Paul Dukes - World Order in History - Russia and The West-Routledge (1996)

WORLD ORDER IN HISTORY
‘A bold enterprise…. Much of the thrust of the book comes

from addressing the present Russian dilemma: should Russia
borrow yet another model from the West as to what its future
should be?’
Roy Porter
World Order in History argues that historians’ ideas about world
order have been influential in transforming nations’ sense of
themselves.
Paul Dukes demonstrates how successive historians and other
analysts attempt to make sense of the world in which they live,
often appropriating intellectual ideas spawned in different
contexts in order to do so. Hindsight allows us to view stages
in the evolution of these interpretations, and to recognise that
they are limited by the constraints of the age in which their
authors lived.
Dukes pursues the arguments with particular reference to Russia
and the Western world from the early modern period right up to
the present. He draws conclusions on the state of the debate in
the 1990s, and offers some views as to the way forward for
historians of Russia and the wider world.
This book will be of interest to all those concerned with the study
of history, in particular philosophy of history and Russian history.
Paul Dukes is Professor of History at the University of
Aberdeen. He is the author of A History of Russia (1974) and A
History of Europe (1985) and several other books on Russian and
comparative history.
WORLD ORDER IN
HISTORY
Russia and the West
Paul Dukes
London and New York

First published 1996
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1996 Paul Dukes
The author and the publisher would like to thank

Cambridge University Press for permission to quote
from Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed.
by Anne M.Cohler et al. (Cambridge Texts in the History
of Political Thought, Cambridge, 1989).
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-415-12936-2 (Print Edition)

ISBN 0-203-22330-6 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-22342-X (Glassbook Format)
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 MONTESQUIEU AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER 14

Montesquieu and The Spirit of the Laws 15
Montesquieu, the USA and Russia 21
Catherine the Great and the Russian ‘constitution’ 29
George Washington and the American constitution 33
Constitution and revolution: Burke and Robespierre 38
2 MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER 44

Karl Marx: introduction 45
Marx and Capital 52
The Russian Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin 57
The Russian Revolution: revisions and alternatives 66
3 FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC

ORDER, 1900–22 78
A watershed in European history, 1900–13 79
History congress in England, 1913: speeches 87
History congress in England, 1913: papers 91
From European towards Atlantic order, 1913–22 96
4 SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER, 1923–62 107

Pirenne and Europe, 1923 108
E.V.Tarle and the USSR, 1923–48 111
C.A.Beard and the USA, 1923–48 116
Jan Romein and the Cold War, 1948–62 123
Towards a new world order, 1962 and after 134
v
CONTENTS
5 CONCLUSION 138
The action, the time, the place 139
Montesquieu, Marx and Western world orders 144
Russian history: alternatives and revisions 154
World history, pure and applied 167
Notes 172
Index 189
vi
PREFACE
This book has turned out to be different from the one I first aimed
at. To begin with, I wanted to consider the problem of the study of
history, pure and simple. Increasingly, however, I took up the
further problem of the application of the discipline, largely under
the pressure of history in its other guise; that is, because of what
happened.
The idea was originally conceived many years ago but did not
mature until after 1985 with the arrival of perestroika and
glasnost. The actual writing began in the aftermath of the great
changes which swept through Eastern Europe in 1989, and
continued against the background of further shattering events
from August 1991 to October 1993 as the Soviet Union broke up,
only for the integrity of its largest fragment, the Russian
Federation, to come under threat. The final revisions have been
made throughout the year 1994, as a question mark still hangs
over the future of that Federation and the other former republics
of the USSR.
No answer is given here to that highly significant question, since
the book has been written by a university teacher who for more
than twenty-five years assured students that the Soviet Union
would never collapse. Understandably, perhaps, I have not
presumed to make any more categorical statements about what
fate may hold in store for the Russian and other successor states.
However, I have attempted to take a fresh look at the Russian past
in its context, taking into consideration not only the impact of recent
years but also the consequent shifts in perspective.
At the outset, I must make it clear that this book is not primarily
about the Soviet Union, its predecessors and successors. Bearing
vii
P R E FA C E
in mind my original intention to consider the problem of the study

of history, I have thought it of overriding importance to adopt a
wider setting for the study of the USSR, before and after, than
has normally been adopted. There has been the strong tendency
for West to remain West, East to remain East, and the twain rarely
to meet: in other words, for the academic divisions of discipline
and demands of specialisation to keep separate Russian studies
on the one hand and European and American studies on the other
hand. Nevertheless, many researchers in Western fields, not just
historians but also social scientists, have been and remain obliged
to fit the vast Russian chunk of the Eurasian continent somehow
into their global view. By global view, I do not mean an
examination of all the stretches of land and water from pole to
pole, but rather the equivalent of the Russian mirovozzrenie or the
German Weltanschauung. I have sought an approach which
illustrates how investigators have incorporated Russia into their
overall conception of Western world order, which means for the
most part leaving aside Africa, Asia and Latin America.
I have selected two different kinds of world order for
particular attention—the constitutional and revolutionary,
respectively indicating continuity and change. I have attempted
to describe the manner in which two outstanding Western
individuals, Montesquieu and Marx, in turn formulated
influential views of constitutional and revolutionary order, and
the manner in which Russia was included in them. At the same
time, I give some emphasis to the USA, for two reasons. First,
its political culture serves as a measure of comparison with
Russia’s against various European standards, embodied by
constitutional Montesquieu and revolutionary Marx especially.
Second, the USA came to dominate the West in the twentieth
century, especially during the years of the Cold War, itself
becoming the standard against which other states and their
political cultures were measured.
Against the background of constitutional and revolutionary
orders, I also want to consider some of the global views of the
historical profession as it has evolved through the twentieth
century, both before and after the two world wars, looking first
at its practitioners in Western Europe, including the UK, then at
their colleagues in the USSR and USA. For the years of the Cold
War, I have singled out for special attention the work of a Dutch
historian, Jan Romein, more affected than most by the impact
viii
P R E FA C E
of that great conflict. From 1900 to the 1990s, as we shall see,

there have been several significant shifts in the overall outlook
of Romein and other representative historians.
There can be no firm conclusion to a work such as this, but in a
final chapter I seek to recapitulate and draw together the book’s
major themes. In so doing, my aim is to reinforce the case for critical
scrutiny of the Russian predicament to be accompanied by a
measure of Western introspection. I would particularly like to
encourage researchers both in Russia and in the West to achieve
more fully their aspirations to greater mutual understanding. While
shying away from any predictions for the future, I try to point out
some ways in which we might approach the past, especially
through the abandonment of ‘uniqueness’ in the treatment of
Russian history and by a fuller acceptance of a wider comparative
framework by historians and other academic investigators
irrespective of location and affiliation.
In the course of writing the book, I have become aware of many
problems, for example variations in meaning from century to
century, from place to place and according to the subject under
discussion of such words as ‘history’ and ‘world order’ as well as
‘Russia’ and ‘the West’. I hope that I have made my usage of these
and other words as unambiguous as possible at any given moment,
although I would also argue that complete and clear distinctions
cannot always be maintained: at least, to take the same examples,
the entities signified by the words above cannot be divorced from
our perception of them.
Like all my other published work during the past thirty years,
this book has been completed at the University of Aberdeen, an
institution whose Quincentenary on 10 February 1995 has been a
constant reminder of the necessity to take the long view. As before,
I consider myself fortunate to be a member of an excel-lent
department with colleagues always ready to help and encourage,
and to have found equally willing support elsewhere, mainly but
not exclusively in the Arts and Social Sciences, not forgetting the
Queen Mother and King’s Libraries. In particular, although I alone
bear the responsibility for the final outcome, I should like to thank
Cathryn Brennan, Dr Jean Houbert and Dr George Molland of
the University of Aberdeen along with Professor Edward Acton
of the University of East Anglia and Dr Sarah Davies of the
University of Durham for their most helpful reading of successive
drafts: all five will readily see how much of their advice I have
ix
P R E FA C E
accepted, how little of it rejected. The secretarial support of Sandra

Williams and Gillian Brown has been indispensable, as have been
the advice and encouragement of Claire L’Enfant and other
associates of Routledge. I am grateful to Douglas Matthews for
compiling the index, and for indicating several errors and
inconsistencies.
The book is dedicated to my friends at the University of
Aberdeen. I venture to say that there are too many to list by name,
but I believe that I know who they are, and I hope that they do,
too. I would like to make exceptional mention of Cathryn Brennan,
Jean Houbert and George Molland; and of Ann Gordon, for many
years Administrative Assistant in the Department of History and
a wise counsellor still.
Paul Dukes
King’s College, Old Aberdeen
10 February 1995
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INTRODUCTION
What is history? What purpose is there in studying it? Over the

years, I have put such questions to many colleagues. I recall in
particular the answer given to the second of them by a
distinguished professor at Yale, C.Vann Woodward: the elimination
of error. When I asked him if this was enough, he replied that he
found no shortage of error. Taking our subject at C.Vann
Woodward’s word, let us begin by making a couple of correc-tions.
First, in a stimulating book by Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson
entitled Russia 2010 and What It Means for the World, the authors
write:
The fact is that the West has been the main source of
example and competition for Russia for a long time, ever
since the Russian élite turned decisively towards Europe
at the beginning of the seventeenth century. French and
(later) German were the languages spoken at the tsarist
courts.1
The fact is otherwise. The Russian élite did not turn decisively
towards Europe before the end of the seventeenth century, even
the beginning of the eighteenth century. German was then the main
(foreign) language spoken at the tsarist court. French achieved a
more comprehensive predominance later in the eighteenth century.
To be sure, German made something of a come-back towards the
end of the nineteenth century.
Let us take as a second, more extended example one of the
important news items from December 1993, the Russian election
results. As is well known, these marked the rise of the opposition
ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, and the comparatively disappointing performance
1
INTRODUCTION
of the parties giving various degrees of support to the President.

Boris Yeltsin himself was blamed by some journalists for the
outcome, in particular for not giving more support to Russia’s
Choice, the only bloc committed to continuing economic reforms
at a fast pace.
Although this is not the place for a full analysis of the election
results, or indeed of Russia’s Choice, we may approach at least
some of the issues involved by turning our attention to a
contradiction between the party’s symbol—Peter the Great—and
its motto—Liberty, Property, Legality. In reality, Peter the Great who
ruled Russia at the beginning of the eighteenth century had little
to do with the introduction of these three concepts, all of which
made their first clear appearance there in the second half of the
eighteenth century.
‘Freedom and liberty’ make their first appearance in a decree
issued on 18 February 1762, granted by Tsar Peter III to the nobility.
Even then, several strings remained attached, as may be seen in
the decree’s last words, commanding all the Emperor’s ‘obedient
and true sons to despise and scorn’ those who evaded his service:
such defaulters would ‘not be allowed to appear at Our Court, or
at public meetings and celebrations’. A dozen or so years later, a
false ‘Peter in’ (in fact a Cossack named Pugachev masquerading
as the Emperor who had been murdered in the summer of 1762
and replaced by Catherine II) rewarded his followers in a major
peasant uprising with the same ‘freedom and liberty’ among other
gifts, while giving the order in his edict of 31 July 1774 that
those who were formerly nobles in their estates, these

opponents of our authority and disturbers of the empire
and destroyers of the peasants catch, execute and hang
and treat in the same way as they, not having Christianity,
have dealt with you, the peasants.
Arguably, the contradiction between two such views of freedom

reached its climax in the Russian Revolution of 1917: certainly, we
may already see some of the distinctive features of Russian history
as a whole in the decrees of 1762 and 1774.2
These two same documents may be used to illustrate concepts
of property as well as of freedom. Of the first of them, Richard
Pipes wrote in 1959: ‘Altogether, it is difficult to exaggerate the
importance of the edict of 1762 for Russia’s social and cultural
2
INTRODUCTION
history. With this single act the monarchy created a large, privileged,
Westernized leisure class, such as Russia had never known before.’
Other scholars have since modified this evaluation considerably,
some of them giving more emphasis to the Charter of the Nobility
of 1785, but most of them would accept that the 1762 manifesto
was an important milestone along the road to the acquisition of
full property rights by the Russian nobility as a class, if not so much
as individuals.3 Regarding the peasantry, passages from Pugachev’s
edict of 1774 may be taken as indicative of popular attitudes
towards property as well as other matters:
With this personal decree we bestow our monarchical and

paternal generosity upon all those formerly in the
peasantry and subject to the landlords, be true slaves to
our crown…and you may be Cossacks for ever, without
demands for recruit levies, poll and other money dues,
possession of lands, woods and meadows and fishing
rights, and salt lakes without tax and payment and we
free all from the evils caused by nobles and bribe-taking
town judges of the peasants, and taxes and burdens placed
on all the people.
Here, even more clearly than in the case of the nobility, we may
see that property rights are attributed to a class rather than to
individuals, emphasis thus being given to age-old communal
customs and beliefs. Up to the Revolution of 1917 and beyond, the
communal outlook remained strong, as did the belief that the land
belonged to those who cultivated it. Just before that Revolution,
even the intellectuals of the liberal Kadet Party refused to defend
land ownership as a private right; although most of them believed
in such ownership in general, Western legal norms in this area met
with far from broad acceptance.4
As is already apparent, no doubt, Western norms as a whole
were not universally recognised in pre-revolutionary Russia.
Undoubtedly, some progress towards such recognition had been
made from the later eighteenth century onwards, especially during
the reign of Catherine II, or Catherine the Great. On the other hand,
the Empress had come to power via the assassination of her
husband, Tsar Peter III, and had connived at this monstrous act of
illegality even if she did not actually instigate it. Having gained
the supreme power, she was determined not to lose it. The ‘legal
3
INTRODUCTION
monarchy’ which she did much to develop fell short of encroaching

on tsarist absolutism, which included rights and privileges for the
nobility under the protection and patronage of the autocratic
Empress, and meant little if any advancement for the peasants.
This injustice helped to spawn the uprising by Pugachev and his
supporters. In other words, Catherine’s ‘constitutionalism’ was
already confronted by a primitive form of revolutionary opposition
in the shape of Cossack and peasant insurgents.
During the nineteenth century, some significant advance was
made by Russia as far as our key concepts of liberty, property and
legality were concerned. While Russia moved forward, however,
the pace was even faster elsewhere, and the chances for full
assimilation of the main foundations of the Western way of life
under the tsarist (or indeed any) regime were severely limited. In
1906, Max Weber wrote that:
The historical development of modern ‘freedom’ presup-

posed a unique and unrepeatable constellation of factors,
of which the following are the most important: first,
overseas expansion…secondly, the characteristic economic
and social structure of the ‘early capitalist’ period in
Western Europe; thirdly, the conquest of life through
science… finally, certain ideal conceptions which grew out
of the concrete historical uniqueness of a particular
religious viewpoint.
Looking at Russia in particular in the aftermath of the failed

Revolution of 1905, Weber added:
It is ridiculous in the extreme to ascribe to modern high

capitalism, as currently being imported into Russia…any
inner affinity with ‘democracy’ or even ‘freedom’ (in any
sense of the word). The question is rather ‘How are any of
these at all possible in the long run under its domi-nation?’5
In the long perspective of 1993, perhaps, some of the voters for

Zhirinovsky were in unwitting agreement with Max Weber, as well
as reflecting traditional attitudes towards liberty, property and
legality.
But 1993, of course, was very different from 1906 not only in
Russia and the West but throughout the world. As we shift our
4
INTRODUCTION
focus of attention from Russia to the world more generally, we can

find a convenient reminder of recent great changes in The
Economist’s end-of-year suggestions for an updated list of the seven
wonders of the world first compiled in the second century BC.
Here they are with their year of creation in brackets: the
microprocessor (1971); the ‘pill’ (1951); the global telephone net-
work (still some way to go—Asia has more than half the world’s
population, but only 7 per cent of its telephones); the ‘jumbo jet’
(Boeing 747) (1968); the off-shore oil platform (1947); the hydrogen
bomb (1952); the human moon landing (1969). Not everybody
would accept this list, but few would argue with the essential
suggestion that the times we live in are indeed very different to
what they were fifty years ago.6
Responses would probably vary according to generation, an
important consideration for current affairs and history alike.
Arguably, the longer people have lived, the more likely they are
to appreciate history’s essential component, the passage of
time, and to possess a sense of perspective on today’s
preoccupations. On the other hand, while the senior citizen
might recall the days before the automobile and the aeroplane,
he or she might also have difficulty in getting to grips with the
implications of such new-fangled hardware as the computer
and the video-recorder, which most young people take to
almost as ducklings to water.
But if we look forward, and assume that human beings will still
be in existence in 2093, in a hundred years’ time there may well be
some researchers pouring scorn on the short-sightedness of The
Economist’s choice in 1993. ‘Why no mention of genetic
engineering?’ one can imagine somebody asking in that far-forward
year. None of us can yet perceive what the really significant
developments of our own time may turn out to be.
Apart from partiality of generation, and of moment in time,
there are other differences of viewpoint. Western attitudes will
by no means always coincide with Russian, while within these
two main groups there will be further variations in world
outlook, especially since the disestablishment of Soviet Marxism-
Leninism. For example, on both sides, especially in the English-
speaking world where the two words have distinctive meanings,
there will be some who maintain that history is an art, others
who insist that it is a science; everywhere, some will be more
conservative, resisting change, others more progressive,
5
INTRODUCTION
welcoming it. And so on. To some extent, differences may be

reduced by a number of approaches, of which the most fruitful
is the comparative. This approach is of two kinds: the synchronic
and the diachronic. That is, one may consider any historical
phenomenon in the global context of the time at which it made
itself known—synchronic—or trace its development and
consequences (and/or its antecedents and origins) through
time— diachronic. For example, Catherine the Great could be
considered either as one of the enlightened despots or absolutists
of the late eighteenth century or as one of a succession of Russian
rulers after Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great but before
Nicholas II and Lenin. Similarly, Pugachev could be compared
not only with such predecessors as Bolotnikov, Razin and
Bulavin—all leaders of peasant revolts in Russia—but also with
successors, including some of the peasant insurgents in the
Revolution of 1917, or with similar figures elsewhere in the
eighteenth century.7 There may indeed be distant echoes of the
edicts of Pugachev in the promises and threats of Zhirinovsky,
although more conventional parallels would be sought in more
recent ultra-nationalists at home or abroad. In fact, many
comparative approaches, including that to be adopted in the
present book, are a mixture of the synchronic and the diachronic.
To give one more example, the concepts in the slogan of Russia’s
Choice—Liberty, Property, Legality—have evolved and been
discussed in other countries over a longer period than in Russia
itself, as is already clear from the observations of Max Weber in
1906, quoted above. We need to look no further than John Locke,
who, at the time of the ‘Glorious and Bloodless Revolution’ of
1688, gave much attention to liberty and property, along with
life, as basic human rights within the framework of civil
government, drawing on well-established English traditions of
legality as he did so. Looking forward from 1688, we could draw
a line of development through to the American and French
Revolutions of the late eighteenth century and beyond. Here,
as already mentioned in the Preface, special emphasis will be
given to the American case.
Ultimately, any comparative investigation should be carried
out within some kind of global framework: hence the theme of
this book, as clearly indicated in its title. Yet, though simple
enough to be spelled out in eight words, this basic idea has met
so far with less than general acceptance, and therefore requires a
6
INTRODUCTION
considerable amount of elaboration: indeed, five chapters have

been considered a bare minimum. In the rest of this Introduction,
therefore, I explain how the rest of the book is structured, and
what I aim to do in it. After the prologue constituted by this
Introduction, the five chapters address the theme roughly in the
manner of the five acts of classical drama: Chapters 1 and 2 are
exposition; Chapters 3 and 4 are development; and Chapter 5 is
conclusion or denouement. The main plot is Western
interpretation of world order in history and Russia’s place in it.
However, there is a sub-plot: comparative American-Russian
history examined against the expanding background of the move
from European to Atlantic ‘civilisation’, and then on to an all-
embracing ‘new world order’. Incidentally, too, such questions
as the relationship between the arts and sciences are touched
upon. The actors are mainly academic or intellectual in their
primary interest, but there are some who are doers rather than
thinkers, and a few who are a mixture of both.
The first two chapters set out two kinds of modern Western
order, constitutional and revolutionary, of which early
definitions were given by Maximilien de Robespierre in a speech
delivered at the end of a year of tumult and Terror on 25
December 1793:
The goal of the constitutional government is to maintain

the Republic; that of the revolutionary government, to
found it.
The revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies;
the constitution is the regime of liberty, victorious and
peaceable.
The revolutionary government demands extraordinary
activity precisely because it is at war. It is subject to less
uniform and less rigorous laws because prevailing
circumstances are stormy and changing and, above all,
because it is forced constantly to deploy new and speedy
resources to meet new and pressing dangers.
The constitutional government is concerned principally
with civil liberty; the revolutionary government, with
public liberty. Under the constitutional regime little more
is required than to protect individuals against the abuse
of the public power; under the revolutionary regime, the
7
INTRODUCTION
public power itself is forced to defend itself against all

attacking factions.8
Some of what Robespierre said in 1793 would be repeated by

Lenin in 1917 and after: we will look more closely at both the French
and the Russian Revolutions below. But, for present purposes,
constitution is taken to mean continuity and stability, revolution—
radical change amid turbulence.
The first kind of order was elaborated by the middle of the
eighteenth century in L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws), where
Montesquieu argued that government in various parts of the world
should accord with the basic circumstances of particular states,
geographical as well as historical. Later in the century, after the
work had established a great reputation, it was adopted by
Catherine the Great and the ‘Founding Fathers’. The Russian
Empress sought to compose a ‘constitution’ for her ‘enlightened
absolutism’, while Hamilton, Madison and other leading formu-
lators of the constitution of the USA wanted to devise a rationale
for their federal republic. Before the century was over, however,
constitutional government on both transcontinental and
transoceanic frontiers of Europe was challenged by its antithesis
embodied in the most radical phase of the French Revolution.
Against this background, in 1792 and 1796 respectively, Catherine
the Great and George Washington asserted in her and his own
fashion the advantages of constitutional order. These were also
expounded by Edmund Burke in Britain, while Robespierre in
France made his early comparison of constitutional and
revolutionary government.
Revolutionary order was proclaimed in a more developed
fashion fifty years or so later by Marx and Engels in their
Communist Manifesto, followed by a series of works culminating
in the unfinished Capital. This expanded the argument that the
development of capitalism was a world process leading towards
its own collapse reinforced by the maturation of a new class, the
proletariat. The Marxist analysis found apparent confir-mation
fifty years after the publication of Volume 1 of Capital in the
October 1917 Revolution in Russia. But how should Marxism be
interpreted and used? Three differing answers were given to this
significant question by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. And other
significant questions were posed in the years preceding and
following the October Revolution. Was the only road to socialism
8
INTRODUCTION
Marxist revolutionary? What were the possible alternatives? In

particular, could Russia join constitutional rather than
revolutionary order along the lines indicated by the US President
Woodrow Wilson in his vision of a world made safe for
democracy? My Chapter 2 concludes with a response to the
October Revolution by a Russian historian, E.V.Tarle, implicitly
closer to Wilsonism than to Leninism.
The second pair of chapters takes discussion of constitutional
and revolutionary order from the opening of the twentieth century
to the immediate aftermath of the First World War, then through
the Second World War to 1962 when the Cold War reached its climax
in the Cuba Crisis. However, the emphasis is not on the historical
events, but on the writing of history. The basic question here is:
how did a representative selection of Western historians react to
emerging world order and disorder? Here, it should be pointed
out that the profession of historian was one of the world’s youngest:
up to the late nineteenth century, few if any writers had been able
to make a living solely through the investigation of the human
past. That is not to say that there was no worthwhile historical
writing in earlier centuries, but rather that the practitioners whom
we will meet in Chapter 3 were very conscious of their
comparatively new-found importance. Moreover, the beginning
of the twentieth century marked a turning point, distinctive
responses to which came from such historians as Karl Lamprecht
in Germany, Henri Berr in France and Lord Acton in England. A
decade or so later, a general opportunity for discussing questions
of global and not so global significance arose at the International
Congress of Historical Sciences meeting in London in April 1913.
In fact, ‘International’ tended strongly to mean ‘European’ for many
of the delegates, who were at the same time clearly moved by the
spirit of nationalism, with most opportunities for celebration of
that spirit given to the majority of those in attendance—from the
host nation. However, minorities from Russia and the USA made
their mark, which was to be more distinctive after the First World
War and Russian Revolution. In particular, the centre of the English-
speaking world was poised to move considerably to the west of
longitude 30 in mid-Atlantic where Lord Acton had placed it in
1896, as the USA overtook the UK and the other European powers
as potential world leader.
Chapter 4 begins with the reaction of one of the 1913 London
Congress delegates, Henri Pirenne, to the cataclysm of the First
9
INTRODUCTION
World War, which he personally had spent largely in a prisoner-

of-war camp. In a keynote address to the following Congress, held
not in St Petersburg in 1918 as originally planned but in Brussels
in 1923, the Belgian historian recommended an approach to
universal history via the comparative method. Another delegate
to the 1913 London Congress, E.V.Tarle, whose reactions to the
Russian Revolution are discussed at the end of Chapter 2, made
an accommodation with Marxism-Leni-nism to become one of the
leading Soviet historians. Tarle did this by waving the USSR’s flag
of ‘socialism in one country’ and celebrating patriotism more than
internationalism. Similarly, episodes from the career of Charles
A.Beard, first introduced towards the end of Chapter 3, illuminate
some of the historiographical currents in the West, especially the
USA. For example, Beard attempted to set out to further a ‘New
History’ incorporating the USA in a world-wide order and
broadening the subject in many other ways. In particular, Beard
and his colleagues could not hold themselves aloof from ideological
struggles in Europe, although the Atlantic civilisation adumbrated
before the First World War did not take on full shape until after the
Second. The successive stages of development from 1945 to 1962
are illustrated by an examination of three articles by the Dutch
historian Jan Romein, from ‘Theoretical History’ through ‘The
Common Human Pattern’ to ‘The Problem of Transformation’.
Reflecting a new Western concern for the history of all humankind
as part of the post-1945 world order as he adapted the old
arguments of his predecessors, Romein also ran up against the
restrictive influences of the Cold War and nationalist self-assertion.
However, he died in 1962 before the climax of the Cold War and
decolonisation, and the many other great changes, economic, social
and cultural, associated with the 1960s. The movement towards a
more complete global view of history now accelerated, against the
background of the continuing Cold War.
After the exposition of the ‘classical’ conceptions of the
constitutional and revolutionary world orders, and their twentieth-
century development as reflected in the works of some
representative historians, we come to the denouement,
‘Conclusion’. A simple analogy is made with a game of football: if
there can be no hope of general agreement concerning the
movement imparted to a ball for an hour and a half by twenty-two
human beings in an area not exceeding a few hundred square
metres, how can we approach an objective appraisal of the events
10
INTRODUCTION
and developments of several centuries’ duration involving the

population of the entire globe? In search of an answer to this persist-
ent question, a recapitulation follows of the worldviews of
Montesquieu and Marx, along with some updated discussion of
the accompanying twin-track theme of the courses of American
and Russian history. There is consideration of the continuing
relevance of these worldviews, and this theme, even into the 1990s.
Next, I present some observations on historical revisions and
alternatives triggered by the collapse of the USSR and its aftermath,
but incorporating recent developments in the arts and sciences.
How best can we consider constitutional and revolutionary order
in the light of the new circumstances? And which further
comparative approaches might prove most fruitful? Finally, there
comes ‘world history, pure and applied’. Is it possible to study
history for its own sake, or must there be some ulterior purpose? I
suggest that it is possible to do both in any approach to world
history, and that they can both play a part in the difficult task of
discerning world order and the even more intractable problem of
creating it. The same might be said of the two kinds of order
discussed in this book, constitutional and revolutionary. Like other
opposites, they are ultimately not contradictory, but
complementary, a thesis and antithesis leading towards synthesis.
To conclude this introduction, another question must be posed:
why begin a study of history and world order with Montesquieu?
After all, through language, human beings have sought to impose
order on their environment since the dawn of time, even if
historians as professional dealers in time did not emerge before
the later nineteenth century, a period which introduced the
demarcation of academic disciplines in general. Briefly, philosophy
in a broad sense ‘finds in human reason the common source of our
knowledge of nature and our beliefs concerning the supernatural’
from the period of Descartes—‘a worthy contemporary of the
heroes of the Thirty Years War’ — that is, the first half of the
seventeenth century. And about a hundred years after the
conclusion of that war, ‘Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois (1748)
undoubtedly makes use of the Cartesian method itself, applying it
to political matters.’ Meanwhile in England, the empiricist tradition,
based on observation rather than on reason alone, was firmly
established in the course of the seventeenth century from Bacon to
Newton, both of whom continued to exert an enormous influence
throughout the eighteenth century. Between them, Descartes and
11
INTRODUCTION
Newton may be considered among the most important forerunners

of the Enlightenment.9
Descartes himself wrote of the histories and fables of ‘the
Ancients’:
For to converse with those of other centuries is almost the

same as to travel. It is a good thing to know something of
the customs and manners of various peoples in order to
judge of our own more objectively and so not think
everything which is contrary to our ways is ridiculous and
irrational, as those who have seen nothing are in the habit
of doing. But when one spends too much time travelling,
one becomes eventually a stranger in one’s own country;
and when one is too interested in what went on in past
centuries, one usually remains extremely ignorant of what
is happening in this century.10
These words of the ‘modern’ Descartes could serve as an

epigraph for this book. Its aim is to visit earlier centuries in order
to arrive at a better understanding of our own. It hopes to
indicate through an analysis of the writings of Montesquieu,
Marx and others how their ideas were influenced by the times
in which they lived, but also to indicate how the themes of
constitutional and revolutionary order as enunciated by
Montesquieu and Marx, and developed—either explicitly or
implicitly —by historians and others in the twentieth century,
remain of great relevance today. Of course, there are other kinds
of order besides the constitutional and the revolutionary, but at
least some of them, for example the economic, will normally be
sub-sumed under them. Definitions are in any case perhaps best
left to social scientists,11 while this book concentrates on the
historian’s stock in trade—movement through time—attempting
to illustrate how the study of past views of world order may
help us approach the present and the future.
In 1748, the year of publication of The Spirit of the Laws, the
world was still imperfectly known. In spite of voyages of
‘discovery and exploration’ from Columbus to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the Southern Pacific and Australasia still
awaited Cook and others, while most of the Arctic and Antarctic
would remain uncharted for many years. Meanwhile, the interior
of the great continents had yet to be penetrated fully by those
12
INTRODUCTION
with the most extended worldview, Europeans at home and

abroad. In particular, as far as the outliers of the northern
hemisphere were concerned, what was to become the USA and
Canada consisted primarily of maritime colonies, while Russia
was barely beginning to incorporate Siberia fully into the empire.
Great changes would ensue through the dates to be picked up
later in this study, 1789, 1867, 1917 and so on up to 1994—as we
will remind ourselves, as we pursue the subject of the
consideration of world order through time.
13
1
MONTESQUIEU AND
CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER
In 1748, when The Spirit of the Laws was first published, Charles
Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, wrote to
a friend:
I can say that I have worked on it my whole life: I was

given some law books when I left my college; I sought
their spirit, I worked, but I did nothing worthwhile. I
discovered my principles twenty years ago; they are quite
simple; anyone else working as hard as I did would have
done better. But I swear that this book nearly killed me; I
am going to rest now; I shall work no more.
Indeed, this publication was the one on which he laboured

longest and for which he is best remembered. However, he certainly
wrote other worthwhile books, notably The Persian Letters, which
satirises the French society and politics of his time, and
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their
Decline, probably envisaged with at least half an eye on the
eighteenth-century present. Equally, his vision was on Greece and
especially Rome when he began his Foreword to The Spirit of the
Laws with the observation:
In order to understand the first four books of this work,

one must note that what I call virtue in a republic is a love
of the homeland, that is, love of equality. It is not a moral
virtue or a Christian virtue; it is political virtue, and this is
the spring that makes monarchy move. Therefore, I have
called love of the homeland and of equality, political virtue.1
14
MONTESQUIEU AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER
MONTESQUIEU AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS

Montesquieu’s masterpiece gives special attention to the
relationship between the four major continents of the world—
Europe, Asia, Africa and America—as they were known before
1748, the year of publication. Montesquieu was at pains to show
why, among all these continents, Europe had achieved
supremacy. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, Europe
was the Western world, and so the Americas were in the
periphery of Montesquieu’s vision. As for Russia, the great man
suggested that its relationship with Europe was also bor-derline.
Having looked at the manner in which The Spirit of the Laws
outlined the relationship of Europe—the then West— with the
transoceanic and transcontinental frontiers, this chapter
proceeds to depict the way in which the book was utilised during
the composition of the American constitution and the Russian
‘constitution’, that is the rationale for enlightened absolutism.
It then goes on to throw some light on the impact of the French
Revolution on the Russian and American systems as defended
by Empress Catherine the Great and President George
Washington, as well as making a few observations about how
Russians and Americans of the time related to Europe. Finally,
excerpts from the works of Burke and Robespierre are used to
illustrate further the concept of ‘constitution’ and to introduce
its apparent opposite, ‘revolution’.
Montesquieu was the first major writer to attempt to apply the
principles of modernisation to the world as it was, or rather as it
appeared to be in the first half of the eighteenth century. Hobbes,
Locke, Grotius and Pufendorf, among others, discussed the
principles at an earlier stage, but they did not attempt to apply
them. Hobbes and Locke, for example, both had extensive
knowledge of the New World as well as of Europe through a wide
range of contacts, but their discussion of government was mostly
abstract. The social contract, developed by Locke in particular, was
a conceptual tool at best, not a reality. Montesquieu, on the other
hand, brought fundamental questions down to earth, although why
this should be still appears itself as a matter for speculation.
Probably, it was a combination of growing commerce, a greater
number of travel accounts and a certain vogue for the Orient which
combined with a favourable conjuncture in French history and with
Montesquieu’s own talent and energy.2
15
If Montesquieu was not the first to conceive of a social science,

he was the first who wanted to give it the spirit of a new science,
so to speak, in proceeding not from ideas but from facts, and
extracting from these facts their laws. In other words, the discovery
of Montesquieu was not ingenious detail but universal principles
permitting the understanding of all human history along with all
its details.3
Montesquieu himself made a more explicit comparison of his
approach with that of the artist. As he observed at the end of the
Preface to The Spirit of the Laws: ‘When I have seen what so many
great men in France, England, and Germany have written before
me, I have been filled with wonder, but I have not lost courage.
“And I too am a painter”, have I said with Correggio.’ Correggio
was alleged to have made this remark on seeing Raphael’s St
Cecilia. This painting may have been on his mind when, in his
discussion of the spirit, mores and manners of a nation,
Montesquieu declared:
In extremely absolute monarchies, historians betray the

truth because they do not have the liberty to tell it; in
extremely free states, they betray truth because of their
very liberty for, as it always produces divisions, each one
becomes as much the slave of the prejudices of his faction
as he would be of a despot. Their poets would more often
have an original bluntness of invention than a certain deli-
cacy of taste; one would find there something closer to
Michelangelo’s strength than to Raphael’s grace.4
Nearly two and a half centuries after the first publication of The
Spirit of the Laws, many limitations are apparent in the great man’s
masterpiece. But even now historians and their colleagues in other
disciplines alike could do worse than take it as a point of departure
for their examination of some of the most important developments
taking place in the decades following 1748, in particular the framing
of the American constitution and the attempt by Catherine the
Great to introduce a ‘constitution’ into the Russian Empire. As they
embark upon such an exercise, they should no doubt strive to avoid
the excesses of the pursuit of their profession in extremely absolutist
and extremely free states, while recalling the strength of
Michelangelo, seeking the balance and harmonies of St Cecilia, and
bearing in mind the conclusion of Montesquieu’s Invocation to
16
the Muses: ‘You also want me to make reason speak. It is the noblest,
the most perfect, the most exquisite of our senses.’5
The first approach might be to the proportions of The Spirit of
the Laws itself. The work was divided by Montesquieu into six
parts of unequal length, as follows. Part 1 begins with an
introductory section on laws in their various forms, continues
with an analysis of three kinds of government—republican,
monarchical and despotic—and follows with a further
examination of these three from the aspects of education, civil
and criminal cases, matters of sumptuosity and the condition of
women, before a final discussion of how the principles of the
respective kinds of government might become corrupt. Part 2
looks at defensive and offensive force, political liberty in the
constitution and for the citizen, before evaluating the relationship
to liberty of the levy of taxes and the size of public rev-enues.
Part 3 is devoted mainly to climate and its influence on civil and
domestic slavery and political servitude; it includes a book or
section on laws in their relation to the nature of the terrain, and
another on laws in their relation with the principles forming the
general spirit, the mores and the manners of a nation. Part 4
focuses on commerce, commercial revolution, the use of money
and the number of inhabitants, Part 5 on religion and on the
relationship of various kinds of law—religious, civil, political and
domestic—to their contexts. Part 6, concentrating on the Roman
and Frankish origins of feudalism, brings the work to an end on
fiefs ‘where most authors have begun it’.6
If Montesquieu’s end is in the beginning, his last is certainly
not his least. For, in ascending order of length, the parts run 5,
2, 3, 4, 1, 6. There is more than three times as much on feudalism
as on religion, while Part 6 is more than half as long again as its
nearest competitor, Part 1. Vulgar proportions do not necessarily
mean intended emphases, yet the preponderance among the
parts matches a marked bias in the whole considered from
another point of view—the geographic. To put it bluntly, for all
its worthy intentions to be global in coverage, The Spirit of the
Laws is heavily Eurocentric, with the rest of the world
constituting a periphery to its core, acting as provinces to its
metropolis.
Asia is the continent ‘where despotism is, so to speak, natural-
ized’, where ‘domestic servitude and despotic government have
been seen to go hand in hand in every age’. Moreover,
17
‘Mohammedan princes constantly kill or are killed’, while the

ravage of Asia by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan also
demonstrated that:
we owe to Christianity both a certain political right in

government and a certain right of nations in war, for which
human nature can never be sufficiently grateful. This right
of nations, among ourselves, has the result that victory
leaves to the vanquished these great things: life, liberty, laws,
goods, and always religion, when one does not blind oneself.
Inequitable taxation, emphasis on luxury at one end of the social
scale and consignment to misery at the other were among other
Asian problems, which all stemmed largely from physical features,
especially heat.7
Meanwhile, in Africa, ‘carnivorous beasts…have had
dominion…from time immemorial’. Moreover:
Most of the peoples on the coasts of Africa are savages and

barbarians. I believe that this comes largely from there being
some uninhabitable countries that separate those small
countries which can be inhabited. They are without industry;
they have no arts; they have precious metals in abundance
which they take immediately from the hand of nature.
Therefore, all peoples with a ‘police’ (i.e. good order as well as

coercive power) were in a position to trade with them in an
advantageous manner.
Again, climate was a factor, if not the only one. Africa to some
extent resembled also Asia in other features, of which Montesquieu
wrote in comparison with his home continent:
In Asia one has always seen great empires; in Europe they
were never able to exist. This is because the Asia we know
has broader plains; it is cut into larger parts by seas; and, as
it is more to the south, its streams dry up more easily, its
mountains are less covered with snow, and its smaller rivers
form slighter barriers.
In Europe, natural divisions had led to the formation of many

medium-sized states which could be maintained with the rule of
law, but would without it become decadent and inferior. Hence,
‘a genius for liberty’, making it very difficult for any part to be
18
subjugated by foreign force ‘other than by laws and by what is

useful to its commerce’. By contrast, in Asia there reigned ‘a spirit
of servitude’ that had never left it: ‘in all the histories of this
country it is not possible to find a single trait marking a free soul.’
Moving on to summarise his view of the world as he knew it,
Montesquieu declared:
This is what I can say about Asia and Europe. Africa has a
climate like that of southern Asia, and it has the same
servitude. America, destroyed and newly repopulated by
the nations of Europe and Africa, can scarcely demonstrate
its own genius today, but what we know of its former
history is quite in conformity with our principles.8
By America, of course, Montesquieu meant both northern and
southern continents, before and after their ‘discovery’. As one
who did not accept the idea of a social contract, Montesquieu
found no state of nature in the Americas. In the area of primary
concern to this chapter, even the Iroquois, who allegedly ate their
prisoners, possessed a ‘right of nations’ even if it was not founded
on true principles. In nearby Louisiana, the ‘savages’ cut down
trees and gathered the fruit when they wanted it. But, if this
approached the state of nature, Montesquieu deemed it ‘despotic
government’. As a whole, ‘There are so many savage nations in
America because the land by itself produces much fruit with
which to nourish them.’ The happy fate of these peoples of plenty
was contrasted with that across the Atlantic: ‘I believe one would
not have all these advantages in Europe if the earth were left
uncultivated; there would be scarcely anything but forests of oak
and other unproductive trees.’ However, after the ‘discovery’ of
1492 and beyond: ‘The peoples of Europe, having exterminated
those of America, had to make slaves of those in Africa in order
to use them to clear so much land.’ As a possible individual
exception to this rule, Mr Penn was singled out as a ‘true Lycurgus’
bent on peace. But, in general, beyond conquest and annihilation,
‘in Europe it remains a fundamental law that any commerce with
a foreign colony is regarded as a pure monopoly enforceable by
the laws of the country.’9
Less than thirty years later, such an attitude was to help lead to
the American Revolution. Before we move on to that event and
the ensuing developments leading to the drawing up of the US
constitution, however, two further points need to be made. What,
19
in Montesquieu’s view, were the reasons for Europe’s pre-

eminence? And how had it developed over time? Part of the answer
to the first question has already been given: a conducive
geographical disposition; a particular aspect of it has been strongly
implied: the moderate climate. Asia had no temperate zone, but in
Europe there was a very broad one. From this, Montesquieu argued:
it follows that the strong and weak nations face each other;
the brave and active warrior peoples are immediately
adjacent to effeminate, lazy and timid peoples; therefore,
one must be the conquered and the other the conqueror.
In Europe, on the other hand, strong nations face the strong;
those that are adjacent have almost the same amount of
courage. This is the major reason for the weakness of Asia
and the strength of Europe, for the liberty of Europe and
the servitude of Asia: a cause that I think has never before
been observed. This is why liberty never increases in Asia,
whereas in Europe it increases or decreases according to
the circumstances.
These included internal climatic variations, which divided the

north of the European continent from the south. Equilibrium was
maintained by the laziness of the latter compared with the industry
and activity of the former. Between them, England, France and
Holland were responsible for nearly all the commerce and
navigation of Europe, while Europe as a whole carried on the
commerce and navigation of the other three parts of the world.
Altogether then:
Europe has reached such a high degree of power that

nothing in history is comparable to it, if one considers the
immensity of expenditure, the size of military engagement,
the number of troops, and their continuous upkeep, even
when they are the most useless and are only for osten-
tation.10
This predominance, conditioned as it was by basic

geographical circumstances, had also developed over time, from
the ancient world through the medieval to the modern. Of
course, it all began with the Greeks, and was continued by the
Romans, a view widely shared by his contemporaries along with
Montesquieu, who devotes a considerable amount of The Spirit
20
of the Laws to the systems to be found in Athens and Rome.

