contemporary writing of Richard Wagner. Wagner’s revolutionary enthusiasm, in the relevant period, is beyond all doubt. In The Revolution (1849) Wagner wrote:

The Revolution, redeemer and creator of a new world blessing…I, the Revolution, am the ever-rejuvenating, ever-fashioning Life….For I am Revolution, I am the ever-fashioning Life, I am the only God…. The incarnated Revolution, the God become Man…proclaiming to all the world the new Gospel of Happiness.

At the time when Wagner wrote that, the only Revolution actually achieved that could possibly arouse feelings of that order was the French one. So it seems clear that he, like the 1848 revolutionaries in general, desired a German revolution that would be as spectacular as the French one, but would transcend it. The passage quoted contains, of course, no clue at all to the actual content of the redeeming revolution. But one clue is contained in another work of Wagner’s of the same year: Das Judentum in der Musik (1849). This is the first major anti-Semitic tract of a secular and racist type. Nor was Wagner unusual, among German revolutionaries of the time (often misleadingly designated as “liberal”). Paul Lawrence Rose has amply demonstrated the anti-Semitic and racist character of the German revolutionary tradition in the nineteenth century in his recent pioneering study, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner.[^4] The German revolution was already marked out to be völkisch: that is, both nationalist and racist. The Nazi revolution—for it was one—had its roots in the völkisch tradition. As Heinrich Heine had written in 1820, “A drama will be enacted in Germany in comparison with which the French Revolution will appear a harmless idyll.”

For the German revolutionary tradition in the nineteenth century, the Enlightenment component in the rhetoric of the French Revolution remained largely alien. The relevance of the Revolution consisted in that spectacular demonstration of possibility. After 1917, that demonstration was no longer directly relevant. The Russian Revolution offered a far more exciting demonstration that revolution was possible in the twentieth century. But the second demonstration owed quite a lot to the first.

My contention that the völkisch revolutionary tradition was encouraged by the recollection of the French Revolution is open to argument. The place of the French Revolution in the Marxist tradition is not.

What I find surprising in The Crooked Timber is that the idea of the French Revolution as Utopia does not get explored. For surely the French Revolution deserves consideration as the first major realization of a Utopian project: the construction of a perfect society, owing nothing to the past. Isaiah Berlin rightly identifies the destructive potential of Utopia, but he seems to confine it to Marxism and to twentieth-century revolutions. Except for Berlin’s account of Maistre’s reaction to it, the great precursor gets left out.

I can only guess at the reasons for so large an omission. I have three guesses. The first concerns the nature of the “history of ideas” tradition. The historian of ideas generally scrutinizes the writings of important thinkers. He often scrutinizes them with major historical events in mind, and the possible bearing on those events of the ideas he is scrutinizing. But he does not scrutinize the events themselves, though he makes occasional reference to them. In this sense, the history of ideas is rather like classical tragedy; the rough stuff goes on off stage.

Still, I don’t think this hypothesis altogether explains the omission, from a discussion of Utopia, of the first example of realized Utopia. My second guess is that Isaiah Berlin may find the theme of the French Revolution intrinsically uncongenial. The French Revolution looks after all like a case of Enlightenment culminating in Terror. Isaiah Berlin, as a true child of the Enlightenment, might well find that a painful paradox. Yet the victims of the Terror—and the far more numerous victims of the wars of French territorial expansion, beginning with the Revolution—were victims, not of Enlightenment but of one of its enemies: nationalism.

What the Enlightenment did was to create an emotional vacuum, which was filled by nationalism. The French nation took the place of God. The king’s head was cut off to cries of Vive la Nation! The insistence of La Grand Nation on dominating all other European nations plunged Europe into war for almost a quarter of a century. For all that, the Enlightenment had only an indirect responsibility. Yet the responsibility, though indirect, was real, through the creation of that cosmic emotional vacuum. That painful paradox recedes, but will not altogether go away.

My third guess is probably the nearest to the mark. This is that Isaiah Berlin thinks the French Revolution was in some basic sense a liberating event, and so not to be placed in the category of destructive Utopias, along with the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century. This view of the matter is indicated by Berlin’s inclusion(in a passage quoted above on page 55) of Edmund Burke in a list of “reactionary” thinkers, along with Hamann, Möser, and Maistre: a galley on which Burke would never have voluntarily embarked. And the only reason why Burke could possibly be classified as “reactionary” is his strong and consistent opposition to the French Revolution.

