John Lukacs and the Recent Practices of Historians

Do free people have a history, does their freedom extend to the choice to do without it, and if so what then? In his new book John Lukacs is very much at ease with the long age of democracy, which he presents as the age of historical curiosity, but profoundly worried about the recent practices of historians. Just at the moment when the people truly began to rule, in the second half of the 20th century, historians found for them a new set of chains. Rather than preserving disciplinary traditions that were in fact liberating, historians opted instead to be intellectual reactionaries even as they seemed to be following the latest trends. Seeking to follow the "fads" of the social sciences rather than the sound traditions of the greats, historians removed themselves from the wave of the future, and instead drank its briny backwash.

The problem, for Lukacs, seems to have been one of balance and confidence. During the decades when history and historians had their best opportunity for intellectual and thus social power, they theorized for themselves impotence, and then insisted upon it for their readers and students. This error rested, says Lukacs, on a basic misunderstanding of the modern age. What is most noteworthy about modernity, Lukacs maintains, is that it can be best described by a sort of Marxism à rebours. Under conditions of democracy and a rising bourgeoisie, ideas make economic and social institutions, rather than the other way around. True intellectual power thus rests with those who insist on the importance of individuals, ideas, and choices, rather than with those who insist upon Marxism or other forms of social history. Though it might have seemed to make sense that social history took hold at the same time that the United States became a full democracy (after the Civil Rights Act, say), in fact this choice of methods was retrograde rather than progressive.

A 19th-century etching of Karl Marx. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-16530].

If Marxism's notions of substructure and superstructure are precisely wrong, then to accept them amounts to a willful embrace of unfreedom. Thus historians' preference for social history, though seemingly consonant with rising freedom, and promising more liberation in the future, is not only error but self-oppression—and the oppression of readers and students. Counterintuitively, it is the forms of history that seem most conservative, diplomatic and military history, that are in fact the most progressive. It is precisely the study of states, and indeed statesmen, that best befits an age of liberty. As political liberation proceeds, more and more people are interested in the past, and the past that they both want and need is precisely the study of individual action. It is on the example of the behavior of great statesmen (so I read Lukacs) that the reader understands that and how choices have consequences, and that the name for these consequences is history. Such a method, the study of ideas and their realization, would be not only true but liberating. Lukacs is not quite this explicit, but this conclusion seems consistent with his own prior choices of subject and interpretations.

Here, however, Lukacs has a problem, and he faces it squarely. If ideas are as important and historians as feckless as Lukacs thinks, then wrongheaded historians must be destroying their own profession with their wrong ideas, and it is hard to see how this might change. If it is true that ideas make institutions rather than the other way around, the temptation for the great majority of us who are not courageous and honorable statesmen will be to make institutions in accordance with ideas that are dishonorable and cowardly. In other words, if our will is not only free but powerful, and our will is not good, we are likely to become pragmatists in the worst sense, making the institutional world around us in our own cloudy image. In our research we can choose what Lukacs calls objective determinism, or the wrong kinds of social history; while as a profession we can choose...