The Trouble with History: Morality, Revolution, and Counterrevolution by Adam Michnik (review)

Being asked to review a book by Adam Michnik is a tall order—to say the least. Michnik is one of the founders of the Third Polish Republic, which emerged from Poland’s negotiated 1989 exit from Communism. Before 1989, he was a renowned figure in the Central and East European dissident community. In the post-Communist era he has been one of the most influential voices in Polish public life, especially in the pages of Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Newspaper), the daily newspaper he has edited for more than 25 years.

Through prolific advocacy and wide-ranging activism, Michnik has remained remarkably consistent in his insistence on the interconnectivity of dialogue, pluralism, and civic freedoms. More than almost any other Soviet-bloc dissident—with the possible exception of Václav Havel—Michnik has long stood out for his ability to put pen to paper and channel his own struggle into thought-provoking meditations on social and political ethics. His first publication—Kosciół, lewica, dialog (1977), published in English translation in 1993 as The Church and the Left, a history of the pre-Solidarity rapprochement between Poland’s secular left and its “open-minded” Catholic intellectuals—was conceived from the outset as a book-length work. He subsequently published many other books in English, French, and Polish as collections of essays, some dating back to his years as a political prisoner in Communist-era Poland. Prior to 1989, his essays originally appeared in émigré or underground presses. Since 1989, his default forum has been Gazeta Wyborcza.

Such is likewise the genesis of The Trouble with History, a new collection of English-language translations of essays written over the past decade. At first glance, one wonders how well the five essays—organized into two parts—will fit together. The first part deals with political ethics in post-1945 Central and Eastern Europe, and the second focuses on the French Revolution and its long shadow. The book’s first chapter explores the ethical complexities of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s career as a Cold War statesman, and the second looks at the pitfalls of political de-Communization and lustration in post-Communist Poland (particularly under Jarosław Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party government). The final three essays, inspired principally by the writings of the nineteenth-century French novelist Stendhal, concern the bitter fruits of revolution and restoration in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France.

Taken as a whole, however, the collection is fully coherent. A single overarching lesson in political ethics and morality emerges from a mosaic of much smaller lessons. In book form, these essays represent a clarion call for non-monocausal, non-ideological, dialogue-driven—Michnik uses the term “polyphonic”—approaches to learning from the past. Acknowledging that narratives of collective accomplishments and failures play a central role in constructing a given community’s contemporary political identity and mores, Michnik calls for, among other things, “a conversation with the Other, the one who thinks differently, who is differently situated, and who has been differently shaped by his or her social position” (p. 49).

Ideals of “freedom” and “truth” have long served to anchor Michnik’s writings. Abstract and elastic as these concepts might seem, Michnik fleshes them out in the most concrete possible terms in the book’s eponymous chapter, “The Trouble with History.” The definition of freedom that Michnik provides is eminently practical: “the capacity for autonomous evaluation of the past, the confrontation of various points of view, and various interpretations of the sources” (p. 48).

Too rarely do historians reflect on their craft—not only on its epistemology and ethics, but also on the power that historical narratives hold over current political and social imaginaries. For Michnik, political opposition to Communism was anchored in the power and possibility of narratives: “the democratic opposition confronted the monologue of the communists’ version of...