In reality, Burke was no more a reactionary than Isaiah Berlin is. He was a liberal and pluralist opponent of the French Revolution. Philippe Raynaud in his excellent preface to the most recent French translation of Reflections on the Revolution in France[^5] precisely defines Burke’s position when he describes him as “liberal and counter-revolutionary.” The French Revolution was abundantly productive of liberal documents and liberal speeches, but its transactions were not in accord with those documents and speeches. The Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen is no better a guide to the realities of the French Revolution than Stalin’s Constitution of 1936 was a guide to the realities of life in the Soviet Union. Similarly Burke, in attacking the French Revolution and its would-be imitators in Britain, was no more reactionary than was George Orwell when he attacked the Russian Revolution and its would-be imitators in Britain. And Orwell, too, was classified as a reactionary by the friends of the revolution which he attacked.

Burke perceived and attacked what a later age would call the totalitarian tendencies in the French Revolution, and he discerned these tendencies from very early on, years before the Terror. He is a pluralist, a defender of diversity against the claims of revolutionary absolutism, as appears from the following sentence in the third of the Letters on a Regicide Peace:

All the little quiet rivulets, that watered an humble, a contracted, but not an unfruitful field, are to be lost in the waste expanse and boundless, barren ocean of the homicide philanthropy of France.

Nor did Burke, as Berlin suggests in the same passage, deliver any “attacks on the Enlightenment” as a whole. Burke was himself a child of the Enlightenment, in its earlier phases and forms: the Enlightenment of Locke and Montesquieu. He did attack that branch of the Enlightenment—the Enlightenment of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists—that was hostile to Christianity and to the whole Judeo-Christian tradition. Burke’s Enlightenment was ecumenical.

I am sorry that Isaiah Berlin should have included Burke in that list of reactionaries, for Burke and Berlin are in reality kindred spirits. Berlin, indeed, seems to realize this when, in his essay on Maistre, he develops a perceptive contrast between Burke and the real reactionary that Maistre was. I think, on consideration, Berlin might be prepared to take Burke out of that list.

My observations above on the French Revolution have the limited purpose of showing that that revolution belongs in the category of attempted Utopias culminating in Terror. The French Revolution was much more shortlived, in terms of the durability of the regime which it established, than the Russian and Chinese Revolutions have been. In the French case the attempt at Utopia ended, with the end of the Terror in which it had culminated, in July 1794, with the fall of Robespierre’s “Republic of Virtue” just five years after the fall of the Bastille. In the year after the fall of Robespierre, the Thermidorian “Constitution of the Year III” signaled the abandonment of Utopia by substituting for “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” the word “liberty, equality, security, and property.” And in the year after that General Bonaparte introduced a new and more dynamic formula when he promised the hungry soldiers of his army of Italy “honor, glory, and riches.” Napoleon’s Empire was to continue the military expansionism of its revolutionary predecessors, and also their practice of systematically looting the countries they claimed to be liberating.

Undoubtedly the Revolution brought considerable benefits to large groups of French people; the most conspicuous winners, and the most faithful defenders of the revolutionary gains, being those who acquired les biens nationaux: the lands and other property confiscated from the Catholic Church. The fall of the same Church was accompanied by citizenship for Protestants and Jews. The bourgeoisie benefited, principally by an enhancement of its status, through the fall of the nobility. Many peasants gained, but some were among the greatest losers of all. The war waged by the Convention against the refractory peasantry of La Vendée was ferocious to the verge of genocide. Finally, among the benefits conferred by the French Revolution, we must include much of the legislation passed by the Convention, and embodied by the Emperor Napoleon in the Code Civil.

Many people, in retrospect, think of the benefits of the French Revolution as outweighing their “cost,” often counted as comprising only the decapitation of a couple of thousand persons in Paris. If we add those more informally despatched en masse in the provinces, including La Vendée, the death toll rises far higher although the exact numbers will never be known. If we add in the deaths which were a result of French military aggrandizement—which began under the Revolution and continued under Napoleon—the cost was enormous in human terms.

That people think of the French Revolution more sympathetically than they do of the Russian one is largely due to the fact that the French attempt to achieve Utopia was of far shorter duration than the Russian one. Suppose, on the one hand, that the Russian revolution had found its Thermidor in 1922. We would be likely today to be talking about the benefits that revolution brought to the peasantry. Suppose, on the other hand, that, in July of 1794, it was the Thermidorians who lost, and Robespierre and his friends who won. That might easily have happened. It may be that the determining factor was an accident: the wound to Robespierre’s jaw that silenced the voice that had held all political France in mortal fear since the death of the king in January 1793. If the Thermidorians had lost, the Republic of Virtue would have continued in being, with institutionalized Terror as its standing resource.

My point is that it is wrong, in terms of Isaiah Berlin’s own anti-Utopian value scheme to treat an opponent of the first attempt to realize Utopia—the French one—as being ipso facto a reactionary.

