Dumb bleating Kirsten mounts the roof
and beats her booming drum;
she’ll soon be blasted down,
since that’s what saviours get in pay;

six hundred years away
Old Loman is struck dumb
and in that instant sells a million
with nothing gold to say:
with nothing but the turning of his thumb.

Edward Davies has been publishing poetry and short fiction since 1993, with over thirty publications to his credit. He has won Oxford’s Martin Starkie Prize, and honourable mention in the Neville Coghill Prize.

Lou Hoover stands cocky, contr’apposto,
in the slouch hat of an American marine
and tough white linen, face in shadow,
no sign of whalebone or crinoline.
One hand, one foot rest on—proud, like ‘My son’—
wheel rim, recoil blocks of a modern four-inch gun.
Behind her: the wrecked skyline of Tientsin.

Edward Davies has been publishing poetry and short fiction since 1993, with over thirty publications to his credit. He has won Oxford’s Martin Starkie Prize, and honourable mention in the Neville Coghill Prize.

Mil Millington
Things my Girlfriend and I have Argued About
Hodder and Stoughton, 2002
338 pages

In the autumn of 1998, I followed an Internet link inviting me to ‘read a huge list of things an English guy finds annoying about his German girlfriend’. This led me to Mil Millington’s homepage, where there is indeed a huge list. Disagreements on subjects as diverse as the correct way to cut kiwi fruit and eat Kit-Kats, or what colour to decorate the living room, are described in loving detail. I spent a happy few hours there, and I return occasionally to look through new postings.

www.thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com is a cult, and remains a gem in a cyber-world that seems to consist primarily of porn and get-rich/thin/happy/healthy-quick sites. Millington’s column for The Guardian Weekend magazine is based on his website, but, unfortunately, the transfer between Internet and newspaper publication has not been successful. Millington’s flippancy, endearing on the web, is tediously trivial on newsprint. Still, I was eager to see how well Millington’s brand of humour would translate to a full-length work of fiction.

Despite the fact that the book shares its title with the website and the column, the main characters’ names have been changed. Mil becomes Pel, and his German girlfriend Margret becomes Ursula. The plot is entirely ‘character-driven’: Pel, a thirty-something man, works in the fictional University of North-Eastern England, as an IT manager for the university library. He has a German girlfriend, two young sons, a couple of friends he meets for lunch, and assorted coworkers, each more manic than the last. And that’s basically it. The fact that one of his colleagues goes missing and thus facilitates Pel’s own promotion, that Pel has to arrange covert meetings with the Triads to give them ‘fees’ for recruiting overseas students, and that the university biology department is stashing nerve gas in the foundations of the new library extension are mere sidelines. Explaining that this work is High Fidelity meets Man and Boy meets Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, with perhaps just the slightest sprinkling of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason thrown in for good measure, gives a much better idea of what to expect.

This is not to say that Millington merely jumps on the back of Nineties publishing fads. Millington capitalizes on all the quirks of trans-European romance and all the hilarity that emerges from the ethnic differences and miscommunications involved in an intercultural relationship. Ursula and Pel arguing about their house being burgled is one example among many:

‘This is just typical of England. People don’t get burgled in Germany.’

‘Er.… I think that might not be true.’

‘It is. I was never burgled there, neither was anyone I knew. It’s just something that doesn’t happen.’

‘Oh, sorry—I didn’t realise you had the figures to back it up.’

‘You’re going to the estate agents tomorrow.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because, we’re moving—point.’

‘You mean “We’re moving—full stop”.’

‘I’m going to hit you in the face.’

At the end of the novel, faced with the discovery that her boyfriend has become entangled with the shady dealings of the university and is potentially going to be used as their scapegoat, Ursula’s reaction is ‘Aw, bollocks to it—let’s go to bed’. The moral of the story, then, is ‘those who argue about the trivial have stronger relationships than the smug who claim they share everything, including opinions’. But don’t worry too much about the moral: Millington’s work is light entertainment, an ideal companion for those untroubled by laughing out loud on crowded trains.

Gillian Dow is researching a DPhil at Balliol College, Oxford, on the contemporary reception of the works of the best-selling eighteenth century writer Madame de Genlis. She likes to read twentieth century bestsellers too.

Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Canongate, 2002
319 pages

How much can you believe—that a sixteen-year-old boy spends 227 days adrift in the Pacific? What if he’s with a 450-pound tiger? Strained credulity is the order of the day in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and deliberately so: the question of belief is central to Life of Pi, the Canadian author’s third book and this year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize.

The main story of Life of Pi is framed by Martel’s own preface, which describes the winding path that led him to write the book. Martel thanks our protagonist, ‘Mr. Patel’, for sharing his story through interviews. Martel, it seems, wants us to believe that the story we are about to read is true, even though we know that Life of Pi is a novel. When Pi himself takes over the narrative in the first chapter, he captivates us with a very different, instantly appealing voice. The novel continues to oscillate back and forth between Pi’s narration of his long-ago survival at sea and Martel’s italicised interjections. Because Pi’s perceptive, reverent, and practical view of the world draws us in, though, we’re willing to suspend our disbelief of this elaborate framing device and immerse ourselves in the story.

