On Words, Sources, and Historical Method: Which Truth about Muscovy?

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass¹

Words carry meanings and connotations, regardless of how carefully we try to redefine them and hedge them in with caveats. Marshall Poe surely is aware of that when, to provoke debate, he chooses to deploy the explosive term "despotism" in his attack on what he calls the "Harvard School." Despotism is not a neutral term. It is a negative descriptor of an evil government, of absolutism run amok. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word as follows: "Absolute power, especially when exercised unjustly or cruelly." The dictionary entry proceeds to provide an unfriendly list of synonyms: "a. dictatorship; b. tyranny; c. autocracy; d. totalitarianism." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition of a despot: "An absolute ruler of a country; hence, any ruler who governs absolutely or tyrannically; any person who exercises tyrannical authority; a tyrant, oppressor." ² Despotism is not a term that can be used with any degree of cultural relativism; it is a hard and fast condemnation of cruel, arbitrary, and untrammeled rule. This is certainly the sense in which Poe's Western travelers employed the term, as a condemnation, a term of opprobrium, hammering in the bottom-line logic of the moral and political superiority of Western systems.

Can the label of despotism be a useful starting point for historical inquiry? As a systemic descriptor, it obscures far more than it reveals. Like the term "heresy," despotism is applied by those who do not accept a system of values and practices. To write off the various heresies that have colored the history of Christianity as simply heretical, pure and simple, would be to miss the marvelous variety in belief systems, the particularities of social, political, and theological critique, reaction, and expression manifested in particular times and places. If we could not look beyond the heretical nametag, we would never have gained insight into the rough cosmology of Carlo Ginsburg's Menocchio or Emanuel LeRoy Ladurie's Montaillou. To write off Muscovite rule as "despotic," and to leave it at that, would be to abandon the most interesting challenges of historical investigation. Knowing that Muscovite rule was absolute, tyrannical, and cruel, we would be able to marvel at the lasting success of such an arbitrary system, as Poe does, but we would push no farther toward understanding.

Fortunately, Poe is too good a scholar to accept a schematic, flattened caricature of Muscovite despotism. Even in the polemical piece he has written here, Poe is eventually forced to distance himself from conventional definitions of despotism, "as it was invented by opium-smoking 19th-century English poets" (485). Instead, he comes up with a convoluted formulation according to which despotism is not despotism, but something else. Like Humpty Dumpty, Poe imperiously redefines the term to mean something far more encompassing and much watered down from its original meaning. Muscovite despotism, he concludes, included not only the tsar-despot, but also his court, army, chancelleries, provincial administration, and, most surprisingly, all Muscovites, except slaves. The tsar-despot did not use his power arbitrarily to fulfil his own personal desires or fantasies. The tsar-despot "may have a greater opportunity to act capriciously than a monarch or president, but he would be wise not to, for the consequences are grave" (485) So the tsar-despot, like any other ruler, had to rule in conjunction with his elite, and, indeed with the cooperation of society at large. If this were the case, is despotism a useful term? Even Poe does not seem convinced that it is. Instead he attempts to stretch the term to encompass many of the important insights of his "Harvard Schoolers," conceding that despotism...