The Politics of History. Howard Boone's Zinn
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it is important to see with what incredible speed the Chinese Communists have been able to mobilize seven hundred million people against famine and disease. We need to know, in the face of terrifying power behind the accusing shouts against us who rebel, that we are not mad; that men in the past, whom we know, in the perspective of time, to have been great, felt as we do. At moments when we are tempted to go along with the general condemnation of revolution, we need to refresh ourselves with Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine. At times when we are about to surrender to the glorification of law, Thoreau and Tolstoi can revive our conviction that justice supersedes law.
That is why, for instance, Staughton Lynd’s book, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, is useful history. It recalls an eighteenth-century Anglo-American tradition declaring: 9
… that the proper foundation for government is a universal law of right and wrong self-evident to the intuitive common sense of every man; that freedom is a power of personal self-direction which no man can delegate to another; that the purpose of society is not the protection of property but fulfillment of the needs of living human beings; that good citizens have the right and duty, not only to overthrow incurable oppressive governments, but before that point is reached to break particular oppressive laws; and that we owe our ultimate allegiance, not to this or that nation, but to the whole family of man.
In a time when that tradition has been befogged by cries on all sides for “law and order” and “patriotism” (a word playing on the ambiguity between concern for one’s government and concern for one’s fellows) we need to remind ourselves of the depth of the humanistic, revolutionary impulse. The reach across the centuries conveys that depth.
By the criteria I have been discussing, a recollection of that tradition is radical history. It is therefore worth looking briefly at why Lynd’s book has been criticized harshly by another radical, Eugene Genovese, who is a historian interested in American slavery.10
Genovese is troubled that Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism is “plainly meant to serve political ends.” If he only were criticizing “the assumption that myth-making and falsifying in historical writing can be of political use” (for instance, the history written by so-called Marxists in the Stalinist mode) then he would be right. But Genovese seems to mean something else, for Lynd is certainly telling us the straight truth about the ideas of those early Anglo-American thinkers. He says a historical work should not deal with the past in terms of “moral standards abstracted from any time and place.”
Specifically, Genovese does not like the way Lynd uses the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as a kind of “moral absolutism” transcending time, connecting radicals of the eighteenth century with those of the twentieth, while failing to discuss “the role of class or the historical setting of the debates among radicals.” He is critical of the fact that “Lynd never discusses the relation of these ideas to the social groups that hold them” and claims Lynd “denies the importance of the social context in which ideas occur,” rather seeing the great moral truths as “self-evident and absolute.” This means to Genovese that Lynd “thereby denies the usefulness of history except for purposes of moral exhortation.” He says Lynd leaves out “the working class, the socialist movements” and the “counter-tendencies and opposing views of the Left,” thus making the book “a travesty of history.”
It is a powerful and important criticism. But I believe Genovese is wrong—not in his description of what Lynd does, but in his estimate of its worth. His plea not to discuss the past by moral standards “abstracted from time and place” is inviting because we (especially we professional historians) are attached to the anchor of historical particularity, and do not want some ethereal, Utopian standard of judgment. But to abstract from time and place is not to remove completely from time and place; it is rather to remove enough of the historical detail so that common ground can be found between two or more historical periods—or more specifically, between another period and our own. (It is, indeed, only carrying further what we must of necessity do even when we are discussing the moral standard of any one time and place, or the view of any one social movement—because all are unique on the most concrete level.) To study the past in the light of what Genovese calls “moral absolutism” is really to study the past relative to ideals which move us in the present but which are broad enough to have moved other people in other times in history.
The lure of “time and place” is the lure of the professional historian interested in “my period” or “my topic.” These particularities of time and place can be enormously useful, depending on the question that is asked. But if the question being asked is (as for Lynd): What support can we find in the past for values that seem worthwhile today?—a good deal of circumstantial evidence is not especially relevant. Only if no present question is asked, does all the particular detail, the rich, complex, endless detail of a period become important, without discrimination. And that, I would argue, is a much more abstract kind of history, because it is abstracted from a specific present concern. That, I would claim, is a surrender to the absolute of professional historiography: Tell as much as you can.
Similarly, the demand for “the role of class” in treating the natural-right ideas of Locke, Paine, and others, would be very important if the question being asked was: how do class backgrounds and ideas interact on one another (to better understand the weaknesses of both ideological and Utopian thinking today). But for Staughton Lynd’s special purpose, another emphasis was required. When one focuses on history with certain questions, much is left out. But this is true even when there is a lack of focus.
Similar to the professional dogma requiring “time and place” is a dogma among Marxist intellectuals requiring “the role of class” as if this were the touchstone for radical history. Even if one replaced (as Genovese is anxious to do) the economic determinism of a crude Marxism with “a sophisticated class analysis of historical change,” discussing class “as a complex mixture of material interests, ideologies, and psychological attitudes,” this may or may not move people forward toward change today. That—the total effect of history on the social setting today—is the criterion for a truly radical history, and not some abstract, absolute stand ard of methodology to which Marxists as well as others can get obsessively attached.
For instance, Genovese agrees that one of the great moral truths Lynd discusses—the use of conscience against authority as the ultimate test for political morality—was a revolutionary force in the past. But for Genovese this is a historical fact about a particular period, whereas: “Lynd seeks to graft them on to a socialist revolution, the content of which he never discusses. He merely asserts that they form the kernel of revolutionary socialist thought, although no socialist movement has ever won power with such an ideology.…” This is precisely the reason for asserting a moral value shared by certain eighteenth-century thinkers (and, on a certain level, by Marx and Engels): that socialist movements thus far have not paid sufficient attention to the right of conscience against all states. To be truly radical is to maintain a set of transcendental beliefs (yes, absolutes) by which to judge and thus to transform any particular social system.
In sum, while there is a value to specific analysis of particular historical situations, there is another kind of value to the unearthing of ideals which cross historical periods and give strength to beliefs needing reinforcement today. The trouble is, even Marxist historians have not paid sufficient attention to the Marxian admonition in his Theses on Feuerbach: “The dispute over the reality or nonreality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” Any dispute over a “true” history cannot be resolved in theory; the real question is, which of the several possible “true” histories (on that elementary level of factual truth) is true, not to some dogmatic notion about what a radical interpretation should contain, but to the practical needs for social change in our day? If the “political ends” Genovese warns against and Lynd espouses are not the narrow interests of a nation or party or ideology, but those humanistic values we have not yet attained, it is desirable that history should serve political ends.
5. We can show how good social movements can go wrong, how leaders can betray their followers, how rebels can become bureaucrats, how ideals can become frozen and reified. This is needed