Pi Patel grows up, we are told in the first third of the novel, on his family’s zoo in India. The Patels then decide to sell their animals to American buyers and settle in Canada. But in the middle of their journey across the Pacific, their hopes meet with an abrupt end. As Pi tells us, with characteristic candor:

The ship sank. It made a sound like a giant metallic burp. Things bubbled at the surface and then vanished. Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.

The ship sinks suddenly and for no known reason. Pi finds himself thrown aboard a lifeboat by the ship’s crew (who vanish into the sea), accompanied by animals (who have been inexplicably liberated from their cages). His family is gone. He is left in a well-stocked lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

If the events narrated are, in principle, possible, they become increasingly improbable. This is magical realism in the original sense of the phrase: there is no actual magic, but events and images are juxtaposed so as to create a sense of the magical. Pi’s fascination with the details of life imbues everything he explores with simplicity and subtle beauty. Pi’s wonder and descriptive talents lend the story a fantastical aura:

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you would be amazed at the animals that would fall out. It would pour more than cats and dogs, I tell you. Boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, piranhas, ostriches, wolves, lynx, wallabies, manatees, porcupines, orangutans, wild boar—that’s the sort of rainfall you could expect on your umbrella.

A constant stream of strange imagery prepares us for what happens after the ship sinks: we are so spellbound by the perceptive enchantment of Pi’s world that we are eager to believe anything he tells us. So when he finds himself on the animal-loaded lifeboat, we believe it and keep reading. It is no surprise that the hyena attacks and eats the zebra and orangutan: Pi has explained the rules of animal hunger in detail.

And when Richard Parker emerges from his hiding place on the boat and kills the hyena, this, too, makes sense. It is the tiger’s failure to turn on Pi that defies all expectation. Even Pi is surprised, as, shaken with fear, he assesses the food supply and builds a small raft of lifejackets and paddles just in case.

The situation’s implausibility pleases rather than frustrates, and, anyway, we want to know how the situation will turn out, so on we go. With one exception, the narrative of those 227 days at sea flows smoothly as an account of a day-to-day existence where wonder is joined with acceptance and belief:

With just one glance I discovered that the sea is a city. Just below me, all around, unsuspected by me, were highways, boulevards, streets and roundabouts bustling with submarine traffic. In water that was dense, glassy and flecked by millions of lit-up specks of plankton, fish like trucks and buses and cars and bicycles and pedestrians were madly racing about… I gazed upon this urban hurly-burly like someone observing a city from a hot-air balloon. It was a spectacle wondrous and awe-inspiring. This is surely what Tokyo must look like at rush hour.

The only time the narrative overstretches itself is when Pi encounters an island made of algae, inhabited solely by meerkats. Pi begins the tale with a warning: ‘there will be many who disbelieve the following episode. Still, I give it to you now because it’s part of the story and it happened to me’.

The event presages Pi’s landfall on the Mexican shore. There, we are again forced into disbelief, this time by two events that are entirely plausible, even predictable.

First, Richard Parker abandons Pi. Considering all we’ve been told about animals and their desire for comfort, it only makes sense that a tiger would quickly abandon seasickness and scarcity of food for the nearby jungle. But after 227 days of relationship building, we hope for a different, miraculous outcome (perhaps Pi will keep the tiger, or they will remain lifelong friends?). The second event is more jarring: the authorities refuse to believe Pi’s story. Their skepticism prompts Pi to retort:

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?… Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.

To prove his point, Pi offers a different, more ‘believable’ account, substituting the animals on the lifeboat for people from the ship. The authorities have trouble accepting this story as well—and the reader’s faith in Pi, so long maintained, is also in danger. Is he mad? Is Richard Parker a hallucination? Will our author return once more and explain? And what did happen to the ship, that accident that started all of this in motion? To the end, Pi insists on his original version, but the reader’s faith in narratives, and in this narrative in particular, has been shaken.

It is this direct relationship between storytelling and belief that makes Life of Pi more than just a well-told magical realist fable. In its questioning of other kinds of faith—faith in God, faith in nature’s complexities, faith in the will to live when faced with enormous loss—the book addresses the sort of philosophical themes often used to separate ‘literary’ from ‘popular’ fiction. Further, the novel frames its questions with an aching sincerity and eloquence that distinguish it as the sort of touching and accomplished ‘literary’ work Booker Prize judges historically privilege. It also boasts strong characterization and an original, compelling plot. In retrospect, it has obvious Booker potential (although no less than five publishers, including Penguin and Chatto & Windus, turned down the manuscript before Canongate picked it up). In addition to its highbrow ‘literariness,’ however, as one of the judges noted, Life of Pi ‘is a book with enormous and wide appeal,’ fitting nicely with the ‘new’ Booker Prize’s agenda to include more popular books. Perhaps the novel’s double appeal is best understood through another judge’s comments:

Unlike popular or genre novels, literary novels cannot be prescribed by publishers… They create their own enclosed world, are inventive in terms of narrative and character, and have an inimitable voice, the personal signature of the author.

Part spiritual fable, part metafictional reflection, and part adventure story, Life of Pi transcends the boundaries of stuffy literary intellectualism and becomes a uniquely enjoyable story in both content and structure. A smart choice for a Booker committee seeking to redefine itself, and just recognition for an author who has come into his own.

Jennifer Dunn is a DPhil student at Balliol College, Oxford, writing on the tropes of magic and the supernatural in twentieth century women’s writing.