However, the great man was not an uncritical analyst of the
classical world, nor did he believe that Europe owed everything
to it. He asserted that there had never been on earth a
government as well tempered as that of each part of Europe
during the years of existence of the Gothic German ascendancy
following the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Apart from
references to the evolution of Europe throughout the work, such
as the observation that the English took their admirable system
of government from the Germans, a whole complete part, the
last and the longest, was devoted to an account of how the feudal
system emerged and then led on towards modernity. By the later
seventeenth century:
Toward the middle of the reign of Louis XIV, France was

at the highest point of its relative size. Germany did not
yet have the great monarchs it has since had. Italy was in
the same situation. Scotland and England had not formed
a monarchy. Aragon had not formed one with Castile; and
the separate parts of Spain were weakened by this and
weakened Spain. Muscovy was as yet no better known in
Europe than was the Crimea.11
MONTESQUIEU, THE USA AND RUSSIA

The moral of that particular passage is: ‘All size, all force, all
power is relative.’12 Indeed, thus it was in the world of the first
half of the eighteenth century, about which Montesquieu said
very little of a specific nature, and so it remained in the second
half of the century, after his death. Silas Deane was to note in
1777 that ‘Russia like America is a new state, and rises with
astonishing rapidity.’ This dual surge interacted with the early
moves of the USA through revolution to constitution, and the
expansion of tsarist Russia accompanied by the attempt of
Catherine the Great to introduce her own governmental
reforms.13
The ideological debt of both movements to Western Europe was
enormous, but both made their own distinctive adaptations. To
take the USA first, as Bernard Bailyn has pointed out, ‘law was no
science of what to do next’,14 but the Americans drew on Coke and
then Blackstone of the English law tradition, Grotius, Pufendorf
21
and Beccaria of the continental schools, as well as the classical

tradition of republican virtue relayed for the most part via modern
authorities. Minor figures were often as important as the major,
for example the former Aberdeen students Gilbert Burnet, Thomas
Gordon and William Small. A comparatively minor influence on
the Revolution, Montesquieu was to enjoy a much more central
presence at the time of deliberations leading to the constitution. To
quote Benjamin Fletcher Wright on the arguments of the opposition:
Montesquieu had a vast prestige in that day. He was almost

venerated as the exponent of principles of free government.
Many of his views were, in fact, entirely unac-ceptable to
the Americans, but those opinions, when not unknown,
were disregarded. On the incompatibility between freedom
and an extensive republic, and on the necessity of greater
separation of powers, his views were quoted over and over
again.15
Meanwhile, in a similar manner, the supporters of the new

constitution were also drawing on the writings of Montesquieu.
James Madison asserted: ‘Montesquieu was in his particular
science what Bacon was in universal science. He lifted the veil
from the venerable errors which enslaved opinion, and pointed
the way to those luminous truths of which he had but a glimpse
himself.’ Without false modesty, Madison implied that he himself
and his fellow contributors to The Federalist knew better than
Montesquieu what was good for the USA. So they could take
from The Spirit of the Laws the concept of the ‘confederate, or
federal republic’, for example, and adapt Montesquieu’s
discussion of it as a means of extending the sphere of popular
government and combining the advantages of monarchies with
those of republics. Madison declared:
As the natural limit of a democracy is that distance from

the central point which will just permit the most remote
citizens to assemble as often as their public functions
demand, and will include no greater number than can join
in those functions; so the natural limit of a republic is that
distance from the centre which will barely allow the
representatives to meet as often as may be necessary for
the administration of public affairs.16
22
As far as the overall influence of Montesquieu on the

Founding Fathers is concerned, the account of Anne M.Cohler
is broadly acceptable, especially since it takes into consideration
the circumstance that the arguments of The Spirit of the Laws often
ran parallel to those of other authorities, the writers of the
Scottish Enlightenment, for example. In her careful formulation,
‘The presentation of the argument for the constitution in The
Federalist follows a pattern that Montesquieu could well have
suggested.’17 There was a need for a more perfect union both
powerful and free, with a government that was representative
of but not too directly dependent on the people, divided,
balanced and checked. But if the nearest model was the British
constitution, this was neither republican nor written, and could
not be adopted directly. Therefore, as Scottish and English
authorities on the limited monarchy of Britain were used by the
Founding Fathers along with the anglophile Montesquieu, they
themselves were probably not always certain whose support
specifically they were using.
The adaptation of the concept of honour from monarchy to
federal republic as a basis for full citizenship might well have
been suggested by The Spirit of the Laws, to give just one example,
but the fact remains that there are only a handful of specific
references to its author in the records of the Federal Convention
and The Federalist. Madison pointed out that if ‘the oracle who
is always consulted and cited’ on the subject of the separation
of powers was ‘the celebrated Montesquieu’, ‘the British
Constitution was to Montesquieu what Homer has been to the
didactic writers on epic poetry.’ And so one of a pair of groups
of specific references is to the separation of powers and allied
matters. The other is to the aforesaid federal republic, which
forms but a minor part of The Spirit of the Laws, and was then
expanded and altered for their own purposes by Hamilton,
Madison and others.18
Meanwhile, some of the central arguments in Montesquieu’s
masterpiece were mentioned scarcely, if at all, for example
climate, seen in that work as one of the fundamental formative
influences. Needless to say, climate was very different in most
of the thirteen states from how it was back in Britain and
northern Europe. An immigrant from England had recently
complained to a friend back home:
23
The hotness of the weather, sir, has so prodigious an

influence on the constitution that it fevers the blood and
sets all the animal spirits in an uproar. Hence we think
and act tumultuously and all in a flutter, and are strangers
to that cool steadiness which you in England justly value
yourselves upon.19
Admittedly, Jonathan Boucher was discussing his own body rather

than the body politic, but there were implications for government
in such observations from the point of view of The Spirit of the Laws
beyond ‘animal spirits’.
Even more significantly, there was virtually no reference in The
Federalist or the records of the Constitutional Convention to the
subject which, if length be any guide, was of greatest importance
to Montesquieu as he concluded where others began, with the
evolution of feudalism. For the Founding Fathers, this was not a
matter of much significance, for the beginning or the end or the
middle of their deliberations. Why should it be, as they made use
of arguments imported across the Atlantic mainly to emphasise
their distance from Europe and the newness of their government
as opposed to those forms to be found in the old continent?
Madison argued that what the channel had done for Great Britain
the ocean could do for his own country: ‘The distance of the United
States from the powerful nations of the world gives them the same
happy security.’ However, if the Union were not more perfectly
formed, there would be much internal disruption in the USA, while
‘A plentiful addition of evils would have their source in that relation
in which Europe stands to this quarter of the earth, and which no
other quarter of the earth bears to Europe.’ A somewhat different
view of this special relationship was put with great passion by
Alexander Hamilton in the course of an address to the people of
New York on ‘The Value of Union to Commerce and the
Advantages of a Navy’:
The world may politically, as well as geographically, be

divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of
interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe, by her
arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has,
in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all.
Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her
domination. The superiority she has long maintained has
24
tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World,

and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her
benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in
direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical
superiority and have gravely asserted that all animals, and
with them the human species, degenerate in America—
that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile
in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these
arro-gant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to
vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that
assuming brother, moderation. Union will enable us to do
it. Disunion will add another victim to his triumphs. Let
Americans disdain to be the instruments of European
greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict
and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great
American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic
force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the
connection between the old and the new world!20
Hamilton felt strongly about the security of the western

hemisphere, not only in his native Caribbean but also on the
expanding continental frontier. His views on the latter subject were
shared nearly a quarter-century previously by Jonathan Boucher,
who characterised the imperial policy leading towards the Stamp
Act as ‘in every sense oppressive, impolitic and illegal’. Boucher
would have been far from alone in such an observation, but not
many attacked the British parliament with the assertion that it was
as ignorant in its dealings with the American colonists as it would
be in the prescription of ‘an assessment to the inhabitants of
Kamschatka’. As far as the London government’s Indian policy in
particular was concerned, Boucher was morally certain that ‘it were
a much easier task to civilize every savage in America, than Peter
the Great had, when he took to humanize the bears of Russia.’
Here, then, was the recognition that Europe had two frontiers, to
East as well as West, and that the situation of the American colonists
was not completely exceptional.21
More specifically, one of Hamilton’s other works, his ‘Report
on the Subject of Manufactures’ of 1791, was published in Russian
in St Petersburg in 1807 with the observation from the translator
A.F.Malinovskii about similarities between the USA and Russia
‘in size, climate and natural produce, in a population
25
disproportionate to size and in the young age of various useful

institutions’. To be sure, Malinovskii recognised the differences
between the two ‘new states’, especially regarding the peasantry;
indeed, he frequently expressed a preference for a rural rather
than an urban society, and was apparently seeking to integrate
manufactures in the former rather than to develop the latter.
Moreover, differences are also revealed in a close comparison of
the original text with the translation, where certain passages of a
technical nature or of a character completely alien to Russian
society are omitted. Evidently, too, in view of the official
sponsorship of his work, Malinovskii made a judicious number
of further changes, omitting a section concerning the American
Revolution and its positive impact on the financial situation of
the USA, and replacing the phrase ‘before the revolution’ with
another: ‘before the separation of America’. He also left out a
reference to a slave revolt in Haiti, for fear no doubt of the
potential comparison with similar action taken by the Russian
serfs—further reinforcement of the argument that eighteenth-
century observers saw the case for the comparison of America
and Russia in general.22
Such a view should be much clearer to us today, and can be
illustrated through the agency of Montesquieu’s world picture
and the use made of it by Catherine the Great, who took The
Spirit of the Laws as her ‘prayer-book’ and went much further
than the Founding Fathers in the direction of the sincerest form
of flattery—imitation—of ‘President Montesquieu’. To be sure,
she was inclined in this direction by the great man himself, who
made more than a score of references to Russia, using as his
principal source John Perry’s The State of Russia under the Present
Czar, first published in London in 1716. It is also possible, though
not certain, that ‘Much of Montesquieu’s information about
Russia may have been derived from conversations with
Cantemir’, that is Prince A.D.Kantemir, Russian ambassador in
France from 1738 to 1744.23
A map drawn as a supplement for the revised edition of The
Spirit of the Laws in 1756 focused on Europe and included at its
eastern extremity ‘Russie Européenne’ stretching as far as the
River Volga with ‘Petite Tartarie’ occupying the northern littoral
of the Black Sea. This caught in the year after Montesquieu’s
death the difficulty that had been caused him in his life by the
26
frontier situation of the Russian Empire. In his estimation of

Catherine the Great’s illustrious predecessor he wrote:
Peter found it easier than he had expected to give the mores

and manners of Europe to a European nation. The empire
of climates is the first of all empires. Therefore, he did not
need laws to change the mores and manners of his nation;
it would have been sufficient for him to inspire other mores
and other manners.
On the other hand, Montesquieu also observed that the soul of

northern peoples was less sensitive than others to pain, and that
therefore: ‘A Muscovite has to be flayed before he feels anything.’
A similar kind of ambiguity and imprecision affects Montesquieu’s
overall estimate of Russia. It was for him a despotism, but he could
not place it in the basic category of Asiatic despotism, or in the
minor, distorted type of European despotism. Moreover, he did
find some possibilities for the mitigation of Russian despotism in
the reforms of Peter the Great and after. For example: ‘In Russia,
taxes are of medium size; they have been increased since despotism
has become more moderate.’24
The Empress Catherine made the most extensive use of The Spirit
of the Laws in the composition of her Nakaz or ‘Instructions to the
Commission for the Composition of a Plan of a new Code of Laws’.
She wrote of this work to d’Alembert in 1765: ‘For the benefit of
my empire I have robbed President Montesquieu, without naming
him; I hope that if he sees my work from the other world, he will
forgive me this plagiarism for the good of twenty million people,
which must come from it.’ And so, confessing to Frederick the Great
that she was behaving like the crow of the fable who made itself a
garment of peacock’s feathers, she took her admiration of The Spirit
of the Laws to the letter, extracting 294 out of 655 clauses in her
Nakaz wholly or in part from her ‘prayer-book’.
But the plagiarism was not without a measure of adaptation
and improvisation, as the Empress discounted her mentor’s
implication that Russia was bound to remain to some extent a
despotism and his description of the desirable structure for the
state. For example, while Montesquieu’s constitution was
basically class-monarchical, Catherine’s was bureaucratic-
autocratic. For his social composition of intermediate powers, she
substituted a bureaucratic variant. Separate as well as
27
intermediate institutions would prevent despotism as well as

favouring the monarch’s own enlightenment. After all,
Montesquieu himself had observed that despotism would not
hold sway where judicial, legislative and executive powers were
separate and the sovereign was enlightened.
Even regarding the bureaucracy, however, the priorities of the
Empress were not those of the philosophe. For example, while
accepting the division of powers, she subordinated this principle
to another, the internal correctness of government, based on the
concept of natural law. Natural law in general appears in the Nakaz
not as the fundamental guarantor to all subjects of certain rights,
but rather as a basic governor of the self-limitation of the
autocratic power, therefore as a rationale not for constitutional
monarchy, but rather for enlightened absolutism. While Catherine
made more extensive use of The Spirit of the Laws in her Nakaz
than had the Founding Fathers, her approach to enlightened
absolutism resembled theirs to the constitutional federal republic
in its selectivity and emendation. Like them, moreover, she had
little or nothing to say about Montesquieu’s longest part, on the
evolution of feudalism, which had taken a different path in Russia
from that of Western Europe. Like them, too, she had made use
of other authorities, including some from the Scottish
Enlightenment, although her tendency towards German
cameralism and French physiocratism were among indicators of
further divergences. In her later legislative work,
contemporaneous with the movement towards the American
Revolution and constitution, moreover, she resembled them in
her adoption as a new model of ‘Sir Blackstone’, although with
the reservation ‘I do not make anything from what there is in the
book, but it is my yarn which I unwind in my own way.’25 Russian
specialists are joining their Western counterparts in serious
consideration of Catherine’s Nakaz and other projects, especially
her Charters of 1785—to the Nobility, to the Towns and (in draft)
to the ‘State Peasants’ —as a foundation of a Russian imperial
constitution. 26 She should not therefore be dis-missed as a
vainglorious hypocrite: if the Founding Fathers were putting
forward in their way the Enlightenment’s ‘program in practice’,
so was she in hers. It might be argued that they were closer to the
intention of The Spirit of the Laws in particular. On the other hand,
it should not be forgotten that Montesquieu had observed in his
masterpiece first published in 1748 that what he knew of
28
America’s former, mostly pre-colonial history was ‘quite in

conformity with our principles’. Would he have seen the USA in
such conformity in 1787, from the point of view of climate,
republics or whatever?27
In their search for a constitution, then, both the Founding
Fathers and Catherine the Great must be allowed equal latitude
in the use that they made of Montesquieu’s work. All of them
worked in conformity with The Spirit of the Laws as set out in the
Preface:
Many of the truths will make themselves felt here only

when one sees the chain connecting them with others…. I
do not write to censure that which is established in any
country whatsoever…. If I could make it so that…each
could feel better his happiness in his own country,
government, and position, I would consider myself the
happiest of mortals…. I would consider myself the
happiest of mortals if I could make it so that men were
able to cure themselves of their prejudices…not what
makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one
unaware of oneself.28
Here also Montesquieu reminds us of the basic aim of this book,

which is to encourage awareness of prejudices in this larger sense.
That aim is now to be further pursued by an examination of the
manner in which both the American and Russian approaches to
constitutionality were confronted at the end of the 1780s by the
challenge of the French Revolution. We will see that this
uncomfortable experience reinforced the Russian and American
deviations from the norms of The Spirit of the Laws.
CATHERINE THE GREAT AND THE RUSSIAN

‘CONSTITUTION’
In the short run, to be sure, the French Revolution appeared to be
joining the search for stability rather than opposing it, and therefore
received a welcome from both sides. The Empress Catherine, to
take her first, shared at least some of the early interest in events in
Paris, although she soon moved towards suspicion, writing to one
of her intellectual correspondents, Baron Melchior von Grimm, in
February 1790:
29
As a person ignorant of the facts, I simply ask questions,

foreseeing the destruction of everything that has been
linked with the system of ideas of the beginning and
middle of this century, which brought forth rules and
principles without which, however, it is impossible to live
one day.29
How could the disciple of Montesquieu and other early

philosophes serve the cause of enlightened absolutism in these newly
troubled times? At least some of her thoughts were set down in a
memoir composed in August-September 1792, ‘On Mea-sures for
the Restoration of the Legitimate Government in France’. The
Empress began with an uncompromising affirmation: ‘The cause
of the king of France is that of all kings. Europe is interested in
seeing France retaking the place due to that great kingdom.’ Force
would be necessary to effect a restoration, but it would not be of
the situation obtaining before 1789. Wrote Catherine:
It seems that a revolution is indispensably necessary, that

matters could not remain on the same footing. This
revolution could consist only of the re-establishment of
monarchical government such as existed since the arrival
of the Franks. Would not the balance of powers, the
nobility, the clergy, the magistrature reunite under leaders
animated by a desire so legitimate, so equitable, so
moderate? The nobility, the clergy, the magistrature, the
princes, the troops, could they not reunite for a most
essential purpose: to effect the deliverance of the king and
the royal family from the hands of the populace of Paris?
And would this be so difficult? If it was not, it would be a
matter only of concentrating the wisest and most certain
means. Since the world began, order has triumphed over
disorder.30
The so-called National Assembly had gone beyond the powers

accorded it, which included the maintenance of monarchical
government, and aimed at the abolition of this form of government
which had been established in France for a thousand years, even
daring to dream of the abolition of the Christian religion. Instead,
it was trying to introduce a destructive anarchy, driven on by the
bandits swarming around Paris. The restoration would have to be
30
carried out by force of arms. However, the aim was not to harm
the reasonable liberty of individuals, but to abolish a government
in the form of a republic incompatible with the existence of a great
kingdom, all the more because it was contrary to the wishes of the
nation prescribed in the cahiers (statements of public opinion) for
the maintenance of monarchical government and the Roman
Catholic religion.
The deliverance of the king and royal family must be carried
out in a manner least likely to cause the risk of a revolt of the princes
which would plunge France into open civil war. Calm and
tranquillity should be reborn from the provinces, whose harmony
would oblige the capital to follow their example. Moreover, as
monarchical government was being re-established, old customs
which inspired respect for rank among the public should not be
neglected or despised. Soldiers must always wear their uniform in
camp, while persons of superior standing should not appear in
public without their appropriate dress, nor princes allow anybody
into their presence in similar circumstances. Such measures would
discourage any lingering illusion of perfect equality, and introduce
anew the dignity of rank in military and civil life, along with the
certainty of hierarchy in the three estates. Generally speaking,
Catherine was aiming in her measures for the restoration of the
kind of monarchy favoured by Montesquieu, true to the Frankish
heritage as set out at length in Part 6 of The Spirit of the Laws, and
reflected by French public opinion in the cahiers: that is, absolute
monarchy, but constitutional. She also revealed some of her own
bureau-cratic-autocratic outlook.31
After the radical turn in the French Revolution signalled by the
execution of the king and queen early in 1793, Catherine’s hopes
for restoration were dashed, and her disillusionment with the
course of events moved towards horror. About a year later, in
February 1794, she wrote to Baron Melchior von Grimm:
And so you were right, never expressing the wish to be

included among the luminaries, the illuminés and the
philosophes, since experience proves that all this leads to
destruction; but whatever they have said and done, the
world will never cease to heed an authority…it is better to
prefer the foolishness of one, than the madness of many,
infecting with fury twenty million people in the name of
‘freedom’, of which they do not possess even the shadow
31
after which these madmen rush forward to ensure that it

will never be achieved.32
Catherine’s final position, then, was even more absolute, and less
constitutional.
Her far-sighted correspondent, Baron von Grimm, had made a
long-term forecast of the French Revolution’s impact at the end of
1790, writing of a future when:
Two empires will then share all the advantages of

civilisation, of the power of genius, of letters, arts, arms
and industry: Russia on the eastern side, and America,
having become free in our own time, on the western side,
and we other peoples of the nucleus will be too degraded,
too debased, to know otherwise than by a vague and stupid
tradition what we have been.33
The quality of Grimm’s forecast was adversely affected by

another of its features, his declaration that the French Revolution
would mean the end of Europe, rather than leading towards the
continent’s further ascendancy. We can compare the actual impact
of the French Revolution on the transcontinental and transoceanic
frontiers by considering successive episodes in the career of a single
individual. Edmond Charles Genet was born early in 1763 at
Versailles, a location aptly suggesting the background of
comfortable circumstances, even if bourgeois rather than
aristocratic. An ambitious father pushed him towards a career
normally above his station, in diplomacy, and after an appropriate
education including a version of the Grand Tour, followed by some
years in the civil service, he was appointed Secretary of the Legation
in the St Petersburg Embassy. Arriving at the beginning of 1788, he
became chargé d’affaires in 1789 when the Ambassador returned to
France soon after the outbreak of the Revolution.
At first, Genet was taken aback, writing at the beginning of
1790 that ‘We have shown Europe the sad sight of all those ills
brought about by anarchy.’ By July 1791, his position had shifted
considerably, as was shown by some of his comments on
developments in Poland: ‘For a long time I could not assimilate
the direction of the new constitution. The consequences of
revolution frightened me, but now I am completely attached to
that system which the people have chosen.’ Later in the same
32
year, he exclaimed: ‘The more numerous the enemies of freedom,

the stronger burns the flame of my patriotism.’ He wrote to his
sister:
I am a patriot not from calculation, but from good

conscience, as always. I love freedom, hate violence, and
the rules of my conduct are based on the citizen’s oath. I am
true to the last breath to the law, the nation and the king.
Towards the end of 1791, there was some doubt in Genet’s mind,
and he wrote: ‘If we cannot instil respect for our order, then it must
be abandoned.’ But he soon recovered to reiterate: ‘My conduct
will show that it is possible to love freedom and to worship the
king.’ He thus confirmed an earlier instruction to his sister: ‘Inform
the king of my feeling and tell him that I shall spill my blood for
his defence with as much readiness as in defence of the
constitution.’ Just before his departure from St Petersburg, Genet
observed in July 1792: ‘Hereditary constitutional monarchy is the
best way of opposing the disastrous intervention of foreigners.’34
Catherine opposed what she saw as his disastrous intervention
by ordering him to leave in July 1792. His moderate support of the
French Revolution, even though not far from her own original
attitude towards it, was too much for her.
GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE AMERICAN

CONSTITUTION
Genet arrived back in Paris in September. In almost no time at all,
he made a considerable impression on the salon of Mme Roland,
who spoke of his ‘solid’ and ‘enlightened mind’, and of the
‘sweetness, justice, grace, and reason’ of his conversation, which
contained no ‘affectation or pedantry’. Jacques Pierre Brissot, who
had recently visited the USA and written a book about it, used his
influence as a journalist and politician to advance the cause of
‘democrat Genet’ as he chose to call him. Having written a report
on the reorganisation of the diplomatic service, arguing for its
comparability to the civil service, Genet found himself the
beneficiary of one of his own proposals, the substitution of
‘Minister’ for ‘Ambassador’ as the highest appointment, as he was
appointed representative of the French government in the USA
early in November.35
33
The instructions for Minister, or as he was to become known,

Citizen Genet, were ready by the middle of December, and were
in two parts, the first more rhetorical, the second more practical.
They began with a misunderstanding of the American
constitution which was to lead to later complications: addressed
not to the President, but to Congress, the instructions were based
on the erroneous belief that the American Congress, like the
French National Convention, possessed all power since it
embodied the sovereign will of the people. Genet seems to have
been unable to eradicate this misconception during the months
of his mission.
Indeed Genet’s high-handed policies soon after his arrival in
mid-May 1793 attracted much disquiet, and the American
government decided to ask for his recall, complaining that the
French Minister was acting in the USA as if he were a ‘co-
sovereign’. Just one sentence in a long letter written by Jefferson
in mid-August aroused debate in the cabinet: the Secretary of
State feared that Genet’s activities might lead towards hostility
between the USA and France and bring upon both of them ‘a
reproach, which it is hoped will never stain the history of either,
that of liberty warring on herself’. Alexander Hamilton, the
leading member of the pro-British element in the American
administration, objected to the last four words, unable to accept
that the course taken by the French Revolution made it possible
any longer to accept that it promoted liberty. Washington and a
sufficient number of members of the cabinet were persuaded that
the four words should be deleted.36
Soon after Genet learned of the request for his recall, in a
situation deteriorating even further, he wrote in early October 1793
an angry response giving emphasis to his own view of the
American constitution:
Persuaded that the sovereignty of the United States resides

essentially in the People and its representatives in
Congress; persuaded that the Executive power is the only
one which has been confided to the President of the United
States; persuaded that this magistrate has not the right to
decide questions… [which] the Constitution reserves
particularly to Congress; persuaded that he has not the
power to bend existing treaties to circumstances…per-
suaded that the league formed by the tyrants to annihilate
34
republican principles founded on the rights of man, will

be the object of the most serious deliberations of Congress;
I had deferred in the sole view of maintaining good
harmony between the free people of America and France,
communicating to my Government, before the epoch at
which the representatives of the People were to assemble,
the original correspondence which has taken place…
between you and myself.37
Less than six months after his arrival in the American capital,
then, Genet had reached the point of no return in his relations with
the American administration. He had alienated himself from the
government in the USA even more quickly than he had previously
done from that in Russia. However, on this occasion, unlike before,
Genet did not go home, but married and settled down as a farmer,
writing to his future wife early in 1794 that his ‘sole desire was to
settle in a country where virtue was honoured and liberty respected;
where a man who obeyed the law had nothing to fear from despots,
aristocrats, or ambitious men.’38 Red Indians and black slaves, to
name but two groups, would not have agreed, but Genet’s decisions
as well as his letter to his future wife were a clear reflection on the
triangular relationship of constitutional developments in the USA,
France and Russia in the 1790s.
Of course, in that decade, the international situation as well as
the relative internal situation in each country were changing very
quickly, and, even in the USA, life was far from tranquil for political
leaders. In the summer of 1793, which Jefferson considered
important for mankind all over the earth, President Washington
lost his temper after a satirical attack in which it was suggested
that he would suffer the same fate as Louis XVI. As Jefferson
described the ensuing spectacle:
The President was much inflamed, got into one of those

passions when he cannot command himself, ran on much
on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him,
defied any man on earth to produce one act of his since he
had been in the govmt. which had not been done on the
purest motives, that…by god he had rather be in his grave
than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his
farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet they were
charging him with wanting to be a King.39
35
By this time, early August, an outbreak of yellow fever had

begun, and was to become an epidemic by the end of the month.
Thus, climate interfered with the business of government as well
as affecting the tempers of its leaders, a vindication of some of
Montesquieu’s arguments in The Spirit of the Laws.
However, rather than developing that point, looking further at
popular disaffection in 1793 and 1794 or examining the manner in
which the great debates on the French Revolution continued in
the USA in the later 1790s, we will look at the comparative calm of
Washington’s famous Farewell Address of 19 September 1796,
seeking out in particular the retiring Presi-dent’s views on the
constitutional order. Thanking his fellow-countrymen for their
support and expressing the wish that ‘the free constitution, which
is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained’,
Washington went on to declare:
Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that

country has a right to concentrate your affections. The
name of AMERICAN, which belongs to you, in your
national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patri-
otism, more than any appellation derived from local dis-
criminations. With slight shades of difference, you have
the same Religion, Manners, Habits, and political
Principles. You have in a common cause fought and
triumphed together. The Independence and Liberty you
possess are the work of joint councils, and joint efforts—
or common dangers, sufferings and successes.
Here is a blend of constitutional order with its antithesis,

revolutionary order.
However, the strong emphasis is on the preservation of what
had been won in the past rather than on what might be gained in
the future. And so, although ‘the right of the people to make and
alter their Constitutions of Government’ is the basis of our
political systems, change can only come about through ‘an explicit
act of the whole people’. Until such a step has been taken,
Washington stresses, the constitution which exists at any time ‘is
sacredly obligatory upon all’. To take another example, ‘the
continuance of the UNION’ should be ‘a primary object of
Patriotic desire’. The President asked an almost rhetorical
question, possibly reflecting some of the reservations of
36
Montesquieu as well as more recent debates: ‘Is there a doubt,

whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere?’
But his answer in fact left little room for doubt. Immediately, it
was: ‘Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such
a case were criminal.’ A longer response, arguing for the necessity
of co-operation between North, South, East and West, took up a
not insignificant proportion of the Farewell Address.
The spirit of the American laws was expressed further through
‘reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power’, obtained ‘by
dividing and distributing it into different deposi-tories, and
constituting each the Guardian of the Public Weal against
invasions by the others’. The necessity for such checks had been
evinced ‘by experiments ancient and modern; some of them in
our country and under our own eyes’. Here again was a mixture
of old and not so old precept with more recent practice. Further
props for justice and efficiency (all of them noted by Montesquieu
in his time) were the promotion of institutions for the general
diffusion of knowledge, and the preservation through restraint
of the public credit, not to mention religion and morality. Domestic
despotism would thus be avoided.
Internally, apart from threats to the Union, there were ‘the
baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally’. Unfortunately,
this spirit was natural and deep-rooted, and was sharpened by
another spirit, that of revenge. In different ages and countries,
there had thus arisen a frightful despotism, which could lead
through an inclination ‘to seek security and repose in the
absolute power of an Individual’ to ‘a more formal and
permanent despotism’. Party might serve as a useful check on
government and protection of liberty in monarchies, but was
not a spirit to be encouraged in those which were purely elective
and of a popular character.
Externally, peace and harmony should be cultivated with all
nations, while ‘inveterate antipathies against particular nations
and passionate attachments for others should be excluded’. In
particular, Washington observed that ‘Europe has a primary set
of interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation.
Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes
of which are essentially foreign to our concerns.’ At the same time:
‘Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to
pursue a different course.’ And so: ‘Why, by interweaving our
destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and
37
prosperity, in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest,

humour, or caprice?’40
CONSTITUTION AND REVOLUTION: BURKE AND

ROBESPIERRE
As he left office, Washington hoped that his policy of neutrality
would be followed, as well as the rest of his advice. In fact, the
impact of the French Revolution and accompanying wars was to
lead to strains on good order of a kind even greater than those of
the mid-1790s. On the other hand, there were observations of a
more lasting value in his Farewell Address, which was to be
discussed as a living document in the twentieth century. More of
that, and also of American and Russian constitutional order later.
But for the moment, we will not leave the eighteenth century.
Instead, having noted again that there were echoes of Montesquieu,
witting and unwitting, in the retiring President’s remarks, let us
cross the ocean to set out a view of constitutional order formed at
about the same time in offshore Europe.
Earlier in his career, Edmund Burke had been a good friend to
the American cause, although not to all of its revolutionary aspects.
In general, he was a supporter of constitutional order, even if
unwritten rather than written, perhaps. Certainly, in 1790, soon
after the outbreak of the French Revolution, he had described it as
‘a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma’, the first such since
the Reformation, and bound, like its predecessor, ‘to introduce other
interests into all countries than those which arose from their locality
and natural circumstances’. Thus, for example:
The Russian Government is of all others the most liable to

be subverted by military seditions, by court conspiracies,
and sometimes by headlong rebellions of the people, such
as the turbinating movements of Pugatchef. It is not quite
so probable that in any of these changes the spirit of system
may mingle in the manner it has done in France. The
Muscovites are no great speculators—but I should not
much rely on their uninquisitive disposition, if any of their
ordinary motives to sedition should arise. The little
catechism of the rights of man is soon learned; and the
infer-ences are in the passions.41
38
Six or so years on, and the situation had deteriorated almost

beyond recognition, as Burke was to spell out in his Letters on the
Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France. Many later
observers would say that by 1796–7 the Republic was returning to
some kind of order, but not Burke at the time. In his view, since the
Revolution, a state had prevailed worse than anarchy, for the
government had become ‘the most absolute, despotic, and effective’
that had ever appeared on earth:
Never were the views and politics of any government

pursued with half the regularity, system, and method, that
a diligent observer must have contemplated with amaze-
ment and terror in theirs. Their state is not an anarchy, but
a series of short-lived tyrannies.
France had no public, and the French people had become absolute
slaves, in a manner ‘so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking’
that nothing like it was known by ‘the helots of Laconia, the
regardants of the manor in Russia and Poland, even the negroes in
the West Indies’.42
In such conditions, Russian and other peasants were less likely
perhaps to be seduced by ‘the little catechism of the rights of man’,
but Burke found it necessary, nevertheless, to develop further
analysis and issue more warnings. He looked with approval at
the past:
There have been periods of time in which communities,

apparently in peace with each other, have been more
perfectly separated than, in latter times, many nations of
Europe have been in the course of long and bloody wars.
The cause must be sought in the similitude throughout
Europe of religion, laws and manners. At bottom, these
are all the same. The writers on public law have often called
this aggregate of nations a commonwealth. They had
reason. It is virtually one great state having the same basis
of general law, with some diversity of provincial customs
and local establishments. The nations of Europe have had
the very same Christian religion, agreeing in the
fundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies and
in the subordinate doctrines.
39
It would seem, then, that the Reformation was no longer the great
revolution in theory and doctrine that it had been for Burke in
1790. In 1796–7, he continued:
The whole of the polity and economy of every country in

Europe has been derived from the same sources. It was
drawn from the old Germanic or Gothic customary, from
the feudal institutions which must be considered as an
emanation from that customary; and the whole has been
improved and digested into system and discipline by the
Roman law. From hence arose the several orders, with or
without a monarch (which are called states), in every
European country; the strong trace of which, where
monarchy predominated, were never wholly extinguished
or merged in despotism. In the few places where monarchy
was cast off, the spirit of European monarchy was still left.
Those countries still continued countries of states; that is,
of classes, orders, and distinctions such as had before
subsisted, or nearly so. Indeed the force and form of the
institution called states continued in greater perfection in
those republican communities than under monarchies.
Possibly Montesquieu might not have agreed with this last

observation, but in general his spirit presided over the letters of
Burke, who went on to remark that Europe’s ‘system of manners
and of education’ was so similar throughout the continent that ‘no
citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in any part of it…and
never felt himself quite abroad’.
But now, ‘a general evil’ was to be found in every country of
Europe, and among all orders of men. The centre of the evil was
France, and the circumference was ‘the world of Europe wherever
the race of Europe may be settled’. Looking around this world,
Burke lighted last on the most important of all, as he saw it—
Russia, where he hoped that the Emperor Paul, the former Grand
Duke who had succeeded Catherine the Great in 1796, would
rule in the tradition of Peter the Great, since: ‘He is sensible that
his business is not to innovate, but to secure and to establish; that
reformations at this day are attempts at best of ambiguous utility.’
Burke then went on to say: ‘I do not know why I should not
include America among the European powers, because she is of
European origin; and has not yet, like France, destroyed all traces
40
of manners, laws, opinions, and usages, which she drew from

Europe.’ Nevertheless, an America ‘men-aced with internal ruin
from the attempts to plant Jacobinism instead of liberty in that
country…whose independence is directly attacked by the French’
was unwisely advocating ‘a treacherous peace’ with those French
forces threatening both peace and neutrality everywhere. For
France was bent on forming a universal empire through universal
revolution, and would attempt sooner or later to involve all other
countries in a war against Britain and the British constitution,
destroying for ever the balance of power and artificially creating
a new constitution almost every year.43
From Burke in 1797, let us move towards conclusion by way of
Montesquieu about half a century before. In The Spirit of the Laws,
we found the classical exposition of constitutional order. Looking
back at the British Revolution of the seventeenth century,
Montesquieu observed that the nobility was buried with Charles
I, and that Charles II believed himself to be less powerful than his
father. On the other hand, he wrote:
It was a fine spectacle in the last century to see the impo-

tent attempts of the English to establish democracy among
themselves. As those who took part in public affairs had
no virtue at all, as their ambition was excited by the success
of the most audacious one [Cromwell] and the spirit of
one faction was repressed only by the spirit of another, the
government was constantly changing; the people, stunned,
sought democracy and found it nowhere. Finally, after
much motion and many shocks and jolts, they had come
to rest on the very government that had been proscribed.44
A monarchy without a nobility could hardly have been the same,

but would promote more virtue than its regicide predecessor.
Montesquieu would appear to have looked upon the seventeenth-
century revolution, then, as Burke looked upon the revolution at
the end of the eighteenth century.
Of course, we cannot say how Montesquieu would have reacted
to events in France in 1789 and after. But we can observe that his
masterpiece, looked upon as subversive enough at the time of its
publication, was now considered for the most part a force for
conservatism. Its argument that any polity should embody the spirit
of its people was being replaced by the argument that the spirit
41
should be changed, or at least more liber-ated. On the other hand,

Marat declared in 1785 on the road to revolution that Montesquieu
was ‘the first among us to carry the torch of philosophy into
legislation, to avenge outraged humanity, to defend its rights, and
in a way, to become the legislator for the whole world’. Generally,
according to Anne M.Cohler: ‘In France, during and after the French
Revolution, Montesquieu’s concern to balance power led to the
question of whether there remained any independent political
body, king, or noble, that could be used to moderate the sovereignty
of the people.’45
Of course, the revolutionaries themselves in the years following
1789 were too preoccupied with day-to-day events and too much
men of affairs ever to set down in an extended form their own
view of the world. On the other hand, Robespierre at least was
able to express his broad outlook in a speech of 25 December 1793,
which we have already encountered in the Introduction and which
will now lead us from Chapter 1 towards Chapter 2:
The theory of the revolutionary government is as new as

the revolution which has brought it to power. We must
not look for it in the books of political writers, who by no
means foresaw this revolution; nor in the laws of tyrants
who, content to abuse their power, are hardly preoccupied
with investigating its legitimacy…. The function of the
government is to direct the moral and physical energies of
the nation towards the goal for which it is instituted….
The greater the power, the more free and rapid is its action
and the more necessary is it that good faith directs it; for
the day it falls into impure or perfidious hands, liberty
will be lost; indeed, its name will become the pretext and
excuse of counter-revolution itself and its energy will be
that of a violent poison.46
Constitution, revolution, counter-revolution, would the great

wheel never stop turning? On 5 February 1794, Robespierre tried
to put forward ‘an exact theory and precise rules of conduct’, a
new concept of virtue, ‘an order of things where all base and cruel
passions are bound up and all the benevolent and gen-erous
passions are aroused by the laws’. The people would be led by
reason and the enemies of the people by terror in a situation which
was as if ‘the two opposing spirits that have been contending for
42
control of nature are fighting, in this great epoch of human history,

to establish irreversibly the history of the world, and France is the
theatre of this awesome combat’.47 The second speech was not the
equal of the first. Robespierre was already in decline, and was to
lose most coherence before his execution in late July 1794. But
opposing spirits of constitution and revolution, if not quite as he
defined them, would continue their struggle.
Before moving on to Marx, let us see what we have done with
Montesquieu. Without repeating the opening remarks of this
chapter, let us simply note that The Spirit of the Laws has helped us
to conduct a kind of laboratory test. Historians often talk
metaphorically of the litmus test, for example of the manner in
which a tendency or movement may become more acidic— that
is, redder—or more alkaline—that is, bluer. Here, I shall use in a
similar way the more refined ‘universal indicator’ of the ‘pH test’.48
That is, in drawing up their constitutions, the American Founding
Fathers and the Russian Empress made use of the great work for
their own purposes. Thus, Montesquieu’s book is the ‘neutral’: over
the Atlantic, American ‘alkali’ affected it in the creation of a basis
for the federal republic; over the continent, Russian ‘acid’ worked
upon the emerging structure of enlightened absolutism. In this case,
by ‘alkali’ I mean the inbuilt tendency in the USA towards
representative government, ultimately democracy, the political
culture formed by the immi-grants from Europe in their new
setting. On the other hand, I take ‘acid’ to be the political culture
evolving in Russia over the centuries in its particular environment.
Thus, we have pointed out the relationship between Montesquieu’s
Western world order on the one hand and the stage reached at the
end of the eighteenth century by Russian history and our selected
principal comparator, American history, on the other.
Let us now proceed to conduct a similar experiment with Marx
and his Capital.
43
2
MARX AND
REVOLUTIONARY ORDER
The pH ‘universal indicator’ test to be conducted in this chapter

is a little more complex than that carried out in Chapter 1, even
though it proceeds along similar lines. Here, Marx’s Capital is the
white paper, so to speak, and Russia turns it reddest, at least in
the end, that is by 1917. But Marx himself shifted his own position
on Russia considerably before his death in 1883, while both before
and after the Russian Revolution his disciples argued about the
message to be extracted from his teachings. The basic questions
were: was the process described in Capital global or merely
Western? How long would it take for that process to work itself
out, and for capitalism to be superseded by communism? Then,
in particular, to what extent was Russia a full participant in the
passage from feudalism to capitalism and beyond? More certainly,
during Marx’s lifetime, the USA was rapidly rising to be
considered an integral participant in capitalist modernisation, but
its ‘alkali’ resisted the overall impact of later Marxist doctrines.
The major battles were fought in Soviet Russia, by Lenin, Stalin
and Trotsky, whose struggle for the true succession will receive
at least a measure of the attention that it deserves. While non-
Bolsheviks also joined in the debate throughout Europe and
beyond, even in Russia a more traditional Western view of world
order was still in existence, as evidenced in an essay on ‘The Next
Task’ by the historian E.V.Tarle. Just as Robespierre provided a
bridge from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2, Tarle builds another from
Chapter 2 to Chapter 3.
44
MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER
KARL MARX: INTRODUCTION

On 17 March 1883, Frederick Engels made his speech at the
graveside of Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery, London. Three days
before, ‘the greatest living thinker ceased to think’. And so: ‘An
immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant
proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in
the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the death of
this mighty spirit will soon make itself felt.’ For:
Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic

nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human
history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed
by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of
all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can
pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc.; and that
therefore the production of the immediate material means
of subsist-ence and consequently the degree of economic
development attained by a given people or during a given
epoch, form the foundation upon which the state
institutions, the legal conceptions, the art and even the
religious ideas of the people concerned have been
evolved, and in the light of which these things must
therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as had
hitherto been the case.
But that was not all: in particular, Marx had discovered the law
of surplus value, ‘the special law of motion governing the present-
day capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois society that
this mode of production has created’. Moreover, the man of science
who made independent discoveries in every field that he
investigated was not even half the man. ‘Science was for Marx a
historically dynamic, revolutionary force’, and the man himself
was ‘before all else a revolutionary’, whose real mission was to
overthrow capitalist society and its state institutions, and to
contribute to the liberation of the proletariat. Marx had been the
first to bring about the proletariat’s consciousness of its own
position and needs, and for this revolutionary cause, ‘he fought
with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival’.
While he had encountered much slan-der and opposition, he had
brushed them aside as though they were cobwebs. He had hardly
45
one personal enemy, and was ‘beloved, revered and mourned by

millions of revolutionary fellow-workers—from the mines of
Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America’. Engels
concluded: ‘His name will endure through the ages, and so also
will his work!’1
Little more than a century after that ringing declaration, the issue
is somewhat in doubt. While the Russian Revolution of October
1917 and its aftermath appeared to give fresh emphasis to the words
of Engels, the August Revolution of 1991 seemed to mark the end
of an era in Russia, with the beginning of the end already apparent
in Eastern Europe in 1989. This of course was 200 years after the
French Revolution, whose authenticity was also more than a little
in question in bicentennial analysis. Towards the end of the
twentieth century, then, the cause of revolution looks to be in retreat.
We will examine that subject in due course in Chapter 5. Here,
in Chapter 2, we will attempt our own appraisal of aspects of the
life and works of Karl Marx, as well as making some observations
about the revolutions, from 1789 in France to 1917 in Russia, and
beyond. In this exercise, we shall not forget Marx’s own words,
especially:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just
as they please; they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition
of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the
brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in
revolutionising themselves and things, in creating
something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of
revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits
of the past to their service and borrow from them names,
battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new
scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and
this borrowed language.2
Leaving aside for later (as indicated above) any implications of

these remarks for the 1990s, we should note in particular that the
relationship of the Russian Revolution to the French Revolution
could be considered so close as to be almost sym-biotic. Moreover,
Karl Marx himself helped to prepare the way for this relationship
through an intellectual journey taking him from France to Russia
46
by way of Germany and England (or Great Britain). To investigate

this journey will mean a neglect of the rest of the world, but, as we
have seen in the funeral oration of Engels and will confirm in our
forthcoming scrutiny, Marx concentrated his attention on those
parts of Europe and America, from Siberia to California, where
the proletariat was to be found. This meant comparative neglect
not only of Africa, South America and Asia, but also of large regions
between Siberia and California in Europe and America. In
particular, as is well known, Marx had a negative attitude towards
most of Eastern Europe, and, for much of his career, Russia. His
‘historical science’ therefore possessed certain weaknesses. On the
other hand, beyond doubt, Marx was one of the great thinkers of
the nineteenth century.
The ‘mighty spirit’, as Engels had called him, began his
intellectual life as an idealist, cutting his teeth on German
philosophers, especially Hegel. Early in 1844, he published an
Introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, including
the following passage (his italics only):
The only liberation of Germany which is practically possible
is liberation from the point of view of that theory which
declares man to be the supreme being for man. Germany
can emancipate itself from the Middle Ages only if it eman-
cipates itself at the same time from the partial victories over
the Middle Ages. In Germany no form of bondage can be
broken without breaking all forms of bondage. Germany,
which is renowned for its thoroughness, cannot make a
revolution unless it is a thorough one. The emancipation of
the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this
emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat.
Philosophy cannot realize itself without the transcendence
of the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot transcend itself
without the realization of philosophy. When all the inner
conditions are met, the day of the German resurrection will be
heralded by the crowing of the Gallic cock.3
Before the Gallic cock crew again, Marx gave further
consideration to its announcement of an earlier dawn: in other
words, before review of 1848, there was retrospect to 1789. Early in
1845 Marx observed, ‘Ideas can never lead beyond an old world
order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order.’
Nevertheless, ‘the French Revolution gave rise to ideas which led
47
beyond the ideas of the entire old world order.’ Under the heavy
influence of classical precedent: ‘Robespierre, Saint-Just and their
party fell because they confused the ancient, realistic-demo-cratic
commonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritual-istic-
democratic representative society.’ The ‘idea of the new world order’ was
to be found not in the thought of Robespierre and his associates,
but in that of a more truly revolutionary movement beginning in
1789, temporarily defeated in Babeuf’s egalitarian conspiracy of
1796, and then re-emerging in France after the Revolution of 1830.
This was ‘the communist idea’.4
From about 1845 to 1846, Marx moved from an idealist to a
materialist conception of the world and history, and began to
formulate more clearly the stages through which human beings
would pass on the road to communism, a goal to be reached
through the agency of the proletariat and involving the abolition
of the division of labour:
In communist society, however, where nobody has an
exclusive area of activity and each can train himself in any
branch he wishes, society regulates the general production,
making it possible for me to do one thing today and another
tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon,
breed cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I
like without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a
herdsman, or a critic.5
At the beginning of 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Marx and
Engels made their first full statement of their new materialist view
of world history. The central idea was an ‘acceleration’ in global
development. That is:
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape,
opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The
East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of
America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means
of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to
commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never
before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element
in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The rising bourgeois class had worked miracles, converting
members of all respected professions into its wage labourers,
reducing the family relation to a mere money relation. Moreover:
48
The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the

brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which
reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement
in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show
what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished
wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aque-
ducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions
that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and
crusades.
In time, competitive expansion would lead towards the internal

collapse of capitalism, and a proletarian revolution would bring
to an end the phase of history dominated by the bourgeoisie.
At the end of that revolutionary year, in December 1848, Marx
compared events immediately preceding with others more remote:
The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and

