Why Ferguson Should Be No Longer Read: an historical perspective on the politics of History
The writing of history, and the reception of historical works, reveals quite a lot about the values of a given society. I have written before about the often explicit political character of historians’ interpretations of the French Revolution and this applies not only to the twentieth century but also to the period in which the Revolution was still happening, and to the nineteenth century as well. In 1898, an article appeared in France called Why Michelet Is No Longer Read, arguing that the famous historian Jules Michelet’s passion for the Revolution was no longer in vogue. Indeed, revolution itself at this stage, to which, as Edmund Wilson points out, the bourgeoisie owed their position, meant not the La Marseillaise and le tricolore but l’Internationale and the Paris Commune of 1871.
Throughout the nineteenth century, and most certainly by 1848, on which the dialectics of revolution hinged like a see-saw, the bourgeoisie in France and Germany had negated its revolutionary potential upon partially achieving its objectives. Revolution in this context was revolution against the bourgeoisie and against property; the bourgeoisie were no longer the Abbé Sieyes of 1789, exhorting his compatriots against the idleness of the aristocracy but the Sieyes of 1799, looking towards a strong executive to defend against ‘anarchy’.
Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the searing impact of the Paris Commune on the consciousness of the French bourgeoisie; even Anatole France, supporter of Zola in the Dreyfus Affair and who was to have his whole catalogue of works placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of the Catholic Church wrote of the communard prisoners in Versaille as “riffraff… hideous, as you may suppose.” Gustave Le Bon expressed bourgeois anxiety about democracy in his 1894 work, The Psychology of Peoples, and the event was reflected in James Ensor’s 1888 painting L’Entrée du Christ a Bruxelles, where the viewer can make out a red banner, hoisted above a frightening crowd, bearing the phrase, ‘vive la sociale.’
It is not only the writing of history but the very idea of a historical perspective that jars with the self-absorbed harmony of a contented class. Hegel, whose dialectic conception of History as the progression of the Weltgeist (or world spirit) towards the realisation of absolute reason in the Universal Stand, informed the radical politics of the Left-Hegelians and, most famously, of Marx and Engels. Nevertheless, in Hegel’s own time, given the patronage bestowed upon him by the Prussian State of Friedrich Wilhelm III, his ideas transmogrified into a legitimization of Prussian absolutism as the ideologists of the State argued that Prussia had indeed reached the absolute pinnacle of History. This sounds very familiar to anyone acquainted with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man which infamously argued that the fall of Stalinism meant the perpetuity of liberal democracy as the highest form of human political organisation.
History, therefore, tends to ‘end’ at the most convenient of destinations as far as these ideologues are concerned. A true historical perspective, however, is at once anathema to this position. It was Bertolt Brecht who said, “Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are,” and this encapsulates the restlessness of history, and the potential transience of all social, political and economic relations. Margaret Thatcher’s insistence that ‘There is No Alternative’ is the echo of successive bourgeois ideologues who, in order to normalise the status quo, insist on its ‘natural’ qualities and the impossibility of its transformation. “The laws of commerce,” said Burke, “are the Laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God.” As Marx commented caustically in the Poverty of Philosophy, “Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any.”
This was quite literally the case during the late-nineteenth century debate over methods (Methodenstreit) between the German Historical School of Gustav von Schmoller and the Austrian School led by Carl Menger who sought to abstract economics from the substance of history. Menger wrote in 1883 that, “The theoretical and historical sciences of economy, accordingly, do exhibit a fundamental difference, and only the complete failure to recognize the true nature of these sciences can produce this confusion of these with each other, or occasion the opinion that they can replace each other mutually.” As Simon Clarke has written, however, Menger “can make economics a natural science because it naturalises the economic relations of capitalist society.”
So what, then, of Gove’s plans for the history curriculum? Gove, as is well known, is an ideological neoconservative like Ferguson. We should not be surprised, therefore, that he waxed lyrical about Edmund Burke at the 2008 Conservative Party Conference. He also serves on the advisory board for the magazine Standpoint, owned by the Social Affairs Unit, itself a think tank linked to the neoliberal Institute for Economic Affairs which had a decisive impact on the ideas of Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Moreover, he is aligned with the Peterhouse-based Henry Jackson Society which gives liberal-left cover for imperialism in the Middle East and whose militant liberalism (quite literally militant) stems from a negative reaction to the knowledge that Fukuyama was not, in fact, right to precociously welcome the End of History.
In 2008, Gove wrote an article praising Ferguson’s work on the First World War, and mourned the loss of the pre-War Belle Époque in which it “was possible to travel, and trade, freely across a Europe run, mostly, in a tolerant and liberal fashion.” He continues:
“The ramshackle empires of the first decade of the last century may have offended nationalists and utopians of every stripe but they were delivering increased material prosperity and greater personal freedom at a steady rate.”
This is a typically Euro-centric attitude in which the crimes of the ‘ramshackle empires’ are totally ignored; nowhere is it mentioned that the ‘material prosperity’ to which Gove refers (bear in mind this was the Edwardian era where the gap between rich and poor was perhaps never so wide in British history) came at the expense of the exploited toilers of the British Empire. Membership of ‘Club Empire’ was so exclusive and beneficial that, out of sheer benevolence, the British employed the first documented use of a concentration camp in the Boer War not two decades beforehand to subdue the Boers. Let us not mention the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 either, lest it spoil Gove’s dangerous imperalist daydream with the troublesome sound of relentless rifle-fire and the screams of tens of thousand Punjabi men, women and children.
Even on the European continent in this period, the ‘Liberal parliamentarism’ to which Gove refers was a corrupt imitation of democracy. In Italy, a violent and crooked elite perpetuated its own rule through clientelism and Trasformismo; Germany’s executive was still drawn from the exclusive caste of Junkers; the Spanish government crushed a revolt in Barcelona against colonialism using the army during 1909’s ‘Tragic Week’; Britain, too, had not yet introduced universal suffrage; and Russia was still in the grip of Tsarist autocracy. Only when viewed from the perspective of the political classes and finance-capital can this period be seen as a positive model; from the perspective of the ‘ragged-trousered philanthropists’ of Robert Tressell, the Dublin proletariat during the 1913 Lockout or the oppressed masses of the colonial territories, life was grim. It is this elitist and imperialist perspective that we can hope for from Ferguson, a man who derided the national liberation struggles in India and other former colonies as being irrelevant to the fall of the British Empire, and who thinks America should begin acting more like the empire it is coming to represent.
The resurrection of Empire as a positive development in world history is clearly linked to the current age of imperialism for which Gove and Ferguson are prominent cheerleaders. There is a link between Armritsar and Fallujah, but in the neoconversative narrative both were aberrations from a largely peaceful norm. I will withhold further fire until the curriculum itself is announced but as we all know, the writing and teaching of history is an inherently political exercise so the appointment of such an ideological dogmatist as Ferguson by the similarly right-wing Gove is an unwelcome turn. In the battle against bourgeois hegemony the ideas of Niall Ferguson need to be contested before they can ossify into ‘common sense’. This should be a chance to turn the debate around and put these ideas on trial; to challenge the ideological state apparatus and its particular political conception of history. It is a chance we cannot miss.
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