Anka Muhlstein
Astolphe de Custine: The Last French Aristocrat
Teresa Waugh, trans.
Gerald Duckworth and Company Limited, 2001
391 pages

Astolphe de Custine
Letters from Russia
Anka Muhlstein, ed and trans.
New York Review of Books, 2002
654 pages

RUSSIA IS A TYRANNY the vilest tyranny that ever existed. The great mass of the Russian people are gripped by a gang of cosmopolitan adventurers, who have settled down on the country like vultures and are tearing it to pieces.

–Winston Churchill, 1924

IN FRANCE, revolutionary tyranny is an evil belonging to a state of transition; in Russia, despotic tyranny is permanent.

–Astolphe de Custine, 1843

AS A NATION, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

–Abraham Lincoln, 1855

A Russian friend of mine once remarked, as I was describing my grandfather’s experiences during and after the Russian Revolution, that ‘in 1917 the Russians exchanged the tyranny of the czars for the tyranny of each other’. All cultural and political generalizations are problematic, and this one all the more so as it draws on a surprisingly resilient theme in the discussion of Russian history: it admits to a change in the surface conditions of Russian society but not in an underlying, enduring Russian nature. As this tired lore would have it, only the outward forms of the Russian regime change, while the people and the day-to-day form of rule and administration remain, in some way, the same. We are asked to imagine an eternal, static Russia, grounded in an eternal, static Russian people—and to perpetuate the trope of a particularly Russian, self-lacerating preoccupation with self-identity and its relation to history.

One of the most controversial works in the history of foreign investigations of the Russian people and government is Astolphe de Custine’s La Russie en 1839. As Anka Muhlstein, the editor of Letters from Russia, a newly published translation of Custine’s work, states in her 1996 biography Custine (released in English translation in 2001), Letters from Russia was called by the Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen ‘the most intelligent book about Russia’, and its importance to political history has been commonly compared to that of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

But it was the book’s prophetic description of mid-twentieth century Russia which was to be the basis of its reputation in the last century. Indeed, the book’s publication history speaks volumes about the nature of its impact and its importance: it was remarkably popular when published in 1843, widely translated in Europe, banned by Czar Nicholas I and by Lenin, lost in obscurity for some time, and eventually adopted as the darling text of disgruntled American diplomats who, stationed in Moscow during Stalin’s rule, plundered it for surprisingly apropos aphorisms.¹ Custine’s description of the despotism he perceived in Russia in 1839—he discusses ‘the police of the imagination’ and describes the Russian people as ‘voluntary automata’—are easy to recognize as remarkably accurate descriptions of later tyrannies.

The work’s reliability has been more hotly contested than its significance. It has often been criticized as a distorted, myopic representation of Russia through the eyes of a prejudiced, Romantic dandy. But that was not how George Kennan saw it. As he contended in the 1969 Chicele lectures at Oxford, and as he argues in the book which he developed out of the lectures,² the startling similarity between Custine’s and Stalin’s Russia was not inevitable.

Rather, in Kennan’s view, the changes following the 1917 revolution represented nothing less than a return to an ethos of tyranny and seclusion from which Russia had been emerging at the end of the nineteenth century.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the appeal of La Russie was renewed by interest in the oppressive past from which Russia was perceived to be distancing itself. But soon the rest of the world’s dwindling interest in (or even memory of) the USSR threatened to relegate Custine’s popular and influential work to the ash-heap of history along with the system it had so aptly prefigured. Robin Buss, the editor of a highly abridged 1991 version, argued naturally enough that the value of Custine’s work extends beyond its status as prophecy to its historical importance as fine travel literature and as a representation of the nineteenth century European fascination with Russia.³ However, such a move would no doubt confine this sweeping and highly personal work to specialized academic interest and literary analysis. No longer worth banning, La Russie seemed no longer relevant to contemporary concepts of Russia and Russian identity.

It was at this point that Anka Muhlstein took up the cause of Custine, motivated by a desire to promote interest not only in La Russie, but also in Custine’s other works and in the man himself. In her biography of Custine, subtitled The Last French Aristocrat, she portrays Custine as a neglected genius whose works are significant in the wider contexts of French history and European romanticism. But a revival of Custine’s second-rate novels and poems is rather unlikely, and Muhlstein’s crucial insight, in the end, is that La Russie amounts to a paradigmatic and incisive assessment of Russia and its tyrannies by an educated, liberal aristocrat in the wake of the French revolution. ‘I arrived in a new country,’ he claims of his entry to Russia, ‘without any other prejudices than those which no man can guard against; those which a conscientious study of history imparts’.

Custine’s ‘conscientious study of history’ was not simply bookish: he lived and observed the history of his own times in some remarkable ways. His grandfather was an officer in both the American Revolution and in the wars fought in the aftermath of the French Revolution and was killed—along with his son, Custine’s father—in 1793 during the Terror. The family fortunes soon crumbled, and Custine’s mother was for some time imprisoned, while little Astolphe, just over three years old, was cared for by a nurse in one of the few rooms of the family home which was not sealed by the authorities. ‘The servants,’ wrote Custine, ‘scarcely spoke to me of anything but the misfortunes of my parents; and never shall I forget the consequent expression of terror which I experienced in my earliest intercourse with the world’.