French revolutions; they were revolutions of a European
pattern. They were not the victory of a particular class of
society over the old political order; they were the
proclamation of the political order for the new European society.
In these revolutions the bourgeoisie gained the victory;
but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory
of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois property
over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism,
of competition over the guild, of the partition of estates
over primogeni-ture, of the owner’s mastery of land over
the land’s mastery of its owner, of enlightenment over
superstition, of the family over the family name, of
industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over privileges
of medieval origin. The revolution of 1648 was the victory
of the seventeenth century over the sixteenth century, the
revolution of 1789 was the victory of the eighteenth
century. Still more expressing the needs of the parts of
the world in which they took place, England and France,
these revolutions expressed the needs of the whole world,
as it existed then.6
The Communist Manifesto had suggested that the next revolution

would be in Germany, and soon, taking place in ‘more advanced
conditions of European civilization, and with a much more
49
developed proletariat’ than its two great predecessors had been

able to experience. But, as we all know, the next revolution was to
come in Russia, and later, and in less advanced conditions of
European civilisation, and with a proletariat under-developed in
most respects. In Russia (and indeed in Germany) for some time
to come, however, the proletariat would have to coexist with a
large peasantry: in Marx’s view an incomplete class which in France
soon after 1848 he found to be a ‘simple addition of homologous
magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sackful of potatoes.
“The peasants” are consequently incapable of enforcing their class
interest in their own name.’7
We will examine the problems of interpretation of the Russian
Revolution, including the relationship between the peasantry and
proletariat, in closer focus below (pp. 59–65). For the moment, let
us simply note the fact that, up to 1848 and beyond, Marx looked
upon Russia as an unregenerate absolutist state beyond
redemption. Moreover, whereas in England and France, and even
in Germany, development of the state had been influenced mostly
by the development of society, in Russia it was the other way round,
in the view of Marx who wrote extensively about Russia at the
time of the Crimean War.
Before then, in the aftermath of February and March 1848, he
had set out his main thesis: ‘Europe, with the defeat of the
revolutionary workers, had relapsed into its old double slavery,
the Anglo-Russian slavery.’ In the New Year, he wrote:
The table of contents for 1849 reads: Revolutionary rising of

the French working class, world war. And in the East, a
revolutionary army made up of fighters of all nationalities
already confronts the alliance of the old Europe represented
by the Russian army, while from Paris comes the threat of
a ‘red republic’.8
But then, the Hungarians and their supporters were defeated by

the Russian invasion, while Marx was compelled to leave Paris for
London, where the end of the Chartist movement also brought a
new ‘bourgeois’ stability.
As well as scrutinising the arrival to power of Napoleon in in
France, Marx now began to study in greater depth his new
homeland and its wider context. As D.B.Ryazanov, the great
Russian expert on Marx, was later to put it:
50
The political enslavement of continental Europe to Russia

was complemented by its economic enslavement to Britain.
The revolution of 1848 had been wrecked on the resistance
of Russia, the despot of Europe, and equally on the
resistance of Britain, the despot of the world market.9
Marx himself described at some length the manner in which

this Anglo-Russian stranglehold had developed from the time of
Peter the Great onwards, emphasising the manner in which the
absolutist government had been able to carry out its reactionary
mission through rigid control of the Russian people.
With the international crisis leading to the outbreak of the
Crimean War in 1854, new opportunities arose for Marx to analyse
and condemn the tsarist autocracy while he also examined the
policies of the government and opposition in Britain too. After the
end of the war and the ensuing reforms in Russia, he still detected
no significant change in Russian society, writing that:
the emancipation of the serfs…is simply intended to perfect

autocratic rule by tearing down the barriers which the big
autocrat has hitherto encountered in the shape of the many
lesser autocrats of the Russian nobility, whose might is
based on serfdom, as well as in the shape of the self-
administering peasant communes, whose material
foundation, common ownership of land, is to be destroyed
by the so-called emancipation.
In the view of Marx, Russian absolutism would not modify its

aggressive foreign policy. On the contrary, ‘the emancipation of
the serfs, as the Russian government sees it, would increase the
aggressive power of Russia a hundredfold.’10
Marx would come to modify this view, possibly under the
influence of Engels, certainly under the influence of events. We
shall return to this revision below (p. 50). For the moment, let us
focus on the place where Marx himself concentrated his attention
in the aftermath of the Crimean War, on the rapid development of
another belligerent, Britain, which Marx, following foreign custom
rather than native prejudice, normally referred to as ‘England’. He
was now on the spot, ideally placed to study what he called the
‘demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos’,11 to capture the essence of the
hustle and bustle of the City of London from the nearby tranquillity
51
of the Reading Room of the British Museum. There, he worked on

what he saw as his most important publication, Capital.
MARX AND CAPITAL

The Preface to the First Edition of Volume 1 published in 1867 ends
with an adaptation of a line from Dante—‘Go on your way, and let
the people talk.’ This was to demonstrate that he was making no
concessions to the prejudices of ‘so-called public opinion’ at the
same time as he welcomed every opinion based on scientific
criticism. Unlike Montesquieu, then, who had wanted to think of
himself primarily as an artist, like Correggio, Marx chose to
compare his fundamental approach to that of the scientist,
especially, though by no means exclusively, Darwin. However, at
the same time, he was anxious to distinguish his own historical
materialism from the ‘positivism’ of Auguste Comte and other
nineteenth-century social scientists.
Earlier in the Preface, Marx compares his own point of departure
with that of the scientist. He explains his early emphasis on ‘value-
form’ by deeming it the ‘economic cell-form’, and noting that just
as in anatomy, ‘the complete body is easier to study than its cells’,
so in economic analysis, the greater rather than the smaller subject
had been previously more open to consideration. Marx goes on
immediately to observe: ‘The physi-cist either observes natural
processes where they occur in their most significant form, and are
least affected by disturbing influences, or, wherever possible, he
makes experiments under conditions which ensure that the process
will occur in its pure state.’
The analogy with physical science is repeated in other Pref-aces
and Postfaces, not least by Engels in the Preface to the English
edition of 1886:
Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the

technical terms of that science. This is best shown by
chemistry, where the whole of the terminology is radically
changed about once in twenty years, and where you will
hardly find a single organic compound that has not gone
through a whole series of different names.
Similarly, continues Engels, Capital had needed to use certain

terms in senses different to those customary not only in ordinary
52
life, but also in ordinary political economy, since he and Marx

looked upon modern capitalist production, not as a form final and
imperishable, but rather as ‘a mere passing stage’ in the economic
history of humankind.12
Marxism in general and Capital in particular have inspired or
provoked a vast amount of commentary and analysis. There will
be little attempt in this book to add to it. However, as with The
Spirit of the Laws above, so with Capital here, a reminder of the
basic approach and contents might be appropriate. Through
emphases and proportions, some idea may be gained of the author’s
overall thrust. But unlike Montesquieu, of course, Marx never
reached the final shore, and so the ultimate destination has to be
imagined. Capital was never finished: indeed, only one volume of
a projected longer work was published in Marx’s lifetime.
According to one calculation, the author devised as many as
fourteen different versions of his plan for Capital. Perhaps the most
settled was drawn up in 1865–6: Volume 1, Process of production
of capital; Volume 2, Process of circulation of capital; Volume 3,
Forms of the process in its totality; Volume 4, History of the theory.
Moreover, at least initially, Capital was projected as part of an
even larger ‘Critique of Political Economy’, for which six books
were envisaged by 1857: (1) On capital; (2) On landed property; (3)
On wage labour; (4) On the state; (5) International trade; (6) The
world market.
Volume 1 of Capital unfolds in the following manner. Part 1 is
the starting point, concentrating on the elementary form of
capitalist wealth, the commodity, from the following points of view:
(a) the commodity and the realisation of its exchange-value, or the
process of exchange; (b) the process of exchange and the means of
exchange: money; (c) money, necessary mediator of the process of
circulation of commodities.
Part 2 discusses the transformation of money into capital, that
is value searching for an accretion of value, surplus-value. Part 3
focuses on the production of surplus-value and absolute value,
Part 4 on the production of surplus-value and relative surplus-
value (from manufacturing to the modern factory system). Next,
Part 5 examines the relations between wages, productivity of labour
and surplus-value, including the rate of surplus-value. Then, Part
6 looks at how the value of labour-power is transformed into wages,
their different forms and variations. Finally, Parts 7 and 8 analyse
the accumulation of capital, that is capitalist wealth in its totality,
53
and its consequences for labour, along with the origins of

capitalism—the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’. In such a
manner, Marx set out to determine a fundamental process ‘stripped
of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences’, as Engels
put it.
Yet, as Marx himself pointed out in 1867, the locus classicus of
the development of the capitalist mode of production had been
‘England’ (i.e. Great Britain): that was why ‘England is used as the
main illustration of the theoretical developments I make.’ Marx
declared:
If, however, the German reader pharasaically shrugs his

shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and
agricultural workers, or optimistically comforts himself
with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so
bad, I must plainly tell him: De te fabula narratur!13
‘The tale is told about you!’ Horace had said in his Satires,
but how would it reach its climax in Germany or further afield?
For even in ‘England’ in 1867 and for some years afterwards,
agriculture was still the most important economic pursuit.
Admittedly, farming had reached the capitalist stage, and
workers were being driven (or attracted) from the land to join
the swelling ranks of the industrial proletariat. But would this
process become universal? It is still insufficiently known that
beyond the reasons of illness, poverty and political activity,
Marx’s hesitation in the face of that question was what delayed
the completion of Capital.
Nearly twenty years on from the first publication of Capital,
Engels appeared to consider that whereas a wholesale change
of terminology was necessary for chemistry, this was not the
case for political economy. Today, more than six times twenty
years after Capital’s first appearance, some critics might argue
that such a complete revision should be mandatory. We will
approach this argument towards the end of this book; here let
us for a moment look upon some aspects of the immediate
context of the first ‘mere passing stage’. To take the outliers of
‘England’ rather than the locus classicus itself and its immediate
West European context, the American Civil War had been over
for two years when Marx observed in his original Preface of
1867:
54
Just as in the eighteenth century the American War of

Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle
class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War
did the same for the European working class. In England,
the process of transformation is palpably evident. When it
has reached a certain point, it must react on the Continent.
The progress made in the USA after the Civil War was marked
in an addition made by Engels to the fourth German edition in
1890 to Marx’s original note of 1866. While Marx had written that
‘the United States must still be considered a European colony’,
Engels was now to point out that ‘it had developed into a country
whose industry holds second place in the world, without on that
account entirely losing its colonial character.’
Some of the reasons for the USA’s rapid development were
already hinted at in 1867. For example:
Nowhere does the fluidity of capital, the versatility of

labour and the indifference of the worker to the content of
his work appear more vividly than in the United States of
America. In Europe, even in England, capitalist production
is still affected and distorted by hangovers from feudalism.
Could it be therefore that ‘value-form’ in the USA differed from

the ‘economic cell-form’ in England and Europe? Marx himself
asserted that they were the same. Whatever the differences resulting
from the lack of feudalism and much higher rates of immigration
and foreign investment, together with closer connections to slavery,
Marx reiterated at the conclusion of Capital, Volume 1, that what
most interested him was the secret ‘discovered in the New World
by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed
by it’. This was that:
the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and

therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their
fundamental condition the annihilation of that private
property which rests on the labour of the individual
himself; in other words, the expropriation of the worker.14
No doubt, the same conclusion would apply to England and

Europe’s eastern outlier, Russia, although Marx had far less to say
55
about it in Capital. He barely mentions the arrival of the ‘peculiar

institution’ of serfdom, and makes no reference to its abolition. As
far as industry is concerned, he notes: ‘On this Russian soil, so
fruitful of all infamies, the old horrors of the early days of English
factories are in full swing.’15 However, while the strong implication
in Capital is of Russian backwardness, the tsarist empire, like the
US republic, was soon to join in the development first noticed in
England and Europe. The progress made by both outliers was noted
most succinctly in the Preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto
of the Communist Party of 1882. Marx and Engels observed that both
Russia and America were missing from their first edition of 1848.
At that time, both were in their respective manners ‘pillars of the
existing European system’. But now, along with the great leaps
forward made by the USA, Russia had advanced sufficiently to
become ‘the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe’, albeit
with peculiar characteristics:
The Communist Manifesto set out to announce the inevitably

approaching dissolution of modern bourgeois property. In
Russia, however, we find that the fast-blossoming capitalist
swindle and newly-developing bourgeois landed property
stand face to face with peasant communal ownership of
the greater part of the land. This poses the question: Can
the Russian obshchina, a form, albeit heavily eroded, of the
primitive communal ownership of the land, pass directly
into the higher, communist form of communal ownership?
Or must it first go through the same process of dissolution
which marks the West’s historical development?16
This final question was to be posed with varying degrees of

intensity for the next fifty years and more; even today, perhaps, a
definitive answer remains to be given. In the shorter run, it is
important that Marx himself devoted much attention in the later
years of his life to the Russian question, in particular to the peasant
commune and ground rent, with up to 30,000 pages of notes. Here
then was another threat, possibly to the ‘value-form’ as ‘economic
cell-form’, certainly to the completion of Capital. Marx had come a
long way from the Postscript to the first German edition of Volume
1 in 1867: ‘If the influence of capitalist production…continues to
develop on the European continent as it has done until now…the
rejuvenation of Europe with the aid of the knout and obligatory
56
infusion of Kalmyk blood… may ultimately become quite

inevitable.’17
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: LENIN, TROTSKY

AND STALIN
Marx’s own thought, as has been increasingly realised, is a far cry
from ‘Marxism-Leninism’, which was an invention of the Stalinist
period, and would not have been recognised as his own by either
of its alleged progenitors. Furthermore, we need to recall, there
were many other analyses besides those of Marx and Lenin
concerned with the revolutionary direction that Russia was taking
both before and even after the Revolution of 1917. Here, we will
take just two examples of the constitutional persuasion.
Maxim Kovalevsky was for a time a close collaborator of Marx
but came to the conclusion that it was possible for constitutional
government on the Western model to find roots in Russia. In
particular, disagreeing with Marx here as well as elsewhere,
Kovalevsky argued that communal property would become private
in Russia as a wider process already nearer completion in other
lands began to gather momentum nearer home. In a Preface to a
translation of Woodrow Wilson’s The State published in the year
1905 he declared:
Not cut off by a Chinese wall from the civilised world,

possessing in our past those selfsame rudiments of free
development as were shown by Western Europe in the
Middle Ages, and in the contemporary transformation of
state estates into economic classes—the guarantee of the
changeover to the system of self-government of society,
we, evidently, are bound by necessity to interest ourselves
in the solutions reached by the races of the German-Roman
world. These solutions might be reached by us in the near
future, but not because of inorganic borrowing, but because
of the force of circumstances, by our intellectual and
economic development, by the transformation of our
contemporary state order.18
Not so optimistic as Kovalevsky was the leading historian of

the period, V.O.Kliuchevsky. In the early nineteenth century,
N.M.Karamzin and his contemporaries had produced an account
57
of the story of Russia centred on successive rulers and implying

that the general direction was progressive. Nearly a hundred years
on, Kliuchevsky sought to present an analysis of the many-sided
activities of the empire’s peoples, a ‘historical sociology’. He
believed that he could achieve his aim only if the national history
was taken to be part of a larger whole, with outside as well as
internal pressures given their due weighting. But while he might
have liked to have adopted the same forward movement as
Karamzin, Kliuchevsky found himself inhibited by a number of
considerations. To take first the most important of them:
The law of the life of backward states or peoples among

those which have outstripped it is that the need for reform
arises earlier than the people is ready for reform. The
necessity for accelerated movement in pursuit leads to the
over-hasty adoption of the ways of others.
Moreover:
the means of west European culture, falling into the hands

of some narrow strata of society, have been turned to their
defence rather than the advantage of the country,
strengthening social inequality, have been changed into a
weapon for the many-sided exploitation of the culturally
defenceless masses, lowering the level of their social
consciousness and strengthening their class animosity, by
which they are prepared for revolt rather than freedom.
Meanwhile, the tragedy of the opposition was that ‘the patriot

enlightened at government expense was struggling against his own
country, while not believing in the power of enlightenment or in
the future of the motherland.’19
Unlike his counterparts in Great Britain, France and the United
States of America, then, Kliuchevsky was unable to present a
‘Whig’ view of Russian history, that is ‘to praise revolutions
provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain
principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is
the ratification if not the glorification of the present’.20 He lived
long enough after the Russian Revolution of 1905 to realise that
the hopes held out for meaningful constitutional reform were
coming to naught, and that it was unlikely that Russia would
follow the path of its Western predecessors.
58
Oddly enough, the individual who did most to divert Russia

along its own way, V.I.Lenin, himself at first appears to have
argued that Russia would follow the Western path. In his first
large-scale work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, coming
out in 1899, he indicated the manner in which the stratification
of the peasantry was leading towards the arrival of capitalism in
rural areas. In other words, at this point, he was in agreement
with the Marx of Capital, rather than of the Preface to the 1882
Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, which suggested the
possibility of direct passage from the peasant commune to the
higher form of communism, with the Russian Revolution as a
complement for the proletarian revolution in the West. Following
Marx, as well as the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, Lenin
argued in What is to be Done?, published in 1902, that the
proletariat was the key class in the movement forward, guided
by a party equipped with the appropriate theory.
Then came the Revolution of 1905, which confirmed for Lenin
the impossibility of Russia following any road other than the
Marxist, and encouraged him to pour scorn on those who offered
alternatives. For example, he ridiculed the assertion of the
émigré Paul Vinogradoff, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford,
that it was necessary to strive with all possible might to ensure
that Russia should move forward along lines comparable to
those of Germany in 1848 rather than those of France in 1789. In
Vinogradoff’s view, the latter would lead Russian society into
danger, even to ruin. For Lenin, Vinogradoff was a lackey of the
Russian bourgeoisie who feared the victory of the people, and
approved of revolution only when, as in 1848, it was
unsuccessful, rather than when, as in 1789, it enjoyed at least
some success.21
After the limited success and ultimate failure of the
Revolution of 1905, Lenin argued that Russia could proceed
along one of two paths: either towards a capitalist landlord
Junker economy, comparable to Germany; or towards the
development of small peasant farming, comparable, at least in
its basic freedom, to the USA.22 In such analogies, and in his
consideration of Europe, Asia and the USA, as always Lenin
took a worldview, if concentrating on Russia rather than its
wider context. From 1907, Lenin saw his homeland following
the Junker path, although he also perceived that industrial
development in some regions would allow the proletariat to gain
59
strength. The outbreak of war in 1914 persuaded him to think

of the possibilities of revolution on a wider scale.
Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline was
written by Lenin between January and June 1916, and published
in 1917. It begins by asserting that during the previous fifteen to
twenty years, especially since the Spanish-American War of 1898
and the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, the economic and political
literature of the two hemispheres had increasingly adopted the
term ‘imperialism’ to describe the ensuing era. For example, a book
with the term as its title had been brought out in London and New
York by J.A.Hobson, an English economist with a point of view of
‘bourgeois social-reformism and pacifism’. While borrowing
heavily from Hobson, Lenin would also seek to deal with the
principal economic aspects of the phenomenon in a different
manner.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Africa and Polynesia had
been divided up by the capitalist countries to complete their seizure
of the unoccupied territories of the planet. In 1852, Disraeli had
declared: ‘The colonies are millstones round our necks’, but just
over thirty years later, Britain was leading the scramble for their
acquisition, fairly closely followed by France, with Germany,
Belgium and Portugal among the European powers in pursuit. By
the end of the century, the field had broadened beyond Europe;
Russia, Japan and the USA were also variously involved in the
race for empire, which Joseph Chamberlain was now describing
as a ‘true, wise and economi-cal policy’, while Cecil Rhodes was
declaring: ‘If you want to avoid civil war, you must become
imperialists.’
As well as quoting bourgeois authorities as much as possible,
since they were forced ‘to admit the particularly incontrovertible
facts concerning the latest stage of capitalist economy’, Lenin set
out what he saw as the five basic features of imperialism:
1. the concentration of production and capital has

developed to such a high stage that it has created
monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;
2. the merging of bank capital with industrial capital,
and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of a
financial oligarchy;
3. the export of capital as distinguished from the export
of commodities acquires exceptional importance;
60
4. the formation of international monopolist capitalist

associations which share the world among themselves; and
5. the territorial division of the whole world among the
biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is
capitalism at that stage of development at which the
dominance of monopolies and finance capital is
established; in which the export of capital has acquired
pro-nounced importance; in which the division of the
world among the international trusts has begun; in which
the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest
capitalist powers has been completed.
Towards the end of his work, Lenin referred to the three periods
suggested by the American writer David Jayne Hill in A History of
Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe: (1) the era of
revolution; (2) the constitutional movement; (3) the then present
era of ‘commercial imperialism’. And he concluded by affirming
that, although such a new stage in human development had been
reached, its fundamental nature was already apparent in Marx’s
‘precise, scientific analysis’.23
In the Preface to Imperialism which Lenin wrote in the spring of
1917, he pointed out how it had been written with an eye on the
censor, and that therefore he had been forced to omit the
observations that:
the period of imperialism is the eve of the socialist

revolution; that social chauvinism (socialism in words,
chauvinism in deeds) is utter betrayal of socialism,
complete desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie; that this
split in the working-class movement is bound up with the
objective conditions of imperialism.
Just over three years later, in another Preface, to the French and
German editions of Imperialism, Lenin claimed that his work had
proved that ‘the war of 1914–18 was imperialist (that is, an
annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides;
it was a war for the division of the world.’ With the war over, the
‘booty’ was shared between ‘two or three powerful world
plunderers armed to the teeth’ —America, Great Britain, Japan,
who were involving the whole world in ‘their war over the division
of their booty’. Tens of millions were ‘dead and maimed’ in the
61
war, while the ‘peace treaties’ were opening the eyes of the same
number and more—‘downtrodden, oppressed, deceived and
duped by the bourgeoisie’, while a thousand million more were
becoming further embroiled in imperialism through the
construction of railways. Thus: ‘out of the universal ruin caused
by the war a world-wide revolutionary crisis is arising which,
however prolonged and arduous its stages may be, cannot end
otherwise than in a proletarian revolution and in its victory.’24
By this time, the summer of 1920, Russia itself had been involved
for about two years in a civil war in the wake of the October
Revolution of 1917 which had brought Lenin and his fellow
Bolsheviks to power. At home, then, in a sense, the revolutionary
was becoming a constitutionalist, or, at least, having sought for
most of his adult life to overthrow a government, he was now
attempting to keep a government in power. And not just any
government, but one representing both the workers and the
peasants of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and their
comrades in the wider world. On the other hand, Russia’s regime
could not become fully constitutional until the achievement of
socialist modernisation at home and of revolution in the wider
world. To put it another way, at the same time, he had to be
conscious of the sets of circumstances which he had described in,
respectively, The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Imperialism:
The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
A further dimension to the years immediately following the
October Revolution was the confrontation of the highest hopes with
the deepest difficulties. Lenin himself considered these continually,
for example in a speech to the Congress of School Extension
Workers in the spring of 1919, with arguments suggesting an update
of those of Robespierre at the end of 1793:
We say to the bourgeois intellectuals, to the adherents of

democracy: ‘You lie when you reproach us with the
infringement of freedom. When your great bourgeois revol-
utionists of 1649 in England and of 1792–3 in France carried
through their revolutions they did not concede to the
monarchists the freedom of meetings. The French
Revolution was called the Great one because it was not
like the weakly phrase-making revolution of 1848: after
overthrow-ing the monarchists it crushed them out of
existence…. He who imagines that the transition to
62
socialism will be effected by one man convincing another,

and this other a third, etc., is at best a child, or a political
hypocrite. You can, if you have luck, smash an institution
at one blow: it is impossible to smash a habit, whatever
your luck. We have given the land to the peasant, freed
him from the squire, thrown off all his fetters, and yet he
goes on thinking that liberty is free trade in corn, and
serfdom the duty to surrender the surplus at a fixed price.’25
Here again, then, was Lenin necessarily thinking of the problems

of the peasantry as part of the transition via proletarian revolution
to socialism, a combination that was to lead to the introduction of
the New Economic Policy in 1921.
According to the assessment of the thirteenth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1926, up to Lenin’s death early in 1924,
his ‘thoughts never ceased to labour at the task of freeing the
workers’.26 This was the conclusion of the author of that assessment,
none other than Leon Trotsky, about to fail in the struggle for
succession with Stalin, but determined to continue the fight for
international proletarian collaboration and world revolution
beyond his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1929 right up to his
assassination by Stalin’s agent in 1940.
Trotsky set out his overview of history, following the law of
‘uneven and combined development’, in the first chapter of The
History of the Russian Revolution, which he completed in exile about
a dozen years after playing a major part in that great drama: ‘The
fundamental and most stable feature of Russian history is the slow
tempo of her development, with the economic backwardness,
primitiveness of social forms and low level of culture resulting from
it.’ In comparison with the leading countries of the West in
particular, Russia would be numbered among those backward
countries which revealed with the greatest sharpness and
complexity in their destiny the most general law of the historic
process—unevenness. From that law derived another involving ‘a
drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining
of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary
forms’, a law which was to be called ‘the law of combined
development’.
Thus, medieval Russia lacked cities as centres of commerce and
craft, with significant social consequences. And so when it came
to the Pugachev Revolt of the late eighteenth century, there could
63
be no conversion into revolution because of the lack of an ingredient

most apparent in France—a Third Estate. A century later, however,
the Europeanisation and modernisation of Russia were especially
noticeable in industry, which went on to double its production
between 1905 and 1914. Now, the law of combined development
revealed itself most forcibly in this economic sphere. While more
than 80 per cent of the people were involved in agriculture, which
still often used seventeenth-century methods, Russian industry in
some aspects had caught up with and even outstripped its
advanced rivals—for example, in the number of large-scale
enterprises and in the confluence of industrial with financial capital.
But this latter circumstance meant the subjection of much of Russian
industry to the Western European money market.27
As with capitalism, so with socialism, ‘uneven and combined
development’ would continue in a global situation characterised
by Trotsky as ‘permanent revolution’. Looking backwards, he
argued that in 1905 revolutionary Russia had revealed to the world
the most advanced form of proletarian organisation, the soviet,
moving on from the Paris sansculottes of 1789 and even the
communists of 1871 to a higher level of proletarian consciousness.
Then, in 1917, the soviet forces had achieved a great victory in
combination with the peasants, for whom the proletarians had
provided leadership. However, in Trotsky’s estimate, there were
other lessons to be drawn from 1905 and 1917. For backward
countries the road to democracy was by way of the dictatorship of
the proletariat. Consequently, a permanent state of revolutionary
development was established between the democratic revolution
and the socialist reconstruc-tion of society. At the same time,
indefinitely and constantly, all social relations were undergoing
transformation, with attendant periods of war and peace, scientific
and moral adaptations, never allowing the achievement of
equilibrium. A final aspect of permanent revolution was its
international character. The socialist revolution might have begun
on national foundations, but it could not continue in that fashion
without succumbing through contradictions.28
Trotsky made these observations in 1930, revising others made
at the time of the Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. By 1930, of course,
Lenin had been dead for about half a dozen years, Trotsky had
been recently ejected from the Soviet Union, and power had been
effectively commandeered by Stalin and his supporters. During
the next decade, a brand of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ was to be
64
developed that was in fact Stalinism. Most succinctly, Stalin himself

had declared in ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ first published in
Pravda soon after Lenin’s death in 1924: ‘The combination of
Russian revolutionary sweep with American efficiency is the
essence of Leninism in Party and state work.’ Lenin, he argued,
had ridiculed the theory of permanent revolution, whose advocates
‘have not only underestimated the role of the peasantry in the
Russian revolution and the importance of the idea of the hegemony
of the proletariat, but have altered (for the worse) Marx’s idea of
“permanent revolution” and made it unfit for practical use.’29
By 1931, the peasantry had been crushed by collectivisation and
the proletariat committed to the fulfilment of the grandiose targets
of the first Five-Year Plan. In a famous speech, Stalin hammered
home a simple message:
To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind. And

those who fall behind get beaten. But we do not want to
be beaten. No, we refuse to be beaten! One feature of the
history of old Russia was the continual beatings she
suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by
the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys.
She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was
beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten
by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by
the Japanese barons. All beat her—because of her
backwardness, because of her military backwardness,
cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial
backwardness, agricultural backwardness…. We are fifty
or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We
must make good this distance in ten years. Either we shall
do it, or we shall go under.30
In a sense, Stalin’s argument was vindicated by the fact that

the Soviet Union was able to withstand the attack launched by
Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. On the other hand, not
only did that attack take him by surprise, he had previously
detracted from the success of the Five-Year Plans by his purges.
Furthermore, his repetitious rhetoric distorted the nature of
Russian history. From victory over the Swedes in 1709 to the
triumph over Napoleon in 1812, tsarist Russia had won more
battles than it had lost. In the years leading up to 1914, some
65
would claim, tsarist Russia was catching up with the advanced

countries more quickly than the Soviet Union would manage to
do after 1917.
The historical debate continues while the argument about the
Marxist inheritance is by no means over. What would Marx
himself have to say about the Soviet Union, and about the views
and policies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin concerning both it and
the Revolution leading to its formation? If some of his last
recorded views are any guide, he would have been surprised by
the events of 1917:
I would consider a European war a misfortune; this time a

terrible misfortune. It would inflame chauvinism
everywhere for years, as every country would have to fight
for its existence. The whole work of the revolutionaries in
Russia, who stand on the eve of victory, would be annihil-
ated and made in vain.31
And then, we might ask, could it be that his analysis of

Stalinism in particular would lead him back to his early view
that, unlike the converse norm in Britain, France and even
Germany, the development of Russian society was mostly
influenced by the development of the state? Of course, we shall
never know: perhaps we cannot remind ourselves too often
that Marx died in 1883, several decades before the course of
events that he had sketched just before his death came to their
full development in circumstances far different. But certainly
his ideas were used to promote revolution as much as those of
Montesquieu had previously been used to underpin
constitutions. At the same time, arguably, at least some of the
would-be leaders of a Russian Revolution looked back beyond
Marx for guidance to the French precedent, updating the
retrospection of Robespierre and his colleagues beyond the
philosophes to classical times.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: REVISIONS AND

ALTERNATIVES
After Marx’s death, however, and even more after that of Engels
in 1895, the inheritance began to be disputed. Almost immediately
after 1895, for example, Eduard Bernstein was to develop a theory
66
of ‘revisionism’, arguing that Marx’s predictions were not borne

out by the evidence that he himself presented in Capital and
elsewhere. To put the point simply, there was no sign of capitalism
weakening, more that it was going from strength to strength. And
so Bernstein argued in his contribution on Karl Marx in the eleventh
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911 that the great scientific
achievement of Marx was to be found not in such conclusions,
‘but in the details and yet more in the method and principles of his
investigations in his philosophy of history’ (Bernstein’s emphases).
Here, as was generally admitted, he had made an original
contribution. Bernstein continued:
Nobody before him had so clearly shown the role of the

productive agencies in historical evolution; nobody so mas-
terfully exhibited their great determining influence on the
forms and ideologies of social organisms. The passages
and chapters dealing with this subject form,
notwithstanding occasional exaggerations, the crowning
parts of his works. If he has been justly compared with
Darwin, it is in these respects that he ranks with that great
genius, not through his value theory, ingenious though it
be. With the great theorist of biological transformation he
had also in common the indefatigable way in which he
made painstak-ing studies of the minutest details
connected with his researches.
It is almost as if Marx the scholar were the superior to Marx the

politician. By implication, political analysis was better provided
by Bernstein himself.
While Bernstein developed his ‘revisionism’, a self-styled
defender of ‘orthodox’ Marxism emerged in the person of Karl
Kautsky. However, while insisting on revolutionary goals,
Kautsky also believed that socialism could be, indeed should
be, realised through the agency of a mass movement operating
in the conditions of parliamentary democracy. He was therefore
opposed to violent action, especially by a minority, and could
only look upon the Bolshevik Revolution as premature and as a
distortion of Marxism. He also differed with Lenin on the subject
of imperialism, especially on the centrality of financial capital.
Yet another view of imperialism was that of Rosa Luxemburg,
who emphasised that the expansion of capitalism depended on
67
the exploitation of pre-capitalist societies. Like Kautsky,

although more of a radical revolutionary than he, she was
opposed to the manner in which Lenin and the Bolsheviks had
forced the pace in 1917.32
In Russia itself, a number of socialists looked upon October 1917
and after as a jumping of the Marxist gun. Chief among them were
the Mensheviks, who looked upon the October Revolution as
premature, believing that it was necessary for capitalism to run its
full course before it could be overthrown, and possibly also
disagreeing with the late Marx himself. Then there were those who
were socialists but not Marxists, especially the Socialist
Revolutionaries who stemmed from the populist tradition, and also
anarchists of varying complexions, including the great Kropotkin,
opposed to the new regime from the liber-tarian point of view. Of
course, the old regime still had its supporters, monarchists or
constitutional monarchists, while a further, fresh interpretation of
the whole Russian Revolution came from the Eurasian or
Europasian school.33
A good example of Russian liberal reactions to the successive
stages of war and revolution may be found in the writings of
Lenin’s former pet aversion Paul Vinogradoff, professor of
jurisprudence at Oxford University. In September 1914, he wrote
a long letter to The Times of London, recounting how a friend, a
liberal like himself, had written from Moscow: ‘It is a great,
unforgettable time; we are happy to be all at one!’ In Vinogra-
doff’s view, the intelligentsia, ‘imbued with current European
ideas as to politics, economics and law’, would be able to
collaborate with the rest of the people in the pursuit of victory.
And it should be recognised that the Russian people were not
backward in comparison with the German, and would be able
to show remarkable patience in the face of suffering. It was an
advantage at this time of crisis that the government was strongly
centralised, and that the tsar could now demonstrate his states-
manship, which would include his recognition that there should
be further constitutional advances at the end of the war. Declared
Vinogradoff: ‘The Slavs must have their chance in the history of
the world, and the date of their coming of age will mark a new
departure in the growth of civilization.’ In 1915, after a visit to
his native land, he observed that ‘there is no more occasion to
doubt of ultimate progress in the field of domestic politics than
there is to be nervous as to the outcome of the struggle in the
68
field.’ Then, in 1917, although he wrote of the ‘catastrophe of

March’ and the manner in which the tsar had been brought down
by the court camarilla, he was also happy to note that ‘Russia
has shaken off her fetters.’ The February or March Revolution
had shaken the pyramid of society to its foundations, but could
not overturn it. The future would bring the glory of a free
commonwealth justifying the faith of Russia in their own
powers.
But the October or November Revolution of 1917 did indeed
overturn the pyramid of Russian society, and undermine the
confidence of Vinogradoff in the immediate future. In 1919,
he ventured still to remark: ‘This summer will, let us hope,
decide the downfall of the criminal gang which has brought
ruin to the country.’ Then, probably, a military dictatorship
would have to be instituted as a necessary transitional stage.
Certainly, ‘strong executive organisation will have to be kept
up’, for ‘interdepen-dence between authority and right is the
essence and the common trait of all constitutions.’ Two years
later, in the summer of 1921, Vinogradoff’s hopes for the
collapse of Bolshevism were still unrealised as he commented
that the new government had been trying to shape the whole
of Russia in the barrack mould associated with Arakcheev,
responsible for military colonies in the nineteenth century. He
could not now believe in the imminent demise of the Bolshevik
regime, and lamented that ‘Salvation will not come from the
emigrants or from the Allies. It can only be expected from an
elemental crisis in an illness which is bound to be a protracted
and an agonising one.’ 34
In the twelfth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published
in 1922, Vinogradoff was able to give his extended views under
the entry ‘Russia’, observing:
Altogether the ‘Constitution’ of the Federal Republic of

Soviets was clearly intended to be an instrument for the
oppression of the formerly privileged classes and a means
of propaganda for the edification of people who want to
believe in the benefits of Communist rule.
However, Vinogradoff commented, ‘Pure Communism can be

introduced only when the people have been ground into uniform
pulp: then Law and the State will disappear of themselves.’ He
69
quoted with scorn the claims of the Bolshevik theorist N.I.

Bukharin that:
The Soviets are direct organizations of the masses; they
are not impermeable, there is the right of recall…. In
democratic commonwealths the supreme power belongs
to par-liaments, that is, to talking-shops…. The real rulers
are the members of a caste, —of a social bureaucracy.
Vinogradoff sarcastically added, ‘One might think that the rule
of Soviets was free from all fictions and substitution of power.’ In
particular, Bukharin and his comrades had sought to justify the
dismissal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 with the
claim that it did not reflect the ‘will of the revolution’. This actually
meant ‘simply the arbitrary sway of a gang of reckless
adventurers’.35
As for non-affiliated historians, many of them lived through
the Revolution of 1917 to confront again the problems which had
preoccupied them before the sequence of shattering events begun
in 1914. Among the survivors was E.V.Tarle, who presented his
new thinking in an article published in 1922 and entitled ‘The Next
Task’, a piece of work deserving close scrutiny not only because of
its observations on 1922 but also because of its implications for the
1990s.36
Nobody, Tarle claimed at the outset, could claim a
comprehensive grasp, but many questions were being posed: for
example, how did the Muscovite state grow, not according to the
twenty-nine volumes of S.M.Soloviev’s History of Russia from the
Earliest Times published from 1851 to 1879, but in reality? A
satisfactory answer was elusive, for two main reasons: first, the
increasing multiplicity of facts, both from the archives and from
the growth of new disciplines, especially economic history, which
was threatening to overwhelm scholars from the beginning of the
twentieth century onwards; and second, the growing complications
of psychology, which made necessary the broadening of horizons.
Moreover, the more difficult the task of criticism, the more attractive
it became, and so critics and polemicists had become more
numerous than systematists and constructors.
The recent great catastrophe had struck deep into the psychology
of that numerically insignificant group of people who had chosen
as their life’s work the investigation of humanity’s past. What were
the consequences for them?
70
Declared Tarle:
The question is at least not unimportant for this group of
people. It is time if not to investigate it, at least to pose it.
One of the greatest virtues and duties of the historian is
mistrustfulness. Must we, as we regain consciousness, with
mistrustfulness turn first of all to address ourselves and
attempt to establish: how has the apparatus of our thought
changed? Are we more or less capable of coping and
understanding than before? The following argument may
be more natural, then: that we looked at the states, their
forces, the correlation between these forces, at the
psychology of the Russian people, at a multitude of
phenomena, in a different manner to how we look at them
now; and we know for certain that not only have these
phenomena changed, but that we simply did not
understand them very much, that we looked at many
things in an unreal fashion and accepted phantoms as
reality. If so, why should we think that our views of history
were without error? If we in 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916
accepted, let us say, the Russian people as somebody else,
then where is the guarantee that we know and understand
better the Romans, the Greeks, the Franks, the
contemporaries of Charles V or Louis XVI or Napoleon?
In death, asserted Turgenev, there is some kind of definitive
truth. Revolution is always first and foremost death, then
life. That is why with each cataclysm there perish very
many old phantoms and lies. And immediately too, of
course, there are born new ones, but in each case, the
process of recovery from old phantasmagorias is capable
of shaking the strongest intellectual self-confidence.
And just at this difficult period of the loss of faith in
correctness of a whole range of their former convictions,
the historians who have undergone the cataclysm are
subjected to new and powerful temptations, their intellect
is diverted from its direct scientific importance by
powerful, often uncertain influences.37
Tarle went on to argue that history must be written not

exclusively as narrative, but to establish the facts, and then to
explain them. Certainly, history must not be written as advocacy,
a practice into which generations following cataclysms too easily
71
fell. The French Revolution could be discussed quietly only thirty

years afterwards, and then only exceptionally. Robespierre still
quarrelled with Danton, but the first was impersonated by
Mathiez, the second by Aulard, and they were both professors of
history. There were many other such examples, even a century
and a quarter on.
Cataclysms also fogged vision, distorting the outlook of many
historians and leading them into pseudo-history, which Tarle
defined as what ensues when historians address some subject,
but set out in allegorical or cryptographic form another subject,
the history of their own time or near to it, modernising motiv-
ation. Such pseudo-history had been rare in Russia,38 but was
especially attractive in epochs after storms. First, there was the
search for analogies and antecedents, then the emergence of
allegory and cryptogram. French historiography of the first
quarter, even the first half of the nineteenth century had looked
for a revolutionary bourgeoisie in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, for the outlook of 1789 in the States-General of the
fifteenth century. The same tendency would soon appear among
Russian historians, in Tarle’s estimation—its chief disadvantage
was that it divided and thus weakened the understanding.
Historians must remember that the situation ‘is not an advantage
for our generation, but, on the contrary, something capable of
seriously lowering the analytical capabilities of even the strongest
intellect’.39
However, there was a positive side to the present predicament
of 1922. Such epochs promoted understanding of what in other
times would not be completely clear, an empty sound. Examples
could be found in the Renaissance writings of Machiavelli and
Guicciardini, while the great Ranke drew extensively on the minor
Clarendon, his superior regarding the experience of the English
Revolution, although in other respects comparison would be
ludicrous. Similarly, Voltaire appeared superficial and insipid
compared to lesser figures who actually lived through the French
Revolution.
The way forward must avoid several pitfalls. History must not
simply tell a story, nor relapse into advocacy. It must not become
pseudo-history, allowing a poetic rendering of ideas to take over,
as tended to happen during cataclysms, for example the years 1789–
99. The great catastrophe of the 1914 war, followed by the Russian
Revolution, posed such a threat because it had first caused death.
72
But then it produced new life, as the old gave way to the new. On
the one hand, Tarle and his generation were faced by a situation
‘capable of lowering the analytical capabilities of the strongest
intellect’; on the other, there was the advantage of being in a position
to react to the immediacy of experience. Continued Tarle:
Auguste Comte ascribed great methodological significance

to the study of revolutionary overtures; even greater
significance in this connection is possessed by the personal
experience of such events. The old fabric is torn, ends and
beginnings are laid bare, and an element appears, which
at other times cannot be seen, and whose presence can
only be implied. The main point is that you observe the
worthlessness of the historical significance of the rational
foundation, all the particular, inhuman, but somehow
different boundless logic, which, to be sure, is dominant
even in ordinary times, but is overshadowed by the public
platform and the press, in words, in gestures, in shouts,
arguments, discussions, articles—in a word, by everything
which masks with such success and hides from our view
—in normal epochs—the true motivating forces of the
historical process. States, apparently eternal, fly into pieces,
the state culture turns out to be a superficial covering,
primeval chaos envelops and overwhelms the shell, which
has only just seemed an unbreakable and majestic ark. It
seems to some nervous people caught up in such a cyclone
that they are going out of their minds and becoming
delirious. On the contrary, they were previously delirious,
lulled by a false security, forgetting that not far under the
elegant carpet of their cabin there is a dark and fathomless
abyss, and that this abyss is the age-old natural reality, and
that their cabin is a fragile and artificial invention; that the
abyss existed before the cabin, and will remain after the
cabin, and they themselves may study the abyss, if only
imperfectly, but they may in no way control it. The most
they can do is to try to delay the wreck of their ark.40
In the view of Tarle, after such an experience, the intellect could

only grow stronger or weaker; it could not stay still.
Looking around him in 1922, Tarle could not find much cause
for optimism. He gave his verdict, for example, on Outline of
73
History by H.G.Wells: an author who combined elements of Jules

Verne and Jack London deluded himself into believing that he
was solving all the mysteries of world history with his gleanings
from secondary-level textbooks mixed with vulgar philosophy
and paradoxes. Yet this work had been taken seriously by a whole
group of British academics, and many other similar examples
could be given. Declared Tarle: ‘Whether there will appear the
long-awaited serious schemes and theories, or whether there will
be in this sphere the dilettante thinking aloud begun in 1914 and
becoming stronger in 1917, leading nowhere, and with no future—
time alone will tell.’41
Tarle believed that a growing academic exchange with Europe
and America could and would have to be one source of fruitful
thought in conditions of continuing cataclysm. But fact gathering
must not be abandoned: indeed, he asserted, ‘The more powerful,
the more authentic the generalising thought, the more it needs the
erudite and erudition.’ To put the matter simply, the seventeenth
century had produced erudition, the eighteenth had produced
philosophy. For its part, the early nineteenth century had brought
forward theory along with some erudition and criticism, while in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, erudition and
criticism had grown, but so-called ‘philosophy’ had fallen to the
low level that might be found only in remote epochs. Moreover,
‘philosophy’ in the eighteenth-century sense was no longer enough,
because of the much higher level of erudition.
Erudition should not be undervalued, Tarle observed:
But never will our present architect, a builder by profession,

begin to pour scorn and sarcasm on those who in
expectation of his arrival have collected and polished the
stones and marble, inspected and thrown away unsuitable
material—and sometimes even participated in the laying
of the foundation.
However, on the other hand, in Tarle’s estimation, erudition should

never be identified with science, nauka.42
Some earlier attempts at schematisation had suffered from a
variety of weaknesses. For example, the eighteenth-century
Physiocrats had explained Chinese and Egyptian history while
knowing little or nothing about it. With a similar handicap in the
nineteenth century, Hegel had attempted to distil the spirit of Indian
74
history. But was Hegel disturbed when facts contra-dicted his

theory? No, the worse for the facts, in Hegel’s view. Such
constructors of systems had been close in their outlook to the
Cameralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who made
the interests of absolute rulers absolute. Wrote one of them: ‘May
he be damned who is predisposed to distinguish the interests of
the sovereign from those of his subjects.’ Such servility was as
unhelpful as disregard for facts. In conclusion, Tarle looked
forward:
We will hope that the beginning of the twentieth century

turns out to be similar to the beginning of the nineteenth
not only in destruction on an international scale of several
million people, but also with the appearance of a galaxy
of synthesising minds and talents. The time for the harvest
has already arrived; perhaps the reapers are approaching.43
We are all too familiar with what was actually approaching:

reapers who were grim indeed, a servility before absolute rulers
that would outstrip that of the Cameralists, and the
superimposition on events of a crude schema. After a period in the
Gulag, Tarle himself, if without losing all his scholarly attributes,
was to become one of the leading Stalinist historians, as we shall
see in Chapter 4. But I have not devoted such close attention to his
attitude in 1922 to the question of ‘The Next Task’ in order to spin
out a cautionary tale, but rather to throw light on the problems
faced by Tarle’s successors seventy years on, in the 1990s, as they
too confront revolution.
To give too much emphasis to the parallel would be to fall into
the trap of the search for analogy and antecedent, which Tarle
advises us to avoid, seeing it as a step towards allegory and
cryptogram. Nevertheless, the following comments appear
pertinent to any discussion of writing on history in the 1990s. First,
seventy years ago, Tarle wrote in a language rarely found among
his successors today, rich in vocabulary and subtlety of expression.
Second, Tarle showed himself to be a scholar of broad education,
familiar with classical and more recent culture, if mostly
Eurocentric. Here, no doubt, Tarle would reflect the normal
standards of his time, especially for specialists in general,
vseobshchaia, history. For similar reasons and also, third, because
he was a specialist in this area, Tarle made an inordinate number
75
of references to French history, in particular the French Revolution,

although we should not neglect the obvious point that the French
Revolution was the antecedent and analogy for the Russian, and
allow Tarle to fall at least some way into his own trap. It certainly
is striking how frequently Annaly: zhurnal vseobshchei istorii, 1922–
4 (published in Petersburg by Petrograd Publishers in which Tarle’s
article on ‘The Next Task’ first appeared), refers to the French
Revolution as the Great Revolu-tion.44 Equally, and fourth, like the
journal of which he was co-editor, Tarle makes little reference to
the Russian Revolution, and, perhaps more surprisingly, not one
mention of Karl Marx, let alone V.I.Lenin.
Even after the turbulent years 1917–21, then, the Russian
historiographical tradition from Karamzin through Soloviev to
Kliuchevsky was still alive. Quite possibly in 1922, Tarle also
harboured thoughts about constitutional development similar to
those of Kovalevsky and Vinogradoff, along lines advocated by
the American President Woodrow Wilson. Even Lenin, as we have
seen, found it necessary to consider both theoretical and practical
problems of constitutionalism as he moved from Russian Republic
towards Soviet Union. On the whole, however, Trotsky was
probably accurate in his observation that Lenin’s ‘thoughts never
ceased to labour at the task of freeing the workers’. After Lenin’s
death, Trotsky kept the banner of proletarian revolution flying
while Stalin moved further in the direction of constitutionalism
(however distorted or even perverted). The original thoughts of
Marx were by now far from the minds of the Soviet establishment,
however much they used ‘Marxism-Leninism’ as an ideological
underpinning for their own power.
But we are running ahead of ourselves. Before moving on, we
must return to our promised second pH test and confess that our
attention in this chapter has focused much more on Russian ‘acid’
than on American ‘alkali’. Here, the reading for Russia would be
towards the extreme, while that for the USA would barely register.
The reason for this imbalance, as already indicated, is that
revolutionary Marxism made little immediate impact in the USA.
As Marx himself had indicated in Capital, this was partly because
of the lack of American communal and feudal development, partly
because of the USA’s possession to an unprecedented level of ‘the
fluidity of capital, the versatility of labour and the indifference of
the worker to the content of his work’ (see p. 55 above). As we turn
our attention to the views of world order put forward from the
76
beginning of the twentieth century by a selection of E.V.Tarle’s

European colleagues, we shall clearly see that the Atlantic remained
a broad divide and that the USA was still not quite accepted as a
fully mature member of the Western world, even if without doubt
poised for rapid emergence to leadership of that world. At the same
time, the kind of constitutional order asserted by Woodrow Wilson
in his academic publications was soon to be proclaimed by him on
the wider global stage.45
77
3
FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS

ATLANTIC ORDER, 1900–22
Putting Marx and Montesquieu along with the pH test into the
background, we now bring to the fore the colleagues of E.V. Tarle,
professional historians. We turn to examine how they were
adjusting their outlook on Western world order at the beginning
of the twentieth century before the First World War, and then
consider the impact made on the outlook of some historians and
other representative writers by that great conflict. In particular,
we shall note the full acceptance in the West, especially the now
so-called English-speaking West, of the idea of an Atlantic
community, including the USA, and the demise of a previously
widely accepted cultural concept, that of a Teutonic’ group of
nations including the United Kingdom and the United States along
with Germany.
In his excited discussion of ‘The Next Task’, E.V.Tarle presented
an interesting view of the development of the writing of history
from the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century.
There is at least one point, however, that he failed to make
sufficiently clear: that the profession of historian emerged towards
the end of the nineteenth century. This development had important
implications: historians expected their profession, like any other,
to be taken seriously; they communicated much more among
themselves, for example by way of new journals, in efforts to realise
this expectation; equally, for the same purpose, they looked
increasingly upon their discipline as a ‘science’ with its own
distinctive techniques.
78
F R O M E U R O P E A N T O WA R D S AT L A N T I C O R D E R
A WATERSHED IN EUROPEAN HISTORY, 1900–13

