Historians and the Open Society

A. R. Bridbury

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317284468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

In this volume, originally published in 1972, the author discusses the conflict between the historian's own expressed political views and the judgements he makes on political events in history.

1 War, bureaucracy, and constitutional development: some neglected costs

Anniversaries are a bore because a year gives one so brief a respite from their recurrence. Prolonging the interval buys respite at the cost of heightening the tension. Centenaries are thus made intolerable by the sense of occasion that incites otherwise perfectly rational men and women to fatuous outbursts of sentimentality and idolatry. The ninth centenary of the Norman Conquest, recently celebrated, ran true to form. The sentimentalists and idolators performed their appointed rituals, capering foolishly round the monument they had raised to 'the Conqueror'; seeing the England of Shakespeare, and Chatham, and the Railway Age, in the squalid brutalities of a gang of Norman marauders; despising the Saxons because their voice was silenced and their culture choked; and eagerly attributing genius to the lucky throw of an adventurer who but for the coincidence of a northern invasion with his own, which distracted Harold and exhausted his men at the crucial moment, might very well have found himself stranded on a lee shore in a hostile land with overwhelming forces gathering to destroy him. 'The ultimate fact of victory', as Liddell Hart said about Blenheim, 'sufficed to make the world overlook what a gamble the battle had been.'¹

Luck, it is said, favours those who are prepared. But luck is not a just and terrible god, and no sane man reflecting upon the course of history can surely fail to be revolted by the egregious complacency that assumes that it is. If luck gave Napoleon a wife who could get him his chance of glory by making herself agreeable to the Directory, it also gave Gladstone Paraell as the ally of the great enterprise of his later years. If it gave Elizabeth Tudor an iron constitution, it also snuffed out Keats before he was twenty-six years old. It deprived England of the effective political services of one of the most gifted men ever to enter her public life by withholding crucial qualities from the richly-endowed personality of Charles James Fox; and granted Disraeli what it had denied Fox without granting him also the distinction of mind and purpose that raised Fox as high above Disraeli in moral concern as Disraeli stood above Fox in profound and enduring political influence. It did incalculable and probably irreparable harm to France by giving Louis VII a wife who succumbed to the magnetism of Henry of Anjou, transferred herself and her Duchy of Aquitaine to the lover who subsequently became King of England, and thus created the ganglion in the flesh of France that festered for centuries, poisoning social and political relationships in more ways than historians have yet explored.

Indeed the memory and Imagination of the race are so crowded with dramatic illustrations of 'the play of the contingent and the unforeseen' that multiplying examples should serve no purpose beyond that of labouring the obvious. But the obvious has no influence over the kind of obsession that sees bold initiative in every blind risk; foresight and calculation where there was only desperate improvisation against time; knowledge and intelligence where in fact ignorant and credulous men had been rescued from the consequences of their own shortcomings by resourceful but anonymous and devoted subordinates; the granite virtues where there was nothing but stolid perversity of temperament; and subtlety and freedom from cant where there was treachery, fraudulence, and lies. In short the working historian who prides himself upon his contempt for philosophy and cherishes the belief that he is, above all, an empiricist, is, in fact, a martyr to the romantic yearnings that betray him into concocting heroes out of the prosaic ingredients of his craft.

To the dispassionate observer it is tolerably clear that late Saxon society was a culturally sophisticated and constitutionally mature society with as much of a civilian caste to it as those unquiet times would permit. The Normans did not bring England into Europe. For what it was worth, England was European already. The Normans could teach the Anglo-Saxons nothing about finance and administration. The nation that produced the Domesday Book within a generation of the Conquest had nothing to learn from the Duke's men in these matters. What the Normans did, surely, was to militarize and degrade the country. The claim that they revived and restored a decadent and enfeebled society rests, not upon evidence, but upon the belief that failing the ordeal of battle is as decisive as a test of social debility as it once was as a proof of legal guilt.

Historians writing in the meridian of empire could applaud the colonizers with fewer qualms than are felt today: in the sunset hour it should be easier to see the point of view of the colonials. But what is significant about modern treatment of the Conquest, and of its hero, the Conqueror, is not its quest for a change of perspective: it is the inflexible determination to see success as the sanctifying agency in history.

Success, however, needs closer definition. Specialization, which has resolved so many activities into their constituent parts, has at once emancipated and imprisoned the historian by dissolving the unity of history into a congeries of unrelated disciplines. Each of these disciplines has its own criterion of success.

To the military historian success means victory. The great strategist is not the man whose plans look best; he is the man whose plans work. And the campaigns that matter are not the ones that start well, or go according to plan; they are the campaigns that bring wars to a successful conclusion. Defeat can be glorious just as victory can be despicable. But military history pauses briefly, if at all, over the shattered ranks of the defeated, however noble their cause or selfless their sacrifice. Its business is with those who win, however odious they or their cause may be. Victory may not yield the results that war was embarked upon to achieve. Again the military historian is unmoved. His test of professional skill is simple and compelling. And indeed it would be difficult to imagine a satisfactory test of military skill which did not concede to the man who wins without having the odds loaded in his favour, some claim to excellence which must be denied to his defeated adversary. But the military historian does not discriminate between the great victory and the great commander. For his purposes the greater the victory, the greater the commander. Cost does not concern him. Only the commander who fails in the end, despite brilliant successes, or who wins only because attrition works for him rather than against him, has to answer for the casualty list and take the blame for the financial strains, the material losses and the social costs that his campaigns have incurred.