From that point forward, the dominating influence in Custine’s life was his mother Delphine, a renowned beauty who kept many lovers, including René de Chateaubriand, and who was probably the model for the heroine of Madame de Staël’s novel Delphine. Biographers tend to make much of Delphine’s influence on Custine, indulging in the kind of dubious psychoanalyzing she seems to demand. Muhlstein is no exception. Indeed, the opening sections of The Last French Aristocrat are thoroughly incoherent, betraying Muhlstein’s inability to decide between focusing on Custine or on his fascinating mother, with her impetuosity, her inconstancy, her heroic independence, and her lovers.

Custine’s sexuality was certainly an important factor in his emotional life as well as central to his place in the history of the French aristocracy. His homosexuality began to surface in adolescent friendships, but it did not prevent him from marrying (most likely as a consequence of maternal pressure) in 1821, and fathering a son, Enguerrand, in 1822. By this time, the Custine fortunes had revived, and the young Marquis was something of a social success, with literary aspirations, good looks, and a fascinating family history. He was also engaged in diplomatic service, attending the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

But in October of 1824 the open secret of Custine’s sexuality became a public scandal from which he never fully recovered. Custine arranged to meet a young guard for a rendezvous one evening, but the guard reported the tryst to his fellows, who appeared at the appointed time, stripped the Marquis, and beat him severely. When Custine brought in the police, the guards claimed they had beaten him to uphold the honour of the regiment. They were exonerated, and, his homosexuality exposed, Custine was no longer permitted to perform his diplomatic duties nor able to appear as usual in respectable society.

Custine subsequently held only a minor place in Parisian society, and his professional possibilities were severely curtailed. His wife had died in 1823 at the age of 21, and his son died in 1826. Custine turned to writing and throughout his life produced poems, novels, and plays which met with only limited success. In 1838 he published his first successful work, L’Espagne sous Ferdinand VII, based on a journey he had made in 1831. Custine received considerable acclaim for his proficiency as a writer of good travel literature, if not of good novels. It was also during this journey that Custine considered the possibility of a tour of Russia, to compare it with Spain and consider its relation to Europe.

Not until 1839 would he bring his plan to fruition and begin writing what was to become one of the most important representations of tyranny and corruption—and specifically Russian tyranny and corruption—ever written. Custine went on to write other works before he slipped into financial difficulties and died of a stroke in 1857, but his work on Russia—and his history preceding its publication—remain the most important aspects of his life for contemporary readers.

Leonard Epp is a Canadian graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford and is currently researching the rhetoric of obscurity and clarity in 1790s British political literature. He will write a DPhil thesis on Coleridge and Romantic Obscurity.

Notes

1 See, for example, Journey For Our Time: The Journals of the Marquis de Custine. Phyllis Penn Kohler, ed and trans. London: Arthur Baker, 1951.
2 Kennan, George F. The Marquis de Custine and His Russia in 1839. London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd., 1972.
3 Marquis de Custine. Letters from Russia. Robin Buss, ed and trans. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

]]> http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/the-marquis-de-custine-and-the-question-of-russian-history/feed/ 0 http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/gilead/ http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/gilead/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2003 12:00:26 +0000 Joshua Billings http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/?p=87 Amy Flanders

That wooden boat has never left the bank,
the oars lie rotten in their rusted locks,
and water seeps around a shrinking plank.
Some hand has drawn her name anew, and yet
that wooden boat has never left the bank.
This brackish creek does not lead to the sea;
it does not trill the song of stream on stone,
but goes to ground beneath a live oak tree.
We fashioned pan pipes from these rushes once.
This brackish creek does not lead to the sea.
This land has always been both bleak and green:
it takes no heed of our meek stewardship.
The hollyhocks can seed themselves between
the orchard rows where countless almonds fall.
This land has always been both bleak and green.

Amy Flanders is a DPhil student at Lincoln College, Oxford. She studies the history of the British publishing industry. One of her poems appeared in May Anthologies 2002.

Isaiah Berlin
Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty
Henry Hardy, ed.
Pimlico, 2003
256 pages

It is difficult to imagine intellectual virtuosity applied to serious ideas of the past winning widespread public attention in today’s world. Yet fifty years ago, when a foreign-born and stage-shy Oxford academic gave a series of lectures on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century European political philosophers over BBC radio, his talks met with exactly that.

The forty-three-year-old speaker picked his way through long sentences in a tense voice, his clipped syllables running together. The authors he discussed were all long dead, and few were well known. With the Cold War underway, however, the topic was timely: he trained his sights on the ways in which philosophers, in trying to defend visions of human freedom, had developed doctrines that justified tyranny. And his style was a perfect mixture of intellectual engagement, sly irony, and dramatic evocation. Under his urbane but intense gaze, the centuries dropped away, and complicated thoughts resolved themselves into striking patterns. The series won a large, avid audience and occasioned a leader along with a flurry of letters in the Times. It was a sensation.

The academic was Isaiah Berlin; and the lectures, under the title Freedom and its Betrayal, have just been published by Berlin’s tireless editor, Henry Hardy. Much of the credit for Berlin’s continued influence belongs to Hardy, who has worked something of a wonder.

In resurrecting neglected works that Berlin himself was too modest or too distracted to publish, preparing these writings for publication by laboriously tracking down Berlin’s references and correcting Berlin’s many free and often inaccurate quotations, he has allowed Berlin’s voice—unfettered, insistent, lucid, humane—to continue speaking, with his rare intellectual passion and rhetorical brilliance, to the perennial problems of people struggling against the threats of oppression in ever-changing conditions. The publication of these lectures, then, is a welcome occasion. Not merely Cold War period pieces, they remain challenging, successful works of popular persuasion.

