What History Tells: George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe

George Mosse and The Holy Pretence

George Mosse and The Holy Pretence David Warren Sabean In 1980, around the time Seymour Drescher, Allan Sharlin, and I were putting together George Mosse’s Festschrift,1 George sent me a copy of his 1957 book The Holy Pretence, subtitled A Study in Christianity and Reason of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop. He wrote on the jacket, “I (but hardly anyone else) consider it one of my most important books.” Indeed, while his first book on English seventeenth-century constitutional thought, The Struggle for Sovereignty in England, was widely reviewed and highly praised, this book found only two reviewers and little positive comment. Up to the time George published The Holy Pretence in 1957, nearly all of his published research—the exceptions being two articles, one on a French seventeenth-century Calvinist and the other, oddly enough, in the Economic History Review on post–Corn Law politics —had dealt with late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English constitutional and political thought. The same year he published The Holy Pretence, George came out with an article in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book entitled “The Image of the Jew in German Popular Culture: Felix Dahn and Gustav Freytag.” That article, of course, signaled a change in the direction of his research, although it took a whole decade for his teaching to shift to match his new project(s). After 1957 there were occasional articles—one or two a year—until his pathbreaking Crisis of German Ideology appeared in 1964. By 1980, when he still saw The Holy Pretence as one of his best books, he had published Nazi Culture, Germans and Jews, Nationalization of the Masses, Towards the Final Solution , Masses and Man, and about 140 other pieces, mostly on racism, fascism , and nationalism. In this essay I am interested in the meeting, in this hinge year of 1957, of two seemingly quite diverse projects, one brought to fruition and the 15 other just being tried out. I am also tantalized by Mosse’s own estimation of The Holy Pretence, which George clearly saw as central to his intellectual biography. In his memoir Confronting History, after talking about the moment in 1933 of leaving Germany, he wrote: “All I have done since and all I have published has had a political agenda.”2 I think one central aspect of The Holy Pretence has to be found in its form of political analysis . But why did he not start right away with the roots of German fascism? There are several reasons, but in his memoirs he points to the influence of William Lunt at Haverford, under whom he did his senior honors thesis : “The subject which would determine my scholarship for the next sixteen years I started to study under Lunt’s direction.” There was a strong element of apprenticeship in his training. He went on to say: “Both at Cambridge and at Haverford, Medieval and early modern history were the periods devoted to serious study.”3 There is the famous anecdote about a colleague who passed judgment on this period of George’s life in the following terms: “How come that you yourself are so interesting and your books are so dull?” His answer gives us an important clue to what he thought he was getting out of this earlier project: “But I did not find my books dull, and, indeed, from the beginning tried to apply to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history theoretical concepts which came from my German background and my quite un-English interest in theory.”4 I suspect that one of the reasons for the poor reception of The Holy Pretence has to do with the fact that most of Mosse’s questions and many of his comparisons come from a Central European or Continental European tradition. He far more readily cites Meinecke, Troeltsch, Croce, Spengler, Heuss, von Muralt, Praz, Pezzolini, Orsini, Laski, von Doellinger , Reuter, Albertini, Cassirer, and Niebuhr than he does any English secondary literature. It was never a book easily assimilable into an English political theory discourse. It is not exactly clear what George meant by “theory” in the quote above. While we were preparing Mosse’s Festschrift in 1980, Robert Nye wrote quite astutely: “I have always taken Mosse to be an intuitive sort of intellectual historian, feeling his way through his materials and reconstructing intellectual developments as they ‘must’ have occurred. On this view, empathy has been his most useful tool; in his hands, ideology appeals as much...