I have been exploring an omission, and the omission is sufficiently capacious to invite such an exploration. But in concluding, I wish to stress the riches actually contained in the essays that make up The Crooked Timber. Though I have quoted abundantly, the quotations, being selected to illustrate a theme, don’t fully bring out the flavor of the text as a whole. One of the delights of reading Isaiah Berlin is furnished by the asides; the little nuggets which his sense of humor leads him to pick up, for our delectation, out of the field of his voluminous and varied reading. I shall conclude with two of these nuggests. The first is from Metternich, the master of the unenthusiastic: “If I had a brother, I would call him cousin.” The second is from Faguet, parodying Rousseau’s “Man is born free, but everywhere is found enslaved and in chains.” Faguet offers a parallel observation about sheep:

Dire: les moutons sont nés carnivores, et partout ils mangent de I’herbe, serait aussi juste.

(It would be equally correct to say that sheep are born carnivorous and everywhere eat grass.)

As a confirmed Rousseau-basher myself, I have to acknowledge that this remark of Faguet’s is the neatest deflation of Rousseau ever achieved. I am grateful to Isaiah Berlin for that discovery, as for much else.

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Shaul Bakhash’s review of Seale’s Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East [NYR, September 27] is in many ways illuminating. There is one crucial transition in Assad’s career, however, which could do with some further light. This is Asad’s attainment of a monopoly of power in Syria, in 1970, through his elimination of his sole remaining rival, Salah Jadid. Of the transition, Bakhash says only: “By 1969, he and Salah Jadid were the two remaining contenders for power. The following year, after having Jadid arrested, Asad alone ruled Syria.”

True, but the circumstances which made it possible for Asad to replace Jadid seem worthy of note, as follows:

In September 1970—the “Black September” of Arab retrospect—Salah Jadid sent more than a hundred Syrian tanks into Jordan in support of Palestinian forces then under attack by the Jordanian forces. Asad, then minister of defence, grounded the Syrian Air Force, allowing the Syrian tanks to be mauled by the Jordanian Air Force. “Badly defeated by the Jordanian forces, the Syrian tanks began to withdraw from Jordan on September 23–24 leaving a large number of vehicles destroyed or captured by Jordanian forces.” [Quandt, Jabber and Lesch, The Politics of Palestinian Nationalism, University of California Press, 1973, pp. 126–128.]

In my book The Siege, I comment on this episode as follows:

It seems worth noting that the domestic effects of Assad’s course—the destruction of the armoured force that accepted a rival faction’s order, and the preservation of the Air Force that accepted Assad’s order altered the internal balance of forces in Syria in Assad’s favour…. Two months later, Assad seized supreme power in Syria. [The Siege, Simon and Schuster, 1986, p. 481.]

As Bakhash notes, Seale, in his life of Asad, presents his subject as basically a decent and patriotic soldier, who is sometimes led, by his deep resentment of Israel’s actions, into courses which some people might perhaps find regrettable. But at that critical moment, in September 1970, the course pursued by Asad, greatly to his own personal advantage, happened to be quite helpful to Israel. The people betrayed by Asad were all Arabs: the Palestinians in Jordan, and the unfortunate Syrian tank-crews, stabbed in the back by their own minister of defence. Commenting on Asad’s role in “Black September,” Seale characteristically says that the confrontation provided “the still inexperienced Syrian soldier with a brutal introduction to regional and international politics.” Quite traumatic it must have been for the poor innocent.

Still, Seale’s depiction of “Asad, the plain blunt soldier” has Shakespearean precedent. That was the public reputation, and role of predilection, of Iago.

Conor Cruise O’Brien
Dublin, Ireland

Shaul Bakhash replies:

I did not treat the Syrian role in the “Black September” affair in any detail in my review. But Patrick Seale does; and I think he would disagree with both Conor Cruise O’Brien’s interpretation of Asad’s intentions and his interpretation of the manner in which the outcome affected Asad’s fortunes.
In O’Brien’s telling, Asad allowed the tank forces under the control of his rival, Jadid, to be mauled in Jordan, thus paving the way for Asad to eliminate Jadid. But Seale argues that Asad was already “master of Syria in all but name” before the Black September crisis and that all the key military forces were in his hand. “There could have been no armed intervention in Jordan of which Asad did not approve,” Seale writes.

But Seale also believes that Asad went into Jordan only half-heartedly. He wished to protect the Palestinians. But he had no sympathy for their aim of marching on Amman and no wish to see King Hussein overthrown, as did the Palestinians. Moreover, Asad had no desire to tangle with King Hussein’s troops or to be drawn into a military engagement with Israel. When large numbers of Syrian tanks were mauled by the Jordanians, and Israel began to mobilize troops, presumably to strike at Syrian forces, Asad quietly withdrew the Syrian forces. Seale’s interpretation is thus at variance with the conventional view.

Conor Cruise O’Brien will find interesting Seale’s assessment of the outcome for Asad. He writes that “his intervention was ill-considered, half-hearted, and unsuccessful. He accomplished nothing of benefit to himself, to Syria, or to the Palestinians whom he was trying to help.”