In July 1900, an International Congress of Comparative History
met within the framework of the Paris World Exhibition. Like
its predecessors from London in 1851 to Chicago in 1893, the
Paris Exhibition was a contrast of wide collaboration and narrow
self-interest. Not surprisingly, therefore, the proceedings of the
congresses on a wide range of subjects both academic and non-
academic tended to comprise a bland mixture of mutual
congratulation and nationalist assertiveness. And so historians
would not have been surprised to hear that their subject had
made great strides throughout the nineteenth century,
overcoming misleading theories (including revolutionary
socialism, no doubt) on the one hand and trivial compilations
on the other to produce a large number of reliable facts revealing
the full truth; nor would they have been surprised to find that
the more they learned about their country, the more they learned
to love it, and the more they loved it, the more they wanted to
learn about it.1
However, both at the congress and even more outside it, there
was ample evidence in and around 1900 that neither fact-
gathering nor flag-waving was enough. Among the historians
who had come to realise the shortcomings of empirical
patriotism was Karl Lamprecht, who was to look beyond the
confines of his German history as he completed its twenty-four
volumes between 1891 and 1913. Increasingly, he came to turn
from specialisation towards universalism, from the
‘individualist’ approach to the ‘collectivist’.
Lamprecht’s views aroused enormous controversy and
carried his name across the Atlantic. Invited to visit the USA in
1904, he set out his approach in a series of lectures published in
1905 as What Is History?. 2 Although this was the broadest
exposition of his views, he still gave heavy emphasis to the
development of Germany over the course of more than two
millennia. In a stirring passage, Lamprecht declared: ‘I can
imagine my sixtieth ancestor marching out with a German spear
and looking with defiant mien across the Rhine, and my fiftieth
ancestor putting behind him the great river and invading the
carefully guarded regions subject to the Roman Yoke.’ And now
their remote descendant—‘a brain-worker whose muscles have
grown flabby from lack of constant exercise’—had crossed the
79
vast ocean to speak to a foreign yet kindred people about the

life of his own nation through the passage of the centuries.
Beginning with the heroic song and other forms of epic,
Lamprecht observed, the narration of the German story passed
through several stages before reaching newer, deeper insights than
ever before in the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the
beginning of the nineteenth century. Then, a period of economic
and political evolution following 1848 and culminating in 1871
was of great significance for intellectual growth. Released from
their great anxieties concerning national life and unity, men could
now concentrate on the development of internal culture. A stirring
in the arts and social sciences shook their common foundation—
‘socio-psychological history’. To be sure, there was a period of
disputation and pessimism, involving ‘brilliant failures’, among
whom could be numbered the ‘tragic person of Nietzsche’. But
during the past half decade or so, the concept of the Superman
had given way to concepts of the individual, society and state
which were simpler yet more in keeping with the dominant spirit
of the new age.3
For Lamprecht, the greatest problem facing the scientific
history of mankind was the deduction of a universal law from
the history of the most important communities. Along with the
USA and Japan these included European countries which had
undergone modernising experiences comparable to those in
Germany. The study of some stages of development of ‘over-
ripe’ or ‘decadent’ cultures such as the Indian and Chinese could
be useful, but the centre of attention would have to be where
significant key political and economic evolution had recently
occurred. This, of course, was ‘the doctrine of Karl Marx, the
theory of the so-called, though most unhappily so-called,
historical materialism’. But, in Lamprecht’s view, the doctrine
of Marx and his school was ‘utterly inadequate’ even if there
was an attempt to measure the mental and moral progress of a
community. Ethnology, archaeology and the history of art would
all play important parts along with political and economic
history in the composition of a scientific Weltgeschichte, but
among all the vast and inexhaustible sources of world history,
the centre was emphatically ‘psycho-historical’.4
Lamprecht recognised that scientific history had advanced
elsewhere, especially in France, both before and after 1871. But, of
course, the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles on 18
80
January of that year was a great humiliation for France, and by the
end of 1871 the Paris Commune had been formed and crushed,
adding another important date to 1815, 1830 and 1848 in the period
following the French Revolution. Nevertheless, both in spite and
because of the revolutionary tradition, French intellectuals had
indeed managed to develop the study of history. Therefore, there
was much to draw on when a new French departure took the
pursuit of the subject further at the time of the Paris World
Exhibition.
In August 1900, the first number of Revue de Synthèse Historique
was brought out by Henri Berr, and Lamprecht and other foreigners
were joined in debate by their French colleagues. In addition, Berr
himself published in 1911 a full exposition of his views, La Synthèse
en histoire: son rapport avec la synthèse générale. In this book, he
accepted that, empirically, history was the study of the human facts
of the past, and that every other definition was tendentious.
However, to concentrate on the summary and classifi-cation of facts
was not enough: there was a clear difference between an erudite
and a scientific synthesis of history, as well as a further gap between
the latter and the philosophy of history.5
What was the scientific synthesis of history? Basically, the
question revolved around another, that of causality, which in turn
might be said to consist of three types or orders: contingency,
necessity and logic. Contingency involved not only chance but also
six modes of individuality: personal; ‘collective’; geographical;
through time; at any moment; and (here Berr could not avoid the
German noun) —Völkerpsychologie (folk or national psychology),
an area much vaster and more indetermin-ate than the term might
suggest, with a deep source expressing itself most clearly in the
various collective individualities. If contingency in Berr’s view
consisted of the facts, necessity was a matter mostly of the social,
and therefore of sociology. The third order of causality, logic, in
history meant ideas, of psychology as well as sociology, which
between them helped to bring about the formation of consciousness
(conscience).
On the one hand, Berr held back from asserting too rigid a
system, a fault which he believed he could find in sociology.
Others, he suggested, might find an organisation of the scientific
synthesis of history more adequate than his, which depended
on the interaction of the three types of cause. On the other hand,
through the patient, methodical and experimental study of this
81
reciprocal interaction, he believed that the study of causes in

human affairs might open perspectives on causes in nature, on
evolution as a whole. In such a manner, scientific synthesis
would establish not only man’s precise role in society, but also
help him to come to understand his role in the universe.6
Devoting the rest of a long career to the pursuit of such broad
aims, Berr was to narrow his focus in the shorter run. For him, as
for many others, the war of 1914–18 was both a point of arrival
and departure in the evolution of humanity. In particular, Berr
wanted to oppose German attempts at Weltgeschichte with a
comparable French exercise demonstrating the national vitality,
both commemorating those who fell to save France and advancing
science in its broadest sense. At this point, apparently, allies were
to be neglected as well as enemies, but in any case Berr had been
on the whole accurate in his earlier observation that Britain in
particular was far from adopting the objective scientific method in
historical study, but continued to look upon history as a branch of
general literature, against a strong background of the empiricist
tradition of the Anglo-Saxons which had recently found expression
in the defence of pragmatism on both sides of the Atlantic,
especially in the USA.7
The senior partner among the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nations, Britain,
was on the point of decline from world hegemony at the turn of
the century, while a junior, the USA, was rising fast towards it.
Among the observers of this phenomenon was Lord Acton, as
much at home in the scholarship of the continent as in that of the
English-speaking community—‘a miracle of learning’, according
to his friend Lord Bryce, with ‘a passion of the intellect, a thirst
like the thirst for water in a parching desert’. Unfortunately,
however, although Acton could on occasion speak ‘as if the whole
landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of
sunlight’, he wrote very little. Or, rather, in a sense, he wrote too
much, filling hundreds of boxes with notes and extracts, distilling
and bottling the essence of what he read, but never pouring it
out fully in publication.
To some extent, this was because Acton could not accept what
Bryce wrote in an increasingly relevant observation: that it becomes
‘daily more than ever true that the secret of historical composition
is to know what to neglect’.8 But a considerable part of his difficulty
arose from the circumstances that he was a loyal Roman Catholic
attempting to become a leading Liberal, and that, among mostly
82
insular empiricists, he was attempting to become a cosmopolitan

universalist: ‘There is no escape from the dogma that history is the
conscience of mankind.’9
While Acton’s professed outlook was all-embracing, it was
not without its limitations and partialities. From its vantage
point in Western Europe, it was directed across the Atlantic
rather than across the continent or towards the wider world.
The Orthodox world was on the circumference of his vision,
and he saw Russia as mostly ‘inert’ in Universal History. Further
afield, Acton confessed himself unable to judge what to think
of ‘those who live pure and good lives but are without reach of
Christianity’, although he firmly believed in the one ‘great
operation set at work by Christ—the Preparation of the Nations’.
And to his Christianity there was added his Liberalism, ‘based
on the love of freedom for its own sake’, in the estimation of
Lord Bryce, ‘joined to the conviction that freedom is the best
foundation for the stability of a constitution and the happiness
of a people’.10
Expounding his overview, though never completing his
history of liberty, Acton thought of the seventeenth century as
‘the crisis in the history of conscience’, seeing 1642 as a starting
point, and coming to share the opinion that Cromwell’s statue
should be at Washington, not Westminster, for the Roundheads
had taken several necessary steps towards 1776 and after.
Although the process went back to Magna Carta and beyond,
Cromwell and his associates had advanced it further through
devising a theory of conscience, rejecting the authority of
tradition and introducing the normality of ‘abstract ideas’.
However, the Commonwealth had been marred by excesses of
simplicity and completeness, and the Glorious and Bloodless
Revolution of 1688 had been necessary to construct a more
balanced legacy to the eighteenth century.
The best was yet to come, for the outbreak of the American
Revolution in 1776 could be rightly compared with the nativity
of Christ, with William Penn’s Quaker ‘Holy Experiment’ as a
prefiguration. The Declaration of Independence had set up a new
theory of government—the absolute condemnation of European
politics—while the Founding Fathers not only continued the
struggle for the introduction of conscience into politics but also,
with the federal structure of the constitution, introduced ‘the
supreme guarantee’ of freedom and democracy. Making a
83
comparative point succinctly, Acton wrote ‘French Revolution—

pathology, American—normal development of ideas’. For him,
the USA had produced ‘a community more powerful, more
prosperous, more intelligent and more free than any other that
the world has seen’.11
American historians would presumably have experienced no
difficulty in accepting ideas such as these, or most of the
sentiments put forward by Acton in his confidential report to the
Syndics of the Cambridge University Press in 1896 concerning
the suggested project of ‘a history of the World’. Recommend-
ing the avoidance of ‘the needless utterance of opinion, and the
service of a cause’, Acton went on to declare: ‘Contributors will
understand that we are established, not under the meridian of
Greenwich, but in Longitude 30 West—that our Waterloo must
be one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alike
that nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors…’
Nobody should be able to detect who put the pen down and who
took it up, although The Cambridge Modern History should be
composed by pens ‘English, American and Colonial’ with ‘a
capable foreigner rather than an inferior countryman’ to be taken
only ‘in an emergency’.
Ultimate history they could not have in their generation, but
they could dispose of conventional history, now that all information
was within reach, and every problem capable of solution. In a
stirring passage, Acton explained what he meant by ‘Universal
History’:
that which is distinct from the combined history of all

countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous
development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an
illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which
the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for
their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a
higher series according to the time and the degree in which
they contribute to the common fortunes of mankind.
Secondary states appear, in perspective, when they carry
flame or fuel, not when they are isolated, irrelevant, stag-
nant, inarticulate, passive, when they lend nothing to the
forward progress or the upward growth, and offer no aid
in solving the perpetual problem of the future. Renaissance
and the Epoch of Discovery, Reformation and Wars of
84
Religion, Turkish Crusade and Western Colonization,

European Absolutism, Dutch, English, American, French
Revolution, and its derivatives, the constitutional
democratic, national, social, Liberal, Federal movement of
the world that is the great argument of the Epic that we
are to expose. These things are extraterritorial, having their
home in the sky, and no more confined to race or frontier
than a rainbow or a storm.12
As an example to illustrate his declaration, Acton chose Russia,

a retrospect of whose history should be given ‘when it emerges,
under Peter the Great, thereby following the natural order of
cause, not that of fortuitous juxtaposition’. Hippolyte Taine had
been right when he had said that to explain events, it is enough
to put them in the proper order: to put them in their place is to
express their cause. Thus, religion, philosophy, literature, science
and art influenced the course of public events from time to time:
‘but when they do not then we are not concerned with them, and
have not to describe their orbit when there is no conjunction.’ In
such a manner, establishing the proportion between historic
thought and historic fact, and adhering to the higher series, Acton
hoped that The Cambridge Modern History would act as a chart
and compass for the coming century, and also establish ‘in what
measure history might be able to afford the basis for a true
philosophy of Life’.
Steering a course beyond longitude 30 to about 75 west,
crossing the Atlantic Ocean rather than moving towards its
middle, the muse of history was also inspiring American devotees.
Henry Adams and George Bancroft led those who, like Acton,
celebrated the triumph of federal democracy, while Frederick
Jackson Turner asserted its impact on the further frontiers, and
Charles Beard was among those interested in a ‘New History’ of
broader scope and greater utility than its old predecessor.
Meanwhile, on the landward side of Europe, longitude 30 east
and more, the Russian peoples, previously ‘inert’ in Acton’s view,
were soon to rise up in the Revolution of 1905 in the wake of the
Russo-Japanese War. The historians among them were to
recommend a variety of ways forward, from the Western
parliamentary to the Marxist Soviet, with the most outstanding,
V.O.Kliuchevsky, preferring the first but not convinced that the
pattern of his country’s past would allow it. Unfortunately, as
85
yet, Kliuchevsky and his colleagues in Russia, even Adams,

Bancroft, Turner and Beard in the USA, had still to make their
full mark in Europe, while wider attention was not easily secured
by scholars from the continent’s lesser powers. To be sure,
Benedetto Croce was to achieve lasting influence with his
argument that all history is contemporary history, that description
of past events refers in reality to ‘present needs and present
situations’. And Croce was not the only outsider to make an
impression on the guild of historians in process of formation at
the turn of the century.13
To capture the perceived circumstances of the end of the
nineteenth century is not easy, but perhaps as good an approach
as any is to quote a widely celebrated work of the French historian
Charles Seignobos, translated into English in 1901 as A Political
History of Contemporary Europe:
The war of 1870 ended the crisis of nationalist wars.

Germany, supreme in Europe, has obliged the other states
to adopt her military system and has put a stop to war by
making it horrible…. All warlike action has related to the
Orient and has been practically outside of Europe…. War
has ceased. The perfect police system and the vast military
power of the governments have made revolutions
impossible.
To varying extents, Lamprecht, Berr and Acton might have

agreed. However, Seignobos went on to observe: ‘A natural
tendency to attribute great effects to great causes leads us to explain
political evolution, like geological evolution, by deep and
continuous forces, more far-reaching than individual actions. The
history of the nineteenth century accords ill with this idea.’ For the
three major crises in Europe after Waterloo, in 1830, 1848 and 1870,
were all accidents, ‘sudden crises caused by sudden events’: the
work respectively of a group of obscure republicans, aided by the
blunders of Charles X; of certain democratic and socialist agitators,
aided by Louis Philippe’s sudden lack of nerve; and of Bismarck
personally, prepared by Napoleon III’s personal policy. Seignobos
concluded: ‘For these three unforeseen facts no general cause can
be discerned in the intellectual, economic, or political condition of
the continent of Europe. It was three accidents that determined
the political evolution of modern Europe.’14
86
The approach of Seignobos would continue through the

twentieth century, with a latter-day version put forward by
H.A.L. Fisher in 1936: ‘I can see only one emergency following
upon another…the play of the contingent and unforeseen.’ Such
a view, of 1914, 1939 and other world crises, is still widely
accepted today. On the other hand, in spite of many unresolved
problems (for example, the definition of ‘science’ and
‘conscience’) and vastly different circumstances, there are those
who would want to persist with the aspirations of Lamprecht,
Berr and Acton for a universal history, now that the debate is
joined on the kind of watershed we are facing at the fin de
millénaire.15
HISTORY CONGRESS IN ENGLAND, 1913: SPEECHES

In the spring of 1913, the powder keg of the Balkans continued to
smoulder after the failure of a peace conference in London in
January. Rumours of war were not far away as the question was
aired as to whether or not a national service system would be
necessary to supplement the regular armed forces. As the process
of replacing horse by motor vehicle continued, and the science of
aeronautics developed, advanced thinkers wondered if future
hostilities would take on unprecedented shape. Meanwhile,
industry was rent by strikes, with the antidote of a minimum wage
receiving little support from employers who, like landlords, were
anxious about income tax and national insurance payments. Home
Rule for Ireland and Votes for Women were continued slogans also
causing apprehen-sion, and there were fears of the threat to public
morality of the cinematograph with its possible ‘perversion into
an agency for pandering to all the lowest instincts of untaught
humanity’.
More than eighty years on, the world of spring 1913 seems
indeed to be one we have lost, especially as described by that
establishment organ, The Times of London, whose issues of early
April have been scanned to build up the picture just presented.
Those issues will also be used extensively to put forward a view
of the point reached in the development of the study of history,
in particular in England, on the eve of the First World War. For,
after earlier meetings in The Hague in 1898, Paris in 1900, Rome
in 1903 and Berlin in 1908, the International Congress of
Historical Sciences or Studies was now to continue its
87
deliberations in the hotels and public buildings of Victorian and

Edwardian London.16
Proceedings began on Thursday, 3 April and, from the general
tone of various speeches, The Times considered that the spirit of
the Congress was to be one of peace and good will towards men.
From all over Europe, from the United States and the British
Dominions, from Chile and Argentina and Japan, the historians of
the world had come to London, just as in previous years they had
assembled at The Hague and Paris and Rome and Berlin, to meet
each other face to face and discuss the latest results of their several
studies. But just because they were historians by profession they
were probably better able than most men to take a wide view of
the meaning of history, and to look beyond the national jealousies
and rivalries of any given moment to the ultimate good of the
human race. And the delegates who spoke all joined, directly or
indirectly, in expressing views of the inestimable value of friendship
between nations similar to those put forward in the presidential
address of Mr (soon to be Lord) Bryce.17
That address began with a hearty welcome, and continued with
a comment on the modern expansion of the scope of historical
research, especially with regard to the study of primitive man, the
early Mediterranean civilisations, and ‘the backward races still
scattered over the earth’. In view of the fact that his other duties
had prevented him from following recent movements, Bryce asked
permission to speak rather as a traveller than a student of
manuscripts or printed books. But his traveller’s observations,
illuminated by his wide historical knowledge and sound humanity,
were throughout listened to with the deepest interest, in the view
of The Times correspondent who went on to quote two passages in
the spirit of international friendliness characteristic of the Congress:
The world is becoming one in an altogether new sense.

More than four centuries ago the discovery of America
marked the first step in the process by which the European
races have now gained dominion over nearly the whole
of the earth. The last great step in that process was the
partition of Africa between three European Powers a little
more than 20 years ago. Now almost every part of the
earth’s surface, except the territories of China and Japan,
is either owned or controlled by five or six European races.
Eight Great Powers sway the political destinies of the globe,
88
and there are only two other countries that can be thought
of as likely to enter after a while into the rank of Great
Powers. Similarly, a few European tongues have
overspread all the continents, except Asia, and even there
it seems probable that these few European tongues will
before long be learnt and used by the educated classes in
such wise as to bring these classes into touch with
European ideas. It is likely that by AD 2000 more than nine-
tenths of the human race will be speaking less than 20
languages. Already there are practically only four great
religions in the world. Within a century the minor religions
may have gone; and possibly only three great faiths will
remain, with such accelerated swiftness does change now
move. Those things which are already strong are growing
stronger; those already weak grow weaker and are ready
to vanish away.18
Those conditions in which the world now finds itself,
these closer relations of contact between the great nations
in their transmarine possessions as well as in their
European homes, suggest a final observation. It is this. One
duty that was always incumbent upon the historian has
now become a duty of deeper significance and stronger
obligation. Truth, and only truth, is our aim. We are bound
as historians to examine and record facts without favour
or affection to our own nation or to any other. Our common
devotion to truth is what brings us here and unites us in
one body divided by no national jealousies, but all of us
alike animated by the spirit of scientific investigation. But
though no other sentiments intrude here, we are only too
well aware that jealousies and misunderstandings do exist
and from time to time threaten the concord of nations.
Seeing that we are, by the work we follow, led to look
further back and more widely around than most of our
fellow-citizens can do, are we not as students of history
specially called upon to do what we can to try to reduce
every source of international ill feeling? As historians, we
know how few wars have been necessary wars and how
much more harm than good most wars have done. As
historians, we know that every great people has had its
characteristic merits along with its characteristic faults.
None is especially blameless—each has rendered its special
89
services to humanity at large. We have the best reason for

knowing how great is the debt each one owes to the other;
how essential not only to the material development of each,
but also to its intellectual and spiritual advance, is the
greatness and welfare of the others and the common
friendship of all. May not we and the students of physical
science, who also labour for knowledge in their own fields,
and bow as we do before the august figure of Truth, hope
to become a bond of sympathy between the nations, help-
ing each people to feel and appreciate all that is best in the
others, and seeking to point the way to peace and good
will throughout the world.19
Bryce’s respect for ‘the august figure of Truth’ should not be

doubted: indeed, it allows us to observe that his speech laid
bare the basic outlook of his generation. This recognised that
the world was becoming one, but that ‘the backward races still
scattered over the earth’ were dominated by European powers
(including, from a linguistic-cultural point of view, the USA).
And there was no sense of any loss of confidence or fear for the
future where ‘things which are already strong are growing
stronger’. As we shall soon see, the proceedings of the Congress
were to demonstrate clearly that the expansion of the scope of
historical research was taking place in a framework of such
presuppositions.
On the morning of Wednesday, 9 April, after five days of
plenary and sectional meetings, the Congress held its closing
session. The invitation to hold the next Congress at St Petersburg
was unanimously accepted, with the Russian delegates assuring
the committee that every facility would be afforded by their
government for the entry into their country of persons who were
not its subjects.20 In the evening, delegates were entertained in
Oxford and Cambridge, The Times recording the speech given
by Lord Morley at All Souls College, Oxford. Proposing the
toasts of ‘The King’ and ‘The Foreign Delegates to the Congress’,
Lord Morley said that, at any rate in England, the power of
universities, and the public schools that fed them, in the working
of other institutions and in moulding both secular and
ecclesiastical politics—often for darkness as well as light, often
the mirror of stolid prejudices and childish conventions—had
been immeasurable. Universities, besides imparting special
90
knowledge, were meant for reason’s refuge and its fortress. The
standing enemies of reason, in spite of new arms, altered sym-
bols, changing masks, were what they had always been
everywhere.
One of the commanding impulses of their era, Lord Morley
continued, had been nationality, and, as it happened, they never
had better cause for realising this in its most comprehensive sense
than at the present time. But then another work of their time had
been the advance of science, and where nationality divided science
united.
Respectfully and with all humility, however, Morley urged
historians to note that improvisation had far more to do in politics
than people thought. He was of all men the very last to deny the
supremacy of rational methods as tests of human beings, but in
politics rationalism needed correction and enrich-ment from
history. The plain busy man often asked what was old history to
him. Well, one answer was that in Europe he was born 2,000 years
old. History mattered more than logic, forces, incidents and the
long tale of consummating circumstance. How often did
miscalculations in the statesman, like narrowness and blunder in
the historian, spring from neglect of the truth that deeper than
men’s opinions was the sentiment and circumstance by which
opinion was predetermined.21
Like Lords Acton and Bryce, Lord Morley was a prominent
Liberal, indeed the leader of his party in the House of Lords.
Possibly, it was his regular exposure to the cut and thrust of politics
that made him a shade less optimistic than his peers, recognising
the existence of both ‘blunders’ and ‘darkness’. However, his faith
in history seemed no less great.
HISTORY CONGRESS IN ENGLAND, 1913: PAPERS

Returning to the proceedings of the Congress, let us see how they
reflected profound ‘sentiment and circumstance’ as they had
developed over 2,000 years and more. To take some general papers
first in order of chronological focus, Eduard Meyer from Berlin
delivered ‘a pleasant conversational lecture’ in English on
‘Ancient History and Historical Research in the last Generation’.
He began with the thesis that the centre of ancient history was
always the civilisation of Greece and Rome, the first great epoch
of high human development, and that since then there had been
91
a continual growth down to his own time. There was more life
and individualism, he said, in the early civilisation of Greece than
in that of Babylon or Egypt. Meyer dwelt at some length on the
great advance in the knowledge of ancient history that had been
seen in recent years, illustrating his statement by the facts that
thirty years before next to nothing was known of Babylon; that
in 1873 he used to be told by his lecturer that the day of Egyptian
discovery was nearly over; and finally, that the discoveries of
Schliemann were, so to speak, themselves become ancient history.
The address was, in the main, a general review of recent advances
in this respect.
Of two general papers with medieval emphasis, Professor N.
Jorga’s considered ‘Les bases nécessaires d’une nouvelle histoire
du moyen age’. The scholar from Bucharest said that the history
of the Middle Ages, which was a recent creation of the science of
history, resulted from a permanent conflict between the new
factors brought in by the barbarians, the stubborn ideas of the
newcomers, and the ideas of Roman antiquity. The new system
that must be adopted, which would give to the history of the
Middle Ages two characteristics which it had hitherto been
wanting, was to follow the Roman ideas, to mark their
interpretation in the Germanic sense, and to show their realisation
by the new forces. Henri Pirenne from Ghent took as his subject
‘Les étapes sociales de revolution du Capitalisme du XIIe au XIXe
siècle’. The Belgian professor showed how through the ages, from
the twelfth to the nineteenth century, the pursuit of capitalism
was due not only to the desire to gain money for a living, but also
to a thirst for the power which was the natural result of riches.
Always it was intelligence that was the impelling power for the
creation of capitalism. In the thirteenth century the peasants were
driven to the towns by their poverty, and as they became rich
merchants formed themselves into guilds. Then the artisans began
to combine against the merchants and developed protectionism,
and having raised themselves to the position of capitalists formed
the nobility after a certain lapse of time. In the fifteenth century
capitalists grew more common in the great towns, and in the
eighteenth century came the age of the manufacturers, who in
their turn were absorbed into the ranks of the nobility. And always
these par-venus, when they had raised themselves by the exercise
of their intelligence, and were able to retire from the struggle of
life, were converted into an aristocracy of financial proprietors,
92
of conservative instincts, in contrast to the radical views with

which they were imbued when their class first began to rise in
the social scale.
Also touching on the medieval period was Professor Geheim-
rat O. von Gierke in a paper entitled ‘Zur Geschichte des
Majoritätsprinzips’. The principle of the majority, though now
widely spread, was not, he explained, self-evident. He limited
his enquiry to the development of the principle in medieval and
modern German law. It was not, he said, recognised in the earliest
German law, where unanimity, produced if necessary by force,
was the ruling idea. But in the second half of the Middle Ages
unanimity came to be reached by the prevalence of the views of
the majority, and the corporate conception was gradually evolved,
based on the fiction that the majority must legally be considered
the whole.
Perhaps the most general of the general papers was that of
Professor Ernst Bernheim on ‘Die historische Interpretation aus
den Zeitanschauungen’. He began by reminding his audience that
the view that each epoch of time left its own peculiar stamp upon
life had been very gradually developed through the writings of
Hegel and Comte. In historical interpretation it had not yet got so
far as to deal with the intellectual part of life from the point of
view of the various periods. Even when one was tolerably familiar
with them one could not enter as clearly as one would like into
their influence on ideas, words, motives and results, so as to
understand thoroughly the specific meaning of the various
events—‘if, in fact, we want to clothe the dry bones of history with
the flesh of life.’22
Between them, these general papers present us with more than
a skeleton of the approaches to history assuming shape at the
beginning of the twentieth century, a shape also indicated by the
addresses of Bryce and Morley. There is in fact a body of
interpretation from classical times through to modern, Eurocentric
and evolutionary. Greece and Rome, vastly superior to Babylon
and Egypt, passed the torch on with some added fuel from the
Barbarians’, especially the Germans, who helped to establish early
democratic principles, while the ‘impelling power’ of capitalism
was accompanied by appropriate social adjustments. Here then,
spelled out in brief, is the heritage of the paper givers from the
‘European home’.
93
Adding further flesh in various ways to the bones, by no

means in every sense dry, of the general papers were those of
the sections, which were nine in number: Oriental and Egyptolo-
gical; Greek, Roman and Byzantine; Medieval; Modern—includ-
ing Colonial, Naval and Military; Religious and Ecclesiastical;
Legal and Economic; Medieval and Modern Civilisational;
Archaeological and Prehistorical; Philosophical, Methodological
and Ancillary. The sections, The Times suggested, were ‘a forcible
illustration of the modern tendency to specialization that it is
in anyway possible for the assembled historians to choose
between the bewildering variety of papers that is offered for
their entertainment, if that is not too frivolous a word to use in
this connection’.23
‘Entertainment’ was not too frivolous a word for the proceedings
of the sectional meetings perhaps, but the delights were rarefied,
and indeed forcibly illustrative of a tendency towards
specialisation. Only one section was deemed worthy by The Times
of description in larger type rather than smaller, and that was for
certain of its aspects only. They were well introduced by Professor
C.W.Oman, who dealt with ‘A Defence of Military History’, urging
that a general knowledge of military history was essential to all
citizens, and that the creation of an instructed opinion in things
military and naval was most necessary. Other-wise we were at the
prey of cranks and sciolists posing as authorities. The ultimate
responsibility in high military matters rested with those who at
present knew nothing of them.24
On the opening day of the Congress, the Acting President Dr
Ward had remarked that, on the occasion of their holding the
Congress in the capital of the British Empire, he felt sure that
the foreign as well as the British members would all wish to see
colonial and naval and military history conspicuously
represented. Special practical importance had therefore been
attached to the proceedings at the Royal United Services
Institution where, in addition to the papers on these subjects,
addresses given from the chair by General Robertson and Sir
George Reid, and particularly by Prince Louis of Battenberg,
the First Sea Lord, added greatly to the interest of the daily
discussions, in the estimation of The Times. Admiral Prince Louis
remarked that the Admiralty was very much alive to the
importance of the study of naval history in the service, and
would welcome a textbook on the subject. He went on to take
94
the opportunity of making an announcement which he thought

might be of interest to those who took an interest in the study of
naval history. The present Board of the Admiralty, soon after
they took office, had realised the desirability of a study of the
tactics of the battle of Trafalgar, which for some years past had
been the subject of a great deal of discussion. At any rate it would
be gratifying to everybody to feel that the crowning achievement
of the incom-parable naval hero of the country had been
definitely and finally set at rest and would no longer be a subject
of discussion.25
Had there been more French delegates present, there might
have been less enthusiasm for a study of the tactics of the battle
of Trafalgar. But, in fact, there appears to have been no overt
dissension at the Congress, and any possibility of such was
reduced by the withdrawal of two papers from the Modern
Section because of ‘their close bearing on contemporary politics’.
On the other hand, reports in The Times on the sectional meetings
reinforce the impression gained from the general meetings and
welcoming speeches of strong prejudices at large among
historians in the spring of 1913. For example, Sir William Lee-
Warner, in a discussion of the evolution of Indian history,
considered the three stages through which the Indian peoples
had passed in the pursuit of freedom: under the Hindu priestcraft;
under the sword of Islam; and under British law. The last of these,
in the speaker’s view, ‘secured the public peace and defence of
India and abolished many evil customs, but, because of the
guarantee of religious neutrality which it gave, could only make
slow headway against the enslaving tendencies of past centuries’.
Another encomium of British law came from Professor H.Marczali
on ‘Count Széchenyi and the Introduction of English Civilization
to Hungary’. In the Count’s own estimation on his first visit, the
three things to be learned from England were constitution, engines
and horsebreeding. It was the constitutional freedom of England,
as opposed to the privileges of the nobility in Hungary, that most
appealed to him as the fulfilment of his own ideals of equality
and as the reason for England’s superiority to other countries.
However, while the Count came to England also to study the
science of bridge-building and to secure engineers and
steamboats, he was always averse to the introduction of
industrialism, and did not wish to put the reins of government
into the hands of a Kossuth, who had wanted to revive Hungary
95
by the agencies of industries and commerce. Professor Marczali

concluded his paper by prophesying that Hungary would some
day return to the doctrines of Count Széchenyi, ‘their great apostle
of humanity and truth’, whose sympathy for England turned, as
he said, to Anglomania.26
Most of the delegates at the Congress, of course, would have
been happy to listen to such observations, since they themselves
were English. In large part, they would also have agreed that the
British Raj had been a most progressive influence on India.
FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC ORDER,

1913–22
Generally speaking, the same mixture of mutual congratulation
and national assertiveness found at the Paris Exhibition of 1900
was in evidence at the London Congress of 1913. For example,
responding on behalf of the foreign guests at a dinner given by the
British government on 3 April, Professor Felix Liebermann,
corresponding Fellow of the British Academy from Berlin, declared
in German that:
the honour of thanking the British government for their

cordial reception of the delegates had probably been con-
ferred on him, and he had been allowed to express it in his
mother tongue, on account of the kinship of civilization
which connected the host country with Germany more
intimately than with any nation not speaking the Anglo-
Saxon tongue….
Here was ample reinforcement for the Teutonic idea of

civilisation so prevalent before the First World War. Further
support came from Commendatore Davidsohn who spoke in
German at a concluding dinner on 7 April on behalf of the
visiting dele-gations as a whole, observing that they all left
England enriched by many intellectual and artistic inspirations,
full, too, of a lively affection for a great, active and free people,
who for centuries had gone forward at the head of the
intellectual and political movement towards progress; for a
people to whom in the last resort was owing all that Europe
had realised in the form of free institutions since the beginning
of the French Revolution.27
96
But, of course, the German contribution to the Congress

consisted of far more than compliments: for example, apart from
Ernst Bernheim, no less an authority than Karl Lamprecht also
spoke on intellectual trends. Meanwhile, the French participation
was smaller, and the appraisal lower, at least in the view of Charles
Bernier of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts writing in the Revue
historique. Though praising the zeal and courtesy of the hosts, along
with a recreational programme so hospitable that it threatened to
overwhelm the cause of science, Bernier criticised the organisation
of the Congress, especially its dispersal and lack of centre, and the
earlier delay in sending out official invitations, the main reason
for the paucity of French delegates. As a consequence of this delay,
insufficient financial support could be found for greater attendance
from across the Channel: ‘it seems that in this time of entente
cordiale, and with England so close to us, France could have and
should have occupied a greater place at the Congress.’28
Possibly, too, albeit unwittingly, Bernier was expressing mis-
givings about the prevalence of the Teutonic idea, which tended to
exclude the contribution of France to European civilisation.
However, even American cousins, integral members of the Teutonic
grouping, were not totally happy with the arrangements made in
the mother country. Writing a report in The American Historical
Review, J.F.Jameson perhaps let the organisation of the Congress
down lightly with the observation: ‘It is to be expected that British
individualism, which has had such brilliant results in history,
should have its compensation in an organizing power, for such
occasions, inferior to that of some other nations’, in particular
Germany. Again, tempering criticism with indul-gence in a passage
concerning the importance of personal contact in a science such as
history in which the human element plays so large a part, Jameson
commented:
More of that pleasure and profit might have been had if

there had been easier means of finding members, inevitably
scattered through a great city, or if it had not been for the
English ‘custom’ of not introducing, but they were had in
a very rewarding measure.
On the sessions of the Congress, there was perhaps a further

element of damnation through faint praise in Jameson’s estimation:
‘papers which by extraordinary originality and power were
97
destined to alter signally the maps of their respective fields were

not numerous—but the general level was high, and the total
contribution to the science much more than respectable in quantity.’
More explicitly, the American commentator noted that not only
did more than half the programme, some forty papers, relate to
British history, but another substantial part, about twenty papers,
touched on it. And so:
An American could not help thinking it to be a strange

fact that, of more than a hundred papers presented by
British subjects, only one was concerned wholly, and
another partially, with the history of the United States, a
country embracing nearly two-thirds of the English-speak-
ing population of the globe.
A paper by Jameson himself on ‘Typical Steps in American

Expansion’ helped to redress the balance somewhat, along with
further contributions from his American colleagues who numbered
about twenty, compared with about 450 British out of a grand total
of 680. European representation included sixty-five from Germany,
thirty from Russia (including some Poles), twenty-five from
Austria-Hungary, and only twenty-two from France, about the
same number from the Netherlands and Belgium together, and
more than twice as many as from Scandinavia. There were just a
few delegates from other parts of Europe, from Latin America and
Japan. Here, quantitatively, was a further reflection of the biases
evident in the proceedings of the Congress.29
In one sense, the spirit of the Congress was that of Lord Acton,
who had died in 1902. A.W.Ward talked there in ‘pious
remembrance’ of Acton’s ‘characteristic breadth of knowledge and
depth of critical insight…ardour for the advancement of historical
studies, unfailing candour of judgement and generosity of
sympathy’.30 Yet Acton might well have been surprised by some of
the arguments advanced at the Congress by delegates from a
country which he had considered to be mostly inert in Universal
History—Russia. For example, A.S.Lappo-Danilevsky gave a well-
received lecture in French— ‘L’idée de l’état et son évolution en
Russie depuis les troubles du XVIIe siècle jusqu’aux réformes du
XVIIIe’. More generally, delivering the presidential address to the
Legal History Section in which Lappo-Danilevsky was to present
his paper, the émigré Paul Vinogradoff sought to suggest ‘the
98
connecting links between the various researches in Roman and

English, German and Slavonic, Civil, Canon, and Common Law’.
He went on to observe:
The fundamental unity of our study may be realized from

two main points of view. They are provided by continuity
on the one hand and by similarity on the other. There are
streams of doctrines and institutional facts which pass
through the ages and cross national boundaries from one
historical formation to another. These constitute what may
be called the current of cultural tradition. Again, the
solutions of legal problems on different occasions fall into
groups according to similarities and contrasts, for which
there is a common basis in the nature of the problems
themselves. This gives rise to the application of the
comparative method. The continuity of culture and
comparative jurisprudence produce the atmosphere of
what might have been called International Law, had not
the term been appropriated to other uses.31
(Needless to say, Vinogradoff made no reference in his paper to

the immediate problems of tsarism in his homeland, nor to the as
yet obscure critic of his views—V.I.Lenin.)
Going back in history beyond the formation of International
Law, two entire sessions at the Congress were devoted to recent
advances and results of archaeological exploration in southern
Russia. However, the Russian delegation’s sense of apartness was
reflected in the presentation of a formal protest about the exclusion
of the Russian language from the proceedings of the Congress,
especially significant in view of general agreement on St Petersburg
as the venue of the next Congress.
J.F.Jameson commented on this choice as he speculated about
the possibility of the Congress one day coming to the USA:
Doubtless the journey would seem difficult to many

historians, and after going to St. Petersburg in 1918 it may
be natural to wish to assemble in 1923 in some capital more
central to western Europe, and the summer climate of
Washington, or any other American city, would seem too
hot to even the most philosophical of European his-
torians.32
99
The years 1918 and 1923 would both come to bear a significance
different from that contemplated by J.F.Jameson in 1913. Recording
his impressions of the Congress at the beginning of 1914 in Nauchnyi
istoricheskii zhurnal, E.V.Tarle of St Petersburg regretted the fact that
the attendance in general was poor, and that in particular there
was an almost complete absence of French colleagues. He was also
disappointed that the English press was preoccupied by the
alarming news from Europe, in particular the Balkan peninsula;
the only exception was The Times, and even that newspaper for the
most part published its reports on the Congress away from the
main pages and in very small print. While he was pleased to note
that the atmosphere was one of serious interest rather than
‘scientific ecstasy’, Tarle was sorry that general questions of the
philosophy of history were largely untouched. In this respect in
particular, he observed:
The Congress expressed, on the one hand, the disorder

and confusion in generalising thought characteristic of our
time, and, on the other, the greatly increased exactitude. It
may be deplored that there is no sign of any new
fundamental formulations of methodological problems,
new interesting generalisations capable of moving science
forward. However, at the same time, it is impossible not
to discern that fortunately in recent years that dilettantism
has ceased which (especially in Germany) not so very long
ago brought very facile and arbitrary solutions to the most
complicated historico-philosophical questions.33
To some extent, in early 1914 Tarle was already mulling over

some of the ideas that he would put forward in 1922. He was also
perhaps voicing Franco-Russian disquiet at exclusion from the
Anglo-Saxon worldview. But, of course, his outlook would be
modified enormously by the First World War and the Russian
Revolution. Events from August 1914 would have a shattering
impact even for other delegates, not least for the Anglo-Saxons. In
1902, in an influential work on Principles of Western Civilisation,
Benjamin Kidd could write:
The native Teutonic habit of mind, underlying the English,

American, and German character, represents, of necessity,
certain qualities—tenacity of purpose, determination in the
100
presence of opposition, love for action and hunger for

power, all tending to express themselves through the State
—which were the necessary equipment of that military
type which has won in the supreme stress of Natural
Selection its right of place as the only type able to hold the
stage of the world in the long epoch during which the
present is destined to pass under the control of the future.34
From 1914 to 1918, natural selection exerted its supreme stress on

one of the three Teutonic nations, Germany, while another, America,
went from strength to strength.
In England, where the First World War made an impact trau-
matic enough, we find a variety of responses from the men who
had played leading parts in the Congress of 1913. Paul Vinogradoff,
among many other major contributions to the peace, wrote of the
necessity to update the system first indicated by Montesquieu in
The Spirit of the Laws. For Lord Bryce, it had been ‘a war of Principles
for Righteousness against Wickedness’. After the victory, it was
necessary to consider how to prevent future wars and encourage
the spirit of freedom and democracy, in particular by means of the
League of Nations. But Lord Morley indicated a different reaction
in the Preface to his Recollections published in 1917. Although he
expressed a loyalty to reason and desire for wise policies, he
declared that the war and his country’s action in it had led to his
retirement from public office. Moreover, in Morley’s estimation,
‘The world is travelling under formidable omens into a new era,
very unlike the times in which my lot was cast.’ Such a valedictory
attitude helped to form the view that ‘he was generally regarded,
during his last years, as sharing with Mr. Hardy the position of
doyen of English men of letters.’ And for Thomas Hardy himself,
in one evaluation at least:
The war had so barbarized taste, encouraged selfishness,
and increased knowledge at the expense of wisdom that
another Dark Age threatened, and the only hope for the
world seemed to be an alliance between religion and
complete rationality ‘by means of the interfusing effect of
poetry’.
And yet, as Comte had said, progress was never in a straight

line, and perhaps the regression was drawing back for a leap
forward. He hoped, though forlornly, that it was so.35
101
Farewell to old England was in part welcome to the new USA.

