Separate but Equal? Individual and Community since the Enlightenment by Richard Herr (review)

Herr takes stock of the tensions between individualist and community impulses in the West since the eighteenth century. His study focuses on the United States, France, Spain, Great Britain, and Germany; Austria, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and other European countries receive less attention. Though he sees the struggle to reconcile individuals and communities as characterizing his entire period, Herr divides his work into three distinct sections, each dominated by a particular feature of that struggle and the political contradictions, alignments, and possibilities that it generates.

In the first section, which culminates in the French Revolution, secularizing European societies developed principles of social organization to succeed religious ones. Herr points to Montesquieu’s concepts of honor and virtue—the former describing the pursuit of individual gain and the latter civic responsibility—as two paths leading from Enlightenment thought. Although Adam Smith took the position that individual striving could generate community benefits, Rousseau emphasized the importance of community spirit. Following their revolution, the Americans prioritized Smith’s approach; in theirs, the French toggled between the two.

Herr devotes the second section to describing the long nineteenth century in terms of competing ways of orienting communities: Would they be formed by vertical or horizontal divisions? Border-crossing horizontal divisions ran between adherents of liberalism and the upholders of old regimes and eventually between social classes. Ultimately, the vertical lines between nations proved more firmly drawn, as the move toward universal white male suffrage blunted horizontal tensions. According to Herr, the willingness of all horizontal orders within the vertical silos of the European nations to go to war in 1914 demonstrates the triumph of the national divisions.

In his third section, Herr examines whether the ideal of the homogeneous society—individuals alike legally and linguistically as the basic units of the social whole—would prevail within national communities, or whether particular communities—rooted in regional, linguistic, racial, religious, gendered, or other forms of difference—would persist. Herr traces the efforts of national governments to achieve homogeneity by exclusion and/or assimilation in the years before and during World War II, when the Nazis demonstrated the darkness into which the homogenization project could descend. After 1945, the nations at the heart of Herr’s study undertook efforts to include formerly excluded peoples, such as African Americans or the children of guest workers in Germany, under the auspices of individual equality. At the same time, however, communities within these nations sought to maintain separate collective identities—for instance, the Bretons in France, Black Power in the United States, and difference feminists in several nations who upheld the distinction of women from men. Could such communities, Herr asks, using the language of the Plessy and Brown cases, be “separate but equal?” Looking ahead, Herr wonders whether ideas like parité or an imagined community as capacious as humanity itself might point the way forward.

This book crosses national boundaries more than disciplinary ones. Its sources reflect the breadth of Herr’s reading in historiography throughout a long career (readers looking for a survey or appraisal of the most recent work in the field should look elsewhere). Though the tension between individuals and communities might be explored through sociological, psychological, and anthropological lenses, Herr deploys the work of these other disciplines largely as primary sources in the intellectual history of the West. Indeed, the discipline other than history that factors most prominently in this book is political theory. The book may be read as a history of thought orbiting around Herr’s dilemma, from the ideas of Montesquieu to those of Malcolm X and beyond. The work’s larger themes assume concrete form in the handful of personal asides that Herr provides—about his military service in Europe during World War II and his chairing of the initial committee at Berkeley reviewing its multicultural course requirements for undergraduates. Such details suggest that a memoir from Herr may further illuminate many of the same themes treated in this volume.