The past and the present

LSE ORATION HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

A historian, like other men, lives in the present: but his study is of the past; and coming as do from Oxford, where some vestiges of past habits still remain, to this institution, which places emphasis rather on the immediate pre- sent. I shall venture to consider the relation, if any. between the two. if any. ..' Some indeed, I know, would say that there is none. The great thing about the past, they tell us, is that it is past. Can we not then forget it and devote our limited span of time to the study of the present, in which we must live, or even of the future which, by our actions, however unconsciously, we determine? Is it not possible that, today, we live in a new age, a scientific, technological age, in which the lessons of the past may even be positively mis- leading? So we are told. Philosophers hitherto, said Marx, have sought to understand the world, but our task is to change it. History, said Mr Henry Ford (who did change it), is bunk, . 'It is surely far more important,' said our Minister of Education, addressing the Association of Education Committees last summer, 'for young people to know all the facts about Vietnam than it is to know all the details of the Wars of the Roses.'

'All the facts about Vietnam . . .' This is a tall order. From whom are we to accept all these facts, how test them? Even to acquire them is an arduous task. Ought we not then to free our forward-looking minds for the purpose, to clear away the incubus of the past, or at least to transform that incubus, from a real night- mare, into the innocent goblin of a fairy tale? It is easy to do this. All we have to do is to remove the study of history from the serious world into the Disneyland of fantasy, in which truth and falsehood do not matter. The tempta- tion. I admit, is very strong. Some distinguished historians, in the weekly press, assure us that it is right to do so: that history has no function but to entertain. Skilful writers also are eager to oblige, ready to dress up the Muse of History ip more fashionable, more highly coloured clothes, for this new occasion. Then, when she has gone, other graver persons come and bid us turn our serious attention to the new queen of sciences, sociology.

I am afraid that I do not agree. . . . If the lessons of history elude easy formulation, they are none the less real, and they provide the reasons for its serious study. What, then, are these reasons?

First of all, I would suggest, there is a general reason : to avoid parochialism. We all agree that parochialism is a fault. By this we gener- ally mean parochialism in space. But there is also parochialism in time. To understand our own country, we need to see it in its wider con- text of space, among other countries. Equally, to understand our own age, we need to see it in its wider context of time, among other ages. To study only our own time may seem, at first sight, proof of our modernity: it is a sign that We are concentrating on the real world. But in fact such concentration may easily be very superticiaI. It removes a whole dimension of thou2ht. and so deprives us of the means of comparison. So much of our own contemporary history is bidden from us that we cannot hope to see it in full. It is so close to us that we cannot see it ,ia,coryEst,proportiput it is not yet over, so that we cannot judge it to the result. Familiarity with the past can suppl■ some of those defects. It can provide a standard of comparison. It can point to a known issue. By so doing It can chasten our parochial arro- gance.

Of course, to speak thus is to speak in gener- alities. To define is more difficult. Perhaps we can best define by opposition. In order to dis- cover the advantages of studying history, we may consider the dangers of neglecting history. For both nations and individuals have some- times made a virtue of neglecting history; and history has taken its revenge on them.

One instance of such historical revenge is the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth cen- tury. In many ways nationalism is the revolt of historically minded people against rulers who have thought in non-historical terms. In eighteenth century Europe most enlightened men were cosmopolitan, international. They looked back at history and saw it as a 'gothic' past from which they had emerged into the full light and freedom of the present; and they re- garded 'patriotism.' national loyalty, national pride, as a vulgar relic of tribalism. How con- descendingly the 'enlightened' French Encyclo- paedists looked at the literature of the past, of which one of them, D'Alembert, would have made a periodic bonfire! How contemptuously they dismissed the atavistic, irrational com- plaints of the bigoted, unenlightened Poles who squealed and squirmed in a most undignified fashion when their country was carved up and absorbed by the Enlightened Despots of Prussia, Russia and Austria! How impatiently, a genera- tion later, the Bonapartist afrancesados of Spain looked down on the obscurantist bigots who re- sisted their rational reforms! But this triumph of Reason did not last. In the next century the nations revolted; and their revolt was nourished, everywhere, by history. It was the 'historic nations,' the nations which were conscious of their history—the Poles, Italians, Germans-- which led the revolt; and all the nations in re- volt began by discovering, or inventing, their history. No doubt the history which they dis- covered was not very good: the cosmopolitan historians of the eighteenth century were prob- ably better as historians; but there was a large area of history which those historians had dan- gerously ignored and which now took its revenge.