Sadness in the hedged fields of Wessex was accompanied by
exuberance in the unfenced lands of Wisconsin, and the centre of
the English-speaking world was poised to move considerably to
the west of longitude 30 where Lord Acton had placed it in 1896.
In the USA, Frederick Jackson Turner had recently observed that
with the closure of the American frontier in 1890, the first period
of American history had closed four centuries from the discovery
of the continent, and after one hundred years of life under the
constitution. Then in that same year of 1896, he recommended
‘the extension of American influence to outlying islands and
adjoining countries’. Meanwhile, those outlying islands did not
include those forming the United Kingdom, and there was still
much cultural deference before British and other European
models over the ocean. Yet, for example, a loud note of
independence was struck in the first volume of the American
Historical Review, published also in 1896. In an essay entitled
‘History and Democracy’, W.M.Sloane observed: ‘It seems to be
the opinion of the keenest observers beyond the Atlantic that the
old world today is weary of the past.’ While Europe yearned for
modernity and futurity, the tendency ‘from experience towards
theory, from adaptation towards experiment, from progress on
traditional lines to advance on untried paths’ was still ‘in no sense
characteristic of America’. But the easy circulation of ideas
throughout the world might introduce that tendency into the
USA, and Sloane warned: ‘if it comes or when it comes, and a
conservative democracy guiding itself by the lights of history is
transmuted into a radical ochlocracy moving by impulse or
steering by wreckers’ beacons, then, as it takes no prophetic gift
to foretell, we shall have anarchy and ruin.’36
Twenty years on, fears such as Sloane’s were beginning to
seize the souls of many of his fellow-Americans as they
prepared for entry into the First World War. After the victorious
end to the war alarm rose to epidemic proportions as a
consequence of the Russian Revolution in the great ‘Red Scare’
of 1919. However, at the same time, there was quiet satisfaction,
even not so quiet celebration, at the thought that the torch of
civilisation might be returning from ‘over there’. Even the
normally prosaic American Historical Review could break into
verse, quoting:
102
Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there
beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
Relative affluence should allow the American Historical

Association to encourage ‘a wide variety of laudable enterprises,
both those which will specially advance historical scholarship in
America and those which will be useful alike to us and the
historians of burdened Europe’.37
As often, the ‘spirit of the age’, or at least some elements in it,
can best be caught through an examination of some episodes in
the career of a single individual, although in this case the example
chosen is far from typical. Having resigned from Columbia
University in 1917 in solidarity with two colleagues dis-missed
for opposing the war policies of the former President of Princeton
University, Woodrow Wilson, Charles A.Beard set off in 1921 to
see for himself the predicament of Europe. On his return, he gave
a series of lectures in 1922 at Dartmouth College, published in
the same year under the title Crosscurrents in Europe Today,38 and
described by the author himself as ‘a collection of notes’ which
he hoped would be pertinent ‘to the great case of Mankind vs.
Chaos’. Among Beard’s notes were several on the Russian
Revolution. From the first, he observed, Lenin had never been
deceived by ‘the childish phantasy that paper decrees would
establish the new heaven and the new earth’ and had
demonstrated since the October Revolution ‘the doctrine of the
pragmatist’. In 1922, it seemed to him ‘fairly safe to guess’ that
Russia would evolve into ‘a huge peasant democracy’ and that ‘a
form of state capitalism’ would take ‘the place of communism’.
Throughout Europe, socialists had ‘laid Marx on the shelf’, having
discovered that ‘party programs do not make plows’. As for that
other great force, nationalism, Beard hoped that statesmen would
come to see that its ethnic and geographical bases had nothing to
do with prosperity, and that ‘some kind of a general economic
constitution’ would be adopted throughout the continent.
Meanwhile, with or without nationalism, the ‘new America’
would be forced by the ‘paralysis of Europe’ to look upon the
Pacific region as ‘the new theatre’.39
103
To move on a further four years for an afterword, as the Prefatory

Note to the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica rightly
observed in 1926:
In fifteen years, as a result partly of physical conflict unpar-

alleled for scale, violence and intensity; partly of the full
and manifold working of influences which had begun to
appear before the War, there has occurred a universal
revolution in human affairs and the human mind.
Because of this universal revolution, and the consequent

uncertainty of the future, the editor J.L.Garvin decided that it was
‘almost unquestionably right to depart from the principle of
Olympian judgment practised by The Encyclopaedia Britannica at
long leisure in more stable times’.
Nowhere was such a departure more noticeable than in a
contribution entitled ‘English-Speaking Peoples, Relations Of’ by
John St Loe Strachey, former editor and proprietor of The Spectator
among other journalistic activities, and author of such books as
The Adventure of Living, Economics of the Hour and Problems and Perils
of Socialism. This subject had never before appeared as such in the
encyclopaedia, but was now considered by Strachey to be ‘perhaps
the greatest of all causes at the present moment’. Because of its
importance, the utmost care was needed in its development and
maintenance. In particular:
Misunderstanding is the chief and disintegrating force in

human affairs. It is that which poisons and disturbs the
body politic. It acts as sepsis does in the body natural. This
is particularly the case with the cause of amity among the
speakers of the English-speaking tongue. Misunder-
standings, on both sides of the Atlantic, spring up like
mushrooms, and with them arise distrust, suspicion, sore-
ness and wounded pride. Thoroughly good intentions use
vague and infelicitous language. Their words are misrep-
resented, and have reactions, evil instead of good. They
are suspected of selfish and sly propaganda! Yet, all the
time, the supposed propaganda was launched in perfect
good faith, and without a thought of taking advantage.
But, naturally, the repelled well-wisher is deeply hurt to
see himself what he calls ‘cruelly misunderstood’. What is
104
wanted is to make absolutely clear the aims of those who

speak the language of Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton, of
Washington, Lincoln and Emerson.
The objection could be made, other than to Strachey’s emotive

language, that he juxtaposed three literary figures from England
with one literary figure and two statesmen from America. But to
help avoid what he called ‘the friction of alarm’, Strachey, ‘a
convinced and life-long supporter of Anglo-American amity and
goodwill’, went on to set out: (1) what the friends of
understanding wanted; (2) why they wanted it; and (3) how they
proposed to get it:
1 True friends of good understanding sought amity not to crush
other races or to exalt their own, but rather, through the link of
language and the consequent intellectual liaison, to make use
of the opportunity for human betterment thereby arising.
2 This was wanted
for the reason that in an understanding between those who
speak the English tongue is to be found the instrument
that will save the civilisation which has been built up with
so much toil and anguish, high hopes and high endeavour,
from going the way of Egypt and Persia, of Athens and
Rome and of a hundred noble races and mighty empires.
If people of good will did not act together, then they might drift
‘into a long series of wars which will sap the vitality of the white
races and expose the civilised world, as we know it, to incursions
from the barbarians of our epoch’.
3 How to arrive at such a goal? There must be forbearance on
both sides of the Atlantic: ‘as zealous Englishmen have got
to avoid the slightest appearance of wishing to catch and lead
Americans, so zealous Americans must avoid the slightest
appearance of wishing, as foolish people would say, “to drag
John Bull chained at their chariot wheels”.’ Both must make
it clear to the whole world that they did not wish to dominate
it. They must learn a different kind of propaganda from that
of the French Jacobins who had proclaimed: ‘Be our brothers,
or we will slay you’, and remember the words of Tennyson:
‘How pure at heart and sound in head,/With what divine
affections bold…’40
105
Implications that England was the senior partner in the union may
be found here, and, indeed, in some senses, England continued
also to dominate Great Britain culturally speaking until after the
Second World War, which produced another ‘universal revolution
in human affairs and the human mind’. However, the First World
War had indeed shaken the foundations of European civilisation,
including those of the offshore islands, while pro-moting a shift in
the centre of gravity of the wider Atlantic community.41
In this chapter, we have examined German, French and English
approaches to the question of Western world order in the early
years of the twentieth century, all sharing assumptions about the
superiority of European civilisation at the same time as expressing
distinctive national viewpoints. We then went on to consider how
historians meeting in London in 1913 set out their views, nearly
all Eurocentric, even Anglocentric. We have then looked at aspects
of the impact of the First World War on several historians, most of
whom had been present at the London Congress.
What, it may be asked, has happened to constitutional and
revolutionary order, and to the pH test? To answer these questions
as simply as possible: constitutional order has provided much of
the subtext of this chapter, nearly all the ideas discussed in it coming
from academics and intellectuals who believed in measured
progress; in the pH test, the nature of the neutral white has changed,
the ‘universal indicator’ now beginning to consist not only of
Europe but also of the USA, which was assuming a much greater
importance in both English-speaking and Atlantic worlds, even if
some years would elapse before it became dominant. We shall look
at this process, along with the marginalisation of Europe’s
continental frontier, the USSR, in Chapter 4.
106
4
SOME APPROACHES TO
WORLD ORDER, 1923–62
Was the Second World War a greater historical watershed than the
First? To a considerable extent, the answer depends on generation.
That is, older respondents would tend to say no, younger would
probably say yes. A further influence would be location. For
example, few Japanese would fail to answer in the affirmative.
There are other pertinent aspects of time and space: history does
provide a seal of approval, partly because of some inherent
veneration for maturity, partly because with the passage of the years
the wood becomes more distinguishable from the trees. Before the
First World War, references to the Great War meant an earlier
conflict. During and even after the Russian Revolution, there were
references to the Great Revolution meaning the earlier, French
upheaval.1 As far as place is concerned, the Second World War was
more completely a global affair, while the First was more centred
on Europe. This was partly because in little more than two decades,
the world had shrunk, with improvements in communications and
transport as well as armaments.
In this chapter, continuing the historiographical survey of the
twentieth century begun in the previous chapter, we shall consider
some of the observations of a further series of historians, which
will take us from 1923 to 1962, when the shooting wars had been
followed by the Cold War, and when Western world orders were
at least beginning to make some accommodation for the rest of
the globe. As before, constitutional and revolutionary orders,
along with the pH test, continue for the most part to form a
background to the discussion, although occasionally coming to
the foreground.
107
SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER
PIRENNE AND EUROPE, 1923

In the spring of 1923, the Fifth International Congress of Historical
Sciences or Studies met in Brussels, Belgium, ten years almost to
the day after the Fourth Congress in London. A keynote address
entitled ‘On the Comparative Method in History’ was given by
Henri Pirenne, who had spent some of the inter-vening period in a
prisoner-of-war camp, and who began by recalling the earlier,
happy experience in London. He remembered in particular the
appeal of Lord Bryce for international agreement based on
historical solidarity, and the decision to meet again in 1917 in St
Petersburg.2 Alas, in 1917, civilisation was undergoing the most
terrible crisis ever, and all energies were devoted to its resolution.
St Petersburg had become Petrograd, and the Russian Revolution
of 1917 made a Congress there impossible. Peace had ensued, but
had given the world neither security nor serenity. How many
problems still had to be solved, exclaimed Pirenne, and how much
moral and intellectual disar-ray could be observed, along with
disturbance of social and economic equilibrium. In spite of all these
and other difficulties, historians had resumed their pursuit of truth
with as much detachment as possible, in the spirit of Louis Pasteur,
who had observed: ‘It is a question of fact, and I approach it without
any preconceived idea. I can only yield to experience, whatever
the answer.’ And now, among these facts were all those
accumulated during the war, which had in general enlarged the
nature of the subject.
During the war, the belligerents had requisitioned for their
use two sciences in particular—chemistry and history. One had
provided explosives and gas, the other pretexts, justifications
and excuses. But their fate had differed: chemistry could serve
armies and preserve its nature, even make precious discoveries,
while history lost its essential qualities of criticism and
impartiality. This loss could always be found in time of war, yet
to interpret princely genealogies and discuss treaties as under
the Ancien Régime was no longer enough: now the morale of
one’s own people had to be maintained by, among other
methods, academic attacks on the enemy. However, such work
had served only to demonstrate the lack of a scientific basis for
the excesses of nationalism, for racial theories. There was no
such phenomenon as pure race, and various peoples had
developed at differ-ent rates not because of racial characteristics
108
but because of different circumstances. This meant that at any

given time the peoples of the world belonged to various stages
of development. Nevertheless, they all went through comparable
stages, and the only way to understand their individuality was
to compare their experiences. Only in such a manner was it
possible to achieve scientific knowledge.
This was a demanding task, and the objection would be raised
that it was beyond any single individual historian. But no chem-
ist could know all of chemistry, still less all of nature. Specialis-
ation was therefore as necessary in chemistry as in history, but in
both from a point of view that was universal. The universal
approach to history had been established up to and during the
eighteenth century, but romanticism and nationalism had
introduced diversity in the nineteenth century. This was far from
being an entirely backward step, since the search for local colour
and differences between peoples had made history more ‘lively,
picturesque and thrilling’ than it had ever been, at the same time
as the criticism of sources and enquiry into all branches of social
activity—law, customs and economy, for example—had made the
subject richer and more precise. Deservedly, the nineteenth should
be called the century of history.
However, this achievement must be considered scholarly rather
than scientific. Apparently, as the field of history wid-ened, its
vision became narrower, ever shrinking as it approached the
present, that is as nationalism and imperialism asserted themselves,
and produced an exclusiveness in the approach to the past. The
consequent lack of impartiality might be unwitting but it was
certainly fatal:
The prejudices of race, politics and nationalism are too

powerful for man to escape if he does not place himself
outside their grasp. To liberate oneself, it is necessary to
raise oneself to the heights from which history appears as
a whole in the majesty of its development, the passing
passions of the moment become calm and subside before
the sublimity of the spectacle.3
Pirenne claimed no originality for his views, and saluted the

manner in which others had put them forward before the war;
Henri Berr, for example, was still engaged in a great project begun
in 1920 with the title ‘The Evolution of Humanity’.4 But Pirenne
109
believed it necessary to emphasise that the only way of arriving at

the desired destination was via the comparative method. That was
the only way to allow history to free itself from the idols of
sentiment and become a science. History would also become a
science to the extent that it adopted for national history the point
of view of universal history. And as it did so, it would become not
only more exact but also more humane: ‘The scientific will go hand
in hand with the moral gain, and nobody will complain if it one
day should inspire in peoples, through showing them the solidarity
of their destinies, a patriotism more fraternal, more aware (conscient)
and more pure.’5
Unfortunately, even tragically, as is well known, the hopes held
out by Pirenne were being dashed almost as he spoke. Indeed, it
could be argued that the impact of the First World War, the Russian
Revolutions and their aftermaths were such that his address was a
vain appeal for historians to meet an impossible standard. Certainly,
Pirenne himself appears to have surmounted the effect of his own
harrowing experiences, and could therefore be forgiven for daring
to suggest that others might follow suit. Several historians indeed
did, but the sequel was not just a matter of personal choice, and
some brave souls were overwhelmed during the following inter-
war years.
In Western Europe, all too evidently, the aspirations of Pirenne
as voiced in 1923 came to less than they might have done. Owing
to the effect on historians and other individuals of the
persistence of ‘war guilt’, both levelled as a charge and stemming
from self-recrimination, and, later, of the gathering clouds of a
further great conflict, the hopes for a new European cosmo-
politanism and for a wider outlook accommodating other
continents were far from realised. And when we turn again to
consider Europe’s outliers in this new phase, we shall see that,
for various reasons, both the USSR and USA were less involved
in Western civilisation than previously, for both internal and
external reasons.
Yet the picture is not all gloom. Pirenne himself persisted
through the rest of his life, not only completing his multi-volume
history of Belgium but also endeavouring to look outwards. For
example, just before his death in 1935, he completed in draft a
study of the relationship of two great figures of the early Middle
Ages, arguing that ‘without Mahomet, Charlemagne would have
been inconceivable’. He enjoyed a close relationship with Marc
110
Bloch and other leading figures of the French Annales school.6

Stemming in some ways from the ‘synthesis’ movement initiated
by Henri Berr in 1900, the Annales school did as much as any
other group during the inter-war period to point the way forward,
struggling to overcome the restrictions of nationality and
tradition.7 Even as Italy and Germany succumbed to dictatorship,
some of their nationals managed to escape the strident chorus of
xenophobia, although they either fell prey to per-secution or went
into emigration. 8 No branch of Nazi historiography was as
warped as that dealing with the East, the land promised by the
Führer as Lebensraum.9 And although some of Eastern Europe
resisted the urge to respond in kind, intense nationalism
developed also in the alleged home of class-based
internationalism, the USSR.
E.V.TARLE AND THE USSR, 1923–48

The ups and downs of academic life in the USSR from the
incapacity of Lenin to the death of Stalin, 1923–53, are well
illustrated in the career of an individual whose earlier work we
have already referred to, E.V.Tarle. During the 1920s, he was able
to coexist with his Marxist colleagues, and, indeed, was elected
to full membership of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in
1927. But the reckoning came soon after. In 1928, he was due to
attend the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo
but was withdrawn at the last moment. In the same year, he was
attacked as a ‘pseudo-Marxist’ and ‘economic-materialist’. In
1930, he was arrested, and soon implicated in a ‘plot’ to restore
the monarchy. He spent five years in exile in Kazakhstan.
However, in 1934, the pendulum of party favour swung back,
and Tarle returned to energetic activity for another twenty years
or so, collecting many honours on the way as well as undergoing
further, if lesser, difficulties. Less an orthodox Marxist than a
somewhat circumspect conformist, Tarle wrote patriotic histories
of the War of 1812 and the Crimean War, among many other
works, too many to describe or even list.10
Here, in consonance with one of this chapter’s basic aims,
emphasis will be on the contemporary conflicts, the First and
Second World Wars, through to the Cold War. In 1927, Tarle
brought out a major study, Europe in the Age of Imperialism, 1871–
1919, with a second, revised edition soon following in that, for
111
him, fateful year 1928. According to his opponents, in this

interpretation of the origins of the First World War, Tarle made
three cardinal errors: he denied the intensification of the class
struggle during the years 1872–1914; he considered that Germany
rather than the Entente powers was responsible for the outbreak
of hostilities in 1914; and he argued that, following the Brest-
Litovsk Treaty of March 1918, German policy in the East
strengthened the resolve of the Entente in the West. For a
combination of reasons, as much to do with Soviet foreign policy
in 1928 as with deviations from Marxist or Leninist interpretations
of imperialism, Tarle’s analysis of the origins and immediate
sequel of the First World War helped to bring about his personal
temporary downfall.11
Tarle’s estimate of the impact of the war on Europe was less
controversial, or at least less central to the attack made on him
in 1928 by his opponents. Certainly, in his view, the losses had
been enormous all round. Although there had been rhetorical
exaggeration in such phrases as ‘The end of Europe’ and ‘The
ruin of the West’, the unvarnished truth could be seen in
mortality figures. Leaving aside Turkey and the Balkans in
general and the massacre of the Armenians in particular,
omitting civ-ilian losses resulting from the British blockade of
Germany and from influenza throughout Europe, concentrating
indeed on the military losses of the major powers, the figures
showed that two million Germans were killed or missing; those
next worse affected were Russians, Austro-Hungarians and
Frenchmen. As far as material losses were concerned, a far from
complete indi-cation could be given by figures for the internal
and external debt of a number of powers, greater and smaller,
in millions of dollars at the beginning and end of the war: these
indicated that payment for the war had been made by Russia,
Germany, Britain, France and the USA, in that descending order.
Of course, most of the US debt was internal, to its own citizens.
As far as the European powers were concerned, the war was an
economic catastrophe for victors and vanquished alike, and they
were all in various degrees of debt to the USA, sending $665
million in interest across the Atlantic in 1920 alone. But the USA
had no interest in crippling Europe either financially in
particular or economically in general.
Along with economic disaster went social dislocation. In some
respects there was reversion to passive attitudes known long before
112
1914, in others widespread activity of a newer kind, especially

among workers. Governments feared that the comparative stability
of the nineteenth century was an aberration, and that there would
be a reversion to instability, possibly in the form of a new revolution.
But the apt observation was made that the situation was more
revolutionary than the people, and by about 1924 a kind of recovery
was noted in many parts of the continent, with some reassertion
of European self-confidence and a comparative fall in American
dominance.12
About twenty years later, this time discussing the
consequences of the Second World War, Tarle was far less
moderate and objective in his tone. He began with a bold
declaration of the importance of the Great October Socialist
Revolution as the mightiest of the world-historical turning
points experienced by humanity in many centuries. This made
the Soviet Union’s salvation of Europe and Asia all the more
significant for those anxious to oppose the emergence of world
fascism and reactionary aggression. This was a far cry from the
Tarle of the earlier or even the later 1920s, now wanting to
emphasise, for example, that at the Paris Peace Conference, the
Soviet government was never referred to as such, but rather as
the ‘Maximalists’. After the Intervention had failed, Tarle
suggested, there ensued in America and Europe a period of
hangover after the immediate post-war excitment. On the one
hand, none of the capitalist powers wanted any rival to secure
economic advantages in its dealings with the Soviet Union. On
the other hand, all those powers feared the consolidation of the
USSR, and consequently embarked on provocations, such as the
infringement of the immunity of Soviet embassies.
These assaults became more serious in the 1930s, with the
rise of the fascist powers which the Western powers hoped
would do their dirty work for them. But the repulse of the
Japanese at Khasan and Khalkin Gol in 1938–9 was followed by
the immediate frustration of Western hopes that Hitler would
attack on the European flank. The French government impris-
oned thousands of communists, and allowed the Nazis to occupy
Poland without one shot fired on the Rhine, before its own quick
collapse in 1940. The treacherous invasion of the USSR by the
fascist hordes was greeted by much of the Western press as
another certain victory for them. But, after the first deceptive
appearances confirming such a view, the scales fell from their
113
eyes as the Red Army went from Stalingrad to Kursk and on to

its great victory. First the Japanese, and then the Nazis and the
Allies came to realise that the Soviet Union was strengthened,
not weakened, by the Great October Socialist Revolution. The
Allies’ part in the Red victory was far from the ‘decisive’
contribution claimed, while the much delayed D-Day crossing
of the Channel was only finally undertaken due to fear of the
rapidity and completeness of that victory. Only now was it fully
realised that, having crushed with an iron hand any possibility
of behind-the-lines activity by a ‘fifth column’, Soviet power
was sufficiently developed to deal the mortal blow to Hitler and
his bandit forces.
Advancing into Eastern Europe, the Soviet forces had cleared
country after country not only of ‘the brown plague’, but also of
centuries-old feudal oppressions and appalling spiritual poison.
In particular, the abolition of the Prussian Junker class had effected
a profound social transformation and acted as a symbol of hope
for further progress. Meanwhile, in a reactionary policy
culminating in the Truman Doctrine, the British and American
governments had been supporting the most anti-democratic
politicians in Greece. Such evident suppression of popular
aspirations had led only to greater unity among the Slav and non-
Slav peoples of Eastern Europe and their stronger, united support
for the only power that could save them from the fate suffered by
the Greeks, Spaniards and Indonesians. Similar unity and support
were being demonstrated outside Europe by those who aspired
to self-realisation, the Indonesians and the Koreans, Indians and
Egyptians.
At the same time, the Soviet Union acted not only as protector
of democracy and independence, but also as a guarantor of world
peace. Tarle asserted: ‘The possessors of money bags were seized
by a seductive illusion of invincibility.’ But their threats of thunder
and lightning (so far only verbal) were breaking against the
granite wall calmly erected before them. They could not win the
diplomatic struggle—for example, reject the argument that the
Soviet Union as one of the victorious powers had the right to
participate in the settlement of the question of the German Ruhr.
Nor could they overcome the fact that the Soviet Union was the
only world power that was socialist, seeking prosperity without
the princes of the stock exchange and the kings of oil and steel,
and opposing the draconian anti-worker legislation of the USA
114
and its allies. Millions of workers throughout the world helped

to defend the USSR against the neo-fascists and transatlantic
followers of Nazism.
In the autumn of 1947, Tarle noted, there would be two
significant anniversaries: 800 years since the founding of Moscow
as capital of a great state, and thirty years since the transformation
of that state into a socialist power. How many exciting comparisons,
how many ideas were evoked by the thought of these happily
coincidental celebrations, among them the occasions during the
country’s 1,100-year history, for example during the Napoleonic
invasion, when Russian military might had helped to save Europe.
To be sure, at other times that same power had acted in a more
threatening manner. Undoubtedly, the Great October Socialist
Revolution had produced a much greater power, exclusively for
progress. Concluded Tarle:
The struggle for the preservation of peace between peoples

and for the social progress of humankind is now associated
throughout the world with the image of Moscow, old and
new, and of a mighty world power of which the Kremlin
is the heart and brain.13
There can be no doubt that in the year 1947 the Kremlin was
looked upon throughout the world as the centre of the communist
movement, although from 1949 Red Russia was to be joined by
Red China in the even more formidable Moscow-Peking axis
symbolising hope for the world—or a threat, since in the West
especially its strongest bastion, the USA, the spread of
communism was viewed in a manner diametrically opposed to
that of Tarle. Needless to say, the Cold War isolated historians in
the USSR as well as distorting historical analysis throughout the
world, and the fact that the West has been deemed the victor does
not in itself mean that the Western range of interpretation is
correct. Much the same might be said about the period between
the wars, the rise of Italian fascism and German Nazism
combining with the consolidation of Soviet power to produce an
international climate in which objectivity was difficult, if not
impossible, to maintain, even in the more pluralist West, crushing
the hopes of Pirenne.14
115
C.A.BEARD AND THE USA, 1923–48

A perspective on American academic life from after the First to
after the Second World War may be gained through an
examination of episodes in the career of Charles A.Beard. Like
his Soviet counterpart, E.V.Tarle, Beard was by no means a consist-
ently orthodox figure, and was often at odds with the
establishment, although without such dire consequences. Like
Tarle, too, Beard was a man of great energy in a wide variety of
fields, including the production of many books and articles.
Neces-sarily, therefore, the following discussion will be highly
selective.
Before 1917, Beard’s career ran along fairly normal lines,
combining university teaching with social awareness and
intellectual curiosity, the latter showing itself in the ‘New History’
movement which he joined along with James Harvey Robinson.
This called for a broadening of the subject in economic and other
directions, while engaging the attention of the ‘common man’ as
well as the statesman. Then, although supporting the USA’s entry
into the First World War, he resigned from Columbia University
over the issue of academic freedom to oppose government policy,
and remained an independent scholar for most of the rest of his
career. His two best-known works were An Economic Interpretation
of the Constitution, published in 1913, and The Rise of American
Civilization which he brought out with his wife and collaborator,
Mary Ritter Beard, in 1927. A controversial figure, Beard was
subjected to many criticisms, including those visited upon
E.V.Tarle (albeit in very different circumstances) of ‘economic
determinism’ and ‘pseudo-Marx-ism’. Largely, on the constitution
Beard argued that there were two major property-based groups:
the Hamiltonian for finance, industry and the city; and the
Jeffersonian for self-sufficiency, agriculture and rural life.
American civilisation’s rise marked a triumph for Hamilton over
Jefferson, especially after the post-humous showdown of the Civil
War, but there was still some hope for Jefferson’s republican virtue
updated in an ‘industrial democracy’. The Crash of 1929 followed
by the Depression of the 1930s turned Beard from a belief in
science and technology to a search for new explanations of the
great economic calamity and new sources of historical
understanding. On the first count, he lost the belief he had
previously held (as for most of their careers, although not always
116
in the 1790s, had Hamilton and Jefferson) in international trade.

His hopes that Franklin Roose-velt’s ‘New Deal’ would
concentrate on national planning were dashed even before what
he came to see as the betrayal of entry into the Second World
War. His last major work, President Roosevelt and the Coming of the
War, published in the year of his death, 1948, gave full rein to his
sense of betrayal. As his death approached he was less than happy
at the declaration of the Cold War, suspicious of the Marshall
Plan and aghast at the Truman Doctrine.15
At the end of 1933, Beard gave his Presidential Address to the
American Historical Association, ‘Written History as an Act of
Faith’, declaring:
Having broken the tyranny of physics and biology,

contemporary thought in historiography turns its engines
of veri-fication upon the formula of historical relativity—
the formula that makes all written history merely relative
to time and circumstance, a passing shadow, an illusion.
Upbraided by a colleague for his economic determinism

originating in Marxism, for his alleged belief that To discover caus-
ation is pure illusion: to offer any other interpretation than one
based on a bold philosophy is to leave history to be the prey of
prejudice’, Beard retorted:
I cannot speak for others, but so far as I am concerned, my

conception of the economic interpretation of history rests
upon documentation older than Karl Marx, Number X of
the Federalist, the writings of the Fathers of the Republic,
the works of Daniel Webster, the treatises of Locke, Hobbes,
and Machiavelli, and the Politics of Aristotle—as well as
the writings of Marx himself.
In furtherance of his relativist beliefs, Beard developed an

interest in the work of German idealist historians, in particular
Friedrich Meinecke. This provided the main theme of an article he
wrote with Alfred Vagts in 1937, entitled ‘Currents of Thought in
Historiography’. They suggested that if Meinecke’s work did
indeed enter controversy, its spirit was that of the elusive search
for truth, and his concept of Historismus contained nothing of the
opprobrious. Meinecke claimed that his Historismus was ‘one of
117
the greatest spiritual revolutions which Occidental thought has

undergone’, overcoming the belief in the stability of human nature
and even more in the power of human reason put forward by the
natural rights school since the later seventeenth century. His
emphasis was on the unique: ‘each time…has its own style’; for
him: ‘The quintessence of historism consists in the replacement of
the generalizing view of historico-human forces by an
individualizing view.’
Setting out Meinecke’s position, Beard and Vagts both elaborated
and criticised it. Among the figures lighted on by Meinecke as his
predecessors were Montesquieu and Burke. He argued that The
Spirit of the Laws had helped to undermine the main weakness of
the Enlightenment, which was its judgement of the past by the
standards of the present. Montesquieu had suggested that nature
was a force of feeling which should be given its own way, although
he did not resolve the contradiction between nature as moral cause
and as physical cause, and fell some distance short of grasping the
individual character of the historical personality. For his part, Burke
had launched the strongest arguments against the French
Revolution as the consequence of natural rights, in favour of ‘saints
and knights’ and ‘pious endurance of the world as it is’.
Comparing Meinecke’s 1936 two-volume work on Historismus
with his earlier studies, Beard and Vagts found the influence of
society and economy on idea and interest more closely indicated.
At the same time, they criticised him for being more aware of
this influence on those he disliked than on those he liked, and
for not making a proper distinction between the conditions in
which French, British and German thought evolved. Hoisting
him with his own petard, they wrote that historism, as defined
by Meinecke, was:
an outgrowth of the bureaucratization of German

intelligence, a function of the servitude imposed upon
business enterprise in Germany, where its development
occurred late, with the aid of only a small intelligentsia
and under the dominance of a military and civil
bureaucracy. This bureaucracy, though out of sympathy
with the rising capitalism on which it mainly lived, did
not greatly restrain the specific interests which finally got
control of the Reich, namely, the heavy industries and
large-scale agriculture…. Meinecke, the historian of State
118
Reason, in truth, belongs to the penultimate generation of

historians who uphold and justify by history the rule of
that bureaucracy and whatever may be behind it.
However, historism would be different in Germany from other

countries:
Neither the content nor the purpose nor the implemen-

tation of American historiography can be the same as that
of historism in Germany or its counterpart in other
countries of Continental Europe, unless we are to believe
that an encompassing social environment makes no
impress on written history.
And so, having weighed up the alternatives, ‘the historian may, if

he can, decide whether he desires to be a maker of history after the
style of the Enlightenment or a victim of it in the manner of Ranke
and Meinecke.’
In conclusion, Beard and Vagts made a number of further
observations concerning currents of thought in historiography.
Analogies with physics and biology, they suggested again, were
on the way out, allowing a return to history as actuality and to the
historian’s subjective or psychological nature. As Croce among
others had indicated, theory and practice tended to con-form to
each other, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding; in other
words, neither theory nor practice existed in a ‘pure’ state. In such
circumstances, each historian would develop a ‘scheme of
reference’, liberal, fascist, Marxist or other. While such labels were
sometimes used too broadly, perhaps, it would be wrong to think
that each historian could develop a unique ‘scheme’. Equally, given
any ‘scheme’, there might be scrupulous and critical use of sources
and facts and, so far, a degree of scientific exactness. Certainly, it
was impossible to return to the type of historism ‘under which the
historian imagined himself able to know history as it had actually
been. That philosophy, for such it was while denying philosophy,
has been wrecked beyond repair.’ At the same time, historians had
moved on from the view that written history was exclusively
concerned with military, political and diplomatic events. They now
accepted as integral parts of their province aspects of biological
and psychological enquiry, for example ‘biometric investigations
of genius, character and family traits’. Indeed, ‘historiography
119
penetrates all specialities and reveals more clearly to them the all
encompassing medium of history as actuality’. And so, to quote
the last words of Beard and Vagts at some length:
Slowly it dawns in contemporary consciousness that

historiography so conceived furnishes such guides to
grand public policy as are vouchsafed to the human mind.
They may be frail guides, but what else have we? The
public policy of each country turns in part upon the posture
and trends of domestic events. On them historiography
so conceived must report. If its reports are meager,
inaccurate, partial, haphazard, and marked by fear,
negligence, and indifference, so much the worse for grand
public policy. If they are full, accurate, comprehensive,
systematic—the fruits of tireless industry and a bold
conception of historical obligations—so much the better
for grand public policy. Even when they repudiate it, deny
it, and seek refuge in the dust of analytical philology,
historians have a public responsibility: the kind of history
they write, whether good or bad, helps to make history in
spite of their efforts to escape from the outcome of their
own labors. As the full-ness of their responsibility unfolds
in the consciousness of historians, historiography will rise
in the estimation of those who serve it and of the society
which it serves, for weal or woe.16
During the inter-war years 1923–41, the belief that historians

should serve society was reflected in the pages of the American
Historical Review, although few practitioners of the subject went as
far as states such as Wisconsin, which passed a law in 1923 that
there should be no falsification in textbooks on such important
subjects as the American Revolution and the War of 1812. Indeed,
as the Second World War got under way warnings were given
against imposing such orthodoxies: let there be no repeat or
continuation of the ‘America First’ slogans or ‘Red Scare’ excesses
that had impinged upon intellectual freedom after the Russian
Revolution and First World War.
There were distant echoes of the ‘Red Scare’ even in Charles
H.Haskins’s article of 1923, ‘European History and American
Scholarship’. After noting that the Communist Manifesto had first
come out in the revolutionary year of 1848, he observed: ‘two
120
generations later Bolshevism appears in the lumber camps of the

Pacific Northwest’. But the main emphasis, if also inter-nationalist,
was also more academic. Haskins affirmed:
Young or old, Europe and America are now in the same

boat, along with the still older Orient, all common material
for history. The historian’s world is one; let him interpret
it as one, in relation both to scholarship and to the molding
of public opinion.
At about the same time, however, reporting on the recent

International Congress of Historical Sciences in Brussels, Waldo
G.Leland pointed out that there had been poor attendance at
experimental sessions on American history, and that interest had
been greatest when there had been some connection with European
history. Five years later, at the Oslo Congress, the position had
changed little if at all, J.F.Jameson observing that there was wide
recognition of the political, economic and social strength of the
USA, but still little or no interest in American history.17
Up to this point, virtually all the major contributions to the
American Historical Review had concerned what might be called
‘Atlantic civilisation’ and its roots in the Middle East, although
at the end of the 1920s ‘the still older Orient’—Chinese history —
made an appearance. Presidential addresses and other broad-
based articles considered such themes as law in history, social
psychology and ‘The Newer Ways’. This last piece came in 1929
from James Harvey Robinson, who said with some pride but also
perhaps a tinge of regret that the ways of ‘New History’ which
he and Charles Beard had advocated years previously had now
been accepted by many, even most of their colleagues. It was now
accepted in principle that world history should be pursued on
an objective basis.18
But not many of them practised what was preached, and
questions still arose about the nature of objectivity. Soon, Charles
Beard was to give his famous answer in ‘Written History as an
Act of Faith’, which he then enlarged and modified in ‘Currents
of Thought in Historiography’ co-written with Alfred Vagts. In
the 1930s considerable attention was given to European currents
of thought, not only German but also Italian. Benedetto Croce
was pressed to visit the USA to enlarge upon his increasingly
popular views, but he regretfully declined the invitation. Instead,
121
he sent messages across the Atlantic, arguing against materialistic

and racialist interpretations of history, and warning of a new
Jacobinism based on abstract concepts of humanity. He declared:
‘In its eternal essence, history is the story of the human mind and
its ideals in so far as they express themselves in theories and in
works of art, in practical and moral actions.’ Croce offered
encouragement for international co-operation towards realistic
common aims.19
A possible vehicle for such aspirations was the International
Congress of Historical Sciences meeting in Warsaw and then in
Krakow, in August 1933. The American Historical Review’s
correspondent, Fred Morrow Fling, who had been in Oslo in 1928,
feared that, although the Warsaw Congress was better attended, it
was even more chaotic. There was much confusion in meetings
and languages alike, with English coming third, after French and
then German, as a common means of communication. There were
in fact few Germans present, Fling regretted, while the Russians in
attendance concentrated on a section they had suggested, Histoire
des mouvements sociaux (sociaux actually meaning socialistes). Fling
did not mention American history, which presumably meant that
it was still conspicuous by its absence. Overall, he gave heavy
emphasis to his conclusion that historical research was atomised
‘at a time when humanity is perishing for a vision of history as a whole,
which the historian alone can give’.20
Just conceivably, although not very perceptibly, there was
some progress by the time of the last International Congress of
Historical Sciences to meet before the outbreak of the Second
World War, in Zurich in 1938. As in 1923 in Brussels, the
American rapporteur on this occasion was Waldo G.Leland, who
indicated that of 1,185 registrations, 1,097 were from Europe,
followed well behind by forty-nine from North America and
seven from South America, nineteen from Asia, eleven from
Africa and two from Australia. There was no representation at
all from the Soviet Union, but some from Eastern Europe, where
the location of the next Congress was to be decided in the
following year. And Prague turned out not to be the place for
such a decision in 1939, nor 1943 the most appropriate year for
the proposed Congress.
In 1938, the year which decided Prague’s fate, Leland noted
much desire for peace and friendship, and, regarding the
international crisis, ‘many interesting and some sensational ante-
122
cedents and parallels…presented and discussed with animation’.

At the end of the 1930s, as in ‘Educating Clio’, a report on the most
recent American Historical Association meeting, there was much
interest in what history could learn from other disciplines, and at
least some reflections of a wider international outlook. But, as the
Second World War was breaking out, overseas interest in US history
was still undeveloped, even in the USA’s main partner in the
English-speaking union, the United Kingdom; there, however,
‘Public interest in the subject of America mounted after the collapse
of France’ in 1940.21
Arguably, the fall of France and its sequels in 1941, notably
the attack on the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and on the
USA by imperial Japan, increased public interest in very nearly
the whole world. After 1945 concerned citizens everywhere took
a much wider view than was customary in the 1930s. But at
what a price, and with what a downside—for the Second World
War was soon followed by the equally global Cold War.
International conflict of whatever kind is not conducive to
objective historiography, which was pursued with great
difficulty in the years following 1945.
JAN ROMEIN AND THE COLD WAR, 1948–62

Having examined the period up to 1948 through aspects of the
careers of E.V.Tarle and C.A.Beard, we will now approach the
dual impact, at once broadening and distorting, of the Cold War
years by considering, again in an overlapping manner, the life
and some of the works of Jan Romein, a comparatively unknown
Dutch historian who lived from 1893 to 1962. This survey will
also provide a recapitulation of what has gone before, as we see
how three of Romein’s articles updated the arguments of his
predecessors.
As a child at the turn of the century, Jan Romein often went to
Rotterdam Zoo, where he was especially attracted by an irrigation
device in the hothouse of tropical plants. Consisting of two
buckets which filled and emptied alternately, the device taught
Romein that ‘motion in one direction prepares for a movement
to the opposite, and even in such a way as to change at sudden
and always unexpected moments’. As a student, he was deeply
affected by the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was also much
influenced by Jan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, published
123
two years later. It made him say to himself, ‘This is the way, and
no other way, that I want to learn to write.’ In a lecture on
Huizinga in 1946, Romein spoke of the combination in Waning of
understanding and vision. In another lecture in 1957 enlarging
on this combination, he talked about ‘integral history’,
encompassing: ‘psychology, philosophy, sociology, the arts,
political science, economics, religion, the ways in which life,
society, and human beings are viewed, the knowledge of all the
sciences and literatures, and not least, the connections and
interrelationships among groups, families, and generations.’ In
order to meet its challenges Romein argued that it was necessary
not to make a hierarchy of the subjects involved, or a centre with
peripheries, but rather to adopt a ‘holistic’ approach, rendering a
vague, mystical idea such as ‘Spirit of the Age’ into a scientific
insight. Huizinga was ‘a seer’ but ‘no thinker’ and his work was
‘many-sided’ rather than ‘inclusive’. Further guidance had to be
sought elsewhere, therefore, in a mature update of Romein’s
experience in Rotterdam Zoo—the dialectical process, operating
in totality as demonstrated by Karl Marx.22
Calling himself a Marxist, and sometimes labelled a
Trotskyist, Romein followed no party line, and had in fact more
or less given up party activity two years or more before his
formal expulsion from the Communist Party of the Netherlands
in 1927. His career held back to some extent by his ideological
outlook, he showed himself to be a staunch patriot in 1940 soon
after a belated appointment as associate professor in the
municipal University of Amsterdam in 1939. Although the
German occu-pation had been imposed, he gave a lecture
entitled ‘The Origins, Development and Future of Dutch
History’, concluding with the declaration: ‘Remember that you
are scions of our beloved country; to be true to its ideals and do
not flinch’. Interned for part of the war (like his non-political
model Huizinga), Romein emerged in 1945 to be appointed a
full professor, to continue work on Dutch and wider history,
including the theory of history.
Gaining a reputation in ‘Theoretical History’, Romein was
invited to visit the USA to lecture on the subject. Unfortunately,
his other reputation as a Marxist meant that he was refused a
visa in 1949; he could therefore accept another invitation, to
lecture in newly independent Indonesia instead. Two interlinked
courses given there in 1951–2, one on Asian, one on European
124
history, encouraged him to develop a third line of thought in

addition to ‘integral history’ and Marxism, the ‘Common
Human Pattern’.
Two books were published from the courses that Jan Romein
gave in Indonesia, Aera van Europa in 1954, and De Eeuw van Azië
in 1956. The first had a subtitle which translates as ‘European
History as Deviation from the Common Human Pattern’, while in
the Preface to The Asian Century, an English version of the second,
the author expressed his belief that in this deviation he had found
‘the final cause of the temporary domination of Asia by the
Europeans’. His later years were largely devoted to a collaborative
enterprise, Part VI of the UNESCO History of Mankind,23 and on his
largest, although uncompleted work, The Watershed of Two Eras:
Europe in 1900. The second of these brought him back, no doubt, to
his childhood memories of the irrigation buckets at Rotterdam Zoo.
Certainly, they formed the introduction to a posthumously
published paper, ‘Change and Continuity in History: The Problem
of “Transformation”’.
From 1893 to 1962, Romein’s lifetime, a great transformation
had indeed occurred in Europe and the world. Against that
background, let us take a closer look at the evolution of his ideas
through articles published in 1948, 1958 and 1964. The first of
them, ‘Theoretical History’, was an outline of a course of study
introduced at his suggestion to the University of Amsterdam in
1945. Addressing the same sort of subject as Lamprecht, Berr and
Acton before the First World War, and Tarle, Pirenne and Beard
after it (as we have seen in earlier analysis), Romein considered
his themes in a manner appropriate for the period following the
Second World War.
His essay is divided into five parts. The first part briefly
explains that the title was taken from the realm of science and
seemed preferable to the alternative ‘historiology’ since this
implied pure description, while ‘theoretical history’ made clear
that the emphasis was on explanation. The second part echoes
Croce and other predecessors in its assertion that ‘the structure
of even the simplest historical event originates in the mind of the
historian, not in the facts which provide merely the material’.
This had now become a commonplace, amounting to ‘the para-
dox that a historian’s value lies primarily in what he knows about
man, rather than in what he knows about the past’. In the third
part of his argument, Romein sets out to fix the frontiers of
125
theoretical history, and urges us to imagine them as forming the

following four sides to a central square: (a) theoretical history as
sometimes used in the eighteenth century to denote ‘hypo-
thetical, ideal, conjectural, natural, or generalized history’; it falls
short of the twentieth-century variety, because it, like (b)
philosophy of history, soars beyond the discipline rather than
lodges within it; (c) is historical method in the sense of considering
‘the nature of historical truth rather than the means of pursuing
it, which is better thought of as technique’; and (d) separates
theoretical from practical history, the latter dealing with topics
possessing a time sequence and geographic unity, the former with
topics which are conceptual rather than temporal or spatial. In
other and simpler words, according to Romein, ‘theoretical history
deals with developments and concepts, and establishes its case
by comparing historical phenomena and developments in
different periods and places.’
Turning to the fourth of the five parts of his argument, Romein
lists a further series of salient features, the five provinces of the
territory of theoretical history. These are: (a) theoretical problems
and problems of method; (b) the study of the pattern and rhythm
of history; (c) the breakdown of the past into periods and
recognition of the driving powers in history; (d) some topics
beyond ordinary historiography; (e) the study of historiography.
To look at them more closely, in particular at the questions that
they pose: (a) How to retain the advantages of specialisation
while eliminating the disadvantages? How to arrange
established facts into a pattern? Does objectivity exist, or is
history dependent on subjectivity and value judgements? And
is history governed by laws, especially of causality? (b) Are the
patterns and rhythms of history to be explained in terms of
biology or another science? Are there ages of integration and
disintegration, of progress and decline, or a mixture? (c) How
should periods be organised, and should breaks between them
occur at peaks of development or at the ends of eras? How to
define terms such as romanticism or imperialism or, more
difficult, individualism? How to establish the relationship
between a leader, the masses and the environment, or between
state, society and individual? (d) How to organise comparative
studies of, say, dictatorship or revolution? or of the ever growing
power of the state? or of medieval myths, of the monarchy or
the papacy? or of historical phantoms? Of the last of these,
126
Romein noted: ‘The phenomenon may be interpreted differently

as the pursuit of phantoms from the past or as the projection of
present ideals into the past; in either case its appeal derives from
the illusion that one’s daydream was at one time reality.’ And
he cited Jan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Arnold Toynbee’s A Study
of History and Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process among
examples of what theoretical history could achieve, (e) Here
again, best to quote Romein:
In short, historiography is to the historiologist what the

document is to the writer of history. Just as the latter
organizes his archival material, the former will acquire as
wide as possible an acquaintance with historiography
before starting in. The latter never tires of browsing
through archives; the former is an indefatigable reader of
the great book of history, for the tragedy of human triumph
and defeat, of human endeavor and error, fascinates him
as nothing else.
The fifth and last part of ‘Theoretical History’ begins with the
ringing assertion that this subject fulfils a practical purpose. To
teach students what they themselves may find in books is not
enough; nor is it enough to train them in historical research. Romein
saw history as a triptych, with the left panel depicting historical
research, the right theoretical history, and both sides achieving their
full meaning only from the centrepiece representing historiography.
Concluded Romein in 1948:
The writer of history, the research worker, and the

historiologist should all three collaborate harmoniously
in training young people to find in their profession the
satisfaction to which they are entitled—to which they are
entitled because they have been born into a world which
through our rather than their fault has become so degraded
that one would wish to leave it, were it not for this very
opportunity to provide young people with the happiness
we older men have not found.24
After 1948, in the short run the outlook became darker for
old and young, men and women alike, and for Jan and Annie
Romein in particular. As already mentioned (p. 124), his Marxist
127
associations, however unaffiliated, were enough for him to be

denied entry to the USA in 1949. His alternative visit to
Indonesia, however, was more than fruitful for his wider
perspective, and, returning home to Amsterdam in 1952, he soon
began to publish fresh thoughts about world history. These were
placed before an international public in 1958 with the
publication of an article ‘The Common Human Pattern: Origin
and Scope of Historical Theories’.
Here, Romein approached a theme to be found at least as far
back as Montesquieu, but he concentrated for the most part on
the interpretations of professional historians. In the nineteenth
century, he began, scholars argued that history was a science
like any other, and that they should therefore seek to enunciate
laws or at least establish systematic recurrence of phenomena.
However, around 1900, a reaction against this assertion began,
with a division made between natural and social science, and
some doubt being put forward about the inclusion of history
even in the second category. So much did the reaction grow that
any historian who still discussed laws of history was generally
looked upon as a worker in a different field, a philosopher.
Then, in the early 1930s, the pendulum started to swing in
the other direction. One reason was a shift in the definition of
natural science, following the discovery of random movements
within the atom and the popularisation of Einstein’s theory of
relativity. While there was no support for reviving the old
analogies between history and physics or chemistry, the feeling
grew that the discipline did require some kind of theoretical
background.
What was theory? Basically, ‘a shorthand note of reality’, and
as such necessarily ‘a simplification of reality’, one-sided, to an
extent distorting and even erroneous. But, in answer to the
question ‘what is scientific truth?’, a biologist had answered
earlier in the century ‘an error of today’, and there probably never
would be in any science a theory wholly and permanently beyond
question. Why was this so? There were three reasons: a natural
tendency for generalisation to lead to exaggeration; a desire to
broaden theory to cover possible objections; and, most
importantly, the circumstance that the structure of reality was
always too complex for full coverage. Thus, in science, theories
that were once central became eccentric or even obsol-ete. They
had served their purpose through stimulating fresh insights, and
128
should also be saluted as, for their time, ‘the highest peak of
human creative power’.
Among historical theories or concepts, Romein selected for
special mention the ideal-type, seen by Max Weber as ‘a rule with
which to measure reality or a standard by which to gauge other
measures’ (not ideal in the sense of approaching perfection). His
own ideal-type, at least in preliminary form, was the theory of
the Common Human Pattern (CHP), derived from earlier
thoughts and from the Asiatic experiences of 1951 and 1952,
‘gathered in the subconscious, unpredictably emerging and being
shaped by the cold air of reason’. This theory was ‘the summary
in one concept of a mass of separate characteristics of human
behaviour which was valid everywhere in the world before
European development since the Renaissance diverged in the
most fundamental respects’.
Before describing them, Romein considered it necessary to
dispose of two misunderstandings: he did not mean to imply that
any culture which was not West European was primitive or that
West European divergence from the CHP was in any way unsound
or regrettable, or anything other than just different. The CHP’s
characteristics could be described in two ways: in themselves or as
mirrored in divergence. To take the latter first, it started with the
Greeks, distinguished by ‘their objective attitude towards nature,
by their rationalism, by their capacity for abstract thought as well
as for exact observation’. They were followed by the Romans,
distinguished by ‘their gift for organiz-ation and its application to
state, society and technique’. The divergence could also be seen in
Christianity which, unlike all other world religions, became a
church with ‘a consciously hierarchical, centralized and hence more
effective form of organ-ization’. Then came the emergence of self-
governing medieval cities, leading to an independent ‘middle class’
between the upper and lower class. The Renaissance began with
the attempt to assimilate the classical heritage, but outstripped it
with ideas of individualism and progress. And the centralised
national state was also purely European in origin. Individualism,
developed through Protestantism and other traits listed above,
contributed towards the growth of capitalism, as did expansion
beyond Europe. Romein continued:
Enlightenment is so essentially a completion of what the

Greeks began and the Renaissance continued that it only
129
can be imagined in the pattern of European divergence.

The same applies to historism, the idea that man and his
institutions are historical categories originating from
something else and becoming something else; an idea
which only can occur in a dynamic society.
(On historism, see again the present chapter, pp. 117–20.) Such
differences led to revolutions, American, French and Russian as
well as the Industrial Revolution, and to imperialism, all working
to separate Europe from the CHP.
Of what did this Common Human Pattern consist? Its most
remarkable characteristics were six in number, nature, life, thought,
time, authority and work: nature—feeling part of it, knowing how
to make use of it when necessary but not seeking to dominate it;
life—accepting that it is essentially worthless, a transition to another
existence in the cosmic whole; thought—in images not concepts,
concretely not abstractly, with much less interest in conscious
organisation, in church or state; time—‘but a succession of todays’,
with no saving of time, or capital, or any conception of progress;
authority—of the gods, the prince, the father, the teacher and the
book, either absolute or non-existent; work—a necessary evil, the
very word signifying worry and pain, and no work ethic or worship
as in the West.
Understanding the CHP was not just a matter of erudition in
Romein’s view; observation of life, especially through travel, was
also necessary. Of course, closer study and inspection might reveal
further divergences from the CHP, which in any case had to be
seen as an ideal-type concept, but meanwhile, the CHP could throw
light on social attitudes, cultural relations, economic problems and
political phenomena. For example, at its frontier, the Bolshevik
Revolution was characterised by the weak resistance of the once
dominant classes. Why was this? One common answer was
exemplified by the perceptive American journalist visiting Russia
in the summer of 1917:
The general attitude of the educated minority towards the

tragic sweep of events was surprisingly often that of mere
bewilderment and a sort of passive melancholy, as if the
storm raging outside their pleasant drawing rooms and
country houses were some untoward act of nature they
were powerless to affect.
130
The submissiveness of the Russian bourgeoisie could be

contrasted with the active resistance of the Finnish, a reflection of
the fact that the former was less touched by divergence from the
CHP than the latter. Furthermore, nobody wrote more pro-foundly
about the two different attitudes to life and death than Leo Tolstoy
in his story ‘Three Deaths’ (of a rich woman, a poor man and a
tree). Conceding that its value could be only relative, Romein
concluded with an affirmation:
I think that the theory of the Common Human Pattern is

true for us here and now and hence an instrument for
reaching a better understanding of the relation between
East and West. And no man of good will will deny that
such understanding is essential to a better relation between
the two worlds; nor will he deny that this relationship is
the principal task of mankind in the present epoch.25
The ‘present epoch’ of the late 1950s was not the same as that of
the early 1900s, when European civilisation was seen far less as a
deviation and much more as the main road of civilisation. Equally,
while some of Romein’s truth lives on after him, it has been much
refined through the completion of the process of decolonisation
and its aftermath. For Romein’s death in 1962 came at a time when
perhaps the greatest transformation in human history was in full
swing. The nature of that transformation which included much
besides decolonisation will be investigated below (pp. 134–7). For
the moment, we will consider a by no means irrelevant
posthumously published article on this very question, ‘Change and
Continuity in History: The Problem of “Transformation”’,
stemming from his childhood acquaintance with the dialectical
structure of irrigation by bucket in Rotterdam Zoo, and thus ending
where he began.
An illustration selected from history was the transformation in
Europe from about 1889 to the First World War, the theme of his
longest (and also posthumously published) book, The Watershed of
Two Eras: Europe in 1900. This consisted of the disintegration of the
‘modern’ worldview based on the thought of Descartes and
Newton, and many other developments, political, economic, social
and cultural, on different levels of profundity and superficiality
(see Chapter 3, pp. 78, 87). In order to make his view of
transformation as clear as possible, Romein managed to isolate a
131
number of types, from the more deliberate to the less conscious.