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Tom Wilson’s book is not an essay in propaganda, although it is written from a unionist point of view. I use a small “u” because Wilson clearly does not speak for either of the Unionist parties (James Molyneux’s Official Unionists or Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionists). Wilson is critical of a number of past Unionist positions, actions, and statements, though he is less critical of these than Nationalists would consider appropriate. Wilson, in fact, represents the most moderate, rational, and secular element in the general unionist tradition. Nationalists regularly call for dialogue with Unionists, and most Unionists most of the time refuse. Wilson is one unionist who is willing for a dialogue to take place with nationalists, but I don’t know of any nationalist who really wants a dialogue with him or the likes of him. I have noticed one peculiarity of a nationalist, considering a statement from a known unionist. The nationalist pays attention only up to the point when the unionist makes it clear that he is still a unionist. When that point is reached, the nationalist loses all interest. Those repeated calls for dialogue are really coded demands for a declaration of surrender.

Tom Wilson was born in Northern Ireland and at various times has acted as adviser to the (former) government of Northern Ireland on economic issues. He has been Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow. Ulster: Conflict and Consent is “an assessment of all aspects—political, economic, religious, constitutional and social—of the situation, in and around Northern Ireland.” It is an extremely perceptive and instructive assessment; the best book on the situation that exists, in my opinion. The people who most need to read the book are Irish nationalists, but most of these, if they open the book at all, will close it when they reach page xi of the introduction, where the author states his basic position as follows:

Although the members of any particular nation may differ widely in their views on many matters, they must, nevertheless, have enough in common to want to belong to the same state and to live under the same central government. A nation, in this sense, needs to be founded on a consensus, and that is a far more searching requirement than a ballot-box majority. There is no such consensus among the people who live in the island of Ireland, and they cannot be said to constitute a “single nation” in any normally recognized sense of the term. To claim that they do so is to ignore “the integrity of their quarrel” and to suggest, with a disregard for both history and recent experience, that there has been no real disagreement after all about national identity. It is to overlook the fact that Irish nationalists have insisted on complete separation from the United Kingdom and have refused to accept the unity of the two islands. The Ulster unionists, for their part, have sought to maintain that unity—hence their name—and have demonstrated in the most unambiguous way that they do not want to belong to the Irish Republic. Indeed it is hard to see how the two sides in Ireland could have displayed more clearly a divergence of views about the political unity of the island of Ireland on the one hand, and the unity of the British Isles on the other.

No Irish nationalist could refute that statement: every sentence in it is irrefutable. Yet, even though irrefutable, it remains utterly unacceptable, for it is a classic statement of what is known, to nationalists, as the “two nations theory.” The “two nations theory” is heresy, in Irish nationalist dogma, which asserts that Ulster Protestants are members of the Irish Nation, even though those Protestants have repeatedly and almost unanimously declared that they want no part of the same.

To avoid confusion, I should perhaps here make clear my own position and background, which are not in alignment with each other. Like Tom Wilson, I am a confirmed “two nations” man. But I don’t belong to the same nation as he does; I belong to the other one. My roots, like Denis Donoghue’s, are in the Irish Catholic community, which generally feels itself to be the Irish Nation, and whose spokesmen so often claim the Ulster Protestants as belonging to the same nation (in which, of course, they would be in a minority). I was brought up on “one nation theory,” and gave it up only rather late in life, when I found, in discussions with Ulster Protestants, that the theory is in fact untenable. And I find, in practice, that I get on much better with Ulster Protestants when they know that I am not claiming them as my compatriots. And with many of my compatriots I also manage to get on pretty well, because they know me as one of them, and they don’t in their hearts believe in the “one nation theory” either.

There is a “two nations theory” and a “one nation theory.” There is also a “no nation theory,” to which at some points in this study Tom Wilson seems to lean:

Like the notion of a pure Gaelic race, the notion of a united Irish nation that existed before the coming of the English is a pleasing fiction. There was no such nation. Gaelic society was tribal and seminomadic with no effective central authority. The High Kingship was an imposing title for which the chieftains of the clans might fight but, apart from brief periods under Brian Boru and Edward Bruce respectively, it meant little in political or military terms. A different verdict would, of course, be required if the words “Gaelic nation” were really a misnomer for Gaelic society and culture. The achievements of the old Gaelic—or, better, the old Celtic—culture are something in which the people of the island, irrespective of creed and political affiliation, can—rather obviously—take pride. This achievement did not, however, rest on political unity. On the contrary: “The absence of political unity makes the cultural unity of the country all the more remarkable.” As Beckett has observed, it was not until the seventeenth century that Ireland was “united for the first time under a central administration.” It was the English who established that administration.