Berlin emphasized that those devoted to human liberty must be wary of too great a passion for certainty, order, regulation, and harmony at the expense of diversity, spontaneity, and eccentricity. He also reminded us that to be careful advocates of freedom, we must learn from the melancholy spectacle of liberty’s betrayal by those who claim to defend it, in addition to countering the disquieting insights of those who overtly struggle against it. This lesson made Berlin’s thought politically and morally profound not only in his own time, but also today. When men and women are imprisoned in the name of defending liberty; when dogma and hysteria are justified in the name of emancipation; and when fanatics murder innocents and are hailed as ‘freedom fighters’—then Berlin’s political analyses speak to us powerfully and urgently.

For all his interest in the application of ideas to contemporary conflicts, Berlin structured these lectures as a work of history, discussing shifts in European political thought through examinations of six influential thinkers. He starts with the eighteenth century French philosopher Helvetius, who believed that the goal of human life was enlightened, harmless pleasure and who dreamed of emancipation through rational education and governance under the direction of a civilized minority.

This vision was rejected by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose attacks on the sophisticated hypocrisy of his time and whose farsighted advocacy of participatory democracy and civic virtue transformed European thought on the eve of the nineteenth century. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte also began as an apostle of liberation and individualism but became an ardent exponent of nationalism and authoritarianism.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the author of the most influential and difficult philosophical master-system of the nineteenth century, sought to understand human freedom by discerning the overarching course of history and, Berlin suggests, ended up subjugating human beings to impersonal historical laws. The Comte de Saint-Simon was an eccentric visionary whose own view of historical progress led him to see the salvation of society in the rule of technical experts: he dreamt of replacing the rule of men with the ‘administration of things’. Finally, Joseph de Maistre frankly declared that freedom and enlightenment were dangerous, politics consisted of bloody conflict, and social life rested on terror, superstition, and oppression: the public hangman was the author of order, and the public scaffold was the foundation of society.

As an intellectual historian, Berlin was never free from reproach. His accounts of individual philosophers lack the close attention to textual detail, the lucid evaluation of logical argument, and the analysis of political, social, intellectual, cultural and linguistic contexts which have transformed the study of political thought. His portrayal of philosophical development too often reads like a morality play. He paints pictures which are dramatic, colorful, simplistic, and at times contrived.

The most problematic portions of this book, in this regard, are those that address the most complicated and powerful thinkers—Rousseau and Hegel. This is both because of the numerous studies of these thinkers which came after Berlin’s lectures, and because the work of Rousseau and Hegel is simply too complex to be jammed into Berlin’s narrative of the betrayal of freedom.

Nonetheless, Berlin’s account of Rousseau provides a powerfully convincing and lucid account of the rationale behind the paradoxes of The Social Contract. Berlin puts his finger on the pulse of Rousseau’s thought in emphasizing his abhorrence of human division and his belief—which Rousseau himself identified in his Confessions as the root of his thought—that the source of all evil lies in conflicts of interest between human beings.

Although Berlin here fails to do justice to the sophistication of Hegel’s system, he does convincingly tease out some of the more disturbing implications of Hegel’s thought and in so doing offers an early version of Berlin’s critique of the tyrannical historical master-narratives of the nineteenth century, which he would further develop in his essays on the philosophy of history and his affectionate portraits of the nineteenth century Russian revolutionary, Herzen.

Indeed, the chapters on Hegel and Rousseau are valuable in revealing the origins of many of Berlin’s later, well-known positions: we are able to watch Berlin working these out through his efforts to make sense of the thinkers whose presences haunted his later work.

These chapters tell us some important things about Rousseau and Hegel; they tell us much more about Berlin and about his very real virtues as a historian. Nor, in judging Berlin’s work, should we forget just how much today’s renaissance in the study of the history of political thought owes to his early, lonely efforts; his BBC lectures, for example, transfixed and inspired a boy named John Burrow, one of today’s most accomplished intellectual historians. While there may be scholars with more precise readings of texts and contexts than Berlin’s, few match his breadth of vision, depth of perception, and infectious enthusiasm.

Berlin’s sympathy for lonely, independent and eccentric figures is one of his most appealing traits, and one of his greatest accomplishments was to revive interest in obscure and neglected thinkers. He did this with Maistre in a long, masterful essay (published in The Crooked Timber of Humanity); the chapter on Maistre here is far shorter and less thorough, but it is nonetheless a direct and vivid introduction.

However, the account of Fichte in Freedom and its Betrayal is by far his fullest discussion of this German Romantic, although Berlin often mentions him elsewhere. The Fichte chapter succeeds marvelously in showing step-by-step how Fichte moved from advocating radical individual emancipation and self-determination to celebrating a mystical conception of collective selfhood in which individuals were wholly subsumed by and utterly oppressed in the name of the Nation, the People, the Race.