The first of these was synthesis, which could be both crude and
subtle. Nearer the former end of the spectrum was the fashionable
attempt in the USA to reconcile religion and Freudianism.
Commenting with some memory of his own personal history
probably not too far away, Romein wrote:
The argumentation goes that both structures aim at saving

souls. In fact, this is only the trivial response to a situation
in which one does not want to give up the benefits of
psychiatric treatment, but is no more prepared to part with
that testimony of anti-communism which has become one
of the most important social functions of religion today.
Towards the latter end of the spectrum was the synthesis of

Aristotelianism and Platonism at the inception of modern thought
from Copernicus to Newton—‘perhaps the most important and
most influential of all spiritual changes’.
Sharp and constant criticism could become ‘more creative’ than
the ‘creation’, as Oscar Wilde put it, and was most appropriately
found in Bible criticism, which had undermined literal acceptance
of the Word of God. This was the second type of transformation,
while the third was ‘supplementation’ or ‘adaptation’. This could
be more subtle and on occasion less deliberate than criticism or
synthesis, and could be illustrated from examples taken from the
history of Marxism around 1900. Plekhanov in his short work The
Role of the Individual in History and Lenin in his What Is To Be Done?
might not have strayed far from the thought of Marx and Engels,
but both gave it a new slant, while Bernstein made a more conscious
adaptation in his formulation of revisionism.
Still more subtle and unconscious was a fourth type, the
‘mistake’. This could be detected in ether-theory, which helped
to lead from classical to modern physics, and also in the ‘turnover’
within positivism from objectivism towards psychologism. But
perhaps the clearest example was in painting, which, like
literature, went through a phase ‘of turning away from the outside
towards the inside’. Gauguin expressed in a nutshell how the
Impressionists conveyed reality: ‘The art of painting is something
that merely consists of what our eyes are thinking.’ In addition
to synthesis, criticism, supplementation and ‘mistake’, there were
two further types of transformation. The fifth was the
132
consequence of intensification, for example the close attention

given to religion throughout the nineteenth century leading to
‘sociology of religion’. The sixth was ‘transformation by accuracy’,
the circumstance that ‘one degree of greater precision in
establishing facts would unsettle conclusions already reached,
and that such uncertainty would create new problems’. Beyond
these types of transformation, there was a shift of emphasis, a
life going beyond the razor’s edge, or old ideas necessarily
expressing a new thought—‘on which it stumbles and which at
best it must drag along in its motion’.
All these transformation types prompted the general
conclusion that the important quality shared by them was ‘a shift
of values: and, after all, values are the criteria of our thought and
action’. Of course, history was a bottomless discipline, but the
problem of ‘turnover’ could be usefully approached through a
carefully used formula. The essence of the problem of
transformation was to be found in ‘the dialectical unity of two
seem-ingly absolute and completely irreconcilable opposites:
continuity and change’. In fact, they were only relative opposites,
like light and shadow. As far as a formula was concerned, such
daring men as Lenin and Einstein had to start with the given:
originality was to be found in the stream of continuity, but,
equally, continuity could still be found in the stream of change.
Putting his argument in the most compressed manner possible,
Romein offered his own E = MC2: A --> A(b) --> B(a) -->B.
The formula was to be explained in the following manner:
A is a given value expressed in thought on a given date;

(b) is an added value, added to A since A started to function
in a changing situation. The addition of (b) gives therefore
a different emphasis to A. In the prolongation of this
process, the emphasis (b) tips the balance by becoming the
main value B, whilst the former main value A is reduced
to an accessory value (a). In the end, B may be receiving
the value of minus A, but this need not be so. At any rate B
will always incorporate A, though A be dissolved.
Insisting that his formula had only marked a modest

theoretical breakthrough, Romein nevertheless expressed the
hope that ‘it would advance by a few steps towards
understanding the way dialectical motion in history goes, and
133
towards finding some sort of historical theory of evolution, or

at least part of it’. In such a case, historical evolution would
also proceed a small step at a time, micro-processes leading to
macro-processes. For example, an infinite number of
transactions in capitalism led to the arrival at the end of the
nineteenth century of imperialism — ‘a new type of banking
and monopoly; the great landslide in which, for the first time,
the masses became part of the existing nations and could
interfere in world development.’26
TOWARDS A NEW WORLD ORDER, 1962 AND AFTER

A century on from that transformation and Romein’s birth, more
than thirty years after his death and the enunciation of his
formula, the role of the masses may not appear quite so active,
while other transformations of at least equal, probably greater,
significance have occurred. Without any intention to diminish
the worth of Romein’s contribution to the understanding of the
processes of history, let us recall that the year of his death, 1962,
was near the beginning of a decade of overall significance
throughout the world. Arguably, our own age does not begin
before the 1960s, or, more precisely before the latter part of that
decade. In an essay entitled ‘1968, Revolution in the World-
System’ first published in the spring of 1989, Immanuel
Wallerstein put forward six theses:
1 The year 1968 brought a revolution in and of the world

system.
2 The primary protest of 1968 was against US hegemony in the
world system (and Soviet acquiescence in that hegemony).
3 The secondary, but ultimately more passionate, protest of 1968
was against the ‘old left’ systemic movements (for example,
against Stalinism).
4 Counterculture was part of revolutionary euphoria, but was
not politically central to 1968.
5 Revolutionary movements representing ‘minority’ or under-
dog strata need no longer, and no longer do, take second place
to revolutionary movements representing presumed
‘majority’ groups.
134
6 The debate on the fundamental strategy of social transform-

ation has been reopened among the antisystemic movements,
and will be the key debate of the coming twenty years.
Without entering into a debate with Wallerstein, or even

spelling out his six theses, we may note that even he would
probably want to make some reformulations in view of
developments since the spring of 1989 when his essay was first
published, beyond his suggestion in 1991 that: ‘The regime
changes of 1989 were…the outcome of the latent, continuing
revolt of 1968.’27
How much more, then, would Romein have wanted to revise
at least some of his views which now have even more of a
period ring about them. Moving towards a conclusion, let us
note at least some of the developments unnoticed by him.
Altogether, they make necessary an approach to world order
which he could not appreciate. This is neither a criticism nor
an excuse, just a bald statement of the fact that the world is in
a constant state of flux, with each generation of historians
taking up new challenges regarding the distinctive feature of
their discipline, the passage of time. Let us take one, but the
most important, example of how significant circumstances
have changed since Jan Romein’s death in 1962, the problem
of the environment. To be sure, there was some awareness of
these problems some years before 1962. In 1948, for example,
Romein’s formula of transformation, A --> A(b) --> B(a) --> B,
had been preceded by another, a ‘bioequation’ expressing
‘certain relationships— almost universally ignored—that every
minute of every day touch the life of every man, woman and
child on the face of the globe’: C=B:E. Here, C indicates the
carrying capacity of any given area of land, that is its ability to
afford food, drink and shelter. B stands for biotic potential, or
the ability of that land to produce plants, especially for food,
but also for shelter and clothing. E indicates environmental
resistance, or limitations imposed by the environment. So, the
carrying capacity is the resultant of the ratio between the other
two factors.
This ‘bioequation’ was devised in 1948 by William Vogt,
drawing on a number of earlier authorities stretching as far back
as Malthus and Darwin. While his Road to Survival may not have
made the impact it deserved, later publications from Rachel
135
Carson’s Silent Spring of 1962 onwards did succeed in bringing

an increasingly serious problem to wide public attention in the
Western world.28 Another book published in 1962, the year of
Romein’s death, and also very influential until it was overtaken
by ever more activity in the global village, was Marshall McLu-
han’s The Gutenberg Galaxy,29 in a sense doing for new electronic
sounds and sights what Rachel Carson’s book did for ominous
silence and disappearance in nature.
But Jan Romein could not have read it, nor could he have
had more than an inkling of the Cuba Crisis, the most serious
crisis since 1945 because it took us closest to nuclear war. He
could not have known that subsequent hopes for limitations of
nuclear and other armaments would be frustrated as vast stock-
piles built up in the USA, USSR and elsewhere. He died before
the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution’ and the escalation of the
Vietnam War, the events of 1968 and significant phases in the
process of decolonisation, while the collapse of communism in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself must have been
beyond his wildest flights of fancy. He may have had some idea
of the imminence of space travel, intercontinental
telecommunication and the spread of computer use, but he could
not have appreci-ated the full extent of the technological or third
industrial revolution which was about to bring a new meaning
to his concept of the Common Human Pattern.
In this chapter I have attempted to illustrate how the high
hopes for universal history of Henri Pirenne and others after
the First World War were dashed by developments in the
following decades. The approach has been individual rather
than general. That is to say, representative figures, Tarle, Beard
and Romein, have been taken into consideration rather than the
work of their colleagues overall. Other members of the great
guild could have been selected: for example, from the United
Kingdom alone, Toynbee, Carr and Barraclough. Each of their
careers provides much material pertinent to the discussion of
approaches to world order.30 However, our choice was far from
random, for Tarle and Beard reflected developments in Europe’s
two outliers, the USSR and USA, while Romein did the same
for Europe itself. Between them their careers throw light on the
pre-war and post-war years, clearly indicating that the terms of
the pH test had radically changed. However much it might be
disguised by such concepts as ‘the English-speaking peoples’
136
or ‘the Atlantic community’, the USA had indeed established

hegemony in the world system; in other words it had become
the ‘universal indicator’ to which Europe and the USSR would
react. And so, while taking notice of the fact that the globe had
in many ways shrunk, world order was still Western world order,
and normally much more constitutional than revolutionary.
137
5
CONCLUSION
So far, Russian history has not appeared very much centre-stage.

Some reference was made to the pre-revolutionary school as
developed from Karamzin to Kliuchevsky, rather more to the
Soviet school as represented by E.V.Tarle. In addition, Catherine
the Great’s views on the question of a constitution were
considered, as were the views on revolution and its sequel of,
among others, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. Why has there not been
more? Basically, because the book is less about the approach to
Russian history in detail, more about its general relationship to
Western interpretations. Thus we have seen how Montesquieu
and Marx placed Russia at the margin of Europe, and how
Western professional historians continued to do so in the
twentieth century.
While the number of such scholars specialising in Russian and
Soviet history has expanded enormously, even we, for the most
part, have tended to pursue the subject in the context of some
Western overview, normally some kind of ‘constitutional’, more
rarely a variant of the ‘revolutionary’, world order. And both
groups, albeit for different reasons, have found it difficult to share
the outlook of our colleagues in the USSR and Russia.
Recently, for nearly all of us, in whatever situation and of
whatever persuasion, the events occurring in the later 1980s and
early 1990s have meant searching reappraisal, and this chapter will
attempt to reflect at least some of the ideas that have been put
forward. I shall make some specific suggestions for the further
pursuit of the study of Russian history in addition to remarks about
the broader context.
138
CONCLUSION
THE ACTION, THE TIME, THE PLACE

To begin with a comparison of something simple, a football match,
with something complex, the process of history. Football, or soccer,
is played in virtually every country in the world.1 Its basic
principles are indeed simple, with two teams each of eleven
players attempting to score goals while preventing the other from
doing so. A spectator ignorant of the sport would need further
explanation of the rules, the role of the referee, and so on, yet
would understand much of what was happening in a match
without difficulty. On the other hand, there is always something
to learn, and the most experienced coach cannot comprehend
football’s every nuance. In particular, nobody can predict the
outcome of a ninety-minute encounter between two sides of
approximately equal ability and achievement: often there will be
complaints that the side that deserved to win in fact lost, and the
result could turn on extreme misfortune. For example, the losing
team could come near to scoring on numerous occasions, while
the winning team successfully seized its one opportunity.
Television replays reveal referees’ errors, lend-ing fresh substance
to the traditional lament of losers that they were robbed. On the
other hand, a traditional argument asserts that over the course of
a whole season such bad and good luck balance out, and the team
that wins a league must be at the very least among the best, even
if a victory or a series of victories in a knockout cup competition
might be more dependent on random factors beyond any
calculation.
On the whole, the historical process is more like a league than a
cup competition: although it does not always run smoothly, sooner
or later the strongest forces will triumph. But there can be infinite
debate about the nature of power, and how it is wielded. And the
contest continues perpetually, with the ‘field’ constituted by the
whole world, the ‘teams’ constantly varying, and no referee or
agreed rules. Moreover, there are no spectators, for however much
the media, especially television, might indicate otherwise, we are
involved in the latest stage of the great game. Equally, in spite of
similarly deceptive appearances, there are no replays, or alternative
courses of events, in history. We might discuss the past, even learn
from it, but we can never recover it.
For this and other reasons, historical interpretation will
always involve a search for the unattainable. If the most
139
CONCLUSION
impartial spectators, versed in the rules and assisted by video

evidence covering a match from all angles, could not be expected
to reach agreement about all aspects of its outcome,2 how much
less might historians who can only aspire to impartiality reach
con-sensus on the infinitely more complex task of assessing an
event or process in their area of expertise. To superimpose any
kind of order on apparent chaos involves a vast number of
presuppositions and value judgements even before the collection
and evaluation of the evidence begin. To say it again, the
majority of Western historians will tend towards a
‘constitutional’, a minority towards a ‘revolutionary’, world
outlook. All we can hope for, then, is greater refinement of
techniques, improved definition of terms, and better
presentation of arguments.
However, let us be clear, both the football match and the rest
of history did happen. And at least one further proposition is
incontrovertible: there is just one world, or at least just one world
inhabited by human beings and other distinctive living creatures
that we are at present aware of. One day, through space travel
or communication, we may encounter other sentient forms, but
they are extremely unlikely to be exactly the same as those of
our world. Meanwhile, human beings have reached the moon
in person and have explored other planets through the agency
of scientific instruments. We may come to colonise them. It is
conceivable that our advanced technology could be used to
protect our earth against meteoric or other invasions from outer
space. But at the present time two other eventualities appear
more likely: one of them is our mutual destruction through war
or accident; the other is global poisoning or other mortal upset
of the ecological balance.3 Of course, there can be dispute about
how far back we can trace the realisation or even the actuality
of one world, as well as about how far into the future it will
contine.
Yet this brings us on to a second constant: the existence of
time, which is the necessary point of departure for the study of
history. If there is no movement through time, there can be no
such study. And while there may be frameworks of
interpretation ignoring the distinction between past, present and
future, the daily lives of most people are organised around such
movement, even if it is the rise and fall of the sun or passage of
the seasons rather than any more elaborate measurement of time
140
CONCLUSION
from seconds to centuries. Some kind of periodisation, then,

follows from awareness of time, and historians have normally
talked of ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary periods
of history.
Equally, in order to make sense of the world, we customarily
divide it up into a number of different segments. Let us consider
these first before returning to the problem of periodisation.
Broadest of all has been the division East-West, and more recently
North-South. The first contrasted the West with the Orient, or
Near, Middle and Far East, or advanced civilisation with
backward civilisation or no civilisation at all. The largest state in
the world since the beginning of modern times, Russia, was in
something of an exceptional midway frontier or even ‘Eurasian’
position until the Russian Revolution of 1917, even more from
1917 until the onset of the Cold War following 1945. Then, it was
placed firmly in the East, which with the formation of the so-
called Moscow-Peking axis after the Chinese Revolution of 1949
seemed for a few years to become a formidable monolith indeed.
North-South has become a normal global division since the
acceptance of the concept of the Third World from the 1960s,
especially since the end of the Cold War, from the late 1980s. Some
analysts now envisage a developed or at least semi-developed
North setting up a firm frontier to inhibit the incursions of
indigent millions from the South.4 Here as elsewhere, there are
exceptions, most notably Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore,
South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
More traditional, of course, has been the division into
continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, North and South America and
Australasia, although they have not always been uniform labels
for kinds of civilisation. Most familiar since the nineteenth
century is the division into nations or states or nation states;
this division remains dominant towards the end of the twentieth
century, with the land surface of the whole world so divided
except for the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions. However,
smaller areas of concentration are possible, with reductions
embracing units as small as a single village. These can appear
meaningful enough to their inhabitants, some of whom still
spend a whole lifetime preoccupied by the arduous routines of
rural life. For example, there are still inhabitants of the Scottish
Highlands for whom the capital city Inverness is in many
141
CONCLUSION
respects foreign territory. Focal points would be much more

localised in less advanced societies.
Here, and hitherto, there has been difficulty, even
impossibility, in discussing place without frequent reference to
time. History is indeed a kind of ‘space-time continuum’, and,
as we have just seen, time cannot be discussed without frequent
reference to place. To take a key example, the concept of
modernisation has been applied to some parts of the world as
still in progress whereas in others it has been deemed to be
complete. Strictly speaking, however, we need to recognise that
such parallel development is impossible. The 1990s are the 1990s
for everybody, for the most backward and the most advanced
together. There are other weaknesses in the concept of
modernisation, too. For example, it seems to consist of two
processes, one of which is modernisation and the other what
may be called ‘contemporarisation’.
This latter point requires some recapitulation, perhaps. Let
us first assert, as many would agree, that modern history begins
in the middle of the seventeenth century, with a prior period of
early modern or pre-modern history beginning around 1500.
Following modernity, there is contemporaneity, again with an
early or pre-period. Here, there would be less agreement, but
let us assert that contemporary history proper begins in the
1960s, with its prologue commencing in the 1890s.5 At the centre
of the two phases are the second and third Industrial
Revolutions: the former, supplementing the original Industrial
Revolution earlier in the nineteenth century, was of oil and steel,
the automobile and the aeroplane, following coal and iron, the
railway and the steamship; the latter is perhaps more accurately
called a scientific-technological revolution, with new forms of
energy and communication (see The Economist list, p. 5 above).
Genetic engineering is perhaps the most significant of further
likely developments.
To illustrate the immediately foregoing argument, let us
consider how a country completing the process of modernisation
would still lag far behind another which was well into the
process of contemporarisation. History does not proceed in such
a neat manner, of course, and the two processes may be observed
in operation simultaneously. However, to include, say, the arrival
of electricity in the same category as that of atomic power, or
the conquest of illiteracy along with the introduction of
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CONCLUSION
widespread viewing of television, is to make too broad a use of

a single term.
This sweeping application of the term ‘modernisation’ has
contributed to various kinds of confusion, including the emergence
of the term ‘post-modernism’. Confined mostly to the world of the
arts, and relating in particular to the term ‘modernism’ employed
from the early twentieth century onwards, post-modernism
consists of a selective use of past styles in order to reflect the spirit
of an age of fragmentation. Arguably at least, it thus takes
appearance for reality, since the world towards the end of the
twentieth century is in fact a smaller, more interdependent unit
than ever before.6
Of course, nobody can fully understand the present, which,
because of its closeness to us, is more confusing than the past. Since
the Second World War, a major determinant of academic
investigation has been the Cold War. Now, in the 1990s, it is deemed
to be at an end (even if the continued existence of enough fire-
power for global annihilation might make that conclusion a little
premature), but readjustment to the new circumstances in academic
as well as other circles is incomplete. At least, the tendency remains
strong for analysis to be based on the confrontation between the
market and state control, democracy and dictatorship, all of them
over-simplified.
Yet the old saying, study the past as if it were the present, the
present as if it were the past, retains much of its validity. Applying
it, we may compare the Cold War with old schisms, and detect
reflections of our own partiality in that of our fore-bears. We may
also see through patterns of past events how the course of history
has previously been determined, and how it may be projected
through the years to come. Thus, there is a case for saying: study
the past as if it were the future, and the future as if it were the
past. Here, however, there are dangers, especially of too much
emphasis on variability, that is on what might have happened
via what might be about to happen. To put the complex
relationship between different phases of time as succinctly as
possible, the future allows free will, the present offers choice, and
the past is determined. And so, in history, there are no alternatives,
but only turning points. Equally, to return again from time to the
other primary consideration of place, the basic premise must be
reasserted that the world is one, and the course of history therefore
fundamentally unilinear. This means that no part of the world
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CONCLUSION
can claim to be unique and that the only yardstick is global, with
no exceptions, only variants. No other approach can aspire to be
scientific.
As well as time and place, there is also a third desideratum,
then, of manner, method or action. Here, some clarification may
be gained through two kinds of comparisons. The first of them
will be with the constitutional and revolutionary orders of
Montesquieu and Marx examined in earlier chapters, the second
through a fresh juxtaposition of American and Russian history
discussed in earlier books.
Before moving on, however, let us attempt to set out our
argument in schematic form:
c. 1500–1900 Modernisation=Westernisation=
Europeanisation
c. 1900– Contemporisation=Westernisation=
Europeanisation+Americanisation
During the process of modernisation, the pH test begins with

Europe and can be applied to America and Russia as ‘alkali’ and
‘acid’ frontiers. During the process of Contemporisation, the pH
test begins with Europe but continues with the USA. The USA
ceases to be a frontier, while the USSR becomes even more of an
‘acid’ frontier than was tsarist Russia for much of its existence.
Europe now becomes in some senses an ‘alkali’ frontier. From
approximately the 1960s, the process of globalisation begins to take
over from Americanisation, thus rendering the pH test even more
difficult.
MONTESQUIEU, MARX AND WESTERN WORLD

ORDERS
Montesquieu died in 1755 and Marx in 1883, yet the influence
of both is still with us, even if more obviously in the latter case.
Of the former, Isaiah Berlin argues that ‘Montesquieu’s views
have far more relevance to our own situation than those of his
nineteenth-century successors.’ Against Marx and other ‘terrible
simplifiers’, ‘whose intellectual lucidity and moral purity of
heart seemed to make them all the readier to sacrifice mankind
again and again in the name of vast abstractions upon altars
served by imaginary sciences of human behaviour’, Berlin
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CONCLUSION
asserts that ‘Montesquieu’s cautious empiricism, his distrust of

laws of universal application, and his acute sense of the limits
of human powers, stand up so well.’7 He recommends the author
of The Spirit of the Laws as an advocate of constitutionalism as
well as of the preservation of civil liberties, moderation, peace,
internationalism and many other ideals. In 1955, when these
remarks were first published, the ideas were standing up so well,
presumably, in comparison with the Soviet view of Marx in
particular. Now, nearly forty years afterwards, in a less
adversarial context, Berlin’s evaluation is still in reprint. In the
context of this book, I have made use of Montesquieu for three
purposes: as ‘an advocate of constitutionalism’; as an example
of eighteenth-century Eurocentricity; and as a basis for the
universal indicator pH test of American and Russian variations
of the European norm.
In recapitulation, let us look again at some of the basic
arguments of The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu insisted that
he did not treat laws, but the spirit of the laws, beginning with
the relations that laws have with the nature and principle of
each kind of government, and then going on to various
conditions and aspects of the laws under each kind of
government—republican, monarchical, despotic. While law in
general is ‘human reason insofar as it governs all the peoples of
the earth’, and the ‘laws of each nation should be only the
particular cases to which human reason is applied’, Montesquieu
also asserted that ‘Laws should be so appropriate to the people
for whom they are made that it is very unlikely that the laws of
one nation can suit another.’8
Today, in its broad sense, one kind of government appears
largely to have superseded the others: in the new world order,
one of the three kinds of government, the republican, is declared
to be predominant, especially in its democratic form. However,
before we examine this claim, and its application today, we
might do well to investigate the early origins of the term
‘democracy’. The West’s first known political theory also
proposed three kinds of government: rule by one, by some, or
by all. In the mid-fifth century BC, democracy or ‘equality under
the laws’ was said to have three distinct advantages: the whole
community would participate in decisions; officials would be
selected by lot, rather than elected; and officials so selected
would be publicly accountable. Such direct and constant
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CONCLUSION
democracy was a far cry from the norm of today. As Paul

Cartledge puts it:
The idea that a prime minister [or president] should not

only not be directly elected but also not be directly
responsible to the people, and even then formally
responsible only at intervals of years, would have been
incomprehen-sible to them. On the other hand, the
exclusion from the ‘people’ of both women and slaves
meant that Athenian democracy was also in some key ways
more restricted than ours.9
For Montesquieu, about two and a half centuries ago, democracy

was one of two forms of republican government, rule by all; the
other was rule by some, or aristocracy. Rule of one could be either
monarchical or despotic. Our present exercise of invoking
Montesquieu’s old world order so as to redress the balance of the
new might best be advanced by examining in particular his
exposition and application of the principles of democracy. For
example, he observed in Part I that:
The political men of Greece who lived under popular

government recognized no other force to sustain it than
virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufacturing,
commerce, finance, wealth, and even luxury. When that
virtue ceases, ambition enters those hearts that can admit
it, and avarice enters them all…. Formerly the goods of
individuals made up the public treasury; the public
treasury has now become the patrimony of individuals.
A concomitant and promoter of virtue was frugality: ‘As each

one there [i.e. in a republic] should have the same happiness and
the same advantages, each should taste the same pleasures and
form the same expectations; this is something that can be
anticipated only from the common frugality.’
Montesquieu was not the enemy of commerce under
democracy:
Certainly, when democracy is founded on commerce, it

may very well happen that individuals have great wealth,
yet that the mores are not corrupted. This is because the
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CONCLUSION
spirit of commerce brings with it the spirit of frugality,

economy, moderation, work, wisdom, tranquillity, order,
and rule. Thus, as long as this spirit continues to exist, the
wealth it produces has no bad effect. The ill comes when
an excess of wealth destroys the spirit of commerce; one
sees the sudden rise of the disorders of inequality which
had not made themselves felt before.
But, to say it again, ‘love of democracy is love of equality’, and

‘love of democracy is also love of frugality’. Therefore, all kinds of
contracts had to be regulated, including inheritances: ‘For if it were
permitted to give one’s goods to whomever one wanted and as
one wanted, each individual will would disturb the disposition of
the fundamental laws.’ Moreover:
So far as luxury is established in a republic, so far does the

spirit turn to the interest of the individual. For people who
have to have nothing but the necessities, there is left to
desire only the glory of the homeland and one’s own glory.
But a soul corrupted by luxury has many other desires;
soon it becomes an enemy of the laws that hamper it.
The inculcation of the right spirit in a republic necessitated ‘the

full power of education’, which would inspire ‘love of the laws
and the homeland…. But there is a sure way for children to have
it; it is for the fathers themselves to have it.’ Mothers, and women
in general, do not receive the most positive mention throughout
The Spirit of the Laws, but Montesquieu does find evidence in
Muscovy, England, Africa and the Indies to observe that women
‘succeed equally well in moderate government and in despotic
government’. By ‘moderate government’, Montesquieu means
moderate monarchy, his own first preference, and therefore his
finding that women may succeed in it is praise indeed.10
To reiterate the main purpose of the present brief exercise,
however, we are concerned not only to apply the arguments of
Montesquieu’s masterpiece to the present day, for example to the
excesses of ‘individualism’ broadly considered, but also to indicate
how far the world has moved on since the middle of the
eighteenth century as well as underlining the continued necessity
of a global interpretation. For example, we may readily accept
that his remarks concerning laws in relation to defensive and
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CONCLUSION
offensive force have little or no continued resonance. Much the

same might be said about laws in relation to climate and to
commerce. In an age of multinational companies, man-made
threats to the environment and firepower exceeding the wildest
dreams and nightmares of the eighteenth century, the world
including Europe of the period preceding the Industrial and
French Revolutions appears remote indeed. On the other hand,
if we measure the chronological distance separating us from the
publication of The Spirit of the Laws, we must recognise that it
amounts to no more than three lifetimes of little more than eighty
years each, the kind of span to which an increasing number of
people are becoming accustomed, at least in the Western world.
In a figurative sense, if the art of Montesquieu is not of yesterday,
it is of two days before yesterday.
Again in a figurative sense, the science of the day before
yesterday was Marx, whom we have made use of in this book
as an advocate of revolution, an example of nineteenth-century
Eurocentricity, and as a further basis for the universal indicator
pH test of variations of the European norm. But here the parallel
with Montesquieu ends, for while it might seem eccentric to
nearly everybody to look through The Spirit of the Laws for
guidance on today’s problems, there are many who would think
of looking nowhere but in Capital and the other works of Marx
for such assistance. In this respect, we should perhaps recall
that Marx himself not only declared himself unwilling to be
included among ‘Marxists’, but also set out with his own
emphases what he believed to be the originality of his
contribution:
And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discover-

ing the existence of classes in modern society nor yet the
struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois
historians had described the historical development of this
class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic
anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to
prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with
particular historic phases in the development of production (2)
that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship
of the proletariat (3) that this dictatorship itself only
constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to
a classless society.11
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CONCLUSION
Since Marx is not known to have disclaimed these assertions,

we may assume that he continued to regard them as key aspects
of his thought. We may also assume, therefore, that nobody who
does not subscribe to them can in the fullest sense be a Marxist.
The question also arises of whether Marx’s claim to be an inno-
vator was justified. The probable answer would be to concede
(2) and (3) of the above assertions, but to dispute his exclusive
right to (1), for the connection between the existence of classes
and particular historic phases in the development of production
was fairly well established during the Enlightenment of the later
eighteenth century, for example in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of
Nations and other works of the Scottish Enlightenment. To be sure,
the proletariat does not make a full appearance in them because
that class was far from completely developed before the
nineteenth century. Even at the time of the Communist Manifesto
in 1848, it was at an embryonic stage even in industrialising
countries.
Within less than one of our long generations, Marxist analysis
of economic development moved on from Capital to the higher
stage of Lenin’s Imperialism. The industrial proletariat reached
maturity. Yet within less than two of our long generations, that
same working class or proletariat is in the process of advanced
dissolution. That is to say, its rise and fall were intimately bound
up with the first and second stages of the ‘Industrial Revolution’.
Now that the third stage is upon us (although the first and second
stages of course remain significant) belief in (2) and (3) of Marx’s
original tenets is difficult to sustain, unless they are adapted to
include the Third World.
A further problem for Marxism as a living ideology is the point
made by Engels and quoted in Chapter 2 to the effect that ‘every
new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms
of that science’. If the whole of terminology in chemistry were
radically changed about once in twenty years, and Marxism were
an analogous science, as Engels suggested, should it not also make
fundamental shifts in its terminology?
The points about the proletariat and science would no doubt
meet with vigorous criticism from today’s Marxists, whose num-
bers may be smaller than before 1989 but whose zeal is not
necessarily dimmed. They still include avowed followers of Lenin
and Trotsky, and even of Stalin, while others of a non-affiliated
nature still display their own version of the red badge of
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CONCLUSION
unorthodoxy. There have been energetic ‘scientific’ attempts to

expound a Marxist ‘social theory for a post-Leninist world’, and to
reconcile Marxism with ecology. Meanwhile, beyond the
proletariat, there still remains the age-old problem of the peasantry
with its world-wide variations, a problem insufficiently addressed
by Marx.12
The multifaceted and even amorphous nature of the Marxist
movement has been one reason why the opposition to it has also
often been ill-defined. Before 1991, and even to some extent since,
‘Marxism’ and ‘neo-Marxism’ have been used as blanket terms of
opprobrium applied to all sociologists and others prepared to use
the word ‘class’ or to attempt to inject system into historical and
other forms of academic enquiry. This has posed a threat to almost
anybody attempting to use the approach of the Enlightenment,
which had already devised a form of ‘historical materialism’ before
Karl Marx was born. As a consequence, other forms of
interpretation of a clearly opposite persuasion have achieved a
popularity which they may not have fully deserved.13 Moreover,
at the same time, history as ‘science’ has suffered, while history as
‘art’ has prospered, but often in an aberrant manner, under the
influence of post-structuralism and post-modernism, with their
emphasis on subjectivity. Even worse, but for similar reasons,
academic and other analysts have given up the attempt to approach
their subject with any consciousness of the world as a whole,
arguing that only subjects of smaller focus can be legitimately
tackled in isolation. In too full a sense, this has been an abdication
of responsibility.
These are strong words and err perhaps on the side of
rhetorical exaggeration. On the other hand, the movement
towards universal history begun in the eighteenth century took
a real step forward around the year 1900, albeit with a major
emphasis on the national framework established in the
nineteenth century. Then, because of the First World War and
the Russian Revolution, the ensuing European ‘civil war’ and
unrest in the wider world, the Second World War and the Cold
War, a long period of further setback occurred. Now, towards
the end of the twentieth century, with a widely expressed hope
for a new world order (and at least equally widespread alarm
at world disorder), the time has come for further advances,
which should not ignore old achievements, but equally should
take notice of new circumstances.
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CONCLUSION
This is not simply an intellectual exercise, but also a response to

a critical situation made up of several different components. In the
first place, there is an unstable international situation, economically
and politically, all too evidently premised on the monstrous
imbalance North-South. Second, before any kind of real
disarmament has been achieved, there are possibilities for new
kinds of warfare, biological as well as thermonuclear. Of overriding
seriousness, however, is the problem which is not so much
international as global: the threat of environmental pol-lution
leading towards ecological disaster. Where shipwreck is imminent,
all hands need to be on the pumps.
Again, this might have the smack of alarmist delirium for
academic and other colleagues who might in any case consider
that, whatever the broader circumstances, the best recourse is the
continuance of the traditional pursuits of scholarship. Certainly,
the aim here is not to deride centuries of worthy achievement. We
will return, indeed, to the question of their significance after some
discussion of the second kind of comparison announced earlier in
this chapter: after Montesquieu and Marx, American-Russian
history.
The Cold War ended in 1991 or even before, at some point
after 1985. Or did it? Arguably, we must wait for a few years,
knowing as we do how history has been full of surprises. While
the situation throughout the former Soviet Union remained
volatile, a considerable variety of scenarios seemed possible:
for example, the Commonwealth of Independent States could
follow the Union into dissolution, and an even more complete
collapse could ensue; there could be an attempt to restore some
kind of USSR. With the capacity for mutual destruction still in
assured existence, a goodly share of it distributed around the
former Soviet Union, the path to a new Cold War, or even a hot
one, is not impossible to imagine.
To look on the bright side, if the Cold War has gone for ever,
further questions arise. Who won it? ‘Not necessarily the USA’
could be a guarded answer, ‘Germany and Japan’ a somewhat more
adventurous but not necessarily inaccurate one. Who lost it?
Obviously the Soviet Union, but arguably also the USA, even the
whole world including Germany and Japan. For the great conflict
distorted the global economy, polity and culture for forty years or
more, and presented humankind with the distinct possibility of
annihilation. Even those who have argued that ‘the balance of
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CONCLUSION
terror’ guaranteed stability during the period following the Second

World War would no doubt agree that an alternative method would
have been preferable, and that its legacy has not necessarily
constituted a new equilibrium.
Although we might say, then, provisionally at least, that ‘the
last great game’ is over, the new world order is not yet firmly in
place as a guarantee against replay. Moreover, in almost any
foreseeable future global alignment, the relationship between the
USA and Russia will remain of great importance. This is the basic
reason for the continuance of comparative American-Rus-sian
history, if—at least for now—a history less of adversaries than of
collaborators. In its search for a new stability, moreover, Russia’s
attempt to devise a new constitution involves a consideration of
the American precedent in particular. The similarities as well as
the differences between the USA and Russia, and their history, must
be closely examined in any such exercise.14
In the first place, then, the discussion is geographical, or rather
geopolitical. Along with Europe, Russia and North America (that
is, the USA plus Canada and Mexico) make up most of the North
in the basic North-South world division. If the line which
separates the North from the South proceeds from the Atlantic
around Europe, then somewhere near the frontier of the former
USSR to take in Japan before crossing the Pacific, the land mass
of the more developed section of the world thus demarcated
consists predominantly of Russia and North America, and,
somewhat ironically, is more than half empty or at least
uninhabited. The vast bulk of the world’s population is to be
found in the South, and may exert ever greater pressure on the
other major section.
This basic set of circumstances throws new light on the
‘classical’ geopolitical theories, which may be divided into two
groups, concentrating respectively on land and sea. The former
focused on the concepts of the ‘heartland’ and ‘Mitteleuropa’,
and was of great interest to thinkers considering the Eastern
European front in the First and Second World Wars, along with
the Russian Revolution and Cold War. The latter, conceived as
the British Empire was beginning to give way to the USA as the
leading thalassocrat or sea-power in the English-speaking world,
indeed (apart from Germany and Japan) in the world as a whole,
was also adapted in the twentieth century in the wake of the
great events just listed. For example, the Washington Conference
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CONCLUSION
con-vening in 1921 attempted to keep a balance between the

world’s major naval powers, and in particular to guarantee that
the Pacific Ocean continued to deserve its name. After the
Second World War and through the Cold War, the USA and (later
and to a lesser extent) the USSR came to dominate the major
oceans, with the Pacific and Atlantic moving towards an
adjustment of their relative importance: the Pacific Rim could
become dominant. However, a new dimension to geopolitics
arose during the Second World War, land and sea being joined
by air. And during the Cold War, this assumed prime significance
as the aeroplane was overtaken by the rocket, bringing into
consideration trans-polar routes not only for civil aviation but
also for attack and defence by missiles. Earlier predictions of
the northward course of world empire now took on a meaning
previously unthought of, and have still perhaps to reach
maturity in the ongoing tension between North and South. Space
remains the final frontier.15
Within the historical ‘space-time continuum’, the USA, the
USSR and their predecessors evolved throughout the modern and
contemporary periods. At first, it was not apparent that the USA
on the transoceanic frontier of Europe would develop more
rapidly than Russia on its transcontinental frontier. However,
during the contemporary period especially, the USA became the
greatest of the great powers before becoming the senior
superpower. In a real enough sense, then, although differences
must be allowed for, ‘the West has been where the East is going’.
In other words, in the 1980s,
Market outcomes replaced full employment and

advancing equality as the regulating principle for public
life in North America, Western Europe, and parts of Latin
America. Along with civic liberties, they beckoned as the
salvation from worn-out modes of authoritarian politics
in the East.
And so, from 1989 especially, the former Soviet bloc has been
attempting to follow the USA and other parts of the West.16 Since
August 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, Russia and other former
constituent republics have been seeking a rationale for their
continued independent existence in a manner giving rise almost
simultaneously to hope and despair, and shaking up interpretations
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CONCLUSION
of the past at the same time as suggesting various scenarios for the
future. All we can do here is assert the continued relevance of
American-Russian comparative history, not as a recommendation
for Russia to follow the American path, but as an aid to
understanding.17 Further study could lead to an update of the
insights gained from the pH test applied by those ‘universal
indicators’, Montesquieu and Marx.
To be sure, there are difficulties in this exercise, for along with
the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a loss of a sense of
historical direction. While the American Revolution and
constitution retain their vitality for most citizens of the USA, with
some of them choosing to find advice for today in such documents
as Washington’s Farewell Address, many of the citizens of
reconstituted Russia appear to have lost whatever confidence they
ever had in the Russian Revolution and Soviet constitutions. For
example, in 1991, Sergei Alekseev, a much-published jurist, called
for an end to state monopoly and of ‘the war of every man against
every man’, and for the creation of a new government based upon
the social contract. In this exercise, Alekseev argued that it was
also necessary for all due consideration to be given to the concepts
of natural law and private law, both previously alien to the Russian
and Soviet tradition. Equally, he sought division of powers along
the lines put forward by Montesquieu and others, with particular
emphasis upon the independence of the judiciary.18 He also made
specific reference to John Locke, some of whose basic ideas dating
back to 1688 were adopted, wittingly or unwittingly, by the political
bloc Russia’s Choice in its slogan of 1993: Liberty, Property, Legality.
Did this mean that Russia was more than three centuries behind
the times? To answer this and other questions there is a desperate
need for a sense of historical direction to be rediscovered in Russia
(and no doubt also in many of the other former republics of the
USSR). Let us proceed to discuss this problem.
RUSSIAN HISTORY: ALTERNATIVES AND

REVISIONS
The approach here is well described in an observation made less
than a year after October 1917 by Paul Miliukov:
The Russian Revolution is like some mighty geological

eruption which playfully throws off the thin crust of latter-
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CONCLUSION
day civilizations and violently hauls to the surface those

remnants of long-hidden and long-gone epochs of
terrestrial history which dimly recall the past. In the same
manner, the Russian Revolution has laid bare to us the
entire structure of our history which till now has been
partially obscured by the thin veneer of recent cultural
accretions. The study of Russian history in our time has
taken on a novel and peculiar interest, for by means of the
social and cultural layers laid out upon the surface by the
great upheaval the attentive observer can trace graphi-cally
the history of Russia’s past.19
In general, what went for 1918 goes also for the aftermath of other
upheavals from August 1991 to October 1993 and beyond. In
particular, the ‘layers’ must now involve the Soviet accretions as
well as tsarist formations.
In the context of the twentieth century, it was a long time
from October 1917 through August 1991 to October 1993. The
world situations in these years differed enormously, while in
Russia and its environs there were huge changes in context from
the events surrounding the Winter Palace in Petrograd to those
enveloping the White House in Moscow. However, as always,
the path to historical understanding proceeds through
synchronic and diachronic comparison, in this case necessarily
moving back beyond the ‘Soviet Union’ in space and the
twentieth century in time.
The chronological perspective cannot come entirely from the
past, since understanding depends on some sense of the future.
And so, like E.V.Tarle in 1922, we have to think of ‘the next task’.
We can agree with him that recent catastrophes have struck deep
into the psychology of that numerically insignificant group of
people who have chosen as their life’s work the investigation of
humanity’s past, with ‘old phantoms and lies’ being replaced by
new ones, and a profound shock even to the strongest intellectual
self-confidence. We can echo his fear that
just at this difficult period of loss of faith in the correctness
of a whole range of their former convictions, the historians
who have undergone this cataclysm are subjected to new
and powerful temptations, their intellect is diverted from
its direct scientific importance by powerful, often uncertain
influences.
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CONCLUSION
We can agree with him that academic exchange with Europe

and America could and would have to be one source of fruitful
thought in conditions of continuing cataclysm but also that
‘fact gathering’ must not be abandoned, that indeed: ‘The more
powerful, the more authentic the generalising thought, the more
it needs the erudite and erudition.’ 20 On the other hand,
although stimulation and even inspiration are to be found in
Tarle’s article as a whole, we have to recognise that Russia,
the West and the world have all moved on since 1922, and that
we must think further for ourselves. Much the same must be
said about updates of a whole range of interpretation
originating in the period following the Russian Revolution,
from monarchist through republican to anarchist, from
communist through socialist to liberal, from exclusively
Russian through Eurasian to global.21
And so, our own consideration of ‘the next task’ will begin with
alternatives and then go on to revisions. Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union at the end of 1991, there has been much debate about
whether a different path could have been followed through and
after the Russian Revolution. Was it necessary for Nicholas II and
then Kerensky to fall in 1917? Could the harsh-ness of war
communism have been avoided, or the New Economic Policy
continued? Was the Stalin dictatorship inevitable? and so on.
Meanwhile, the search for alternatives has continued deep into
history. At least ten attempts at significant reform have been
identified in the pre-Soviet period, tending towards constitution
before the final collapse in revolution:
1 By Ivan the Terrible in the 1550s.