I don’t quite agree, here. It is true that Gaelic society did not evolve into a nation-state. But is that a reason for denying it the character of a nation? In my view, it is not. Gaelic society—as Wilson acknowledges—had a common religion and language, and a common culture. It had its own distinctive literary and artistic forms, which were common to the whole country. And it also had a distinctive legal system, accepted in all parts of the country. Germans and Italians felt themselves to be part of a German or Italian nation, long before a German or Italian state emerged. Similarly, I think we can meaningfully speak of a Gaelic nation.

The point is of more than academic importance; it has relevance to the scene today, and to the present political violence. Irish Catholics, though their community dropped the Gaelic language for English more than a hundred years ago, see themselves as heir to that old Gaelic nation which once dominated the entire island. They see themselves as having got most of that territory back. And they see themselves as entitled to get the rest back, irrespective of the claims and views of the alien intruders who have got possession of eastern Ulster.

This is the reality within Irish nationalism. This is what drives the Provisional IRA, and also fuels the parallel political pressure for the unification of Ireland. But the reality of the territorial drive has usually been masked, in recent times, by a political rhetoric that says something else. This rhetoric—unlike the reality that underlies it—derives from the Enlightenment. As Tom Wilson rightly says:

The idea of an “Irish nation” indifferent to religious rivalries, rooted in history, but enlightened by the Revolution, takes its rise in the Belfast of the late eighteenth century.

Theobald Wolfe Tone, a true child of the Enlightenment, who died in an attempt to bring the French Revolution to Ireland, dreamed of a secular Irish Republic, in which the descriptions of Catholic and Protestant would have become irrelevant, because submerged in a common radical nationalism. Protestants (he was himself from a Protestant Dublin family) and Catholics would join in creating an Irish Republic, totally separate from Britain, and linked with Revolutionary France.

For a short time, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Tone’s dream looked as if it might possibly achieve fulfillment. Protestant and Catholic radicals did join together in the movement of the United Irishmen. From 1793 on, when England and France were at war, the United Irishmen became a revolutionary conspiracy looking for aid from Revolutionary France. The original United Irishmen were middle-class people and—as Wilson indicates—most of them were Belfast Presbyterians, then the most radical people in all Ireland. (The same people are now the heart of Ulster unionism.) By 1795, Wolfe Tone was in France, where he was brilliantly successful in convincing the French that a revolutionary situation existed in Ireland, and that Ireland was therefore the best place to strike a blow against England. A great expedition was fitted up and reached Bantry Bay, with Wolfe Tone aboard and a large army. If that force had landed, and had armed large numbers of Irish, Ireland would have become, for a few years, part of the French Revolutionary system (and later of the Napoleonic Empire). But bad weather prevented a landing and dispersed the fleet. Wolfe Tone returned to France.

In Ireland, the United Irish leaders persevered. They were conscious that their movement could not succeed if it remained confined to a radical section of Ireland’s small middle class. The peasantry had to be aroused, and some of it was, with results that were to prove disconcerting to the secular radicals (mostly of Protestant background) who originated the call to revolution. The peasants were overwhelmingly and traditionally Catholic, and the secular and ecumenical ideas of the original United Irishmen were incomprehensible to them. Their idea of revolution was that the Catholics would get their land back, and the Protestants would be killed. The “United Irish” oath, as administered in Catholic areas in the second half of the 1790s, included a declaration of fidelity to the Catholic religion. There was also a strong millennial aspect to the Catholic part of the revolutionary movement in the late eighteenth century.

The United Irish rising, which took place in 1798, consisted, in reality, of two quite distinct risings: a Presbyterian one, mainly in County Down (in what is now Northern Ireland), and a Catholic one, mainly in County Wexford (now part of the Republic). The Catholic rising was the more formidable of the two. The Catholic rebels, in the areas they held, massacred Protestants. Both risings were suppressed by the British and the suppression of the Catholic one was particularly ferocious. Late in the year, the French sent another expeditionary force, much smaller than the 1796 one, which landed in the West of Ireland, and was rather easily defeated. Wolfe Tone was captured at sea and committed suicide in prison rather than face execution.

The “United Irish” tradition lingered on, but unevenly. The Protestants of County Down ceased to be enamored of the idea of a “United Irish” revolution once they had considered the fate of the Protestants of Wexford, piked to death on Wexford bridge. Some individual Protestants in the nineteenth and, to a lesser extent, the twentieth century played prominent parts in Irish nationalist and revolutionary movements, but the great majority of the Protestant population—concentrated mainly in eastern Ulster—were and are unionists.

Among Catholics and nationalists—interchangeable terms, in practice by the beginning of the twentieth century—“United Irish” ideas lingered on as ideology. The theory was that Protestants and Catholics had once been happily united, in the brave days of ’98, but had then been separated by the crafty British, with their “divide and rule” imperialism. (The Protestants of County Wexford dropped out of the Catholic folk memory although they remained in the Protestant one.) The unity that had once existed must surely return, Catholics/nationalists kept saying, without managing to sound as if they really believed, or even much wanted, this.