We see the same process today in historic Asia and unhistoric Africa. In 1900 the colonial empires seemed 'enlightened': did they not bring material improvement, utility, modernity? The West was benevolent, cosmopolitan, the educator of the world. In 1942, Mr Wendell Wilkie. Franklin Roosevelt's defeated rival for the presidency of the United States, flew from country to country preaching the glowing mes- sage of 'One World,' and Vice-President Wal- lace afterwards further defined the new Ameri- can ideal as 'the century of the common man.' I confess, I detest both these concepts of these two well-meaning men. I prefer variety and sophistication to such uniform banality. But quite apart from personal preference, such variety, I believe, is necessary. The variety of custom in the world is not merely the super- ficial diversity of a fundamentally uniform humanity : it has independent historic roots, and those roots will continue to thrust up shoots, after their kind: shoots which may be ignored, or cut, or fostered or distorted, but cannot be arbitrarily changed. This has been shown clearly in the past twenty years. Perhaps we would un- derstand today's struggle in the Far East better if we knew less than 'all the facts about Viet- nam' and at least something about the Wars of the Roses.

This recrudescence of history, this periodic revenge of the past, which is my first reason for not forgetting it, is nowhere more obvious than in China today. Theoretically. the Chinese com- munist revolution is a repudiation of the mil- lennial history of China. Communist China has broken decisively with its past, loudly and ex- plicitly disowned its long and splendid history. The recent 'cultural revolution' has emphasised and exaggerated that breach. The deposit of 4.000 years has now been repudiated in its totality; everything that is old has been dis- carded; and all things, we are told, have been made new. But in fact, what has happened? The inheritance of the Kuomintang, of the Chinese Republic, has indeed been rejected, but the older inheritance of the Manchus, of the Chinese Empire, has returned to fill the void. Today Peking is once again the capital of the Middle Kingdom. Chairman Mao, like the Son of Heaven, is to live for ten thousand years. The Europeans are again outer barbarians, whom

the self-sufficient Celestial Empire has no need to know. The usages of international diplomacy, of the comity of nations, have been rejected; and foreign embassies provide the means not of negotiation but of tribute: of the enforced kowtow, of the sacked legation, and of periodic humiliation by the officials of a vast, impervious, conformist bureaucracy.

Such is the revenge of history on those who ignore it. Expelled with a pitchfork, it neverthe- less returns. No great political problem can be seen apart from its historical context.

I well remember the debates that raged, in the 1930s, about the Spanish Civil War. To those who lived in their own time only, to the fashionable, ideologically committed commen- tators of the age, the Spanish Civil War was a war between international fascism and interna- tional communism, which was being fought out, almost by chance, in the Iberian peninsula. Superficially, of course, it was. But fundamen- tally, we all now realise, its causes lay deep in Spanish history. In that context alone could it be understood. General Franco was seen by foreigners as the creature of Hitler and Musso- lini. He saw himself, rather, as a hero of 1809. His opponents were seen, during the Civil War, as international communists. They were not. They were Spaniards, who looked back to an ancient peninsular tradition with which Marx had nothing whatever to do. The profoundest, most perceptive historian of that civil war—I refer to Mr Gerald Brenan—once told me that he was provoked to write his account of it by the abysmal ignorance and folly of those Marx- ist crusaders who thought they could interpret, in the terms of twentieth century international communism, a phenomenon which could only be understood in terms of hitherto unstudied nineteenth—and pre-nineteenth—century Spain.

