Hlsrorv of European Idem. Vol I, No 3. pp 277-293. 198, Pergdmon Press Ltd Punted m Great Bntam

Historians and Eighteenth-Century Europe 1715-1789, M.S. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 251, f12.50.

An air of polished fragility hovers over the Europe of the 18th century; our images of it are of startling contrasts - an elegant Petit Trianon rising, a wormeaten Bastille collapsing - a stream gliding along an ornamental channel, the same limpid flow precipitated into a frightful chasm. An epoch destined to end in revolution, political or economic, must have harboured more unease, more distempers. than it could admit to itself: its airs and graces, costumes and wigs, were an elaborate camouflage for them. Behind the smooth facade of palladian architecture and courtly diverrimenti lay many incon- gruities, a Hogarthian brutality and profligacy, incorrigible militarism, in Britain and Russia beastly drunkenness from top to bottom of society. All through the age of Enlightenment there ran, as Professor Anderson writes, ‘a deep-rooted strain of irrationalism, of mysticism, often of pessimism’ (p. 109). It found its way, ethereahsed. into music. then incomparably Europe’s finest art because of maladies that lay too deep or were too sedulously kept out of sight to find expression in writing. In less ideal guise it could emerge as obscurantism, making use of religion or of a doctrine as antiquated and fanciful as the Great Chain of Being (p. 97).

Deep fissures within the reigning culture can partly be traced to a gulf within society, never before so deep, between cultivated elite and illiterate multitude, Intellectual history has been supplemented in recent years by investigation of ‘the states of mind and unspoken assumptions, the instinctive beliefs and prejudices . . . of unsophisticated and often uneducated people’, and this approach has led to recognition of a mass mentality in l&h-century France still under the sway of ‘superstition and ritual’ (pp. 52-53). Elsewhere Anderson cites Renan’s recollection of boyhood in Brittany in the 1820s surrounded by a rustic life still lived as it was lived in the middle ages (p. 237). Even in areas of life much closer to the highroad of history new things were making their entry, as they have frequently done, swathed in the cast-off clothing of the past. Those ancestors of our trade unions, the compugnonnages, were growing in strength and cohesion, but mentally lagged behind the times in a fashion symbolised by their fondness for tracing their origin to the building of Solomon’s temple, and by their pseudo-religious rituals (p. 60). In Scotland the coexistence of bust- ling, modemising Lowlands and pre-feudal Highlands helped, like flint and steel, to strike sparks in the mind of the intelligentsia. Contrasts within France, scarcely less dramatic, must have had a share in kindling the Enlightenment.

It was a happy inspiration to chart impressions of l&h-century Europe - truly protean shapes - among historians of successive later eras. Anderson was exceptionally well qualified to undertake the arduous task, by his famili- arity with the 18th century, a wide range of interests, Russian history and foreign contacts prominent among them, and a facility in moving to and fro among problems economic as well as political or cultural. He must have been aided not least by a Scottish tenacity and throroughness, in working his way

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278 Rook Reviews

through an immense expanse of reading. much of it one must suppose about as dull as any reading can possibly be. In the best academic tradition he holds the balance judiciously even, though on all matters of dispute he has conclusions or suggestions of his own to put forward. Altogether his book offers to an intelligent reader an excellent introduction to modem Europe at large, as well as to some of its special formative experiences and its long. painful endeavour to translate experience into knowledge. It provides in addition an outline, no less relevant to studies in other fields, of how historiography has evolved in modern times.

The 19th century was ‘an age historical in its modes of thought as none before had been’ (p. 94). Inevitably so, because Europe was now finally breaking away from the stagnation of the old world, and rapid and ubiquitous change forced comparisons of present and past, and speculations about the future. on men’s minds. India wrote no history, because it had little or no awareness of history happening. It may of course turn out that when we have grown fully inured to the sensation of accelerating change, and it is no longer a novelty, it will fade, and the historical sense with it. But as Anderson says in one of a number of telling phrases, it was becoming then ‘the noble and pathetic ambition’ of many gifted minds to elevate history to a science (p. 29). Among these was Taine, whose conservative bias is a warning of how fallible and subjective such a ‘science’ might prove. Guizot was another Frenchman arranging French history ‘for the expression of his own dogmatism’ (p. 14). He was besides a practising politician, and it would be worth while to reckon up how many historians of that epoch were active in politics. and consider whether as scholars they have been better or worse than others. They would form a very varied gallery, from Guizot or Thiers to Engels or Kautsky. But all great historians. who have sometimes been great writers too. have written with a political or moral purpose. Many modern battles of ideas have been fought out in terms of history, more fruitfully than in any other arena, philosophy for instance. and most of all in western Europe. France. still under the stimulus of its Revolution, has taken the lead in this century m new pathways of historical research. Britain, still staggering under the effects of its industrial revolution. has been for historical Marxism another of its best homes.