The United Irish ideology, which had been half-hearted enough in the nineteenth century, acquired a new prestige in the twentieth, in some very odd ways. which were quite at variance with the content of the ideology in question. After the crushing of the Easter Rising of 1916, and the execution of the leaders, the most famous of these, Patrick Pearse, became a quasi-sacred figure for all proper Irish Catholics/nationalists. And Pearse himself had exalted Theobald Wolfe Tone, the father of Irish Republicanism. Tone, sanctified by Pearse, himself became a quasisacred figure, whose utterances were canonical for all Republicans. Republican oratory constantly referred to “the ideals of Pearse and Tone,” as if these were the same thing, which they were not.

If Tone had ever met Pearse, he would have thought him demented, in a repulsively archaic way, altogether alien to Enlightenment values. Pearse was a mystical poet, in whose mind and heart Irish Catholicism and Irish nationalism had fused into one thing. Irishmen who died for Ireland were reenacting the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ and the fruit of their sufferings would be the Resurrection of the Irish Nation. That is why the Rising took place at Easter.

Within the Pearsean synthesis, Wolfe Tone became the proto-martyr: a truly astonishing metamorphosis for a child of the Enlightenment. Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown was, according to Pearse, “the holiest place in Ireland.” Poor Tone, who had hoped to rid his benighted fellow countrymen of such notions as “holy places,” now found himself stuck in one of the wretched things himself.

When, in 1921, the homogeneously Catholic parts of Ireland seceded from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the region with a Protestant majority remained in what then became, and still is, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

In the Catholic part—now known as the Republic of Ireland—both the political parties profess a Republican ideology, which claims to be derived from the principles of Wolfe Tone. It might be thought that this ideology would lead the Republic to be eager for rapprochement with the Protestants of Northern Ireland. The actual effect of the teachings of Wolfe Tone (as interpreted by Pearse) has been not to unite Catholics and Protestants, but to exacerbate the bad relations between them. The more “Republican” an Irish person claims to be, the more likely that person is, in practice, to want to murder Protestants.

Irish Republicans—of whom there are various shades—are the most militant nationalists among the Catholic population. The cutting edge of the Republican movement today is the Provisional IRA. There is an ominous resemblance between the pattern of feelings of modern Catholic Republicans toward Wolfe Tone and Protestants, and the pattern of feelings of traditional Catholics toward Jesus and the Jews. In each case, the great teacher is felt to have been rejected and betrayed by his own people, and then adopted by another people, the Catholics, Wolfe Tone, like Jesus, became a Catholic teacher. And in both cases, all that was left of the relation between the teacher and his original people, in the eyes of his adopted heirs, was the stigma that rested on the original people, by reason of their rejection and betrayal of him.

The resemblance between the “Tone” pattern and the “Jesus” pattern is not coincidental. Modern Irish Republicanism—beneath its thin veneer of Enlightenment—is a product of a profoundly, and traditionally, Catholic culture. To stigmatize people of a different tradition for their rejection and betrayal of a teacher, and then for obstinately denying the obvious truth of his teaching, was a conditioned reflex.

Over the past twenty years, the IRA have been systematically murdering Protestants—as well as British soldiers—in Northern Ireland. The unavowed objective is to rid Northern Ireland of Protestants, after which the departure of the British will be automatic. The IRA know that it will be a long time before this objective can be achieved since the Protestant community, a million strong, is in a majority in the Northern Ireland which the IRA claim to be “liberating.” Still, significant progress has been made. There are now fairly extensive border areas—especially in County Fermanagh—that once harbored Protestant families of farmers and shopkeepers, and that are now altogether free from Protestants. As you might say, judenrein.

The IRA claim that they are not killing Protestants because they are Protestants. “We have nothing against Protestants, as such,” is a phrase frequently on Republican lips. The Protestants are being killed for rejecting a particular tenet of Theobald Wolfe Tone’s: the only one of his tenets that is alive in the modern Republican subculture. This is the proposition to which Wolfe Tone, near the end, claimed to have devoted his life (although, as Marianne Elliott shows in her excellent biography of him recently published, it was only the last three years of his life that he actually devoted to this effort. The proposition runs: “to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils.”)[^*]

To the IRA this text is canonical. To reject it, and support the connection with England, is a capital offense. As almost all Protestants in Northern Ireland support that connection, they are all legitimate targets.