This is surely an extraordinary abdication of judgment by the military historian who is, apparently, so much the victim of his enthusiasms as to forget that in war, as in everything else, success has its price, and that unless he takes into account the price at which success was bought he cannot possibly tell whether success was worth the price that had to be paid for it.

The grim story is now well-known of how Liddell Hart, a subaltern veteran of the carnage of the war of 1914-18, set to work to explain to his fellow-countrymen the strategy of indirect approach upon which quick, cheap, and decisive victory has always depended, only to find that he had succeeded in explaining it to his country's enemies, with sensational results which were very nearly fatal to his country's cause. If he had little enough influence upon the generals and the cabinet ministers for whom he wrote, and sometimes worked, he seems to have had even less influence upon the historians, whose accounts of the great commanders display no recognition of the truth, to which his books bore witness, that a war won at devastating cost is not a war won at all. The world's appetite for famous victories and for untarnished heroes, however, imposes upon even the most critical intellects, and nothing demonstrates this more vividly than the fact that even Liddell Hart never quite emancipated himself from an infatuation with the career of the successful commander which could betray him, occasionally, into defending the wild gamble that came off and the costly victory that was not worth the winning.

To the administrative historian the successful administrator is the man who gets things done, the successful administration, the administration in which the office is coherently organized, the chain of command is clear and intelligible, and the work dispatched without fuss or delay. Since office work is something that we believe we do better than it has ever been done before, the administrative historian's standards are unashamedly those of today, and he praises the modernizer, the man who sets up in rudimentary form an organization which looks recognizably like the ones we have now. He never asks whether efficient dispatch of business was the central purpose of the administration he studies, or the true need of the political system of which it was a minor element. He relishes Bright's devastating sarcasm about the mid-Victorian Foreign Office, that it was nothing but a 'gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocratic classes'; but he does not take Bright's point: for administrative history is never written so as to stress the predominant part so often played by patronage in the evolution and, still more, in the utilization of those improved techniques of office management that preoccupy the historian. Nor is he disquieted by the improvements that modernization achieved. The administrative reformers of the seventeenth century looked abroad to Louis XIV and Colbert with envy, and preferred Hobbes to Locke. It is not surprising that they should have done so. Administrative reform makes government more effective. But the historian who readily endorses such reform and therefore welcomes the additional power it confers upon government makes larger assumptions about the benefits dispensed by government than are warranted either by his duties as an historian or by his own convictions about politics.

In this respect his affinity is with the constitutional historian who adds an obsession with forms and precedents to the predilection for coherence and efficiency, uniformity and central control that he shares with the administrative historian. The constitutional historian's preoccupation is with structure rather than process: with the anatomy of power rather than with its pathology. His dominant themes are king and parliament; his chief concern to depict the sovereignty of the king in the days when kings ruled as well as reigned, and to trace the measured growth of parliament and chronicle the irresistible expansion and burgeoning of its power once the king had been eclipsed.

When government depended upon the king, the king had to be strong. And to be strong he had to be an able general or clever enough to avoid entanglements which might reveal the deficiencies of his generalship. He also had to be financially independent. And the constitutional historian's admiration and esteem for the strong king who lived of his own is almost boundless. The king who lived of his own was not shackled by paymasters. He was not hampered by the need to redress grievance. If he summoned parliament, his doing so was an act of grace and a sign of strength, not the last resort of a bankrupt. And should parliament prove to be recalcitrant the strong king knew how to charm, cajole, or intimidate it into doing his bidding, and when to send it about its business and rule without its help. He might be a bloody tyrant outraging even indulgent contemporary standards of public morality. His constitutional innovations might be nothing but a string of squalid extemporizations which impressed neither his enemies nor even those who worked with him and benefited from his patronage. But if he were strong, and if his innovations could be woven into a coherent pattern, then his honoured place in constitutional history was assured.

Unfortunately for himself, the constitutional historian cannot make the theme of the masterful king last the whole story through. No sooner has he established the Tudor king as the culminating perfection of the type, than he is forced to abandon king for parliament and to tell another story, the story of the growth of parliamentary government. In the Middle Ages only feeble and inadequate kings depended upon parliament; and parliamentary power, great at moments, is depicted in such a way as to make it a sad commentary upon their mediocrity and incompetence. By the seventeenth century things are quite different. The old tricks that enabled earlier kings to manage the country have become shabby and disreputable, at least to the historian who knows that they will fail. Consequently the successful king no longer hectors or beguiles: he signs the Bill of Rights and submits himself, more or less meekly, to a humbler and more circumscribed role.