2 At the end of the Time of Troubles and the beginning of the
reign of Michael Romanov in the 1610s.
3 In the period leading up to the assumption of power by Peter
the Great in the 1680s.
4 At the end of Peter’s reign in the 1720s.
5 By Catherine the Great in the 1760s.
6 At the accession of Alexander I in 1801.
7 With the Decembrist Revolt of the 1820s.
8 After the Emancipation of the Serfs in the 1860s.
9 At the end of the reign of the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II,
1879–80.
10 During and following the Revolution of 1905.
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CONCLUSION
The last of these ‘alternatives’ has been given the most attention
in recent years, perhaps, but possesses no greater right to
significance than the first. Had Ivan the Terrible succeeded in
putting Russian absolutism on a firm foundation in the 1550s,
avoiding the turbulence of much of the later part of his reign, the
Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century would
have been avoided, and so Russia could have taken a different
path, affecting the wider world through the Thirty Years War and
beyond. If there has been one crossroads for Russian history, why
indeed should there not be many?22
In any case, ultimately, ‘alternatives’ are of limited use to the
historian. However numerous and however attractive, the
possibilities of what might have happened are of minor
significance compared to what in fact did happen, and
‘counterfactual’ analysis is important for the light that it throws
on the actual rather than on an imaginary past, for the help that
it affords in what remains a task of almost infinite complexity, in
spite of an inherent exaggeration of the power to choose. For a
choice ‘is the peak of a causal chain that runs back to the origin of
life and down to the nature of atoms and molecules. It is a chain
with a million influences and a little statistical variability thrown
in.’ Of course, ‘People often reject deterministic accounts of
behaviour because of the fear that they reduce human beings to
mere predictable puppets.’23 On the other hand, to quote the old
examination question, it is always necessary in historical enquiries
to give ‘reasons for your choice’. Reason for choice is little distance
from determinism. As far as the study of Russian history in
particular is concerned, zakonomernost (literally ‘regularity of law’
but perhaps more appropriately rendered according to context
in some other way) was not a Marxist-Leninist superimposition,
but could be found previously at the basis of explanation in the
works of the great pre-revolutionary historians, Soloviev and
Kliuchevsky.
Let us take two collective attempts made in 1991 to
reappraise the development of the otechestvo, or fatherland,
bearing in mind that times of crisis bring with them particular
problems, noting indeed some overtones of Tarle’s ‘The Next
Task’. The editor of ‘History of the Fatherland’ (Istoriia
otechestva), S.V.Mironenko, pointed out that to make up the
deficit of preceding years, there had been several new editions
of the writings of the outstanding scholars of the nineteenth
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CONCLUSION
and early twentieth centuries, Karamzin, Soloviev and

Kliuchevsky. Unfortunately, however:
The unsatisfied interest in acquiring knowledge of the most

varied aspects of the history of the fatherland has led to a
wide popularity for cheap publications, the authors of
which speculate on the previous prohibition of many
themes and subjects and, accommodating the public’s
views on history and its personages, describe the history
of Russia as a mixture of thoughtless cruelty and, no less
vacuous, but equally no less desirable for Philistine taste,
‘forbidden themes’.
As an antidote to such sickness, Mironenko and his collaborators

offered history without colouring or distortion, but not in a full,
systematic and detailed manner. Instead:
It consists of popular-scientific essays, each of them

devoted to one or another decisive moment, when the
course of social development led to cardinal turning points
in politics (or attempts at such turning points), when new
contradictions emerged and were then resolved, defining
the further movement of society for years, decades and
even centuries. In a word, the book is devoted to ‘critical
points’ in history, at which the dialectic of social
development appeared to it fullest extent. And it was
natural [zakonomerno] that they in particular have aroused
and still arouse discussion.24
The role of the individual should not be neglected, argued

Mironenko, as did the collective producing ‘Our Fatherland’ (Nashe
otechestvo), stopping some way short, however, of the cult of
personality. ‘Those days have gone’, they asserted, ‘when we had
only one Leader, one Party, one Ideology, one Textbook.’ On the
other hand, while there would be no uniformity of presentation
among them, the collective suggested that history as politics
projected into the past was an adequate definition as far as the
fatherland was concerned, with two opposed tenden-cies—
towards reform and counter-reform. For too long, Russia had been
the only country with an unpredictable past, and even now it was
a study justifying the mistakes of the present by reference to
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CONCLUSION
analogous mistakes in the past. Meanwhile, just as in 1953 at the

death of Stalin the whole country shuddered as it contemplated
the future, so there were many people in 1991 apprehensive that
they might be left without history.
Unfortunately, the ‘natural tendency’ (zakonomernaia tendentsiia)
was still to follow the ‘traditional’ Soviet course of interpretation,
even though many, even too many, different views were being put
forward. And so there was a moral and civil imperative for the full
study of the ‘Soviet’ peoples over all the centuries. Such study
necessarily included economic-social, political-military and
cultural-religious aspects, but, among them, there was a special
requirement for the revival of political history, for example along
the lines of A Political History of Contemporary Europe: Evolution of
the Parties and Political Forms, 1814–1896, by Charles Seignobos (see
above, p. 86). Of course, this should not involve over-
personalisation, but certainly would include the question of
alternatives of political leadership as well as of reform and counter-
reform, and other aspects of development.25
Meanwhile, there was also recourse to alternative interpretations
of Russia’s past put forward in the pre-revolutionary period by
Russian thinkers, for example by P.I.Chaadaev, K. N.Leontev and
V.S.Soloviev. Respectively, they attacked the Byzantine heritage,
defended it, and argued for a reconcili-ation between western and
eastern Christianity. A.F.Zamaleev lamented that the October
Revolution had suppressed the universalism and godliness of
Russian idealism: ‘But the past lives in the sphere of the spirit, it
does not die in the national consciousness. And it is necessary to
know it.’26
Almost a superabundance of alternatives presented
themselves in the early 1990s, as they did in the years following
1917 (see p. 68 above). But, as towards its beginning, so towards
its conclusion, this book is set against such an approach to
history in favour of a more determinist zakonomernost. At the
very least, so to speak, the only occasion on which the past can
be changed is when it has not receded beyond the present. And
here, of course, there is an important part to be played by the
study of history, which also deserves the most serious approach
towards objectivity for ‘its own sake’.
In the search for new approaches, a fundamental necessity is
to integrate Western worldviews more fully with the study of
Russian history. To the extent that historians incorporate the
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CONCLUSION
Russian past more fully in wider schemes, comparative or global,

they make it less unpredictable. Relegating alternatives to their
proper place, they promote zakonomernost. Without unnecessary
diversion from discussion of philosophies of history, they assist
the comprehension of the Western world system. All too conscious
of the problems involved in the analysis of a single document, let
alone the incorporation of such detail into a general pattern, made
sceptical by their exposure to the manner in which the best-laid
plans have gone so often askew in the past, historians tend to
have less confidence in grand schemes than do their colleagues
in the social sciences.
Nevertheless, at least now and again, most historians are
prepared to look around them from the vantage point of their
area of specialisation, and then to adjust their overall
interpretation if any such shift appears justified. Certainly, from
the consolidation of the profession of history at the beginning of
the twentieth century, at least some practitioners have attempted
to look at the subject in the round. Let us glance again at how
they have done so in successive periods before we attempt to
establish what worldviews are appropriate for the end of the
twentieth century.
Chapter 3 considered the move from European towards Atlantic
order. In 1905 in What Is History?, Karl Lamprecht suggested that
the greatest problem facing the scientific history of humankind
was the deduction of a universal law from the history of the most
important communities, that is those European countries like
Germany which had undergone modernising experiences, along
with the USA and Japan. In 1911, Henri Berr published La Synthèse
en histoire: son rapport avec la synthèse générale, asserting that a
scientific synthesis of history might be reached through the study
of causality and lead on to open perspectives on causes in nature,
on evolution as a whole. Before then in 1896, in Great Britain where
there was far less talk of history as a ‘science’, much more of it as a
branch of general literature, Lord Acton put forward a plan for ‘a
history of the World’ in which he explained what he meant by
‘Universal History’: ‘distinct from the combined history of all
countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous
development, and is not a burden on the memory’. Realised, his
plan would act as a chart and compass for the coming century,
and also establish ‘in what measure history might be able to afford
the basis for a true philosophy of Life’. Acton was closer in spirit to
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CONCLUSION
Lamprecht, a fellow Teuton, than to Berr, whose thought was more

abstract in a tradition developing from at least as far back as
Descartes. But all three were clearly, if not always explicitly,
Eurocentric.
In the works just cited, Acton was the only one of the three to
refer specifically to Russia, observing that a retrospect of its
history should be given ‘when it emerges, under Peter the Great,
thereby following the natural order of cause, not that of
fortuitous juxtaposition’. Until then ‘inert’, it was not ready for
inclusion in the mainstream of ‘Universal History’, which flowed
much more strongly on Europe’s other, transoceanic frontier,
where the USA had produced ‘a community more powerful,
more prosperous, more intelligent and more free than any other
that the world has seen’. Acton died in 1902, yet his name was
recalled in ‘pious remembrance’ at the International Congress
of Historical Sciences or Studies meeting in London in 1913. On
the other hand, the ‘worldview’ evident at that Congress differed
somewhat from his, with rather more attention being given to
Russian history and very much less to American history than
he might have liked. The heavy emphasis was on the European
tradition, especially English, Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, without
much explicit inclusion of the USA.27
Chapter 4 described some approaches to world order from
1923 to 1962. The First World War and the associated Russian
Revolution of 1917 led to a significant shift in emphasis. Soviet
Russia was soon cut off, along with much of its prehistory; the
Teutonic idea was dead, but the USA moved towards closer
inclusion in a reformed Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking group.
Viewed posthumously, Acton’s worldview was on the rise, even
if this was not fully realised until after the Second World War.
More immediately, in 1923 at the Fifth International Congress
of Historical Sciences or Studies in Brussels, the torch of
universal history was taken up by the Belgian Henri Pirenne,
plac-ing his trust ‘On the Comparative Method in History’, an
approach recommended by the Oxford professor of
jurisprudence Paul Vinogradoff and others before 1914, and now
appearing ripe for development after 1918. In such a manner,
Pirenne believed, the ‘prejudices of race, politics and
nationalism’ could be transcended, and the scientific go hand
in hand with the moral gain.
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CONCLUSION
Alas, Pirenne’s hopes were soon dashed as the ‘prejudices of

race, politics and nationalism’ reared their ugly heads more
blatantly after the First World War than before. The comparative
method, indeed any method, of universal history found it difficult
to make headway, although there were some advances such as those
achieved by the successors of Henri Berr in the Annales school. For
all its avowed internationalism, Marxism-Leninism increasingly
became a thinly veiled vehicle for Soviet patriotism, as was
illustrated by some of the writings of the historian E.V. Tarle on
the First and Second World Wars. Meanwhile, in the USA, there
were comparable feelings of apartness, the result of continued
domestic belief in the exceptionalism of American history and
continued lack of European interest in what still seemed to be an
exotic subject. But Charles A.Beard was not alone in taking on board
the Historismus of the German Friedrich Meinecke, the quintessence
of which was to be found in ‘the replacement of the generalising
view of historico-human forces by an individualising view’, which
emphasised the unique, each time having its own style. To be sure,
Meinecke had become ‘the historian of State Reason’ while
American adherents of Historismus might try to guide grand public
policy rather than becoming embodiments of it.
The Second World War was in many ways a greater watershed
than the First, with the subsequent Cold War leading to an
intellectual divide even wider than that between the two wars.
But there were as before at least a few bold spirits trying to
transcend the limitations of the period, for example the Dutch
historian Jan Romein. His journey towards understanding could
be marked by three milestone articles.
In ‘Theoretical History’, 1948, Romein made a distinction
between the theoretical ‘historiologist’ and the ‘writer of history’:
Just as the latter organizes his archival material, the former

will acquire as wide as possible an acquaintance with
historiography before starting in. The latter never tires of
browsing through archives; the former is an indefatigable
reader of the great book of history, for the tragedy of human
triumph and defeat, of human endeavor and error,
fascinates him as nothing else.
In ‘The Common Human Pattern: Origin and Scope of Historical

Theories’, 1958, Romein drew on his experience of several years in
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CONCLUSION
Indonesia to discuss the manner in which Europe was a deviant

from the CHP. This article revealed a much broader consciousness
of the world as a whole than can readily be found in the works of
other historians discussed in this book. It also made a reference, of
considerable significance in the present context, to Russia, which
Romein saw as occupying a frontier position in the CHP between
East and West. For example, in the view of this self-styled Marxist
and sometime Trotskyist, the Bolshevik Revolution was
characterised by the weak resistance of the once dominant classes,
including the submissiveness of the bourgeoisie, a predicament
not to be found in nearby Finland.
Posthumously, Romein’s ideas on ‘Change and Continuity in
History: The Problem of “Transformation”’ were set out in 1964, at
the precise time that the greatest transformation in human history
was under way. Like the other articles, this one deserves at the
very least the brief analysis devoted to it in Chapter 4. Here, let us
just note that, like them, it stands in its own right and also reflects
the moment at which it was composed. In both respects, therefore,
Romein’s hopes are realised that ‘it would advance by a few steps
towards understanding the way dialectical motion in history goes,
and towards finding some sort of historical theory of evolution, or
at least part of it.’28
This modest aspiration has a different ring from the more
confident hopes of Lamprecht, Berr and Acton at the beginning of
the twentieth century, or even the tempered optimism of Henri
Pirenne in 1923. (Would many of us write, as Pirenne did, of history
as a whole appearing ‘in the majesty of its development’, of ‘the
sublimity of the spectacle’?). How different again is our viewpoint
from the 1990s. Nevertheless, our selective tracing of historical
thought through the two world wars and the Cold War gives us an
informed sense of direction and prepares us for our final task, which
is to turn to Russian history in the light of Western worldviews,
and to suggest specific directions in which further research might
move.
Before that exercise, a final word on history as art and science.
Remembering that the English language is less inclusive in its
use of the word ‘science’ than most of its continental counterparts,
we may nevertheless reassert that history as art has received more
support in the English-speaking world than elsewhere. Here,
more emphasis is given to the ‘contingent and unforeseen’, to
the role of individual and/or group perception. Without difficulty,
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CONCLUSION
therefore, there can be easy enough acceptance along this line of

enquiry of the concept of post-modernism. While, carried to
excess, it reduces the study of history to fiction, it also provides a
latter-day reminder of the weakness of positivism and the
necessity to accommodate rela-tivism. On the other hand, for
those pursuing their discipline as a science, there has been a
stronger tendency to borrow such overarching ideas from the
physical sciences, positivist then relativist. I have myself in this
book and elsewhere adopted the metaphor of the pH test, writing
of European and later American culture as a ‘universal indicator’,
but also suggesting that the pH test becomes less appropriate with
the arrival of globalisation.
Now, the next task could be to adapt the approach of
‘complexity’, that is ‘to dynamical interactions at the edge of chaos’.
Without doubt, the whirlpool and other images used by some of
the advocates of ‘complexity’ recall the ‘earthquake’ of Miliukov
and the ‘cyclone’ of Tarle. To be specific, here is a passage from
Roger Lewin’s Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos:
I thought about the repeated pattern of the rise and fall of

states through history. This was in October 1991, just a few
months after the failed coup in the Soviet Union and the
brink of collapse of that once great power. George Bush
had proclaimed the events in Eastern Europe, of which
the disintegration of the USSR became part, as ushering
in a ‘new world order’. I remembered a conversation with
Chris Langton, animated as always, in which he pulled
out a copy of the results of a computer evolution model.
‘Look’, he’d said. ‘You can see these two species coexisting
in a long period of stability; then one of them drops out
and all hell breaks loose. Tremendous instability. That’s
the Soviet Union’, he’d said, pointing to the species that
drop-ped out. ‘I’m no fan of the Cold War, but my bet is
that we’re going to see a lot of instability in the real world
now it’s over. That is, if these models of ours have any
validity at all.’29
Because of the difficulty of predicting human behaviour, even

analysing it, historians might want to avoid acceptance of such
models, while nevertheless informing their approach with some
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CONCLUSION
awareness of ‘complexity’. Could it be that ‘complexity’ is the

scientific counterpart of the artistic post-modernism?
Here, for the moment, I will say no more than that to seek
alternatives is a less satisfactory approach, both artistically and
scientifically, than to look for revisions. Certainly, at least as many
of the latter could be suggested now as were listed of the former.
Indeed, let us take the list of ten recorded above (p. 156) and
substitute revision for alternative. (To be sure, this bypasses further
questions of considerable significance concerning medieval
history—the nature of Kievan civilisation and of the Mongol impact
to name but two.)
1) To what extent should the reign of Ivan IV be considered
absolutist or proto-absolutist? In other words, to what extent
was Muscovite Russia conforming to a European pattern of
socio-political development in the later sixteenth century?
2) How significant was the participation of Muscovite Russia
in the ramifications of the Thirty Years War during the reign of
the first Romanov, Michael? An answer here has further
implications for definitions of Europe in the early modern
period.
3) To what extent was Muscovite Russia a participant in the
mid-seventeenth-century political crisis sweeping Europe, and
how comparable was its experience in the following resolution?
4) How remarkable an individual was Peter the Great, and to
what extent were the innovations associated with his name
revolutionary? Needless to say, this key figure in Russian history
needs constant reappraisal, not least in the context of early
eighteenth-century Europe. The immediate aftermath of his
death in 1725 might also be viewed in a comparative manner.
5) How remarkable an individual was Catherine the Great,
and how seriously should we take her ‘enlightened absolutism’
in the 1760s and later as opposed to that of, say, Frederick the
Great of Prussia or Joseph II of Austria? As argued in Chapter 1
above, Catherine’s constitutionalism bears comparison with that
of the American Founding Fathers, both as first conceived and
in reaction to the French Revolution.
6) What was the impact on Russia of the French Revolution
and Napoleon and how was it reflected in developments during
the early years of the reign of Alexander I? How does the Russian
adaptation compare with that of other European states and
societies?
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CONCLUSION
7) In what ways was the Decembrist Revolt comparable to

events elsewhere in the 1820s? How did French, American and
other foreign influences adapt to Russian soil? How distinctive
was the early-nineteenth-century Russian nationalism emerging
after the failure of the Decembrist Revolt, for example its guiding
concept of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’? Again, the
American comparison as well as the European dimension are
worthy of investigation.
8) To what extent should the Emancipation of the Serfs of
1861 be assessed in a wider framework? In particular, this
involves the Emancipation of the American Slaves in 1863, but
might also include other events of the period in Poland and even
China.
9) To what extent should Russian imperialism be assessed in
a wider framework? In other words, was Alexander II’s Chancel-
lor Gorchakov justified in his assertion that, like Russia: ‘The
United States in America, France in Africa, Holland in her
colonies, England in India, were all forced to take the road of
expansion dictated by necessity rather than ambition, a road on
which the chief difficulty is to know where to stop’? Much of
Western writing on this subject has concentrated on the empires
of Western Europe, omitting both Russia and the USA, whose
experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
bears comparison, as ever.
10) Was the Russian Revolution of 1905 from below or above,
and how does it fit into the pattern of Western agitation at the
beginning of the twentieth century including concepts such as
the ‘general strike’?30
Certainly, this chapter has argued, in the wake of Paul
Miliukov, that revolutions, whether in 1905, 1917 or 1991, oblige
us to examine afresh the entire structure. On the other hand,
quite obviously, nobody can hope to begin to encompass them
all, nor indeed can anybody alone hope to achieve a completely
acceptable overall view. Therefore, the above suggestions are
put forward in conjunction with the following remarks of a
group of colleagues made at a conference entitled ‘Revisioning
History: Imperial Russia’. For example: ‘Russia and the West’
should be a ‘theme of research in history, not a historical research
tool’; moreover, the Russian experience should be evaluated
within ‘a cosmopolitan scale of values’ and a framework of
‘world history’. While Russian ‘differences’ should not be
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CONCLUSION
converted into ‘abnormalities’, it should be noted that in Russian

history, ‘long periods of slow or negligible change ended with
sudden transformations’, producing a ‘cultural pro-clivity to
repudiate tradition and reject the past’. Cultural history,
including the popular variety, should provide many topics for
research, and help to ‘deinstitutionalise’ institutional history
while encouraging the study of personal interactions.31 These
remarks take us far beyond the ten suggestions listed above and
towards a comprehensive reappraisal likely to keep us all busy
for years to come.
WORLD HISTORY, PURE AND APPLIED

To repeat the question posed at the beginning of this book, what
is history? For all the undoubted worth of E.H.Carr’s book with
that title, we might still ask ourselves if that is the right question.
Or should we rather be asking ourselves: what is history for?
Immediately, the objection will be raised that this is to move away
from disinterested pure enquiry, entering into the realms of
applied, and therefore biased, utility. But let us also admit at the
outset that there are a number of questions that cannot be
answered in the first mode, yet assume huge importance in the
second. For example, what is electricity, or even (at least for many)
what is life?32
Certainly, history has been subject to misuse of varying kinds,
both Left and Right, both Whig and Tory. In The Whig
Interpretation of History, Herbert Butterfield criticised the
tendency in many historians ‘to praise revolutions provided they
have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress
in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not
the glorification of the present’. On the other hand, according
to one of Herbert Butterfield’s successors as Master of
Peterhouse, Cambridge, Hugh Trevor-Roper, high table talk in
his more recent day included assertions that: ‘the Revolution of
1688 was a crime, the Enlightenment a disaster; that Bishop
Warburton was the profoundest thinker of the eighteenth
century and Dr Pusey of the nineteenth’; that the confessional
state ‘should never have been replaced by a plural society’; that
‘the wrong side’ won the First World War and that Hitler should
have been allowed to win the Second.33
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CONCLUSION
Leaving aside the question of who said what in the course of a

squabble in a Cambridge college, we are forced to recognise that
an extreme right-wing interpretation of the past appeared in the
early 1990s to be on the rise in much of the Western world, and in
the Eastern, too. As communism rolled back from Berlin to
Moscow, the principles of Adam Smith, or rather a distorted
version of them, seemed to be moving immediately into the
vacuum thus created. Along with the enthronement of ‘market
forces’ sometimes went a fascism asserting its own view of a ‘new
order’ aiming ‘to mobilise the masses through slogans and myths
pregnant with historical and cultural resonance for those alienated
from the liberal status quo and its international-ist Marxist
alternatives’.34
Is there no place left, then, for pure history? At the very least,
the argument could be put forward that The Wealth of Nations
needs to be understood in the context of the period of its
composition, the decade or more before its year of publication,
1776, and in the context not only of the whole corpus of the work
of Adam Smith, but also that of the Scottish Enlightenment as a
whole. Nor should it be forgotten in the context of pure history
that among the most lyrical celebrants of capitalism were Marx
and Engels, who declared in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 that
the bourgeoisie had been ‘the first to show what man’s activity
can bring about’.35
If we move on to the observation that neither the free market
economy as advocated by disciples of Adam Smith nor socialist
society as envisioned by followers of Marx is appropriate for the
world of the 1990s, we return from pure to applied observation,
no doubt. But for an increasing number of historians, perhaps, it
is difficult to see either ‘classic’ set of arguments as the end of
ideology. Are some of us adopting a new, green approach to
replace the red or the blue? Will history under the pressure of the
process of globalisation join with the social sciences in a
pandisciplinary merger with earth and life sciences, in order to
produce a unified description of the way our planet functions?
Will Clio pay homage to Gaia? And, as previous disciplinary
demarcation disputes are forgotten under the pressure of fresh
circumstances, might we not through this application arrive at
renewed pandisciplinary purity?
Avoiding such large-scale questions, the economist J.K.Gal-
braith argued late in 1992 that monetarists and socialists should
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CONCLUSION
sink their differences to help the world rise from recession. He

argued: ‘The broad lines of the modern mixed economy are here
to stay. What remains is the task of making the system work better
and for all the people. Ours is not an age of broad theory. It is an
age of pragmatic thought and action.’ 36 Yet, for many other
observers, pragmatism would not be enough: at least, some kind
of worldview would remain necessary, as both an explanation of
the past and a vision for the future.
On the other hand again, the perspective of world history does
not necessarily mean all that such a grandiose label might imply.
For ‘it is an approach rather than a huge pile of facts, not so much
an amassment of knowledge as an awareness of relationships, less
a burden on the mind than a challenge to the imagination.’ To take
one example prompted by my own location, the history of
Aberdeen and its hinterland cannot be understood in isolation.
Our dim understanding of prehistoric peoples and their stone
circles is illumined by considering them in a context that is at least
European, and the dawn of history is discerned more clearly in the
light of the knowledge from Tacitus and elsewhere that this region
marked the most north-erly probings of the intercontinental Roman
Empire. Aberdeen’s first university was founded in 1495 as an
extension of the aspirations of Papal Rome as well as for more
parochial reasons, the second in 1593 as a widening of scarcely
less universal ambitions emanating from Calvinist Geneva in
addition to pro-moting the personal ambitions of the Earl Marischal
of Scotland. Both institutions brought an academic component into
a distinctive local culture evolving from the construction of the
stone circles, and before.
The divines, students and mercenaries of the early modern
period, the missionaries, explorers and empire builders of the
later, were among those operating on an increasingly broad scale,
while all the way through there have been many dealings with
the rest of the British Isles, Scandinavia and the Low Countries at
a more local level through to the most far-flung— to whalers
sailing to Arctic waters and clippers sailing to China and
Australia. The paving of the streets of London lined the pockets
of granite merchants with gold, investment in American railroads
netted as much silver as the activities of the North Sea herring
fleet. For better or worse, there have also been far-reaching
strategic considerations, most recently NATO listening posts and
air bases, at a time when the local economy has been deeply
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CONCLUSION
affected by a more peaceful activity of global dimensions, the

extraction of the glittering prize of oil.
And so, local history increasingly becomes what in a real sense
it has always been—world history; and we must be careful not to
let Grampian, Scottish, British, English-speaking, European or other
regional definitions obscure this basic circumstance, which
embraces the even greater and more fateful divisions of East-West
and North-South. The need to assign due proportions, to appreciate
distant affinities, constitutes a challenge posed with a new
urgency.37
For in a highly volatile situation, where a week can be a long
time not only in political activity but also in historical significance,
the shape of things to come is even less clear than before. However,
as old hopes and fears come to the surface to join new ones, we
can if anything be more confident that the future cannot be
discussed without constant reference to the past. At the same time,
to carry on such discussion within a national or other restricted
framework is at best a distortion, at worst an encouragement of a
‘new order’ of fascism, a danger already indicated.
Here, significant instances may be located in Europe, from Spain,
Portugal and Italy through France and Germany to all the countries
of Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia. In Romania, the first
inter-ethnic disturbances after the revolutions of 1989 broke out
when the Hungarian minority began to com-memorate the 1848
revolution in which Romanians and Hungarians had been opposed.
The new regime continued to put forward for its own benefit a
nationalist view of history not dissimilar from that of its
‘communist’ predecessor, including a dismissal of Hungarian and
other minorities. A distinct note of anti-Semitism could be detected
in the charge that Jewish party members had been largely
responsible for bringing Bolshevism, terror and crime to Romania.
A blinkered view of ancient history, with heavy emphasis on the
predecessor Roman province of Dacia, was still in evidence. All
the successor states to the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires
found themselves looking back to their origins, while the former
components of the Russian Empire examined again the manner in
which their own nationality had been suppressed not only after
1917 but also before.38
Concluding where we began, with the elections of 1993 and their
aftermath, the results showed a significant rise in support for the
nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who captured just under a
170
CONCLUSION
quarter of the votes. While foreign observers lamented the

reassertion of Russia’s special place in the world, there was much
domestic discussion of what nationalism should mean as the
twentieth century comes to a close, with some arguments more
assertive than those of Zhirinovsky, as well as others more
moderate. There was also much consideration of the inappropri-
ateness for Russia of the Western ‘market economy’ and
‘democracy’, with some suggestion of the creation of ‘corporate
democracy’ and even more of the revival of the Soviet Union.39 All
this debate had implications for historical interpretations of world
order and Russia’s place in them, encouraging our pursuit of the
topics and themes listed above (pp. 165–7).
One of the active participants in the debate was the distinguished
expert on Russian culture in general, Academician D. S.Likhachev,
who had previously asserted that in his country ‘emotional
principles’ always meant more than the logical.40 With respect, one
could argue the converse: that the concepts of zakonomernost, or
regularity of law, and mirovozzrenie, or world outlook, both
implying logic rather than emotion, had always meant more in
Russian than their equivalents in some other European languages,
especially English. Possibly, the relative weight given to
considerations of history and world order in Russia and the West
will appear more exactly to the extent that the American political
scientist, Samuel P.Huntington, becomes justified in his suggestion
that ‘World politics is entering a new phase…. The great divisions
among humankind and the domi-nating source of conflict will be
cultural.’41 To be sure, such a scenario will not facilitate the cause
of objective academic enquiry. On the other hand, through the
pursuit of comparative and other boundary-breaking methods,
there could be maintained a clear counter to xenophobia and milder
forms of exclusiveness, as well as a closer approach to objectivity.
And as far as the discipline given most attention in this book is
concerned, in a real sense, the purer the history, the more efficacious
the application.42
171
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, Russia 2010 and What It Means for
the World, London, 1994, p. 70.
2 Paul Dukes, trans. and ed., Russia under Catherine the Great: Volume
One, Select Documents on Government and Society, Newtonville, 1978,
pp. 32–5, 123. In 1918, the Russian historian and politician Paul
Miliukov wrote:
What strikes the foreign observer of contemporary affairs, what
is for him the first key to the external sphinxlike silence of the
Russian people, has long been known to the sociologist and
student of Russia’s historical evolution. For the latter, Lenin and
Trotsky lead movements far closer to Bolotnikov, Razin and
Pugachev—to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our
history—than to the latest words of European anarcho-
syndicalism.
(Paul N.Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, Vol. 1
ed. Richard Stites, Gulf Breeze, 1978, p. 1)
3 Richard Pipes, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A
Translation and Analysis, Cambridge, Mass., 1959, p. 15. A modified
view has been given by Carol S.Leonard, Reform and Regicide: The Reign
of Peter III of Russia, Bloomington, 1993, p. 71: ‘In its impact on society,
the manifesto was one of the major acts of legislation in the hundred
years preceding the abolition of serfdom. By detaching service from
land tenure, this enactment was decisive in the development of estates’
rights.’ In 1993, Pipes himself wrote: ‘The Nobility Charter of
1785…marks the beginning in Russia of private property in the true
sense of the word.’ See ‘Was There Private Property in Muscovite
Russia?’ (in response to two articles by George G.Weickhardt), Slavic
Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, 1994, p. 530. The Charter of 1785 and other aspects
of Catherine’s policies will be discussed in Chapter 1.
4 Paul Miliukov, the Kadet leader, wrote: ‘The idea of private property
has had a stunted development here…the principle of the national-
172
NOTES
ization of the land, in the sense of the supreme right of the state to
land, is an ancient Muscovite principle’ (quoted by Richard
Wortman, ‘Property, Populism, and Political Culture’, in Olga Crisp
and Linda Edmondson, eds, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, Oxford,
1989, p. 30). On the same page, Wortman goes on to point out:
‘Among the political groups that formed before 1905, only the
Marxists expressed support for the notion of property, at least
during the bourgeois stage that most of them believed must precede
the socialist revolution.’
5 Quoted by David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics,
Cambridge, 1985, pp. 46, 205–6.
6 The Economist, 25 December 1993–7 January 1994, pp. 87–91.
7 See, for example, Jeremy Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, London,
1990, pp. 131–6. And see Note 2 above.
8 William Scott, trans., ‘Robespierre’s Speech of 25 December 1793’, in
R.C.Bridges and others, Nations and Empires: Documents on the History
of Europe and on its Relations with the World since 1648, London, 1969,
pp. 77–9.
9 Emile Boutroux, ‘Descartes and Cartesianism’, Cambridge Modern
History, Vol. 4, Cambridge, 1907, pp. 779, 784–5, 799.
10 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. and intro.
F.E.Sutcliffe, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 30–1. I owe this reference to
George Molland.
11 I accept many, if by no means all, the arguments of Ernest Gellner in
Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, London, 1991, and Reason and
Culture: The Historic Role of Rationality, Oxford, 1992.
1 MONTESQUIEU AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

1 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M.Cohler,
Basia C.Miller and Harold S.Stone, Cambridge, 1989 (hereafter The
Spirit), pp. xi, xli. The Foreword was first printed in the 1757 edition.
This chapter owes much to the translation and edition produced by
Anne M.Cohler and her colleagues.
2 See, for example, Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes, Sandys, and the Virginia
Company’, Historical Journal, Vol. 24, 1981, p. 318: ‘why did Hobbes
make so little use of his special knowledge? The answer must lie mainly
in his disdain for anything that might tie his argument to empirical
questions of fact.’ Locke’s The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina and
other American connections are also well known, yet he made very
little specific reference in his two Treatises on Government. In both cases,
as Malcolm suggests for Hobbes, it is quite possible that data at their
disposal would contradict the view of the ‘state of nature’ presented
by Hobbes and Locke. On Montesquieu’s sources, see Muriel Dodds,
Les Récits de voyages: sources de l’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu, Paris,
1929, pp. 11–12.
3 Louis Althusser, Montesquieu: la politique et l’histoire, Paris, 1964, pp. 8–
9. Isaiah Berlin is among many others to accord Montesquieu similar
173
NOTES
distinction. See Chapter 6, note 7. Among other contenders would be

Giambattista Vico, whose Principles of a New Science was first published
in 1725.
4 The Spirit, pp. xlv, 333.
5 Ibid., p. 337. But Montesquieu also refers to science on pp. 4, 231–3.
6 Ibid., p. 722.
7 Ibid., pp. 63, 158, 237, 357, 461.
8 Ibid., pp. 283–4, 290, 355. Montesquieu’s observations about Africa
recall those of Hobbes on the state of nature. On Asia, he makes a
distinction between the north, that is Siberia, and the south. See p.
279.
9 Ibid., pp. 8, 37, 59, 159, 250, 289–90, 294, 391.
10 Ibid., pp. 280, 355–6, 392–3.
11 Ibid., pp. 137, 167–8.
12 Ibid., p. 137.
13 Silas Deane quoted by J.Miller, Triumph of Freedom, 1775–1783, Boston,
1948, p. 586. By ‘new state’, Deane obviously meant recently acquired
political power rather than cultural tradition, especially in the case of
Russia.
14 Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,
Cambridge, Mass., 1967, pp. 27–31.
15 Benjamin F.Wright, intro. and ed., The federalist, Cambridge, Mass.,
1966, pp. 4–5.
16 Paul M.Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 1760–1801, New York, 1969,
pp. 258–61; The Spirit, pp. 131–3.
17 Anne M.Cohler, Montesquieu’s Comparative Politics and the Spirit of
American Constitutionalism, Lawrence, Kan., 1988, p. 149.
18 Wright, The Federalist, p. 337.
19 Paul Dukes, ‘Jonathan Boucher: Tory Parson, Teacher and Political
Theorist’, University of Washington MA Thesis, 1956, p. 16.
20 Quoted in Wright, The Federalist, pp. 296–7, 141–2. Hamilton makes a
specific reference to Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, the
source for the observation on dogs (whose author I have been unable
to trace), but might also have aspects of Montesquieu in mind. Needless
to say, there were many stories of the ‘dogs cease to bark’ type about
Russia.
21 Dukes, ‘Jonathan Boucher’, pp. 34–5.
22 Malinovskii’s translation is entitled Otchet general-kaznacheia Aleksan-
dra Gamil’tona, uchinenny Amerikanskim shtatam 1791g. o pol’ze manu-
faktur i otnoshenii onykh k torgovle i zemledeliiu, St Petersburg, 1807. I
owe this reference, and the accompanying comments, to Ms Paola
Ferretti, who has completed a PhD dissertation on Malinovskii at
Cambridge University. See also N.N.Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of
Russian-American Relations, 1775–1815, Cambridge, Mass., 1975 (first
published in Russian in 1966).
23 Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography, Oxford, 1961, p.
176.
24 The Spirit, pp. 221, 233, 316.
25 Paul Dukes, intro. and ed., Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz)
174
NOTES
to the Legislative Commission, 1767: Russia under Catherine the Great,

Vol. 2, Newtonville, Mass., 1977, pp. 9–33. A second major source
was Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments. Other influences
included Adam Smith before the publication of The Wealth of
Nations. See A. H.Brown, ‘Adam Smith’s First Russian Followers’,
A n d re w S k i n n e r a n d T h o m a s Wi l s o n , e d s , A d a m S m i t h :
B i c e n t e n a r y E s s a y s , Oxford, 1975. For an additional and
alternative version, see Victor Kamend-rowsky, ‘Catherine II’s
Nakaz, State Finances and the Encyclopédie’, Canadian-American
Slavic Studies, Vol. 13, 1979. See also Marc Raeff, ‘The Empress
and the Vinerian Professor: Catherine II’s Projects of Government
Reforms and Blackstone’s Commentaries’, Oxford Slavonic Papers,
New Series, 7, 1974.
26 See, for example, David Griffiths, ed., ‘Catherine’s Three Charters
of 1785’, with contributions from Robert E.Jones, George Munro
and Roger Bartlett, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, Vol. 23, 1989;
O.A.Omelchenko, Kodifikatsiia prava v Rossi v period absoliutnoi
monarkhii: vtoraia polovina XVIII veka, Moscow, 1989; ‘Zakonnaia
mon-arkhiia’ Ekateriny II, Moscow, 1993. On p. 382 of ‘Zakonnaia
monar-khiia’, Omelchenko concludes that Catherine’s reforms took
absolutism as far as it could go without changing its essential
nature.
27 In his mostly admirable work, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,
Vol. 2, London, 1970, Peter Gay gives an unbalanced view of
Catherine and the Founding Fathers, dismissing the former for her
policy towards serfdom, while excusing the latter for their policy
towards slavery.
28 The Spirit, p. xliv.
29 Sbornik imperatorskogo istoricheskogo obshchestva, Vol. 23, p. 481.
30 V.Sirotkine, ‘Restauration absolutiste ou compromis avec la révolu-
tion? Un mémoire peu connu de Catherine II’, in A.Narotchnitski and
others, eds, La Révolution française et la Russie, Moscow, 1989.
31 Ibid.
32 Sbornik, Vol. 23, p. 593.
33 Ibid., Vol. 33, pp. 293–4
34 S.Bogoiavlenskii, ‘Rossiia i Frantsiia v 1789–1792gg: po materialam
perliustratsii donosenii frantsuzskogo poverennogo v delakh v Rossii
Edmona Zhene’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo, Vol. 33–4, Moscow, 1939. For
the context, see Paul Dukes, October and the World: Perspectives on the
Russian Revolution, London, 1979, Chapter 2.
35 Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission, New York, 1973, pp. 17–19.
36 Quoted in ibid., pp. 108–9.
37 Frederick J.Turner, ed., ‘Correspondence of the French Ministers to
the United States, 1791–1797’, Annual Report of the American Historical
Association for the Year 1903, Vol. 2, Washington, DC, 1904, pp. 202–11.
38 Ammon, The Genet Mission, pp. 30–1, 54–7.
39 Quoted in ibid., p. 63. Washington would no doubt cast himself in the
role of Cincinnatus or some other Roman Republican leader. See, for
175
NOTES
example, Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the

Enlightenment, New York, 1984.
40 Saul K.Padover, ed., The Washington Papers: Basic Selections from the
Public and Private Writings of George Washington, New York, 1955, pp.
309–25.
41 F.W.Raffety, intro., The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke,
Vol. 4, Oxford, no date, pp. 346–7. Roger Bartlett considers that ‘both
the ideas and the actions of the French Revolution were inaccessible
in any direct or meaningful way to the mass of the rural Russian
population’ (‘The Russian Peasantry on the Eve of the French
Revolution’, History of European Ideas, Vol. 12, 1990).
42 Raffety, The Works, Vol. 6, p. 367.
43 Ibid., Vol. 6, pp. 156–7.
44 The Spirit, pp. 22, 91, 118.
45 Ibid., pp. xxiv-xxv.
46 William Scott, trans., ‘Robespierre’s Speech of 25 December 1793’, in
R.C.Bridges, Paul Dukes, J.D.Hargreaves and William Scott, Nations
and Empires: Documents on the History of Europe and on its Relations with
the World since 1648, London, 1969, pp. 77–9.
47 Quoted by Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu,
Rousseau and the French Revolution, London, 1983, p. 238.
48 For an earlier exposition of the pH test, with some mention of
Montesquieu but more of literary figures, see Paul Dukes, The Last
Great Game: USA versus USSR: Events, Conjunctures, Structures, London,
1989, pp. 133–44.
2 MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER

1 Karl Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 1, London, 1942, pp. 16–18.
2 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 315.
3 François Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, Chicago and London,
1988, pp. 124–5.
4 Ibid., pp. 135–8. See also:
And in the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic

its gladiators found the ideals and art forms, the self-deceptions
that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the
bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep
their passion at the height of the great historical tragedy. Similarly,
at another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and
the English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions
from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution.
(Karl Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 2, London, 1942, pp. 316–17)
5 David McLellan, The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction, London,

1971, p. 36. Communist society here seems bourgeois or even feudal.
6 Furet, Marx, p. 190.
7 Ibid., p. 180; Marx, Selected Works, Vol. 2, p. 415.
176
NOTES
8 D.B.Ryazanov, ‘Karl Marx on Anglo-Russian Relations’, unpublished

translation by Brian Pearce, pp. 28–9.
9 Ibid., p. 32.
10 Ibid., pp. 151–2.
11 Ibid., p. 32.
12 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, trans. by Ben
Fowkes and intro. by Ernest Mandel, London, 1976 (hereafter Capital),
pp. 89–90, 111. On 7 July 1866 Marx wrote to Engels: ‘I am also studying
Comte now, as a sideline, because the English and French make such
a fuss about the fellow. What takes their fancy is the encyclopaedic
touch, the synthesis. But this is miserable compared to Hegel’ (Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895, London,
1943, p. 210).
13 Capital, pp. 27–36. The overall plan for ‘The Critique of Political
Economy’ as in James D.White, ‘Marx and the Russians: The Origins
of Dialectical Materialism’, unpublished typescript, p. 270.
14 Capital, pp. 91, 580, 940, 1014.
15 Ibid., p. 703.
16 As in Teodor Shanin, ed., Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘the
Peripheries of Capitalism’, London, 1983, p. 139. In 1881, in the final
version of a multi-drafted response to a similar question posed by the
Russian revolutionary activist Vera Zasulich, Marx quoted from the
French edition of Capital:
At the heart of the capitalist system is a complete separation
of…the producer from the means of production…the
expropriation of the agricultural producer is the basis of the whole
process. Only in England has it been accomplished in a radical
manner…. But all the other countries of Western Europe are following
the same course.
He then went on to observe: ‘In the Western case, then, one form of
private property is transformed into another form of private property. In the
case of the Russian peasants, however, their communal property would
have to be transformed into private property’ (ibid., p. 124, Marx’s
emphases).
17 James D.White, ‘Marx and the Russians: The Romantic Heritage’,
Scottish Slavonic Review, No. 2, 1983, including quotation from Capital,
p. 52, and as amended in White’s unpublished typescript. See also
Shanin, Late Marx. Marx had even more problems with Asia than with
Russia. See, for example, K.N.Chaudhuri, ‘Tides of History? The Indian
Ocean Societies’, Alan Ryan, intro., After the End of History, London,
1992, pp. 104–6.
18 V.Vil’son, Gosudarstvo: proshloe i nastoiashchee konstitutsionnykh uchre-
zhdenii, Moscow, 1905, pp. ii–iii. On Kovalevsky’s relations with Marx,
see White, ‘Marx and the Russians’, and Shanin, Late Marx. Kovalevsky
based his argument on a long study of socio-economic development
in England, France and Russia from medieval times onwards. A major
work was Ekonomicheskii rost Evropy do vozniknov-eniia kapitalisticheskogo
177
NOTES
khoziaistva (‘Economic Growth of Europe until the Emergence of a

Capitalist Economy’), 3 vols, Moscow, 1898–1903.
19 Paul Dukes, ‘Klyuchevsky and the Course of Russian History’, History
Today, July 1987, reprinted in Paul Dukes, ed., Russia and Europe,
London, 1991.
20 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, London, 1951,
p. v.
21 V.I.Lenin, Sochineniia, third edition, Vol. 8, Moscow, 1935.
22 See, for example, V.I.Lenin, Collected Works, fourth edition, Vol. 3,
Moscow, 1960, pp. 31–4.
23 V.I.Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Moscow, 1970,
pp. 15, 76, 82–4, 86, 88, 115 (hereafter Imperialism); David Jayne Hill, A
History of Diplomacy in the International Development of Europe, New York,
1905.
24 Imperialism, pp. 7–14.
25 Quoted by Paul Vinogradoff, ‘Russia’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, twelfth
edition, Vol. 32, London and New York, 1922, pp. 331–4.
26 Leon Trotsky, ‘Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov’, Encyclopaedia Britannica,
thirteenth edition, Vol. 2, London and New York, 1926, p. 701. The
most complete work in English is the trilogy by Robert Service, Lenin:
A Political Life, London, 1985, 1991, 1994.
27 Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, London, 1965, pp.
25–37. For an alternative view, see Ian D.Thatcher, ‘Uneven and
Combined Development’, Revolutionary Russia, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1991.
28 Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New
York, 1969, pp. 132–3.
29 J.V.Stalin, ‘The Foundations of Leninism’, Works, Vol. 6, Moscow, 1953,
pp. 108–9, 196.
30 ‘The Tasks of Business Executives’, Ibid., Vol. 13, pp. 40–1.
31 Engels quoted by Boris Nicolaevsky and Otto Maenchen-Helfen, Karl
Marx: Man and Fighter, London, 1936, p. 374.
32 Bernstein, ‘Marx, Heinrich Karl’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh
edition, Vol. 17, Cambridge, 1911, p. 811. On Bernstein and Kautsky,
see, for example, David McLellan, Marxism After Marx, London, 1979.
33 See, for example, Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian
Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922, New York and Oxford, 1986. See also
Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, London, 1990.
34 The Times, 14 September 1914; Quarterly Review, No. 223, April 1915,
No. 228, July 1917; Contemporary Review, No. 111, May 1917, No. 115,
June 1919, No. 119, June 1921.
35 Vinogradoff, ‘Russia’, pp. 323, 329–30.
36 E.V.Tarle, ‘Ocherednaia zadacha’, Annaly, No. 1, Petersburg, 1922.
37 Ibid., pp. 5–13, especially 12–13.
38 Ibid., pp. 13–14. Among examples of pseudo-history cited by Tarle were
Dragoman Ukrainophiles writing of Provençal literature while
thinking of the Ukraine, and Czechs writing of Ireland while thinking
of Czechia.
178
NOTES
39 Ibid., pp. 14–15.