The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of the Russian revolution, in which the Tsars have perhaps more long-term importance than Marx. The same can be said of modern Greece. And perhaps the war in the Far East would be better understood if it were interpreted with a little less of fashionable modern doctrine and a little more of unconsidered local history.

If past history—by whatever ducts and chan- nels it flows—thus exercises a continuing force in human affairs, it is obvious that individuals also will greatly err who decline to consider its lessons. Once again I take an obvious instance from the 1930s. Neville Chamberlain, and those who supported him, were men of the twentieth century. They could not believe that Hitler, who was their contemporary, who rose to power in a modern, highly industrial society, could be fundamentally different from themselves. He might be a vulgar demagogue; he might use ex- travagant language and violent methods; but at bottom his aims must surely be limited by the shared rationality of the twentieth century, as they knew it, and ultimately, if only one could see past the violence and the vulgarity, it must be possible to reach agreement. But Hitler was not a man of the twentieth century. No man who concentrates in himself the claims of a whole nation is a man of his own century only. Winston Churchill, out of office, writing, in those very years, a great historical study of the seventeenth century, was in a better position to understand the true character of nazism than those who understood, however well, only the immediate problems of their own time.

But if past and present are thus continuous, so that the present cannot be fully understood in isolation from the past, can we be more par- ticular? Can we use the past not merely to pro- vide a general conte4 vid&binjbch the.paiticu-

lar problems of the present may be the better understood, but also to provide particular solu- tions to particular problems? Can we even, at least in theory—for this is logically entailed in that—use the past to predict the future?

Those who speak of 'the science of history,' 'scientific history,' would presumably answer yes. I would not go so far. Even if history were a science, I would remain basically sceptical: for there are sciences and sciences, and even in science we must never be too schematic, too quick to systematise: that is how sciences are not forwarded but arrested, frozen. And besides, history. I believe, is not a science: it is an art in whose method several sciences are subsumed without making it thereby itself scientific.

At certain times, indeed, history itself has been declared scientific. It was scientific in the Middle Ages, and that scientific interpretation lasted, with the rest of the intellectual infrastruc- ture of the Middle Ages, however damaged by heresy, until the mid-seventeenth century. In those centuries, History was understood to have both a beginning and an end. It began with the Creation and would end at the pre-ordained end of the world; and both dates could, theoretically at least, be scientifically determined with the perfection of astronomical tables and the clarifi- cation of sacred texts. .. .

How remote it all seems now! Why should we trouble ourselves now with these exploded fantasies? Why, indeed, except to show a lesson of history, and learn humility thereby. The past is littered with the debris of ambitious historical systems, in which some of the greatest minds of the time—a Scaliger, a Napier, a Newton—have been invested. And why should later systems be any more durable? Are the doctrines of linear progress, or the continuing dialectic of the class struggle, or the withering away of the state, or the Yin and Yang any less metaphysical in their foundations?

History, I believe, is dependent on several sciences in its detail. But it remains itself too human a subject, too dependent on accident, too variable in the proportion even of its recurrent features, to be safely predictable. We may pre- dict in detail, and conditionally, where we have the means of comparison, and such limited pre- dictions may be scientifically, or at least em- pirically, tested and so justified and useful; but generally and absolutely there can be no pre- diction, only a guess; and a guess is, in the strict sense, worthless.

For instance, we may say that, according to the evidence of history, if there is a severe economic recession in a multi-racial society, there will be acute inter-racial tension; and we may also say, according to the social pattern and ideological tendency of the time, what form that tension will take. We can use for this pur- pose the evidence of sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain, which will, I believe, be of more value than any purely modern sociological

theory. But we cannot say, unconditionally, that, by the law of history, the next generatio'n shall see the end of the world, or a 'time of troubles,' or the rise of a new world empire, or universal peace, or indeed, in those absolute terms, anything else.