Tocqueville’s work on the Ancien Regime showed him ‘unquestionably an elitist, the greatest of modern times’, but also a pioneer in analytical instead of narrative history, and in his approach to it in terms of relations between social classes (pp. 21-3). To aristocrats class consciousness has always been as natural as the air they breathe, whereas others have had to grope towards it, the lowest the slowest. He was under a compulsion of genius similar to what made those other conservatives, Scott and Balzac, write with profound realism. (Historical novelists, Scott above all, might have found a place in this scrutiny. ) In them we see conceptions of history altering and broadening under pressure of events. of humanity’s collective fortunes. But in the past hundred years history has been turning into a profession, increasingly thronged, even overcrowded, by prac- titioners, and has progressed in response to inner urges of its own as well. Latterly it has expanded far more in technical virtuosity than in breadth or clarity of vision of the kind sought by a Tocqueville or a Marx, though with results which in the long run may make their hopes less unattainable.

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Since the 1930s there has taken shape the aim of a multilateral approach, a convergent use of geographical, sociological. literary, and many other lines of enquiry to enrich history (p. 50) - history strictly so called, if anything nowadays can be. Economic history, late in starting, has gone ahead pro- digiously, accompanied in our time by stress on ‘quantification, regional studies, mentalit&‘, to which a section of this book is devoted (p. 40 ff.). Irrespective of political views, all this has furthered a democratising tendency, a removal of the limelight from kings and their generals and mistresses to ordinary folk. With Michelet ‘the people enters the historiography of the old regime for the first time’; in Russia by the later 19th century the peasant question was the overriding concern of historians (pp. 15, 16.5-166). Russia thus led the way in exploration of the agrarian past, whose importance the urbanised West was slower to perceive. All this shift of interest leaves us free to view common humanity as either the prime creative, motive force of history. as democrats and then Marxists did, or as passive, inert, or crudely anarchical. mere raw material of history. as conservatives have preferred to think.

Despite its comprehensive overview of the continent, the space this book is compelled to devote to 1789 and its background is an index of how large they have always bulked in discussion of 18th-century Europe. Those who have condemned the Revolution have habitually found much to complain of in the Enlightenment, as its precursor, sometimes in earlier days treated one-sidedly as its essential cause. Ignorance is bliss. Research has confirmed old suspicions that the leading philosophes formed a proselytising sect, pushing their supporters forward and trying to stifle opponents (p. 35), as many groups since then have done or been suspected of doing. In our day hostility to the Enlight- enment has been sharpened by fear of social revolt, and it has been accused of opening the door to 1917 as well as 1789, as in J.L. Talmon’s work on ‘totalitarian democracy’ (p. 74). As Anderson points out, Carlyle’s denun- ciation of it as superficial and destructive is quite in harmony with much anti-progressive criticism current today (p. 19). It was Voltaire who from the outset stood out as its archetypal figure: one may recall the histrionic horror with which the Tory convert Wordsworth talks of him in Book 2 of The Excursion. Anderson supplies a bird’s_eye view of the enormous literature on Voltaire, and goes on to the other most heatedly debated publicist, Rousseau. He observes that for too long the Enlightenment was considered a French monopoly, and the German and Italian contribution neglected; this has begun to be set right (pp. 111,115). A Scats historian might have been expected to take more account than he does of the very substantial Scottish contribution, and later assessments of it.

Ever since 1789 Europe has been striving to comprehend what began then - SO far, despite huge diligence, with only limited success - somewhat as Goethe, its contemporary, obsessively embarked on compositions about the Revolution which he failed to complete. One of its many paladins and then victims, Barnave, produced before his execution ‘the boldest and most original of all contemporary analyses’ (p. 11). In its own homeland the Revolution stirred up at the time more thinking than artistic creation; its English pre- decessor, much earlier and more entangled with the past, may be said to have excited each about equally. In 19th-century France, especially after the advent

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of the Third Republic, acceptance or rejection formed the grand dividing-line among historians. Conservatives, for whom it was an evil. or at best an evil necessity, saw the mass of mankind, as Taine did, in sombre colours; and the badness or otherwise of human nature is today as much as ever one of the topics most keenly argued, practically as well as theoretically momentous. In the other camp there has been a move away from the outlook of the triumphant post-1870 bourgeoisie towards a standpoint further and further left, from which students have contemplated 1789 as pregnant with far wider meaning for mankind than the unleashing of a new ruling class, or a capitalist economy. In the past half-century its defenders have been radicals, or, increasingly, Marxists.