40 Ibid., pp. 15–16.
41 Ibid., p. 17.
42 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
43 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
44 ‘History was of course a great favourite, and French history in
particular’ (John Keep, ‘1917: The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd’,
Soviet Studies, Vol. 20, 1969, p. 25).
45 For an interesting discussion, see Eric Foner, ‘Why Is There No Socialism
in the United States?’, History Workshop, 17, 1984. Foner doubts that
the question should be posed in Marxist terms.
3 FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC ORDER, 1900–22

1 Jan Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900, Middletown,
Conn., 1978, pp. 296–8, 447. A Congress concentrating on diplomatic
history had met in The Hague in 1898. For the origins of the Congress
and a more positive view of the proceedings in Paris, see Karl Dietrich
Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker: Geschichte der Internationalen
Historikerkongresse und des Comité International des Sciences Historiques,
Göttingen, 1987.
2 Karl Lamprecht, What Is History? Five Lectures on the Modern Science of
History, New York and London, 1905: ‘The immediate occasion came
in the form of an invitation to take active part in the Congress of Arts
and Sciences which met in St. Louis during the World’s Fair’ (p. viii).
The first lecture was delivered in St Louis, while the other four lectures
were given as part of the 150th anniversary of the founding of
Columbia University, New York, all in the year 1904.
3 Ibid., pp. 185–6, 93–102, 107.
4 Ibid., pp. 190–227.
5 Henri Berr, La Synthèse en histoire: son rapport avec la synthèse générale,
Paris, 1953, pp. xi-xvi, 1–3; compare Tarle, p. 74.
6 Ibid., pp. 222–3.
7 Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle, Paris, 1934, p. xi. See also
Martin Siegel, ‘Henri Berr’s Revue de Synthèse Historique’, History and
Theory, 9, 1970.
8 James Bryce, ‘John Emerich Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton’, Studies in
Contemporary Biography, London, 1903, pp. 386, 392–4.
9 Acton, in ‘German Schools of History’, English Historical Review, Vol.
1, 1886, p. 35. See also the quotation from Bryce, ‘John Emerich’, p.
390: ‘It is the office of historical science to maintain morality as the
sole impartial criterion of men and things.’
10 John Nurser, The Reign of Conscience: Individual, Church and State in
Lord Acton’s History of Liberty, New York and London, 1987, pp. 34,
109; Bryce, ‘John Emerich’, pp. 383–5.
11 ibid., pp. 84–7, 91–3, 100, 104–5. See also Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The
179
NOTES
American Revolution in the Political Theory of Lord Acton’, Journal of

Modern History, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1949. Himmelfarb makes some
interesting comparisons between the approaches of Lord Acton and
Edmund Burke.
12 Lord Acton, Longitude 30 West. A Confidential Report to the Syndics of the
Cambridge University Press, New York, 1969.
13 Romein, The Watershed, pp. 457–60.
14 Charles Seignobos, A Political History of Contemporary Europe, Vol. 2,
London, 1901, pp. 845–7.
15 H.A.L.Fisher, A History of Europe, London, 1936, p. v.
16 The Times, 1–10 April 1913.
17 J.F.Jameson, ‘The International Congress of Historical Studies, held at
London’, American Historical Review, Vol. 18, 1913, pp. 683–4, suggests
that Bryce was chosen to be president, ‘we may assume, as best
representing the cosmopolitan spirit in the historical thinking of
England’.
18 Presumably, the five or six European races were the British, French,
German, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish or Italian; the eight great powers
included Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy,
Spain and the USA; and the two likely to join the top ranks were Japan
and China. (Japan was already a great power, perhaps, but Bryce’s
observation that ‘a few European tongues have overspread all the
continents, except Asia’ suggests that he himself did not want to
consider it a great power in a full sense.) The four religions must have
been the Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Bud-dhist. Buddhism was
perhaps the prime candidate for disappearance. I am grateful to
Professor John Hargreaves for his comments on this passage.
19 The Times, 4 April 1913, pp. 7–8. In Bryce’s absence, his address was
read by Dr A.W.Ward.
20 The Times, 10 April 1913, p. 5.
22 The Times, 5 April 1913, p. 6; 8 April 1913, p. 6.
26 The Times, 5 April 1913, p. 6; 7 April 1913, p. 11. The two papers
withdrawn concerned Albanian history and Austrian administrative
methods. See Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker, p. 100.
27 The Times, 4 April 1913, p. 8; 9 April 1913, p. 6; W. Michael in Historische
Zeitschrift, No. 111, 1913, pp. 464–8; Erdmann, Die Ökumene der
Historiker, pp. 86–96.
28 Ch. Bernier, ‘Le troisième Congrès International d’histoire’, Revue
historique, Vol. 113, 1913, pp. 216–18.
29 J.F. Jameson, ‘The International Congress’, pp. 679–80, 682, 687, 690.
31 Paul Vinogradoff, ed., Essays in Legal History, read before the
International Congress of Historical Studies held in London in 1913,
London, 1913, pp. 3–4, 356–83.
180
NOTES
32 J.F.Jameson, ‘The International Congress’, pp. 686, 690. He cites a paper

by Professor N.Bubnov of the University of Kiev, Les Titres scientifiques
de la langue russe pour l’admission de la langue russe dans les congrès
historiques internationaux, Kiev, 1913. See also A.G.Slon-imskii, ‘Uchastie
russkikh uchenykh v mezhdunarodnykh kongres-sakh istorikov’,
Voprosy istorii, No. 7, 1970.
33 E.V.Tarle, ‘Mezhdunarodnyi istoricheskii kongress v Londone (3–9
aprelia nov. st. 1913 g.)’, Nauchnyi istoricheskii zhurnal, No. 1, 1914, pp.
130–3.
34 Benjamin Kidd, Principles of Western Civilisation, London and New York,
1902, p. 363, quoted by W.H.Roobol, ‘In Search of an Atlantic Identity’,
Yearbook of European Studies, No. 4, Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga., 1991,
p. 6.
35 Paul Vinogradoff, ‘Historical Types of International Law’, Collected
Papers, Vol. 2, Oxford, 1928, pp. 248–9; James Bryce, Essays and Addresses
in War Time, London, 1918, Preface and p. 180; John Morley,
Recollections, Vol. 2, p. 953; F.E.Halliday, Thomas Hardy: His Life and
Work, London, 1972, p. 218. See also Keith G.Robbins, ‘Lord Bryce and
the First World War’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 10, pp. 255–77. Bryce
was among those who had previously believed in the existence of
‘Teutonic freedom’.
36 F.J.Turner, quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States
Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750, New York, 1989, p. 175.
W.M.Sloane, ‘History and Democracy’, American Historical Review, Vol.
1, 1895–6, pp. 16–17.
37 ‘The American Historical Association, 1919’, American Historical Review,
Vol. 24, 1919, pp. 353–4.
38 Charles A.Beard, Crosscurrents in Europe Today, Boston, 1922.
39 Bernard C.Borning, The Political and Social Thought of Charles A. Beard,
Seattle, 1962, pp. 14, 37, 56–9, 66; Ellen Nore, Charles A.Beard: An
Intellectual Biography, Carbondale, Ill., 1983, pp. 76, 84–6, 95–100.
40 Encyclopaedia Britannica, thirteenth edition, Vol. 1, London and New
York, 1926, pp. vii, xxxiv, 1011–12.
41 Walter Lippmann coined the term ‘Atlantic community’ in 1917. See,
for example, Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century,
New York, 1981, p. 111, as cited by Roobol, ‘In Search’, p. 7.
4 SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD HISTORY, 1923–62

1 See, for example, E.H.B.Rodger, Aberdeen Doctors, Aberdeen, 1892, p.
254, for a reference to the ‘Great War’, and Nina Platonova, ‘Nakanune
Velikoi Revoliutsii’, Annaly, No. 1, 1922, for a reference to the ‘Great
Revolution’. I owe the first of these references to Professor Roy Bridges.
2 See Chapter 3, pp. 90, 99. The meeting in St Petersburg was agreed for
1918, not 1917.
3 H.Pirenne, ‘De la méthode comparative en histoire’, Compte Rendu
181
NOTES
du V Congrès International des Sciences Historiques, Brussels, 1923,

pp. 19–32.
4 See, for example, Henri Berr, En marge de l’histoire universelle, Paris,
1934.
5 Pirenne, ‘De la méthode comparative en histoire’.
6 RIM, ‘Pirenne, Henri’, in John Cannon, ed., The Blackwell Dictionary of
Historians, Oxford, 1988.
7 See, for example, Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The
Annales School, 1929–1989, Oxford, 1990. On p. 2 Burke writes: ‘The
movement may be divided into three phases. In the first phase, from
the 1920s to 1945, it was small, radical and subversive. After the Second
World War, the rebels took over the historical Establish-ment…. A third
phase…opened around the year 1968. It is marked by fragmentation…’
8 Georg G.Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography, Middletown,
Conn., 1975.
9 M.Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the
Third Reich, Cambridge, 1988.
10 K.F.Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick,
NJ, 1962, pp. 13, 28, 43, 49, 56–63, 117–18, 146, 228; Ann K.Erickson,
‘E.V.Tarle: The Career of a Historian under the Soviet Regime’, Slavic
Review, Vol. 19, 1960; E.I.Chapkevich, Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle, Moscow,
1977.
11 Shteppa, Russian Historians, pp. 58–61.
12 E.V.Tarle, Evropa v epokhu imperializma, 1871–1919, second edition,
Moscow, 1928, pp. 488–97.
13 E.V.Tarle, ‘SSSR—mirovaia derzhava’, Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, No.
11, 1947, as in Sochineniia, Vol. 12, 1962, pp. 239–48. At least in this
piece, Tarle omitted reference to the human and material issues far
greater in the Second than in the First World War.
14 There were no Soviet representatives at the International Congresses
of Historical Sciences in Zurich, 1938, and Paris, 1950. See, for example,
Karl Dietrich Erdmann, Die Ökumene der Historiker und des Comité
International des Sciences Historiques, Göttingen, 1987, pp. 465, 471. In
spite of their isolation, Soviet historians produced a considerable
amount of work of considerable merit, for example on the medieval
and modern West. See Alexander Kan, ‘Soviet Historiography of the
West under Stalin’s Prewar Dictatorship’, Storia della Storiografia, Vol.
21, 1992.
15 DAJ, ‘Charles Austin Beard’, Blackwell; Bernard C.Borning, The Political
and Social Thought of Charles A.Beard, Seattle, 1962; Ellen Nore, Charles
A.Beard: An Intellectual Biography, Carbondale, Ill., 1983.
16 Charles A.Beard, ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’, American
Historical Review (hereafter AHR), Vol. 39, 1933–4, pp. 225–9; Theo-
dore Clarke Smith, ‘The Writing of American History in America,
from 1884 to 1934’, AHR, Vol. 40, 1934–5, pp. 447–9; Charles A. Beard
and Alfred Vagts, ‘Currents of Thought in Historiography’, AHR,
Vol. 42, 1936–7, pp. 466–83. See also William Dray, ‘Charles Beard
182
NOTES
and the Search for the Past as It Actually Was’, Perspectives on History,
London, 1980, pp. 27–46.
17 AHR, Vol. 28, 1923, pp. 226–7, 650.
18 AHR, Vol. 34, 1928–9, pp. 265, 270; Vol. 35, 1929–30, p. 245.
19 AHR, Vol. 39, 1933–4, especially pp. 230–1.
20 AHR, Vol. 39, 1933–4, pp. 269–73, Fling’s italics.
21 AHR, Vol. 44, 1938–9, pp. 290–3; Vol. 45, 1939–40, pp. 505–32; Vol. 50,
1944–5, p. 75.
22 There is no entry on Jan Romein in Blackwell. Information on him taken
from: Maarten C.Brands, ‘A Memoir of Jan Romein’; Annie Romein-
Verschoor, ‘Preface’; and Harry J.Marks, ‘Introduction’; all in Jan
Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras: Europe in 1900, Middletown, Conn.,
1978, trans. Arnold J.Pomerans, pp. ix-xxxviii.
23 Caroline F.Ware, K.M.Panikkar, J.M.Romein, History of Mankind, Vol.
VI: Cultural and Scientific Development, London, UNESCO, 1966.
24 Jan Romein, ‘Theoretical History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9,
1948, pp. 53–64.
25 Jan Romein, ‘The Common Human Pattern: Origin and Scope of
Historical Theories’, Journal of World History, Vol. 4, 1957–8.
26 Jan Romein, ‘Change and Continuity in History: The Problem of
“Transformation”’, in J.S.Bromley and E.H.Kossmann, eds, Britain and
the Netherlands, Vol. 2, Groningen, 1964.
27 See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘1968: Revolution in the
World-System’, Geographics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-
System, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 13–14, 65–7. And see Note 7 above.
28 William Vogt, Road to Survival, London, 1949, pp. v-vi, 16–17; Rachel
Carson, Silent Spring, London, 1962.
29 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man, London, 1962.
30 See, for example, William H.McNeill, Arnold J.Toynbee: A Life, Oxford,
1989; Christopher Brewin, ‘Research in a Global Context: A Discussion
of Toynbee’s Legacy’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2,
1992; R.W.Davies, ‘Edward Hallett Carr, 1892–1982’, Proceedings of the
British Academy, Vol. 69, 1983. Pieter Geyl, Encoun-ters in History,
London, 1963, contains criticism of both Toynbee and Barraclough as
well as of Jan Romein.
5 CONCLUSION
1 The most interesting exception is the USA, where basketball is the
most popular spectator sport and bowling the most popular participant
sport. American football, like Australian and Gaelic football, is a
distinctive local variant.
2 To ask someone what a game of football was like is a simple request
and usually gets a simple answer. Ask more than one body, however,
about the same match and before long you’re left wonder-ing if they
183
NOTES
were all referring to the same event’ (Stewart Weir, The Scotsman, 13
April 1992). Compare the remark attributed to another journalist:
‘Football’s not about the facts, it’s about what happened.’
3 ‘A Near-Earth Asteroid Detection Workshop Aims at Averting any
Untoward Collision’, The Observer, 20 October 1991.
4 See, for example, Jean-Christophe Rufin, L’Empire et les nouveaux
barbares, Paris, 1991.
5 Compare Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History,
London, 1967, p. 20.
6 To attempt to define post-modernism is perhaps to risk a contradiction
in terms. However, to adapt the football analogy, the spectators have
joined in the game. Perhaps the most succinct definition of post-
modernism come from Jean François Lyotard: ‘death of centres’;
‘incredulity towards metanarratives’.
7 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Montesquieu’, Against the Current: Essays in the History
of Ideas, Oxford, 1991, pp. 130, 132, 160–1.
8 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M.Cohler,
Basia C.Miller and Harold S.Stone, Cambridge, 1989 (hereafter The
Spirit), pp. 4–9.
9 Paul Cartledge, ‘Cross Currents of Democracy’, History Today, February
1990, pp. 7–9. This subject is pursued to the present day in John Dunn,
ed., Democracy: The Unfinished Journey 508 BC to AD 1993, Oxford, 1992.
See also Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, London, 1992.
10 The Spirit, pp. 22–30, 43–51, 98, 104–11, 135–41. Catherine the Great, of
course, would like to have included herself here.
11 Marx to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, with his own emphases, in Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 1846–1895, London,
1943, p. 57.
12 See, for example, Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology, Oxford,
1991; Keith Graham, Karl Marx, Our Contemporary: Social Theory for a
Post-Leninist World, London, 1992. See also A.G.Meyer,’ The End of
Communism?’, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, 1994.
13 For arguments in the other direction, see Alan Ryan, introduction, After
the End of History, London, 1992.
14 See, for example, N.N.Bolkhovitinov, ‘Three Pine-Trees or Which
Textbook of Democracy Should We Study?’, Soviet Literature, 1989, No.
11 (500), pp. 26–9. Nobody has done more than Academician
Bolkhovitinov to investigate contacts between Russia and America,
especially up to and including the sale of Alaska in 1867. From the
American side, see Norman E.Saul, Distant Friends: The United States
and Russia, 1763–1867, Lawrence, Kan., 1991, and the works cited
therein.
15 See Vilhjamur Stefansson, The Northward Course of Empire, London,
1922.
16 Charles Maier, ‘The Collapse of Communism: Approaches for a
Future History’, History Workshop, No. 31, 1991, pp. 53–6. In a sense,
184
NOTES
Maier’s conclusions follow on from those of Eric Foner. See Chapter

2, Note 45.
17 See for example, Colin White, Russia and America: The Roots of Economic
Divergence, London, 1987, as well as my own works, most recently
Paul Dukes, The Last Great Game: USA versus USSR: Events,
Conjunctures, Structures, London, 1989.
18 Nezavisimaia gazeta, 6 November 1991. For a modification of Alek-seev’s
assertions by a fellow lawyer, see W.E.Butler, ‘Civil Rights in Russia’,
in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia,
Oxford, 1989, p. 9:
dismissing Russian civil rights as non-existent or inconsequen-

tial is not merely to lose sight of a major arena for political and
social reform but also to indulge in a kind of axiomatic negativ-
ism that likewise continues to obscure our perceptions of modern
realities in the Soviet Union.
Similar caveats might be expressed about some of the interpretations

advanced since August 1991.
19 Paul N.Miliukov, The Russian Revolution, Vol.1, ed. Richard Stites, Gulf
Breeze, 1978, p. 1.
20 See above, pp. 71, 74.
21 See above, p. 68.
22 Alexander Yanov, The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000, Oxford, 1987,
p. 293; R.G.Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo terrora, St Petersburg, 1992; Paul Dukes,
‘Russia and Mid-Seventeenth Century Europe: Some Comments on
the Work of B.F.Porshnev’, European Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1974.
23 Colin Blakemore, The Mind Machine, London, 1990, p. 272. Some might
prefer to be puppets rather than monkeys. See, for example, Jared
Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, London, 1991, or
Steve Jones, ‘The Language of the Genes’, The 1991 BBC Reith Lectures.
24 S.V.Mironenko, ed., Istoriia otechestva: liudi, idei, resheniia: ocherki istorii
Rossii IX-nachala XXv., Moscow, 1991, pp. 5–6.
25 S.V.Kuleshov and others, eds, Nashe otechestvo: opyt politicheskoi istorii,
Moscow, 1991, Vol. 1, pp. 4–7.
26 A.F.Zamaleev and others, Rossiia glazami russkogo: Chaadaev, Leon-tiev,
Soloviev, St Petersburg, 1991, p. 16. See more generally M.A. Maslin,
ed., Russkaia ideia, Moscow, 1992.
27 See above, pp. 96–8.
28 See above, pp. 127, 133–4.
29 Roger Lewin, Complexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos, London, 1993, pp.
54, 60–1, 195–6.
30 Of course, a number of works already go some way towards answering
these questions, for example:
1) Many years ago, I heard a lecture given by the late Joel Hurstfield
in which he doubted whether the inhabitants of Ivan the Terrible’s
Russia were worse off than those of Elizabeth I’s England. See more
185
NOTES
generally N.S.Kollman, Kinship and Politics: The Making of the Muscovite

Political System, Stanford, 1987.
2) B.F.Porshnev, The Thirty Years’ War: The Entry of Sweden and
Muscovy, Cambridge, 1995.
3) Philip Longworth, Alexis: Tsar of All the Russias, London, 1984;
Lindsey Hughes, Sophia: Regent of Russia 1657–1704, London, 1990. See
also Paul Dukes, Chapter One, ‘The General Crisis of the Seven-teenth
Century’, October and the World: Perspectives on the Russian Revolution,
London, 1979.
4) E.V.Anisimov, The Reforms of Peter the Great: Progress through
Coercion in Russia, New York and London, 1993; E.V.Anisimov, ‘Peter
I: Birth of Empire’, in J.Cracraft, ed., Major Problems in the History of
Imperial Russia, Lexington, 1994. Boris Yeltsin has written: ‘In a general
sense Peter the Great’s reforms have not been achieved to this day.
Although we have become Europeans, we have remained ourselves.’
I owe this reference to Dr Lindsey Hughes, who is completing a study
of Russia in the age of Peter the Great.
5) See Chapter 1, Note 23 above. See also A.Kamensky, ‘Pod seniu
Ekateriny’: vtoraia polovina XVIII veka, St Petersburg, 1992. Significant
translations are to be found in David Griffiths and George E.Munro,
trans. and eds, Catherine II’s Charters of 1785 to the Nobility and the Towns,
Bakersfield, Calif., 1992.
6) Dmitry Shlapentokh, ‘The French Revolution in Russian
Intellectual Life’, in Joseph Klaits and Michael H.Haltzel, eds, The Global
Ramifications of the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1994; Dukes, Chapter
Two, ‘The Democratic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century’, October
and the World.
7) Janet M.Hartley, Chapter Nine, ‘The Parting of the Ways’,
Alexander I, London, 1994; David Saunders, Chapter Four, ‘The
Decembrist Movement’, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform, 1801–
1881, London, 1992.
8) Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom,
Cambridge, Mass., 1987. Steven Hoch argued for the comparison of
post-Emancipation Russia with the post-Emancipation American South
in the symposium described by Jane Burbank in Note 31 below.
9) Michael Rywkin, ed., Russian Colonial Expansion to 1917, London,
1988, and other works by the contributors; Karen Dawisha and Bruce
Parrott, Russia and the New States of Eurasia: The Politics of Upheaval,
Cambridge, 1994, pp. 289–94: ‘The Upheaval in Comparative
perspective’. Geoffrey Hosking, who is completing a book on the
Russian Empire, has written of a late tsarist ‘constitutional nationalism’
as a mixture ‘similar to that which Joseph Chamberlain had been
preaching in Britain a few years earlier: an Empire for the common
man’ (The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma,
1907–1914, Cambridge, 1973, p. 106).
10) Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Percep-
186
NOTES
tion and Prejudice, 1848–1923, Cambridge, 1992; Edward Acton,

Rethinking the Russian Revolution, London, 1990.
31 Jane Burbank, ‘Revisioning History: Imperial Russia’, Slavic Review,
Vol. 52, No. 3, 1993. The participants cited are Jane Burbank, Jeffrey
Brooks, Michael Confino, Richard Wortman, Richard Stites, Gregory
Freeze and David Ransel.
32 E.H.Carr, What is History?, second edition, London, 1987. A colleague
in a science department has defined electricity as ‘a proba-bilistic drift
of probable particles’.
33 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, London, 1951,
p. v; The Independent Magazine, 9 December 1989, and subsequent issues,
including vigorous rebuttals.
34 Roger Griffin, ‘The Fascist Phoenix’, Politics Review, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1992.
See more fully Roger Griffin, The Nature of fascism, London, 1991.
35 In a review of a book on Scotland and the Slavs (Slavic Review, Vol. 53,
1994, p. 575), Dale E.Paterson refers to ‘the timely issue of whether the
Scottish enlightenment of Dugald Stewart, Adam Smith and Adam
Ferguson succeeded in creating an intellectual tradition strong enough
to support the current experiments in political and cultural liberalism
in the post-communist Slavic nations’. For the quotation from The
Communist Manifesto, see for example Karl Marx: The Revolutions of 1848,
Political Writings, Vol. 1, ed. and intro. by David Fernbach, London,
1973, p. 70.
36 J.KGalbraith, quoted in The Scotsman, 25 November 1992.
37 Paul Dukes, Forum, History Today, June 1984. Among the most concise
arguments is William H.McNeill, ‘A Defence of World History’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, London, 1982.
38 See, for example, Tom Gallacher, ‘Currency for the Return Ticket’ and
Alison Utley, ‘The Empire Watchers Strike Back’, The Higher, 8 May, 28
August 1992. Recourse to history was attended with most xenophobia
and violence in the former Yugoslavia and the Cauca-sian republics.
39 See, for example, Iu. S.Kukushkin and others, Russkii narod: istoricheskaia
sud’ba v XX veke, Moscow, 1993; L.A.Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia
gosudarstvennost, St Petersburg, 1992 (reprint of a work on the
monarchical state first published in 1904); Oleg Rumyantsev, Chairman
of the Russian Foundation of Constitutional Reform, ‘Let’s Hear It for
the USSR’, The Guardian, 10 August 1994.
40 D.S.Likhachev, The National Nature of Russian History, New York, 1990,
p. 18.
41 Samuel P.Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, foreign Affairs, Vol.
72, No. 3, Summer 1993, p. 22.
42 This is to disagree with Herbert Butterfield, who wrote: ‘In reality, the
poet, the prophet, the novelist and the playwright command sublimer
realms than those of technical history because they recon-stitute life
in its wholeness. The history of historiography may help us to keep
187
NOTES
the technical historian in his place’ (Man on His Past, Cambridge, 1955,
p. 141). Compare E.V.Tarle and Jan Romein, pp. 74, 127 above. Arguably,
the ‘technical’ historian helps to keep firmly on the ground the feet of
those who seek ‘sublimer realms’. Certainly, there can be no history of
historiography without ‘technical’ historians to help provide the
historiography.
188
INDEX
Aberdeen 169–70 Atlantic community 106

Acton, John Emerich Edward August Revolution (Russia, 1991)
Dalberg, 1st Baron: death 98; 46
and historical universalism 82– Aulard, François Victor Alphonse
7, 102, 125, 160–1, 163; 72
influence 9; Liberal convictions
91 Babeuf, François Noel (Gracchus
Adams, Henry 85 Babeuf) 48
Africa 18–19, 60, 88 Bacon, Francis 12, 22
Alekseev, Sergei 154 Bailyn, Bernard 21
Alexander I, Tsar 156, 165 Bancroft, George 85
Alexander II, Tsar 156 Barraclough, Geoffrey 136
American Civil War (1861–5) 55 Battenberg (Mountbatten),
American Historical Association Admiral Louis, Prince of (later
103, 123 1st Marquess of Milford
American Historical Review, The 97, Haven) 94
102, 120–2 Beard, Charles A.: career and
American Revolution (War of ideas 116–21, 125, 136, 162; and
Independence, 1775–83) 6, 8, ‘New History’ 10, 85, 116, 121;
19, 22–4, 55, 83 Crosscurrents in Europe Today
Americas (North and South) see (lectures) 103; ‘Currents of
New World Thought in Historiography’
anarchists 68 (article; with Vagts) 117–21; An
Anglo-Saxon tradition 82, 161; see Economic Interpretation of the
also English-speaking peoples Constitution 116; President
Annales school (of historians) Roosevelt and the Coming of the
111, 162, 182n7 War 117; The Rise of American
Annaly: zhurnal vseobshchei istorii Civilization (with Mary Beard)
76 116; ‘Written History as an Act
Arakcheev, A.A. 69 of Faith’ (address) 117, 121
aristocracy 146 Beard, Mary Ritter 116
Aristotelianism 132 Beccaria, Cesare Bonsena,
art: history as 5, 150, 163 Marchese de 22
Asia 17–20, 125 Belgium: colonialism 60
189
INDEX
Berlin, Sir Isaiah 144–5 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of

Bernheim, Ernst: ‘Die historische Salisbury 22
Interpretation aus den Bush, George 164
Zeitanschauungen’ (paper) 93, Butterfield, Herbert: The Whig
97 Interpretation of History 167;
Bernier, Charles 97 Man on His Past 187n42
Bernstein, Eduard 66–7, 132
Berr, Henri: and Annales school Cambridge Modern History 84–5
111, 162; influence 9; and Cameralists 75
universal history 86–7, 125, Cantemir see Kantemir
163; ‘The Evolution of capitalism: historical
Humanity’ 109; La Synthèse en development of 92–3; and
histoire 81–2, 160 imperialism 134; Marx and
Bismarck, Prince Otto von 86 Engels on 53–5, 168
Blackstone, Sir William 21, 28 Carr, Edward Hallett 136, 167
Bloch, Marc 111 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 135–6
Boer War (1899–1902) 60 Cartledge, Paul 146
Bolshevik Revolution (October Catherine II (the Great), Empress
1917): Beard on 103; bourgeois of Russia: accession 2; adopts
reaction to 130–1, 163; effect Montesquieu’s Spirit of the
and impact of 69, 110; and Laws 8, 15–16, 26–9, 43;
freedom concept 2; historical autocracy 3–4; and
support for 66; and Marxism constitution 27–9, 138, 165; on
46, 50–1; Miliukov on 154–5; French Revolution 29–33;
and overthrow of capitalism historical view of 6, 165;
68; Tarle on 113, 115 reforms 21, 28, 156; Nakaz 27–
Boucher, Jonathan 24–5 8; see also Russia (Imperial)
Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) 112 causality 81
Brissot, Jacques Pierre 33 Chaadaev, P. Ia. 159
Britain: and capitalist production Chamberlain, Joseph 60,
54; colonialism 60; constitution 186n30(9)
23; cost of World War I 112; Charlemagne, Emperor 110
decline 82; economic Charles I, King of Great Britain 41
dominance 50–1; and relations Charles II, King of Great Britain
with USA 104–6; revolutions 41
(17th century) 41, 49, 62; in Charles X, King of France 86
World War I 61 Charter of the Nobility (Russia,
Bryce, James, Viscount: on Acton 1785) 3
82–3; Liberal affiliations 91; Chartists 50
presidential address at 1913 chemistry 52, 108–9, 128
Historical Congress 88–90, 93, China: Cultural Revolution in
108; on World War I 101 136; forms axis with USSR 115,
Bukharin, N.I. 70 141; historical study of 80, 121
Burke, Edmund: Beard on 118; Christianity: Acton’s commitment
and constitutional order 8, 15, to 83; influence on political
38; on French Revolution 38– rights 18
40; Letters on the Proposals for Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st
Peace with the Regicide Directory Earl of 72
of France 39 class struggle 148
190
INDEX
climate: effect on political Descartes, René 11–12, 131, 161

development 18, 20, 23; in despotism: Montesquieu on 17,
North America 23–4, 36 27–8; in Russia 28; Washington
Cohler, Anne M. 23, 42 on dangers of 37
Coke, Sir Edward 21 diachronic history 6
Cold War: and Cuba crisis 9; ends Disraeli, Benjamin 60
143, 151; follows world wars
107, 162; Romein on 123; USSR economic determinism 116–17
and 141 Economist, The (journal) 5, 142
collectivisation (USSR) 65 Egypt: independence 114
Columbus, Christopher 12 Einstein, Albert 128, 133
commerce: Montesquieu on 147 Elias, Norbert: The Civilizing
Common Human Pattern (CHP) Process 127
128–31, 136, 162–3 Encyclopaedia Britannica 63, 67, 69,
Commonwealth of Independent 104
States (post-1991 Russia) see Engels, Friedrich: death and
Russian Federation inheritance 66; eulogy of Marx
communism 48, 69, 136; see also 45–7; influence on Marx 51;
Marxism-Leninism Preface to Marx’s Capital 52, 54;
complexity 164–5 and scientific terminology 149;
Comte, Auguste 52, 73, 93, 101, on US industrial development
177n12 55; The Communist Manifesto
Congress of School Extension (with Marx) 8, 48–9, 56, 59, 120,
Workers, USSR (1919) 62 149, 168
conscience 87 England see Britain
contemporarisation 142, 144 English-speaking peoples 78, 104–
Cook, Captain James 13 6, 161
Copernicus, Nicolaus 132 Enlightenment, The 129–30, 150,
Correggio 16, 52 167; see also Scottish
Cossacks 3 Enlightenment
Crimean War (1854–5) 51 Europe: global dominance 88–90;
Croce, Benedetto 86, 119, 121–2, and modernisation process
125 144, 177n16; Montesquieu on
Cromwell, Oliver 41, 83, 176n4 supremacy of 15, 17–21; and
Cuba: 1962 missile crisis 9, 136 North American separation
24–5
Dante Alighieri 52
Danton, Georges Jacques 72 Federalist, The (journal) 22–4
Dartmouth College (USA) 103 feudalism 21, 28
Darwin, Charles 52, 67, 135 Finland 131, 163
Davidsohn, Commendatore First World War see World War I
Robert 96 (1914–18)
Deane, Silas 21 Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens 87
Decembrist Revolt (Russia, 1825) Five-Year Plans (USSR) 65
156, 166 Fling, Fred Morrow 122
decolonisation 131 France: 1940 collapse 113, 123; and
democracy: and capitalism 4; cost of World War I 112;
origins of 145–7; in post-Soviet representation at 1913
Russia 171
191
INDEX
Historical Congress 97–8; and Hamilton, Alexander 8, 23–5, 34,

scientific history 80–1 116–17
Frederick II (the Great), King of Hardy, Thomas 101
Prussia 27, 165 Haskins, Charles H.: ‘European
freedom see liberty History and American
French Revolution: Burke on 38– Scholarship’ 120–1
41, 118; and constitutional Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
government 8; effect on 47, 75, 93
Russian and American Hill, David Jayne: A History of
constitutionality 29–33, 165; in Diplomacy in the International
historical context 6; influence Development of Europe 61
in USA 34–8; Lenin on 62; Marx historical materialism 80
on 47–9; and monarchy 30, 33, Historismus (historism) 117–18,
42; Tarle alludes to 75–6 130, 162
Hitler, Adolf 111, 114, 167
Galbraith, John Kenneth 168 Hobbes, Thomas 18, 173n2
Garvin, James Louis 104 Hobson, J.A.: Imperialism 60
Gauguin, Paul 132 Home Rule (Ireland) 87
Genet, Edmond Charles 32–5 honour: concept of 23
Genghis Khan 18 Horace: Satires 54
geopolitics 152–3 Huizinga, Jan: Homo Ludens 127;
Germany: attack on USSR (1941) Waning of the Middle Ages 123–4
65; colonialism 60; and cost of Hungary 95
World War I 112; democratic Huntington, Samuel P. 171
majority principles in 93; Hurstfield, Joel 185n30(1)
Lamprecht on history of 79–80;
Marx on 47, 49, 54; and natural imperialism 60–1, 67, 109, 134
selection 101; and rise of India 80, 95–6, 114
dictatorship 111; in World War Indonesia 114
II 113, 123 International Congress of
Gierke, O. von: ‘Zur Geschichte Comparative History, Paris
des Majoritätsprinzips’ (paper) (1900) 79, 87–8
93 International Congresses of
Glorious Revolution (Britain, Historical Sciences (or Studies):
1688) 6, 83, 167 London (1913) 9, 87–100, 106,
Gorchakov, Prince Alexander 161; Brussels (1923) 108, 121,
Mikhailovich 166 161; Oslo (1928) 111, 121;
Gordon, Thomas 22 Warsaw and Krakow (1933)
Great War see World War I (1914– 122; Zurich (1938) 122
18) Italy: dictatorship in 111
Greece, ancient 20–1, 129, 146 Ivan IV (the Terrible), Tsar 156–7,
Greece, modern 114 165, 185n30(1)
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Baron
von 29, 31–2 Jameson, J.F. 97, 99, 121; ‘Typical
Grotius, Hugo 15, 21 Steps in American Expansion’
Guicciardini, Francesco 72 98
Japan: 1938 repulse at Khasan and
Haiti: slave revolt 26 Khalkin Gol 113; attacks USA
192
INDEX
123; imperialism 60; in World development and progress 59;

War I 61 unmentioned by Tarle 76;
Jefferson, Thomas 34–5, 116–17 Vinogradoff ignores 99; The
Jorga, N.: ‘Les Bases nécessaires Development of Capitalism in
d’une nouvelle histoire du Russia 59, 62; Imperialism: the
moyen age’ (paper) 92 Highest Stage of Capitalism 60–2,
Joseph II, Emperor of Austria 165 149; What is to be Done? 59, 132
Leontev, K.N. 159
Kadet Party (Russia) 3 Lewin, Roger: Complexity: Life at
Kantemir, Prince A.D. 26 the Edge of Chaos 163
Karamzin, N.B. 57–8, 76, 138, 158 Liberal Democratic Party (postS-
Kautsky, Karl 67–8 oviet Russia) 1
Kerensky, Alexander Feodorovich liberty (freedom): as concept
156 under Peter the Great 2; and
Khalkin Gol 113 French Revolution 34; Lenin on
Khasan 113 62–3; and reforms 4; in Russia’s
Kidd, Benjamin: Principles of Choice 6
Western Civilisation 100 Liebermann, Felix 96
Kliuchevsky, V.O. 57–8, 76, 86, 139, Likhachev, D.S. 171
158 Locke, John 6, 15, 154, 173n2
Korea 114 Louis Philippe, King of France 86
Kovalevsky, Maxim 57, 76 Luxemburg, Rosa 67–8
Kropotkin, Prince Peter A. 68 Lyotard, Jean François 184n6
Kursk, Battle of (1943) 114
Machiavelli, Niccolò 72
Lamprecht, Karl: doctrine of McLuhan, Marshall: The Gutenberg
universalism 79–81, 86–7, 125, Galaxy 136
160, 163; at 1913 Historical Madison, James 8, 22–4
Congress 97; influence 9; What Mahomet (the Prophet) 110
Is History? 79, 160 Malinovskii, A.F. 25–6
land ownership 3, 56, 172n3, Malthus, Thomas 135
173n4, 177n16 Marat, Jean Paul 41
Langton, Chris 164 Marczali, H.: ‘Count Széchenyi
Lappo-Danilevsky, A.S.: ‘L’Idée de and the Introduction of English
l’état et son évolution’ (paper) Civilization to Hungary’
98 (paper) 95
League of Nations 101 Marshall Plan 117
Lee-Warner, Sir William 95 Marx, Karl: Beard on 103, 117;
legality 4, 6 death and inheritance 66–7;
Leland, Waldo G. 121–2 and historical science 46–7;
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich: Beard on ideas and doctrines 45–50, 144,
pragmatism of 103; and 148–9; Lamprecht criticises 80;
constitutionalism 76; on position of Russia 138;
governmental reforms 62–3; Romein on 124; and 1917
and Marxist doctrine 44; Russian Revolution 66–7;
originality 133; on unmentioned by Tarle 76;
revolutionary government 8, world view 11; Capital 8, 44, 52–
57, 138; on Russian 6, 59, 76, 148; Communist
Manifesto (with Engels) 8, 48–9,
193
INDEX
56, 59, 120, 149, 168; Critique of (on Russia) 26–7; (structure) 17,
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 47 145
Marxism-Leninism: development Morley, John, Viscount 90–1, 93;
of 57; disestablishment of 5; as Recollections 101
ideology 149; resisted in USA
44; revisions of 67, 149–50; and Napoleon I (Bonaparte), Emperor
revolutionary order 8; and of the French 66, 165
Soviet patriotism 162; and Napoleon III, Emperor of the
Stalinism 65, 76; Tarle accepts French 50, 86
10 Nashe otechestvo (‘Our Fatherland’)
Mathiez, Albert 72 158
Meinecke, Friedrich 117–19, 162 nation states 141; see also state, the
Mensheviks 68 National Assembly (France) 30
Meyer, Eduard: ‘Ancient History National Convention (France) 34
and Historical Research in the nationalism 103, 108–9, 111
Last Generation’ (paper) 91–2 natural law 28
Michael Romanov, Tsar 156, 165 natural selection 100–1
Michelangelo Buonarroti 16 Nauchnyi istoricheskii zhurnal 100
Miliukov, Paul 154, 164, 166 Nazism 111
Mironenko, S.V.: (ed.) Istoriia New Deal (USA) 117
otechestva 157–8 New Economic Policy (USSR) 63,
modernisation: concept of 142–4 156
monarchy: Burke on 40; Catherine New World (Americas) 15, 19
II on 30–1; as form of Newton, Sir Isaac 12, 131–2
government 146–7; and French Nicholas II, Tsar 156
Revolution 30, 33, 42; and Nietzsche, Friedrich 80
nobility 41 nobility: Charter (Russia, 1785) 3;
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de formation of 92; freedom
Secondat, Baron de La Brède et decree (Russia, 1762) 2; and
de: on democracy 146–7; monarchy 41
influence 144–5, 148; on
position of Russia 138; and obshchina (communal land
promotion of public ownership) 56
institutions 37; self-image 52; October Revolution (Russia
and social science 16; supports 1917)see Bolshevik Revolution
constitutionalism 66, 145; Oman, (Sir) Charles William: ‘A
world view 11, 26; writings 14; Defence of Military History’
The Spirit of the Laws: (and (paper) 94
American Revolution) 22–5, 43; otechestvo (fatherland) 157
(Beard on) 118; (Catherine II
takes as model) 8, 15–16, 27–9, Pacific Ocean: in geopolitics 153
43; (on constitutional order) 41; Paris Commune (1871) 81
(and Descartes) 11; (on effects Paris World Exhibition (1900) 79,
of climate) 18, 20, 23, 36; (on 81, 96
European supremacy) 15, 17– Pasteur, Louis 108
21; (and French Revolution) 42; patriotism: and history 79
(influence) 8, 16, 22–3, 29, 41, Paul I, Tsar 40
43; (invoked) 101; (on peasants: in 1917 Russian
monarchy) 31; (publication) 14; Revolution 6; and
194
INDEX
collectivisation 65; and Pugachev, Emelian Ivanovich 2–4,

common land ownership 56; 6, 38, 63, 172n2
and emancipation of serfs 51; Pusey, Edward Bouverie 168
Lenin’s policy on 63; in Marxist
theory 50, 150; move to towns racial theory 108–9
92; and proletarian leadership Ranke, Leopold von 72, 119
64; and Pugachev rising and Raphael Sanzio: St Cecilia
freedom decree 2–4 (painting) 16
Penn, William 19, 83 Reid, Sir George 94
permanent revolution 64–5 relativity theory 128
Perry, John: The State of Russia Renaissance 129–30
under the Present Czar 26 republicanism 40, 145–6
Peter I (the Great), Tsar: Acton on ‘Revisioning History: Imperial
85, 161; assessed 165; Russia’ (conference, 1991) 166–
Montesquieu on 27; and 7
political ideals 2, 156, 186n30 revolutions of 1848 50–1, 62
(4) Revue historique 97
Peter III, Tsar 2–3 Revue de synthèse historique 81
pH test 43, 44, 76, 78, 106, 136–7, Rhodes, Cecil 60
144 Robertson, General Sir William
physics 128 Robert 94
Physiocrats 74 Robespierre, Maximilien de: on
Pipes, Richard 2 constitutional government and
Pirenne, Henri: at 1913 Historical revolution 7–8, 15, 42–3, 62;
Congress 10; history of historical view of 72; Marx on
Belgium 110; and universal 48; and Russian Revolution 66
history 125, 136, 162, 163; ‘Les Robinson, James Harvey 116; ‘The
Etapes sociales de revolution Newer Ways’ 121
du capitalisme du XIIe au XIXe Roland, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon 33
siècle’ (paper) 92; ‘On the Romania 170
Comparative Method in Romanov, Michael see Michael
History’ (address) 108–10, 115, Romanov, Tsar
161 romanticism 109
Platonism 132 Rome (ancient) 20–1, 129
Plekhanov, Georgy Valentinovich: Romein, Jan: career and ideas 123–
The Role of the Individual in 6, 162–3; influence 10; Aera van
History 132 Europa 125; ‘Change and
Polynesia 60 Continuity in History: the
Portugal 60 problem of “Transformation”’
positivism 52 125, 131–2, 163; ‘The Common
post-modernism 143, 165, 184n6 Human Pattern’ 128–9, 162; De
proletariat: dictatorship of 64–5, Eeuw van Azie (The Asian
148; Lenin on importance of 59; Century) 125; ‘The Origins,
in Marx’s theories 49–50, 149; Development and Future of
and Russian peasants 64 Dutch History’ 124;
property 2–3, 6; see also land ‘Theoretical History’ 125–7,
ownership 162; The Watershed of Two Eras:
pseudo-history 72 Europe in 1900 125, 131
Pufendorf, Samuel 15, 22 Romein-Verschoor, Annie 127
195
INDEX
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 117 Scottish Enlightenment 23, 28, 149,

Royal United Services Institution 168, 187n35
94 Second World War see World War
Russia (Imperial): Acton on 85, 98; II (1939–45)
Burke on 38, 40; Catherine’s Seignobos, Charles: A Political
reforms in 21, 27–9, 156; History of Contemporary Europe
compared with USA 25–6; and 86, 159
cost of First World War 112; serfs, serfdom: emancipation 51,
economic-political 156, 166; Marx’s silence on 56;
development 57–8; historical revolts 26
study and interpretation of slaves, slavery 26, 166
157–61, 165–7, 171; imperialism Sloane, W.M.: ‘History and
60; influence of French Democracy’ 102
Revolution on 29–30, 165–6; Small, William 22
Karl Marx on 49–51, 55–6; Smith, Adam: The Wealth of
March revolution (1917) 69; on Nations 149, 168
margins of Europe 138; social contract 15, 154
Montesquieu refers to 26–7; socialism: and imperialism 61;
representation at 1913 Kautsky on 67; Lenin and 63;
Historical Congress 98–9; 1905 and permanent revolution 64
Revolution 59, 85, 156, 166; ‘Socialism in one country’
suppresses 1848 revolutions 51; (doctrine) 10
see also Bolshevik Revolution; Socialist Revolutionaries (political
Russian Federation; Union of group) 68
Soviet Socialist Republics Soloviev, S.M. 76, 158, 159; History
Russian Federation (post-1991) of Russia from the Earliest Times
152–6; see also August 70
Revolution (Russia, 1991) Soviets: as institutions 64
Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Spanish-American War (1898) 60
Republic 62 Stalin, Josef V.: death 158;
Russia’s Choice (political bloc) 2, embraces constitutionalism 76;
6, 154 and Marxist doctrine 44; on
Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) 85 need for modernisation 65;
Ryazanov, D.B. 50 power and position 65, 156;
and revolutionary order 8, 138;
Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Leon de ‘The Foundations of Leninism’
Richebourg de 48 65
St Louis: Congress of Arts and Stalingrad 114
Sciences (1904) 179n2 Stamp Act (USA, 1765) 25
St Petersburg: chosen as venue for state, the 40, 100; see also nation
1918 Historical Congress 99, states
108 Strachey, John St Loe: ‘English-
Schliemann, Heinrich 92 Speaking Peoples, Relations of
science: definition unresolved 87; 104–5
Engels on terminology of 149; surplus value, law of (Marx) 45,
and erudition 74; history as 5, 53, 67
108–10, 150, 163; Marx and 52; Sweden: Russia defeats (1709) 65
theories and truth in 128–9 synchronic history 6
Széchenyi, Count István 95–6
196
INDEX
Tacitus 169 world power 114; in World War

Tamerlane (Timur) 18 II113–15, 123; see also Bolshevik
Tarle, E.V.: career and ideas 111– Revolution; Russia (Imperial);
15, 116, 125, 136, 138, 155, 162, Russian Federation
164; on 1913 Historical United States of America: Burke
Congress 100; on history and on 40–1; and concept of
pseudo-history 72–7; and contemporarisation 144;
revolutionary order 9–10; constitution 16, 19, 22–4, 29,
Europe in the Age of Imperialism, 36–7, 43; and cost of World War
1871–1919 111; ‘The Next Task’ I 112; emancipation of slaves
44, 70, 75–6, 78, 155–7 166; and end of Cold War 151;
‘Teutonic’ idea 78, 96–7, 100, 161 and English-speaking peoples
theoretical history 125–9, 162 104–6, 161; Europeanism 90;
Third World 141 Genet in 33–5; geographical
Thirty Years War 165 isolation 24–5; and 1913
Time of Troubles (Russia, c.1605– Historical Congress 97–8;
1613) 156–7 imperialism 60; industrial
Times, The (newspaper): on 1913 development 55–6; influence of
Historical Congress 87–8, 90, French Revolution on 34–8;
94, 100 Marxism fails to influence 76;
Tolstoy, Count Leo: ‘Three Deaths’ place in Western world 77;
131 post-World War I
Toynbee, Arnold 136; A Study of independence from Europe
History 127 102–3, 110; power of Congress
Trafalgar, Battle of (1805) 95 34–5; relations with Russia 152;
transformation 131–5 rise to dominance 82, 136, 153;
Trevor-Roper, Hugh (later Baron in World War I 61
Dacre) 167
Trotsky, Leon: on Lenin’s aims 63, Vagts, Alfred: ‘Currents of
76; and Marxist doctrine 44; Thought in Historiography’
and revolutionary order 8, 138; (with Beard) 117–21
History of the Russian Revolution value-form 52, 55–6; see also
63–4 surplus value
Truman Doctrine 114, 117 Vietnam War 136
Turgenev, Ivan S. 71 Vinogradoff, Paul: at 1913
Turner, Frederick Jackson 85, 102 Historical Congress 98–9, 161;
Lenin ridicules 59; liberal
Union of Soviet Socialist views 68; and Soviet Russia 69–
Republics (USSR): axis with 70, 76; and updating of
China 115, 141; Bolshevik Montesquieu’s system 101
regime 62; civil war in (1918– virtue: Montesquieu on 14;
20) 62; collapse of communism Robespierre on 42
in 136, 154; economic Vogt, William: Road to Survival 135
development 63–4; and end of Völkerpsychologie 81
Cold War 151; Germans invade Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de
(1941) 65; isolation from 72
Europe 110; Marxism in 44, 76;
military successes 65–6; Wallerstein, Immanuel: ‘1968,
nationalism in 111; rise to
197
INDEX
Revolution in the World women: Montesquieu on 147;

System’ 134–5 votes for 87
war guilt 110 Woodward, C.Vann 1
Warburton, William, Bishop of World War I (1914–18): compared
with World War H 107; impact
Gloucester 167 of 100–4, 106, 110, 161; Lenin
Ward, (Sir) Adolphus William 94, describes as imperialist 61;
98 mortality figures 112; Tarle on
Washington Conference (on 112
disarmament, 1921) 152 World War H (1939–45) 107, 113–
Washington, George: accused of 14, 162
power abuse 35; and Wright, Benjamin Fletcher 22
constitutional order 8, 36;
deletes references to liberty in Yeltsin, Boris 2, 186n30(4)
Jefferson letter 34; Farewell Yergin, Daniel and Gustafson,
Thane: Russia 2010 and What It
Address (1796) 36–8, 154;
Means for the World 1
Montesquieu and 15
Weber, Max 4, 6, 129
zakonomernost (regularity of law)
Wells, H.G.: Outline of History 72–3 157–9, 171
Wilde, Oscar 132 Zamaleev, A.F. 159
Wilson, Woodrow 9, 76–7, 103; The Zasulich, Vera 177n16
State 57 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir 1, 4, 6, 171
198

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WORLD ORDER IN HISTORY

‘A bold enterprise…. Much of the thrust of the book comes

London and New York

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

© 1996 Paul Dukes

The author and the publisher would like to thank

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0-415-12936-2 (Print Edition)

1 MONTESQUIEU AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER 14

2 MARX AND REVOLUTIONARY ORDER 44

3 FROM EUROPEAN TOWARDS ATLANTIC

4 SOME APPROACHES TO WORLD ORDER, 1923–62 107

in mind my original intention to consider the problem of the study

of that great conflict. From 1900 to the 1990s, as we shall see,

accepted, how little of it rejected. The secretarial support of Sandra

What is history? What purpose is there in studying it? Over the

of the parties giving various degrees of support to the President.

those who were formerly nobles in their estates, these

Arguably, the contradiction between two such views of freedom

With this personal decree we bestow our monarchical and

monarchy’ which she did much to develop fell short of encroaching

The historical development of modern ‘freedom’ presup-

Looking at Russia in particular in the aftermath of the failed

It is ridiculous in the extreme to ascribe to modern high

In the long perspective of 1993, perhaps, some of the voters for

focus of attention from Russia to the world more generally, we can

welcoming it. And so on. To some extent, differences may be

considerable amount of elaboration: indeed, five chapters have

The goal of the constitutional government is to maintain

public power itself is forced to defend itself against all

Some of what Robespierre said in 1793 would be repeated by

Marxist revolutionary? What were the possible alternatives? In

World War, which he personally had spent largely in a prisoner-

and developments of several centuries’ duration involving the

Newton may be considered among the most important forerunners

For to converse with those of other centuries is almost the

These words of the ‘modern’ Descartes could serve as an

with the most extended worldview, Europeans at home and

I can say that I have worked on it my whole life: I was

Indeed, this publication was the one on which he laboured

In order to understand the first four books of this work,

MONTESQUIEU AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS

If Montesquieu was not the first to conceive of a social science,

In extremely absolute monarchies, historians betray the

‘Mohammedan princes constantly kill or are killed’, while the

we owe to Christianity both a certain political right in

Most of the peoples on the coasts of Africa are savages and

Therefore, all peoples with a ‘police’ (i.e. good order as well as

In Europe, natural divisions had led to the formation of many

subjugated by foreign force ‘other than by laws and by what is

in Montesquieu’s view, were the reasons for Europe’s pre-

These included internal climatic variations, which divided the

Europe has reached such a high degree of power that

This predominance, conditioned as it was by basic

of the Laws to the systems to be found in Athens and Rome.

Toward the middle of the reign of Louis XIV, France was

MONTESQUIEU, THE USA AND RUSSIA

and Beccaria of the continental schools, as well as the classical

Montesquieu had a vast prestige in that day. He was almost

Meanwhile, in a similar manner, the supporters of the new