When people ask me whether historian, should not be able, ideally, to prophesy the future, I ask them a simple question. Let them place themselves at any date in past history arki say honestly whether any man could rationally have prophesied the course of the next WI\ years. In 1900? Who could conceivably haye forecast the convulsions of Europe or foreseen the total dissolution of the recently united Ger- man Reich? In 1950? Who would have sup. posed that America, the liberator of Europe, with its inherited cult of isolation and its publii; hatred of imperialism, would become the very type of imperialist power, fighting a long and bitter war in the Far East, and that a Demo- cratic President would be denounced in Asia— however unjustly—as 'the new Hitler'? I do not believe that such prophecy would have been possible. If it had been made, it would have been not scientific but an inspired guess.

On the other hand conditional prophecy is always possible, if the conditions are clearly understood, and the more we study history, and the more scientific its content becomes, and the more we respect its limits, the better we can prophesy. There are numerous conditional laws of history: empirical rules which can be taken from a wide range of historical experience. Any of them may be applicable to the present, none of them provides a certain formula for the present. For one safe rule of history is that his- torical situations never exactly repeat them- selves: there are too many variable ingredients in each situation for identical recurrence. Even if they should do so, the mere fact of repetition is a new ingredient which may alter the mixture.

I have often been asked, in the last twenty years, whether I could forecast an effective re- vival of nazism in Germany. I have always answered, no: because I have never believed that the old doctrines could revive in the old form. They might survive, as a kind of dead deposit, in ageing minds. Elements of them would recur. here and there, in new situations: for some of the elements are permanent features of German history, and some are predictable re- sponses to recurrent social pressures. But the fusion of all these elements in a particular dynamic pattern was caused, in the past, by the particular, unrepeatable experience of one generation; and even if all the same circum- stances should recur, in the same order (which is inconceivable), the emotional content would be not communicable, unchanged, to another generation: for the identical pattern of pres. sures and the same intellectual climate would not recur.

For this reason the new fascism, when it occurs, will occur with radical differences. In- deed, with such differences, it has already occurred. The arrogant cult of youth, the in- tolerance of dissent, the rejection of rational argument, the deliberate invocation of force to justify counter-force—all these have recently been resumed. But they have been resumed it classes and circumstances very different trom those of the 1920s and 1930s; and although a knowledge of the original fascism may help as to understand the new phenomenon, the precise form in which they have been resumed could not, I think, have been predicted. This constant change of circumstance, and of 'intellectual climate, is what makes the sever. arice of the present from the past, in our studies, ,eai so dangerous. History is the empirical

of the past, which uses, or should use, all

..,•,:rices that are relevant to it. Sociology is !he siudy—its advocates call it the scientific

: it is 'social science' —of the present.

is,!otty entered historical study in the eihtz.enth century, with Montesquieu. It has 7C11;I:Iled within it, strengthening its position in e%.1- since. Today, I cannot conceive of good histor■ without a sociological dimension. But if idciolooy is essential to history, history, I be- line. is no less essential to sociology. Socio- toic.,1 models tend to be static. Unless they are toted. they are necessarily dogmatic. But the test of a model is the way it works, as the test of a car is the way it runs; and the running of the soci5lii2ica1 model is history . . .

E This debate between past and present, be- tween history and 'social science,' is not new.

• It has an old ancestry. It is the debate between Slachiavellj and the Churches in the sixteenth century, between Clarendon and Hobbes in the

seventeenth, between Macaulay and the utili- tarians in the nineteenth. Clarendon accused Hobbes of seeking to impose abstract, 'geo- metrical' models on society instead of taking