‘Industrial revolution’, we are reminded, is a term emanating from France. and from analogy with 1789: for Britain, resistant to political upheaval, it was harder to grasp the concept of an economic earthquake (p. 193), even while undergoing one. But controversy in Britain as to whether conditions for the masses were being bettered or worsened began almost at once, and is still going on; this and a parallel debate about causes are reviewed in chapter 4. In the advancing West movements, social transformation, were what mattered: else- where individuals stood out more prominently, not writers as in France but rulers. Enlightened Despotism as a political ideal seems to have emerged later than the time of the philosophes, and its historical importance has come to be rated much lower than formerly (p. 119 ff.). Historians have been even more

prone to error or fantasy when writing of Great Men than of great events. Carlyle is a monumental reminder of this, and his hero Frederick has been written about more copiously than any other monarch of that age, and for very long more extravagantly. In 1894 there was noisy indignation in Germany when a German scholar ventured to find fault with him (p. 146). Admiration for Joseph II was less unworthy, but not much less unrealistic. Anderson remarks that of all the big countries in the 19th century Austria had the least developed historical school (p. 182). Another requirement for interest in history may be the impetus of a national life, which the Habsburg empire lacked; a further reason why old India wrote little or no history. whereas now it writes a great deal. There is insight in the observation that Russian historiography, ‘one of the most distinctive in Europe’, was not much drawn to biography: a land so vast might well feel in its bones that no single mortal could make or mar appreciably its destinies (pp. 157-158).

Nowadays all roads in history-writing are apt to lead to Marx. One of the riddles insistently raised by this book’s subject-matter is the relative influence on affairs of ideas, and of impersonal forces. It takes perpetually new forms, in response to events in the world which keep repeating the enigmatic lesson that ideas by themselves are impotent, but that without their alchemy nothing comes about. Marxism, more sensitive than any other to this dilemma, is the most potent theory to have emerged in history-writing; but the outcome, as often in battles of ideas as well as of muskets, has been equivocal. In a sense almost every serious historian today is a Marxist of sorts, less as a rule from reading Marx than from being afloat on a tide setting in his direction. In another, exacter sense, scarcely anyone is. Anderson is not, though like Monsieur Jourdain writing prose he often writes on Marxist lines, or, to put it

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differently, often has ideas that any Marxist might envy. He refers at many points to the march of Marxist thinking about the 18th century. Louis Blanc was deducing the Revolution from pure ideas when it was already clear that the future of socialist history-writing lay with Marxism (p. 26). Jaurts was the first to explore the subject ‘from a moderate and intelligent Marxist point of view’

(p. 36). Anderson expects this point of view to remain generally influential, but

doubts whether as ‘a systematic and relatively rigid body of doctrine’ it has much more to offer, by comparison with the new techniques which have been burgeoning (pp. 232-233). This is not unfair, but it may be added that a good many of the novel approaches have owed a debt, direct or indirect, positive or negative, to Marxism; and secondly, that no other system has the capacity to synthesise the endless range of heterogeneous knowledge now accumulating. Whether Marxism has this capacity remains to be demonstrated. In the mean- time its adherents will do well to ponder over some of the queries raised here. One has to do with the difficulty of attaching the Enlightenment to the ambitions of an appropriate social class: Anderson finds it ‘implausible’ to label it the ideology of a rising bourgeoisie (p. 101 ff.). There is the same awkward- ness about fathering the Revolution on such a class. Yet without some per- vading economic and social mutation anything like the Enlightenment would surely be incomprehensible. It could never have dawned in Asia. Historic change may express itself, it would seem, through a miscellany of minds and tongues, not those alone of the class, the heir apparent, standing next in the line of succession.

University of Edinburgh Victor G. Kiernan

Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology and Literature, Ben Lazare Mijuskovic

(Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1979), pp. 100 $8.95.

In this many-faceted study, the author derives from the Western philo- sophical tradition a theory of human consciousness as an immaterial, unitary, and essentially solitary being which is reflexively aware of its loneliness. He seeks to defend the adequacy of this theory (against the claims of the identity theorist. the behaviorist, and proponents of a quasi-Heideggerian Mitsein) and explores its fruitfulness for an understanding of modern fiction and of contem- porary work in psychology. Dr. Mijuskovic is obviously well versed in both these fields; and his discussion of certain literary works, in particular, is sensitive and insightful. The book conveys to the reader a sense of personal commitment, quite apart from its speculative interest and responsible scholar- ship. In format, the book consists of a number of chapters reprinted from journal articles, with the addition of two new essays and an Introduction. While there is value in such an unification of thematically related separate studies, the format, in the present case, makes for a certain uncomfortable repetitiveness and lack of progressive development.

Let us examine the author’s thesis more fully. Each human consciousness, Mijskovic holds, is haunted by a pervasive loneliness which it seeks to escape in