Yet the most successful chapter of all is that on Saint-Simon, which reveals that, far from being a dispenser of well-worn commonplaces, Berlin was in fact a deeply prescient and adventurous scholar. Saint-Simon, though a colorful, vain, picaresque, and compassionate aristocrat, has long been an obscure figure, off the well-trodden path of canonical political thought. Yet he was a profoundly important figure in nineteenth century thought. Saint-Simon shaped not only socialism, but also sociology (through his pupil August Comte). The development of ever more bureaucratic government owed much to his vision of a society managed by a cadre of enlightened experts—as did the increased prestige of big business. Even the development of liberalism (J.S. Mill was deeply, if equivocally, influenced by Saint-Simon) owed something to him.

The chapter on Saint-Simon, like the rest of Freedom and its Betrayal, highlights why Berlin turned to the history of ideas and why he approached it as he did. For Berlin (by contrast with figures such as Marx), the important thing was not to change the world, but to understand it. Too many had tried to change the world without understanding it, and the results were all too apparent. Hence Berlin’s focus on beginnings and transitions in intellectual history. This also helps explain his attraction to originality as such, and his tendency to focus on precursors, visionaries, and mavericks who, though marginal and misunderstood in their own time, subsequently laid the ground for the world in which we live. It is this quality that makes Berlin’s work so interesting and accessible, even to those not professionally concerned with intellectual history.

While Berlin’s lectures were shaped by a particular time and situation, he responded by looking at issues that were not merely transitory: the origins and development of certain influential, seductive ideas and, most importantly, the perennial struggle between the thirst for liberty and the hunger for certainty and absolutism which threaten that liberty.

These essays continue to stand as a powerful defense of liberty, and a warning against the passions of fanatics and fundamentalists of all creeds across the centuries. In doing so, they testify to the fact, often overlooked by our hyper-specialized academy, that the errors of an original and generous intellect can be more fruitful than exactitude unnourished by imaginative insight.

Joshua Cherniss is currently working on a DPhil thesis concerned with the intellectual and political context of Berlin’s thought.

The September 11 attacks spurred a debate about what America stands for. America’s response to the terrorists, from the operation in Afghanistan to the mobilization against Iraq, has provoked many critical reactions in the US as well as Europe. Some accuse the US of taking advantage of September 11 to achieve imperialist aims in the Middle East, while President Bush is using the war to divert attention from problems at home.

Disagreements hinge on whether the US is justified in waging its ‘war on terror.’ To determine whether America is worth protecting by such means, an investigation into American ideals is necessary. David McCullough’s John Adams provides an ideal launching point for exploring the values and way of life to be secured by a victory in the multi-front war.

McCullough’s biography is first and foremost a page-turner, short on intellectual history. Still, it details enough of Adams’s philosophy for the reader to appreciate his vision of America at its founding and to observe the construction of the world’s first liberal democracy. The generation that secured independence from Britain and framed the US Constitution succeeded in building a regime that would reflect and accommodate—not strive to change—human nature. The founders disagreed about many issues, but they shared a determination to root the American experiment in the principle of natural freedom and equality. Further, they understood their task to consist in designing a system of self-government that would endure despite the fact that ideals don’t motivate most people most of the time. As Adams wrote in his 1787 Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, ‘Religion, superstition, oaths, education, laws, all give way before passions, interest, and power.’

America’s founders believed that the dictates of self-interest rightly understood should guide politics in a self-governing state; this conviction merits close attention in this period of post-September 11 soul-searching and reexamination. The virtue of McCullough’s account is that it traces the evolution of Adams’s understanding of the connection between human nature and government—a concern that underlies the founders’ innovation in statecraft.

Born to a humble yet sturdy family in Braintree, Massachusetts, Adams first distinguished himself as a defense attorney before entering the world of politics in the 1760s, when outrage over the Stamp Act sparked the first flickers of independence in the colonies. From his days as a student at Harvard through his early years of public service—he was a surveyor of highways and then an elected selectman in Braintree before being chosen as a Massachusetts delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774—Adams was plagued by anxiety about his own character. Conscious of both his capacity and his ambition, he worried that his vanity would stunt his political growth.

His most important decision, he often remarked later in life, was his choice of bride. Abigail Adams, whom he wed after a five-year courtship in 1764 at the age of 28, was nine years younger but very much Adams’s equal in the marriage. Some critics have complained that McCullough pays inordinate attention to the devotion between husband and wife, but his exposition of the cooperative and loving spirit of their union sheds light on the development of Adams’s character. McCullough gained access to their private correspondence, and he in turn passes on this insider’s perspective. One representative letter, written after a brief period away from her, conveys Adams’s sense of dependence on Abigail:

My soul and body have been thrown into disorder by your absence, and a month or two more would make me the most insufferable cynic in the world… People have lost all their good properties or I my justice in discernment. But you, who have always softened and warmed my heart, shall restore my benevolence… You shall polish and refine my sentiments of life and manners, banish all the unsocial and ill-natured particles in my composition.

Abigail proved a soulmate who joined Adams in his fervor as an apostle of independence and supported him through the highs and lows of his career. She deserves her prominent place in McCullough’s biography—their correspondence demonstrates Abigail’s role in her husband’s continuing education in human nature.

By the time he traveled to Pennsylvania to participate in the First Continental Congress, Adams had settled upon certain relevant truths of human nature. McCullough quotes early journal entries in which Adams formulates his core principles: ‘Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike,’ he asserts, laying the foundations for the Constitution’s protection of equal liberty.