advantage of the empirical lessons of history; :Ind he urged him, though now at the advanced age of eighty-eight, to go into politics and sit in parliament, and thereby correct the illusions bred by 'his solitary cogitations, how deep so- ever, and his too peremptory adhering to some philosophical notions, and even rules of geo- metr.' Macaulay even more rudely excoriated the mean and abject 'sophisms,' the 'syllogisms.' the scholastic deductions of James Mill, the illu- sion that 'the science of government' could be derived `by short synthetical arguments' drawn from self-evident axioms about human nature. He extolled instead the empirical study of his- tory whose best exponents, he insisted, like Clarendon, had been practical politicians—espe- ciall.v, of course, Whig politicians. Much the same point was put, in terser form, by Mr Quintin Hogg to an wademic sociologist who had the misfortune to cross him, a few months ago. on television. Both Clarendon and Macau- 14. it must be admitted, in their more extended .irgiiments, made some mistakes: which, since am on their side, I shall leave decently unex- posed; for they were not fundamental: they do not affect the general argument. Instead, I shall conclude by asking how we can follow their ,dviee and study history in such a way that, uithout adopting the extreme course of going Into Parliament. we can profit from it in the Present and so avoid the reproaches of Mr Short. I believe that there are at least two golden rules which Macaulay himself would sometimes have been well advised to follow. - First, we must not force the pace of history or seek to extract from it more precise lessons than it will yield. The very value of history lies in its general lessons, its complexity, its sugges- tions and analogies, and the highly conditional nature of parallels, not in concrete lessons or dogmatic conclusions. I know that people Want such conclusions, and when historians will not give them.such conclusions, they sometimes, III theisAsappointment, turn aside to the more Positive, ,fbut not necessarily more helpful) assur- ance, of the social scientists. But I. insist that such precise conclusions are not warrantable, Dr vdtuable. All the greatest historians have re- fused Is> produce them, and those who have Complied with the public demand by producing them are quickly out of date. The .great his- ians—Thuemtides, Gibbon. Rapke7-41510.41t9t

press an interpretation. The concessions that they make to the public are in form only: in style, in lucidity, in readability. They do not spell out crude lessons which can be neatly tabulated for busy readers by obliging epito- mists. Therefore they are not always popular with those hasty students who wish to have their historical philosophy served up to them in a nutshell. The philosophy of the greatest his- torians cannot be quickly summarised. It is not crude. It is subtle; and in a long work it must be allowed gradually to emerge.

Secondly, we must, I believe, respect the inde- pendence of the past. All of us, living in our own time, tend to see the past on our own terms. We like to recognise, in past centuries, familiar problems, familiar faces: to see men looking towards us, not away from us. But this ten- dency, though natural, contains great dangers. It is right, I believe, to look for lessons in the past, to see its relevance to our own time, to observe the signs of continuity, connection and process. The past is not to be studied for its own sake. That is mere antiquarianism. But it is anachronistic, distorting, to judge the past as if it were subject to the present, as if the men of the eighteenth or the sixteenth or the tenth cen- tury had no right to be independent of the twentieth. We exist in and for our own time: why should we judge our predecessors as if they were less self-sufficient: as if they existed for us and should be judged by us? To discern the intellectual climate of the past is one of the most difficult tasks of the historian, but it is also one of the most necessary. To neglect it—to use terms like 'rational,' superstitious,"progres- sive,' 'reactionary,' as if only that was rational which obeyed our rules of reason, only that pro- gressive which pointed to us—is worse than wrong: it is vulgar.

Finally, in studying history, I believe that while we must always appreciate its extent and variety, we must always study one part of it in detail. To study on too narrow a front deprives us of the chance of analogy; but to study too generally is not study at all. The historian who has specialised all his life may end as an anti- quarian. The historian who has never specialised at all will end as a mere blower of froth. The antiquarian at least is useful to others.

I would have all historians specialise, for however short a space, on some part of their own history—for there they are at home: they can read the sources in their own language. This will prevent them from too easy generalisation by showing upon what uncertain and contro- versial foundations received opinions are often based. But having done this, I would have them read the history of other countries, knowing that they will then do so with a double advan- tage. From their specialist study of their own history they will know how to reserve judgment on general history where they have not pene- trated so deeply; and from their general study of foreign history, thus qualified, they will learn that comparative method which will pre- vent them from too readily accepting one for- mula of historical causation: from assuming, for instance, that parliamentary democracy, or trade unions, or liberal catchwords, or any catchwords, are the only way of salvation. By this double process they may make the study of the past not only interesting, but useful. It will not prove to be a science. It will produce no ready-made answers. It will not enable them to prophesy. But it will enlarge their views. It may bring independence of judgment. And so it may enable them to understand, and by under- standing to improve, the present.