Most Irish Catholics in the island of Ireland—as distinct from the borough of Queens, New York—condemn the IRA’s campaign, and most of them do so sincerely. Yet the IRA’s objective, as distinct from its methods, still enjoys widespread support, which does much to account for the durability of the campaign. The objective is of course the unity of Ireland. I remain, as far as I know, the only person who, while actually a member of the government of Ireland (1973-1977), publicly declared that he was not working for the unity of Ireland. That declaration may have contributed to the cutting short of my political career (1977), but I’m not sure how much it contributed. My negative views on Irish unity are in fact shared, or apparently shared, by a large minority of the citizens of the Republic. Wilson quotes some relevant figures from a survey made in 1972: 45 percent of Dubliners supported the “two nations theory,” 58 percent regarded unity as essential for a just solution of the Northern Ireland problem, but 36 percent disagreed. Wilson also quotes poll figures (for 1980 and 1987) suggesting that over 90 percent of the population of Northern Ireland don’t want unity. These figures suggest that there is not a majority in the entire island of Ireland favoring unity. If this is so, the whole democratic—or pseudo-democratic—case for Irish unity falls to the ground.

Still, what polls say is less important than what the ballot box says, and all the Republic’s political parties, with varying degrees of emphasis, claim that the unity of Ireland is high among their objectives. Their sincerity, in many cases, is doubtful, but their professed commitment, whether sincere or insincere, is helpful to the IRA. Indeed, the more insincere it is—and this is often obvious enough—the more it serves as a foil to the sincerity of the IRA, as shown in the risks they run and the sacrifices they are prepared to endure.

But what kind of unity are all these people looking for? Is it a unity of people or simply of territory? “Unity of people” is the orthodox answer, and will be forthcoming from most politicians, when the appropriate button is pressed. Even the IRA would have to mutter something to that effect, if questioned on the point. Unity of people, under the common name of Irishman, is in Wolfe Tone, and therefore canonical in the Republican ideology. In the old days—before 1969—Republicans used to go on a great deal about uniting Protestant and Catholic. The leadership in those days was left-wing, in quest of class war and—at least in theory—opposed to sectarian confrontation. After 1969, with the emergence of the Provisional IRA, the movement became more overtly Catholic-nationalist and only perfunctory and increasingly sparse lip service was paid to the nonsectarian ideal. In theory, one day, Catholics and Protestants might be united; in the here-and-now. Protestants were people to be killed (though not “as such”) in order to recover the lost territory.

Nationalist politicians who condemned the IRA stressed that the unity they desired was a unity of people, not territory. But the Constitution of the Republic said something else, and no party seriously sought to have it amended by referendum (although this is not nearly so difficult a procedure as in the United States).

I shall come back, shortly, to the Constitution, but first let us take a look at the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 15, 1985. That agreement was welcomed at the time by politicians and press, not only in Britain (though not by most people in Northern Ireland) but in the United States and throughout the Western world. Ostensibly, this was a “uniting people not territory” exercise, and it was accompanied by a great deal of rhetoric about “reconciling the two traditions in Ireland.” A few skeptics, including myself, pointed out that an agreement between Dublin and London, reached without consultation with any representative of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, was most unlikely to do anything to reconcile the two traditions. In fact the agreement infuriated the unionists, and was seen, in both communities, as a victory of one side over the other, which it was.

Defenders of the agreement, both in Britain and in Ireland, said that unionists had absolutely no cause for alarm, because the agreement affirms the right of Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, as long as a majority of its citizens so desire. These defenders of the agreement were relying on Article 1(a), which states that “any change in the status of Northern Ireland” would only come about with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The “status of Northern Ireland” was understood in Britain, and also internationally, as meaning its status as part of the United Kingdom. The Republic’s apparent acceptance of this was hailed as enlightened progress, away from the bad old days of irredentist claims to territory, irrespective of the wishes of a majority of the inhabitants thereof. So indeed it seemed. Unfortunately, the progress was illusory.

Tom Wilson, in an excellent chapter on the Anglo-Irish Agreement, points out that the recognition of Northern Ireland’s status is de facto only, and not de jure. There is Article 2 of the Constitution of the Republic to be considered. Article 2 states: “The national territory consists of the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas.” Concerning the relation between this Article of the Republic’s Constitution, and Article 1 of the agreement, Tom Wilson writes:

If this de facto recognition had been accompanied by de jure recognition—that is to say, by the removal of Article 2 from the Irish Constitution—the situation in 1985 would have been transformed.

It was not to be: Article 2 remains in force. How, if at all, can Article 1 of the Anglo-Irish Agreement be reconciled with Article 2 of the Constitution? The precise answer to that one was still unknown when Ulster: Conflict and Consent was published. The answer came on March 1, 1990, when the Supreme Court of the Republic, in a unanimous decision, found the agreement to be consistent with the Constitution. In handing down the judgment, Chief Justice Thomas Finlay cited Article 2 of the Constitution and also Article 3, which runs:

Pending the reintegration of the national territory, and without prejudice to the right of the Parliament and Government established by this Constitution to exercise jurisdiction over the whole of that territory, the laws enacted by that Parliament shall have the like area and extent of application as the laws of Saorstat Eireann [the Irish Free State, geographically identical with the present Irish Republic] and the like extra-territorial effect.