But Adams was not unrealistic about the extent of human equality. While maintaining that people are ‘equal and alike’ at birth, he also recognized the impossibility of a uniform distribution of aptitudes and wealth, glory and honors in a great country. ‘Was there, or will there ever be a nation whose individuals were all equals in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches?’ he wonders, before concluding, ‘the answer in all mankind must be in the negative.’

The government of the United States would have to respect the principle of equality at birth while recognizing the tendency of people to diverge in attributes and accomplishments.

Adams’s study of history, his reading of the classics, and his observation of the men around him afforded him another key insight into human nature. Thus he writes, ‘ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart,’ and, ‘the love of power insatiable and uncontrollable.’ McCullough captures how Adams’s recognition of universal aspects of character—natural equality and indomitable passion—guided his statecraft. In making the case for annual elections, for instance, Adams suggests that without the restraint of having to stand for office, ‘every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey’.

The necessity of holding regular elections, distributing authority among different branches of government, restraining the power of the legislative with a strong executive branch, and developing a strong military capability emerge clearly in Adams’s political texts. Among them, Adams’s 1776 Thoughts on Government and his 1779 ‘Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ decisively shaped the US Constitution, which was finally signed in 1787 while Adams was serving as ambassador in London.

These contributions are slightly overshadowed in the McCullough biography by lavishly detailed descriptions of life in the late eighteenth century. McCullough vividly and expansively narrates harrowing incidents on Adams’s transatlantic voyages, Abigail’s anxieties during frequent outbreaks of influenza and smallpox at home, and standards of living from Boston and Philadelphia to London, Paris, the Hague, and finally the White House. The author’s over-the-top Hollywood touches are hardly surprising in light of the adaptation of his last biography, Truman, into an HBO movie.

A handful of distinguished academics have offered a more substantive critique of McCullough, complaining that he overemphasizes Adams’s moral fiber while neglecting his shortcomings as president. These scholars also object to McCullough’s treatment of Adams’s friend and rival Thomas Jefferson, with whom he is favourably compared throughout the book. In the eyes of these critics, Jefferson’s commitment to egalitarianism and the possibility of self-improvement redeem his vices (which included slave-owning), while Adams, for all his strength of character, was blinded by his conservatism, failing to perceive the consequences of the post-Enlightenment extension of equality. As Sean Wilentz, an American history professor at Princeton, writes in his review in The New Republic, Adams

never really understood (as Madison did) that the Revolution had overthrown [his] way of thinking, replacing it with an ideal of popular sovereignty that permitted no permanent social classes in politics. America, the Revolution had decreed, would have a classless state; and this dispensation would be forever incomprehensible to John Adams.

Wilentz connects this failure to the lowest moment of Adams’s presidency, his endorsement of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts, which granted the president the right to expel any foreigner deemed ‘dangerous’ and criminalized all ‘false, scandalous, and malicious’ writing against the government. Rejecting the explanation proffered by Adams and defended by McCullough—that looming war with France rendered the acts necessary—Wilentz accuses Adams of unforgivable overreach in his restriction of civil liberties. Close readings of McCullough and of Adams himself, however, demonstrate the hollowness of Wilentz’s charge.

Although Adams’s commitment to equality was combined with an appreciation for the unequal distribution of virtues and vices in the population, he was nonetheless a firm believer in the wisdom of the people. His instincts were anything but aristocratic. His journal entries and letters, quoted judiciously by McCullough, reveal his curiosity about and respect for public opinion at all levels. Adams solicited the views of yeoman farmers and senior statesmen alike in the course of his public service career.

Adams’s commitment to equality led him to take care in devising a constitution that would honor and preserve it. It was Adams, not Jefferson, who first complained about the absence of a Bill of Rights from the Constitution drafted while they were both serving in Europe. He repeatedly affirmed that the end of government is to protect certain core rights.

For instance, he wrote in his journal, ‘Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people.’ Adams concludes, ‘There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all others, by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors, in the human hive.’ Government, in his mind, was truly of, by, and for the people.

Adams exemplifies the American founders’ commitment to popular sovereignty, a commitment tempered by knowledge of human tendencies and concern to build a regime that would last. A moral belief in the natural equality of all men, together with a realistic sense of the power of passions and self-interest in the human heart, inspired Adams’s contributions at the dawn of the United States, and the remnants of his spirit endure.

Thanks to the founders, American presidents lead a government conceived in harmony with, not in spite of, human nature.

The liberal democratic achievement of the US constitutional state is that it derives strength from the consent of the governed just as they are, without trying to purify or improve them via a state religion. In the face of the terrorist menace and threats from hostile forces across the globe, McCullough’s book offers an answer to the question of what America stands for—an answer that should both sustain and renew that nation’s resolve to defend itself against its enemies.

Jacqueline A. Newmyer, an MPhil student in New College, Oxford, studies political philosophy and military strategy.

James Carroll
Toward a New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform
Mariner Books, 2003
130 pages

Any recent book about the Catholic Church by a Boston Globe columnist might be expected to address the sexual abuse scandal that has shaken the Church. But James Carroll’s Toward a New Catholic Church: The Promise of Reform devotes little attention to that crisis per se. This slim volume has a much wider scope. Carroll places the current situation in the context of ‘the historic challenge facing all religions after September 11′:

Will the Church sustain its traditional role as a defender of the poor and its more contemporary function as a rare critic of free-market capitalism? … Its image as a bulwark of social conservation, in other words, is only partially accurate. The Church has also been a force for progressive social change. Will it continue to be?