In the event his submission proves to be formal rather than substantial. One-party government and a firm hand with parliament give him a longer lease than he could have bargained for on the morrow of submission. But parliament's day was dawning; and the constitutional historian presently feels free to extol the virtues of parliament, to venerate its complex ancestry and rich traditions, and to applaud its brilliant promise.

This passion for backing the winner at all costs betrays the constitutional historian into manipulating his evidence in a variety of ways of which three are outstanding.

The constitutional historian has the lawyer's faith in precedents. They enshrine and guarantee the victories of constitutional history. Precedents, however, are legion. Not all of them are admirable. Some indeed are abhorrent. But these, providentially, lack the stamina of the precedents that serve the purposes of constitutional development. Either they fade away or they can be explained away. They are not true precedents. True precedents, moreover, are not merely robust. They have other qualities. In particular they have the sovereign merit of being exempt from malicious distortion or honest misrepresentation. None ever seems to have its plain intention nullified by skilful advocacy, perfunctory compliance, or by a tacit but universal conspiracy to ignore its tenor and meaning. In this respect constitutional precedents are, apparently, exempt from the fate that has overtaken the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Constitution of the U.S.A., and all the other monuments to mankind's attempts to root its aspirations in the soil. They shine out like stars, austere and immutable witnesses to the inexorable progression of constitutional affairs from one stage of enlightenment to the next.

But if he is ingenuous as to the integrity of his precedents, the constitutional historian is positively abject in his idolatry of institutions. He takes institutions at face value, content, apparently, to ignore the intense and unremitting social pressures that make the working reality of institutions vastly different from their appearance. His admiration for the jury system, for example, is unqualified. In this he is not alone. Nor is he alone in never having submitted the workings of the jury system to critical scrutiny. When a recent government restored a medieval precedent, by authorizing majority verdicts, it provoked a public controversy which revealed more plainly, perhaps, than anything else could have done, that we have no systematic knowledge whatsoever of the way in which the jury system works, and consequently of its sanity, objectivity, and efficacy as an instrument of justice. Sheer survival has hallowed the jury system and canonized its mysteries. We serve it with incense instead of eyeing it dispassionately as social reformers. The constitutional historian carries this attitude of credulous adulation back into the past, to days when the regions of England were ruled by Olympian magnates and dominated by their satellite local bosses; when the jury system was, therefore, very probably the most perfect instrument of legalized intimidation and fraud then known to man. And he sustains his faith in trial by jury by studiously ignoring its social context and concentrating doggedly upon its formalities.

But these deficiencies are trifling incidental improprieties compared with the chief fault of constitutional history, which is its fundamental irrelevance to the history of the public rights and obligations of the overwhelming majority of the people of England. We smile patronizingly at the Liberian constitution which manages to look something like the American one without in fact conceding a shred of representation to nine-tenths of the population, which it keeps poor, and ignorant, and docile, for the sake of the tiny oligarchy that battens on it. Yet if we banish national pride from our minds can we honestly claim that the constitution of England was so very different until recent times? What were the epic contests of king and barons and king and parliament but the family quarrels of the ruling classes? And what were the ruling classes but the tiny oligarchy that controlled England in the days of Gregory King and Patrick Colquhoun as it had done when Domesday Book was being compiled and Magna Carta signed?

In this respect England was not exceptional. Over the greater part of Europe politics and the constitution were exclusively the preserve of men of substance. The fruits of constitutional development, like the triumphs of politics, were the monopoly of those with money and education and influence. The mass of the inhabitants of the countries of Europe could make themselves felt when occasion offered, but knew nothing of the liberty of the subject, except, perhaps, as an idle phrase, or of representative government, except as yet another perquisite of the enfranchised few.

It would be wrong to depict English society, at any period, as being rigidly stratified into rich and poor, master and servant, aristocrat and retainer. Its interpenetrations were numerous and intricate. Where the casual eye saw nothing but villages of undifferentiated peasants, a more discerning one might see baffling social complexities: copyholders with very much more than a competence; freeholders close to subsistence; men of no great substance or quality with copyhold, and leasehold, as well as freehold land, to their credit; and not a few combining the occupations of farmer, casual labourer, and self-employed artisan, and in one or other of these capacities employing labour perhaps, and knowing the problems of business, therefore, from both sides. In the towns where opportunities were greater, variations of status, occupation, and wealth, could be even more complex than they were in the villages. Moreover the social system itself was in constant movement. Class never hardened into caste. At one extreme riches bought gentility; at the other, poverty hurried its victims to social annihilation and, possibly, to utter ruin. And the process of absorption into higher classes, or rejection and decline into lower ones, never ceased.

But movements such as these were very much on the fringe of things. In every age until the Victorian, except, perhaps, for golden interludes in later medieval times, and in the century between the Restoration and the accession of George III, periodic starvation and chronic illness were the common lot. And until their m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 War, bureaucracy, and constitutional development : some neglected costs
• 2 The cult of nationalism
• 3 Nationalism in economic history
• 4 Was foreign trade necessary?
• 5 The snare of central planning
• 6 Big business
• 7 Farmers' glory?
• 8 The professions and the unions
• 9 The open society
• Index