According to the Chief Justice, speaking on behalf of the whole Supreme Court: “The reintegration of the national territory is a constitutional imperative”. Thus the government of the Republic is required by law to use the Anglo-Irish Agreement to seek to acquire that part of the Republic’s “national territory,” which is at present part of the United Kingdom, its cosignatory. The fact that a majority of the citizens of Northern Ireland wish to remain in the United Kingdom can be recognized de facto—although it is not explicitly acknowledged in the Supreme Court judgment—but de jure there is no such place as Northern Ireland.

The notion that “the reintegration of the national territory is a constitutional imperative” goes a long way to legitimize the Provisional IRA, the people who are most active in implementing the imperative in question.

In the last chapter of his book, Tom Wilson speaks of and is somewhat heartened by what he calls “weak support for unity.” Certainly very few people put unity ahead of material concerns. In that sense “support” for unity is lacking. But acquiescence in pressure for unification is sufficiently general to be a political force. The largest party in the country, Fianna Fáil, is the party that gave the country the Constitution, with that uncompromising territorial claim, and is also the party that still beats loudest on the unity drum. The other major party, Fine Gael, lags well behind Fianna Fáil, partly because it is felt to be “less national.” And if support for unity is weak, opposition to it is still weaker. Were that not so, Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution would have been repealed years ago. As things stand, there is very little chance of their being repealed.

And this “acquiescence in pressure for unification” extends to the IRA. Very few people consciously approve of the IRA and almost everybody condemns their actions. But a certain equanimity, within the condemnations, reflects a degree of acquiescence. Terrible things they are doing, to be sure, but aren’t they our own, and trying to get back our lost land for us? Hardly anyone says anything like that, out loud, but the thought is there. If you live in the Republic, as I do, you can sense it, after each IRA atrocity, in the little silence that follows each ritual condemnation, and then the swift change of subject. A similar, but not identical syndrome exists in Northern Ireland, and Seamus Heaney has captured it definitively in North.

That degree of acquiescence in the Republic, plus a considerable amount of open support as well as ambivalent acquiescence in IRA activities, among Catholics in Northern Ireland, plus much open approval and support among Irish-Americans, plus parallel political “nonviolent” pressure for unification, plus the Constitution of the Republic—and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of it—all these are more than enough, I fear, to keep the Provisional IRA in business for a long time to come.

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Conor Cruise O’Brien’s remarks on Rousseau’s political theory and its influence, in his well-informed and immensely stimulating review-essay on A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution [NYR, February 15], are exactly on the mark. His condemnation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, however, seems to me to call for some modification.

It is limited to Article 3 (“The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation: no group, no individual may exercise authority not emanating expressly therefrom”) and to the “general will” idea in Article 6. Now the meaning of any proposition may be approached in one of two ways. One way is to probe its writer’s intention. This way is generally open to uncertainty; but in this case—and Mr. O’Brien himself makes the point about Sieyès—the intention was antithetical to its outcome in a later phase of the Revolution and Sieyès was appalled by it. The other way is to follow Charles Peirce’s opinion that the meaning of a proposition consists of its possible deductions and consequences.

In 1792–1794 the consequences of Rousseau’s theory of the general will and of Article 3 were exactly those described by Mr. O’Brien. On the other hand, the later—and indeed the immediate reading—corresponded not to the Rousseau-type deductions from it by Robespierre and Saint-Just, but rather to the original intent, which was to prevent recurrence of the tyranny of the Ancien Régime. The tyranny of the general will was not part of this context; the phrase was almost surely taken in a majoritarian sense (cf. the American antecedents which Mr. O’Brien emphasizes and which were familiar to Sieyès and others), not in Rousseau’s absolutist, unanimous sense (how obtain unanimity in an elected parliament?).

Thus the influence of the Declaration on later generations was what was intended by the title, a declaration of political and human rights. It permeates the document as a whole, and one cannot exclude the whole in favor of the part. The influence of the Declaration should not be confused with Rousseau’s influence, which (as is pointed out) went in the opposite direction for the most part. That the writers of the Declaration were influenced by American events and documents is irrelevant to the point of its influence, but quite relevant to their intent.

Castro and Mao read the Social Contract. I don’t know whether they read the Declaration, but we can guess how they read it, if they did.

Lester G. Crocker
New York City

Conor Cruise O’Brien replies:

I am very glad to have Professor Crocker’s endorsement of my assessment of Rousseau’s political theory and its influence. I accept his correction concerning the intent—as distinct from the consequences—of the Declaration. I didn’t exactly mean my remarks as a condemnation of the Declaration. I meant that its liberating effect was being exaggerated in the euphoria of the Bicentennial. Also that the “general will” Articles meant that it gave no protection to accused persons under the Terror.

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