Carroll rallies socially progressive Catholics, disheartened and ashamed by the behaviour of their leaders, with the imperative of reforming their Church.

Carroll, a former priest and author of last year’s Constantine’s Sword, a history of Jews and the Church, places Catholic anti-Semitism at the centre of his analysis. He considers the early Church’s demonisation of Jews as ‘the other’ the first of many disastrous decisions to pervert Christian principles in advancing what amount to worldly interests. The average Catholic reader may initially wonder what all of this history has to do with the current scandal. According to Carroll, that response is the root of the problem.

He characterises contemporary American Catholics as ‘religiously immature’. Though often highly educated and professionally accomplished, Catholic adults still tend to relate to the Church hierarchy, he writes, ‘in the manner of adolescents’. Even those Catholics who can quote their catechism remain uninformed about the history and development of Church doctrine, a code often accepted as eternal and unchanging. Carroll quotes Joyce Carol Oates: ‘Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions’.

Towards a New Catholic Church is a Nietzschean genealogy of several of the Church’s most influential and, to Carroll, most misguided ‘inventions’. Carroll tries to stir up the great majority of lay Catholics who have only a vague sense of how and when their Church became what it is. His examples include the second century formalization of the New Testament canon, which recast the Jews as antagonists in the Gospel narrative; the acceptance in 312 of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine, which resulted in an imperial Church, rather than a Christian empire; and the establishment of ‘papal infallibility’, which dates back only to 1870. Carroll’s call is for increased ‘literacy’ among the laity, meaning not merely the study of scripture itself but of its development and interpretation over the centuries.

Sadly, Carroll’s short book is an insufficient primer. Even socially progressive Catholics may find his reading of the Gospels from a secularized literary-historical perspective jarring. Conservative theologians will fault his narrow selection of historical events and his tendency towards casual generalization. As he delves into more complicated theological developments, such as the history of Christology, Carroll increasingly resorts to arguments based on the movement of de-personalised concepts like ‘Neo-Platonism’ and ‘Enlightenment thought’. At times this short book seems like a hasty summary of more rigorous scholarship. At other times, the unwieldy employment of big, abstract nouns like ‘atonement soteriology’ prevents Toward a New Catholic Church from truly speaking to the laity.

Without guiding moderates through these arguments more surely, the book cannot serve as the blueprint for reform. Yet Carroll succeeds in one major way: he reclaims the powerful tradition of the ecumenical council. One of Carroll’s literacy lessons reminds us that Vatican II was one of twenty-one councils the Church has convened to discuss its own teachings, but only one of two called since 1545. The vigorous council tradition, though diminished in recent centuries by the consolidation of papal authority, ‘was a proclamation of the Church’s ongoing fallibility, its permanent need for reformation’. The tradition of change already exists within the Church and needs only to be resurrected.

Brian Mullin studies English at Wadham College, Oxford, and is a practising Catholic.

Although she is one of the more popular and recognised novelists in America, Barbara Kingsolver is familiar in the United Kingdom only as the author of The Poisonwood Bible or of the less heady Prodigal Summer. Small Wonder, her new paperback collection of essays, does not seem likely to redress that imbalance—mainly because British critics are likely to dismiss its musings about America, particularly America on and after September 11, outright.

Unlike High Tide in Tucson, her earlier collection of essays, the essays in Small Wonder are inconsistent in tone and style. At their best, they are striking, polished meditations by one of the most critical and well-rounded writers in America. At their worst, they are preachy and idealistic. However, it would be a shame to write off this volume, because novelists rarely address global issues with such conviction and clarity. Now is an especially important time to listen to the voices of intellectual American dissidents, a group too rarely noticed by the British media.

In these essays, Kingsolver does what she does best: she describes personal experience vividly, relates those experiences to larger global problems, and then finally reaffirms the importance of individual responsibility and action. For example, an essay that begins about her daughter’s love of the new chicken coop (‘Lily’s Chickens’) becomes a criticism of agricultural policy ills such as the depletion of seed banks and the unnecessary increase in global food importation. Another begins with her daughter asking to be dressed for school in red, white, and blue, moves into a general criticism of the American flag as just another icon (like a Nike Swoosh, but with more sinister implications because of the political and military power associated with it), and then reclaims the flag as the original symbol of controversial, independent voices in America.

But the essays are not all political, and in fact, the most unequivocally successful are the autobiographical, which are of special interest to devotees of her fiction, offering frank commentary on her life and work. In ‘What Good is a Story?’, she outlines how she writes as well as what she considers the value of literature, and she avows her great respect for her readers. In ‘Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen’ and the accompanying ‘Letter to My Mother’, she writes frankly and eloquently about the difficulty of life as well as the difficulties of life as a woman—suffering rape and facing sexual discrimination in her field of professional biology, yet in the end surviving to succeed at what she considers her great calling.

She says it best herself in the first essay of the collection, ‘I believe in parables. I navigate life using stories where I find them, and I hold tight to the ones that tell me new kinds of truths’. This book, in simple terms, is a collection of those reaffirming parables, replete with considered discussions and challenging descriptions. And despite some rough edges, it is a collection as rigorous and provocative as it is hopeful.

Elizabeth Aracic is a graduate student in English at New College, Oxford. She is writing on the poetry of Emily Dickinson.