The most memorable critic of ‘Enlightenment' rationalism was also a visionary moralist.‘If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent,” that very profound and virtuous man Samuel Johnson wrote; “if we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just.” Perhaps the wisest single volume of history ever published in the English language was Thomas Carlyle's massive, and massively influential, The French Revolution: A History (1837), just now republished in a fine new paperback edition, annotated and scholarly but readable, in the Oxford World's Classics series (edited by D. E. Sorenson and B. E. Kinser). It is a work of literature as well as history, in this regard partly resembling the historical and documentary novels of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, perhaps the most important literary works of the past 50 years.
By contrast, the influential English Communist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm (1917–2012) wrote toward the end of his long life that “obsolescence is the unavoidable fate of the historian,” exempting only a few fellow liberal and radical — Whig-progressive or Jacobin-Marxist — historians such as Gibbon, T. B. Macaulay, and Michelet from his generalization: In his view, they had outstanding literary merit. It is clear that Hobsbawm cannot believe in the enduring value and reputation of any historian who failed to share his own secular-progressive faith; yet that worldview has been fundamentally discredited and disconfirmed by the history of the world since 1914, a history in which the great Polish ex-Marxist political philosopher Leszek Kolakowski said “the Devil incarnated himself.” Partly inspired by Kolakowski, the émigré Romanian-American historian Vladimir Tismaneanu has written a fine book called The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2014). To the works of Solzhenitstyn and Tismaneanu we may add the French historian Alain Besançon's volume A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness of the Shoah (1998; English translation, 2007) and other books on Communism, by Stéphane Courtois and associates (The Black Book of Communism, 1999) and Harvard's Richard Pipes (Communism: A History, 2001). The vast literature on the Holocaust needs only to be mentioned to be remembered; a poignant recent book is Bernice Lerner's Triumph of Wounded Souls (2004).
Read Full Article »